Bay 12 Games Forum

• Don't pre-plan what will be on each floor.
• Start with one floor for all surplus junk.
• Modify burrows and labors to create a large dedicated workforce with no other jobs than hauling things from floor to floor in the warehouse, ideally with a funny custom job title. Possibly also permit them to add floors.
• When any floor fills up, build a new floor and divert the biggest part of the full floor's inventory to it. So the second floor might be a furniture stockpile, and you'd turn off furniture on the bottom catch-all stockpile. Then later the furniture floor might be broken out into mechanisms, tables, chairs, etc.

I might try this.

Well, this is unrelated but, have you ever broken a bone by someone hitting you before? It sure damn hurts. But then again, the dwarfs meant to be a demigod. 

Yeah. Here's a thought experiment:  The OP comes to my house and puts his or her hand on my desk, and I take a hammer and smash his or her thumb as hard as I can. Then, we duel with baseball bats. I think the OP would be significantly hampered by this injury.

he's in cahoots with the pie shop.

I love this idea. I wish there were pie shops, and that they were the only places adventurers could sell bizarre mutilated remains.

I wandered around trying to find the entrance to the cave (...) never having found the cursed entrance to the Cyclops' lair.

Are you using the guide box in the upper left of the screen? The top row generally leads you directly to the nearest lair if you walk the direction it says. Look for down ramps. I had trouble finding them as well at first, but after noticing that box, it's been pretty much a straight shot every time.

My second adventurer got assigned to kill the same bandit leader that killed my first adventurer, which the quest giver mentioned by name as a victim! Neat. This time, I hired a blinky swordsman to kill her for me, which worked. Then recruited two more soldiers to kill a second bandit leader. They did, plus a night spouse, without problems.

Found a shop, sold some GCS loot. But there didn't seem to be any new money in my inventory. Maybe it's in that chest? Ooh, coins! Argh, no, those weren't mine--I've become a criminal for taking them, even thought the trade screen said I bought out the shop's money supply and was "owed" a bunch above and beyond that. Wander to next town, but word spreads too fast: I'm already considered a criminal here. Can't get quests or turn them in since no one will talk to me, so my questing days seem over; attack a random shopkeeper for spite.

As I thrust my spear at the shopkeeper's hand (easiest target for some reason), first my axeman companion, then my swordsman companion, leap forward and announce themselves as the mighty slayers of their respective bandit leaders (yes I know guys, I saw you do it), and advise me to prepare for death! A crime too far for them, apparently. Now they're slashing and chopping, and bits of me are flying around the shop. This is probably going to be my all-time most enjoyable video game death ever.

I hope I can find and recruit these guys again with my third adventurer.

EDIT: Third adventurer fell to a night spouse, with mere hammermen at her side. Fourth adventurer sought the shop where the second died. The companions are indeed still there, but rather than being recruitable, they're hostile, and advise adventurer #4 to prepare for the type of death that they brought to adventurer #2! Talk about holding a grudge!

Please, tell me how any of this is somehow inferior to the "Interesting Choices" you came up with for making Dimple Cups arbitrarily and nonsensically up your weaving skill and drop your dodging skill...

While I wouldn't want to call it something as inflammatory as "inferior", I do see two ways to strengthen this proposal. (My specific examples here are pretty boring, since they're only meant to illustrate the point; a good game designer ought to be able to come up with better ones.)

• Different advantages to different approaches. I think this is what is meant by "interesting choices". So far we're talking about a difficult optimization problem with one unique solution, which would mostly recede into the background once solved (with some replayability with population growth, and in the next fort if crop availability varies). But if I could optimize the system towards different goals, then I have a worthwhile reason to come back to it later as my goals change. This is where "either-or" trade-offs tend to come in. Maybe one crop is best for taste, another for health, another for labor-intensity, and another for safe storage. Maybe some combinations give dwarves indigestion and unhappy thoughts when mixed in the gut. Maybe one irrigation method gives a higher average yield with erratic variations, while another is more consistent but less bountiful. There can still be good and bad choices within such a system; my design might fail to perform as I intended. But since the player has chosen the goal towards which he is trying to optimize, this has the potential to be more engaging.
• Complex interaction with other subsystems. The proposed farming system sounds mostly self-contained so far. Insert water, seeds, ground, labor, and time, and in return you get some number of food units that prevent your dwarves from starving and supply some industries. The time you spend thinking about agriculture would be spent thinking only about agriculture, and if you're successful, all you get is a farm system that works. But if I have an incentive to use a large outdoor area for a particularly space-inefficient crop, then suddenly I have to worry about defense of all that space. If some crops required tilling the soil with (expensive?) metal plows, that crop might be out of reach until you start a metalworking industry. If the elves start selling terminator seeds to grow lembas wafer plants, then I start caring about diplomacy. Maybe some plants give off strong tell-tale scents that goblins can use to find you more easily. And so on.

These considerations would make or break a new farming system for me. If all it does is increase the amount of attention I have to pay to the process of making food, I'm going to wish I could go back to what we have now (unsatisfactory as it is). But if I get new strategic choices and new wrinkles in the overall operation of the fort in exchange for that attention, then that's all for the better.

DF is presently incoherent in the domain of political economy; if you list the defining characteristics of feudalism, capitalism, social democracy, idealized-communism, and really-existing-Communism, DF has a hodgepodge of features from all of them. Even the "economy" is not clear-cut; it introduces a facade of (superficially capitalist) wage labor and commodity exchange, but the money for the wages is not paid by any other individual. The dwarves do not own or exchange means of production as commodities (workshops are built and controlled according to player fiat), but they also don't have workers' councils for the direct collective management thereof.

The closest analogy is corporate: a fortress is a single massive capitalist enterprise, with the player as the capitalist or board of directors, like the "company towns" in coal country in the industrial age, or a modern-day office complex. Workshops and equipment are placed and used wherever and however the company says they should be. A small cadre of privileged managers is groomed to oversee operations and enforce policy decisions, with a shop steward (mayor) elected by the workers to deal with personnel issues. Everything they produce becomes company property, which can be sold to outsiders. Healthcare is paid for by the company insurance plan.

Pre-economy, the dwarves are like salaried employees (paid in-kind) at a start-up who are expected to do whatever tasks are put before them as best they can in a desperate struggle to stay solvent. Post-economy, the company has matured, and it gets tired of them "gaming the system," and so cash incentives for tasks are implemented using company scrip. Prices vary, but based on management's assessment of the situation rather than market conditions. Wages are lower than the value of what's produced, so there's an element of capitalist exploitation, but the profits accrue to the company coffers ("created wealth") rather than any individual dwarf. The company owns all the land, so it builds housing and assigns it or rents it out.

... screw caravans, ...

This is arguably a problem in itself--the game has an entire mechanic that can be ignored completely (trade). Structurally, trade ought to be the mechanic that balances the trade-off of ignoring the surface world; when the player is deciding whether to allow an unobstructed path from the edge of the map into the interior of his fort, goblins are the downside and caravans are the upside (and I suppose migrants are both). That choice would become less of a no-brainer if the upside was stronger. And frankly, I doubt that Toady went to the trouble of writing all the caravan code with the intention that no one would use it.

Also, once the world map arc gets going, a mountainhome under siege should have difficulty in sending out settlers and reclamation parties and otherwise managing its empire. Ignoring a siege amounts to cutting yourself off from the outside world, so additional interaction with far-off places is another potential source of balance.