Bay 12 Games Forum

Sparring tricks?

Any trick to have the soldiers spar most of the time and not go visit friends in my main meeting hall? There is a great distance between the two and this is annoying. Should I lock them in a barrack with food and booze?

You can either move the barracks closer to the meeting hall (or vice versa), or you can just remove the meeting hall altogether.They aren't neccesary.

31. Sparring partners for your nobles.

I only do it for my soldiers, so I can tell which champions to station in the middle of the seige so they can chage in and murder everything with thier swords, and which champions to station off to one side so they can murder everything with thier crossbows.

I dig a hallway into the hillside. If there's no hillside I just dig some ramps. At the end of the hall are some stairs, which are usually in a 3x2 configuartion and run the entire Z axis of the map.

A big room in a soil layer for farming and food storage (later expanded for general storage), and another big room for workshops. One room can double for both purposes for the first couple seasons because there's more important stuff to do.

Chop exactly 22 trees, make a carpenter's workshop, seven beds, seven tables, and seven chairs. They all go in the soil layer storage room as a temporary dining room and quarters (1x1 personal bedrooms are better than sleeping in a barracks.)

After farm plots are set up and everything's moved inside, I dig down to a rock layer and carve out a dining room and some permanent bedrooms, which are then smoothed by my miners (engraving is done only after I have a legendary +5 engraver.) I usually put the bedrooms on the bottom level, and the dining room can go just about anywhere, really, but I tend to put it in the center of the map (X/Y-wise), surrounding the main stairwell.

After that I build a trade depot and start setting up cage traps. Then I start working on whatever the hell I feel like.

Animals can and will walk through an open door.

Personally, I got so sick of all the animals breeding so often and eating up processor power that I said to hell with it and butchered everything that wasn't a pet. This was after I had built a pen and thrown all the strays into it (as you can't assign pets to pits, unfortunately.) I've never looked back. I keep at least two males and two females of each species around (if I have them) for breeding, and I immediately butcher the offspring. I never make them available to be pets, either.

I also removed the VERMINHUNTER tag from cats becaus I'd rather have some of my food eaten by pests than have the game run at 6 FPS because of all the dumbass cats.

I let the game run a little longer. A few dwarves became unhappy shortly after the fight because thier friends died, and one female became pretty depressed because she had a hand mangled and miscarried, and she's probably going to be bedridden for the next few seasons. Aside from the latter, though, thier moods went back up pretty fast from talking to thier other friends.

Which is surprisingly realistic. A friend dies, you feel bad for a while, you talk to your other friends, you help each other accept it and you move on.

I also gave my expedition leader an office becase the lack of one was causing negative thoughts.

So I'm thinking this could help with all the unhappiness problems you sometimes run into. Once the fort's up and running and largely autonomous (aside from making booze and trading and such), disable labors for everyone (except farmers, but if you have enough food even they're not neccesary for the next couple season), let them socialize for the next six months so they have a bunch of friends, and when they start to get unhappy from whatever, let them idle for a while. It would also help with the "Oh no these two dwarves are friends and one of them got his ass murdered by goblins because he was a DUMBASS, now the other's going to be all depressed and probably useless for the next couple seasons."

Instead of doing everything in your power to keep your dwarves occupied at all times, let them have some time off once in a while. They'll probably be happier for it.

So just for the hell of seeing what would happen, I made a small (2x2 embark) fort with very simple accomodations. No personal beds, just a barracks, and the tables and chairs for the dining room are no-quality.



That's almost the entirety of what I've done with it. I dug a little lower to get some stone for the smelters (I added a custom reaction for free wood, in case I need it for something), but other than that I didn't touch anything. The stairs on the surface are walled off.

Aside from farming and making the occasional bag or barrel of booze or something,t here's nothin to do, so they spend all thier time hanging out in the dining room talking to each other.



Everyone's ecstatic.

Suddenly...



OHSHITGOBLINS

Since I have the entrance to my fort completely walled off, they can't do anything. They just kinda mill around for a few months. Originally I had just intended to wait for them to leave, but evidently they weren't going to do that. Then I got curious...

All my dwarves had no less than a dozen friends. Some were married, and everyone was ecstatic. What would happen if some of them died?

I drafted all but the first seven and sent them out to fight the goblins.


(KEKEKE ZERG RUSH)

Thirty-nine unarmed, untrained, unarmored dwarves pretty much steamrolled the goblins, including another ambush squad that appeared after they engaged the first. Three dwarves died.



Everyone's moods afterward.


They're all still ecstatic The living ones, anyway. Being drafted, seeing thier friends murdered, and several of them being injured wasn't enough to dampen thier moods in the slightest.

Apparently losing a friend works similarly to how losing a masterpiece does- i.e. if a dwarf only has one friend and his friend dies, he'll take a major hit to his happiness, but if he has a dozen friends and one dies, the negative though from it will be relatively minor.