Bay 12 Games Forum

I like this idea a lot.  I think it could be fun to do voting at the end of every major release cycle, for excellence in dwarfening during the previous "age."  Alternatively, annual or bi-annual voting.  But that way there can be some new stuff in with all the great old forts.  There could be several "laureates" for each category, and one winner.

I also wouldn't limit it to just Fortress mode (which I would separate from Legends).  Not only should some Adventurers get love, but the programmers of the utilities we all take for granted deserve a little extra mention too.  Here are some of the categories I would use:

Fortress mode
Mason's Award - excellence in above-ground fortressing (the Flarechannels Prize)
Miner's Award - excellence in below-ground fortressing (the Undergrotto Prize)
Mechanic's Award - excellence in complicated feats of engineering (or computing)
Siege Engineer's Award - excellence in trapmaking and otherwise murdering invaders
Stonecrafter's Award - excellence in stone sculpting, above or below ground
Architect's Award - excellence in aesthetic fortress beauty
Pump Operator's Award - most creative or effective use of magma
Alchemist's Award - greatest contribution to Dwarven science
Butcher's Award - to the fortress exhibiting the most callous disregard for life of any kind (this one makes me kind of nervous)
Woodcutter's Award - best handling of the Elven menace
Axe Lord's Award - greatest military, either individually or overall
King of the Dwarves - best or coolest overall dwarf of the era
-others that people think of-

and finally,
Mountainhome Award - best overall fortress of the era

Adventurer Awards - I don't know, I don't play this much.

Utilities
Could possibly give awards for: Increasing playability, Modding, Graphics, and general hacking, plus many others I'm sure.

A few updates:

 - I've made it through 8 levels of digging out the Bore, which doesn't sound like much, but it represents hours of digging, even at SPEED:0.  The massive number of mining jobs seriously hurts FPS - I'm going to try doing half-levels from here on out.  These levels were also solid rock.  I'm breaching the final cavern now, which is very large, and should make everything a bit simpler.

 - Rather than leave a natural stalagmite, I've decided to make one, using a "drip" of water and obsidian.

 - Rimslaughters faced its first "real" siege.  Goblins on jabberers, cave swallows, bats, crocodiles, and other fun stuff, along with some trolls.  The trolls made a beeline for the back door traps, which worked out poorly for them (including one insta-decapitation... wish I saved the screenshot).  The main force began moving towards the newly-arrived Human traders, which I was somewhat ambivalent about, but then they did something I just cannot forgive: they knocked over all the statues in the entrance way!

This worked out poorly for them as well.


Bonus: goblin head on tree!


 - As an early defense mechanism (basically ineffective), I locked a bunch of war and hunting dogs into glass-enclosed spaces that invaders would walk past.  Well, that was before the latest updates, and the dogs had puppies, and their puppies had puppies, and now they've all begun fighting each other to the death.


Any dog which defeats all comers will earn a special place  in the Rimslaughters defense plan.  Competition has been fierce.

Quote from: Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on July 07, 2011, 09:36:06 am

Any special tricks on adapting this for use with large scale constructions, rather than digs? I want to build a spiral-staircase tower out of ice, but designating each floor could be a real pain.

I don't think there's a whole lot we can do at this point, because of how DF only lets you designate a construction when there's something on the z-level below.

Really, the best fix would be for DF to actually permit construction designation when there's only a *designation* of wall/stairs on the z-level below, rather than requiring something be already built by dwarves below. This would enable us to designate entire towers (or at least scaffolding) bottom-up.

Failing that, conceivably we could write some AHK script to perform a "designate a tower z-level; unpause for a fixed amount of time to let dwarves build; designate next z-level" loop for you. But since unpausing requires exiting the designate menu, we would lose our DF cursor position. This could be accommodated for by first requiring the user to move the cursor to the top-left corner of the map, then monitoring the movement keys they use to position the cursor to their desired start point. Those cursor movements could then be replicated before each designation step.

Which is a rather ugly solution IMHO, though it would work.


Perhaps I should lobby Toady for getting a few changes to DF for the benefit of DF macroing tools, such as the aforementioned "permit predesignation" idea for towers. Another would be to allow lever/pressureplate target-selection to be done via cursor movement & map selection, rather than choosing from an unpredictably-ordered side menu.

These two changes alone would dramatically increase the possibilities of what could be blueprinted in QF. A fully functional boolean calculator in the shape of a pyramid? Yes!

One more I would add: "use last material" or something similar.  Would allow you to build all your constructions out of one material easily - pretty much my dream.

Hmm, I'd like to see you bring light to hell.  That place needs a little brightening up

Glad to see someone else procrastinating their bar study on here.  I haven't played since March or so, but I just fired up an old fort after enduring way too much secured transactions study.  Just a few weeks to go!

Cool.  I'm glad I'm not alone!  I just like to pretend that I'm handling my dwarves' worker's compensation claims.

I had not seen this before. These projects are beyond words.

Instantly put in my DF Favorites folder, right next to Flarechannel and Undergrotto.

Thank you for this revival. It made my week.

Thanks for the kind words!

So, after I showed off Rimslaughters last year, I took a long break from DF.  But lately I've been looking for ways to procrastinate (I'm taking the bar to become a lawyer in a few weeks... studying is boring!).  I came up with an idea for a new fort, a twist on the Undergrotto massive-cavern idea: The Bore.



My plan is to drill down from the top of the fort to the very bottom of the magma sea, approximately level 104.  I'll leave in a few stalactites and stalagmites, and I'm also going to add some other fun features, but mostly I want a giant empty cavern, save for the interior pillar and a long circular stairway for caravans.  Right now, I am mining out stairs on each level, and eventually, I'll drop the ceiling, which will punch through all the empty levels and hopefully make my job a lot simpler.

This thing is going to be BIG.


It takes a long, long time to mine this out.  However, one of the fun things about this fort is that I can basically leave it completely open to invasion, and the defenses (plus some military screen planning) make it pretty much impervious to assault.  I have had to intentionally disable some of the traps, just so the later traps get to have a little fun.  So far, nobody has made it past the third line of weapons traps in the back door:



So, that's pretty much the plan.  I'm posting here at least in part to keep myself motivated, so let me know if you guys have any cool ideas for the hollowed-out section.  I want to make some glass-domed areas, like little dwarven terrariums, as well as an artificial volcano that the trade walkway will pass directly through.  I am also considering a giant iron bucket filled with magma, hanging from the ceiling on chains, which will drip down onto the glass-enclosed magma forges far below. 

Work faster, furnace operators, or I'll open the roof.

And in case anyone is curious, here's a few of the stocks screen as they stand today.






I'm most proud of the third one - 1,571 mechanisms in use!

1) Can't you just put waterwheels over aquifers directly?

2) The dwarven reactor on the wiki (a pump attached to two waterwheels) is by far the simplest and most effective solution if you can't use natural flow.  Plus, it is infinitely extendible.  Every time I have tried to use "real" flow for waterwheels, with water actually running underneath them, it has been a messy disaster - when and where flow appears for the purposes of power generation just is not reliable. 

I would strongly suggest you give the reactor a try if you haven't before.  Otherwise, your idea sounds as good as any I've seen for moving water systems.