Bay 12 Games Forum

Then I'd suggest the ammo system needs to change...

But you need to define an ammo type for the sling which points to the [ITEM_AMMO] or similar tag group. Since stones aren't defined as an ammo type, you'll need to make a workshop task that makes them. Which is to say, dwarves cannot get their ammo right of the ground.

@Vattic: I agree.

@iceball3: I see what you mean! 

But wait up: how does a catapult recognize stones as ammo, then?  Is it sort of like a reaction more than a combat action sort of thing?

Ayway, I think perhaps all stones could simply have the ammo tag.  But I think there must be more elegant solutions.  Vattic, what would you suggest as an ammo system change?

Reviving this thread a bit, Maybe a bit of thoughts on oxygen? I mean you can build a base completely underwater and still be okay.

Maybe really, really high peaks would have low oxygen content, which would slow dwarves down a bit when their at the top of a 500 Z-level mountain. (not sure on this one, how high is a Z-level exactly in dwarf fortress?)

I like to think dwarves as having ridiculously high red blood cell counts to deal with mining in deep mines with sub-optimal ventilation, and having good constitution to boot to deal with dangerous gasses ans stuff... In that case, maybe they wouldn't suffer much at high altitudes.    Though I like the idea in general!

Hmmm... patriotism's meaning can vary on context.  I will assume that what you mean by patriotism is patriotism in the sense of loyalty and pride for one's own country.  I will have to look into this some more another time, but I'd be willing to bet that patriotism is something that existed well before the modern era.  In order to have patriotism as defined here, you have to have a country, as opposed to a loose confederation of city states, feifdoms and the like which were prevalent throughout the medieval era.  A nation in the modern sense in Europe didn't come around until the Renaissance with the rise of nationalism and stuff. However, I wouldn't be surprised (and this is purely speculation) that there existed patriotism in solid, unified empires like the Roman Empire, and the Persian Empire which I would argue fit, at least in many respects, the modern definition of a nation. 

Patriotism is dependent on a sense of unification across a large geographic area, something that I think couldn't happen without a strong, unifying government able to effectively make its presence felt across a large area; you couldn't really have a nation in the modern sense nor patriotism in the way defined here.  Persia and Rome did have such governments, and I'd be willing to bet that this was due to a thriving economy, solid infrastructure, and a strong professional volunteer military to keep destabilizing agents out of the areas. 

I bring this up, because I think this could give an idea of how to deal with the idea of "nations" in DF.

Ok!  Thanks.

But what makes path finding something that is hard to do in parallel with other processes?  Is it only because there are often other processes that are dependent on the position of the thing moving?  If so, what are these processes?  I can think of some processes where this might be the case, like the pathfinding needed to follow other moving things.  Am I thinking about this right?   

Yeah!  Fortunately, it seems according to the most recent DF talk that Toady is going to do a lot of research concerning military strategy, history, and whatnot for this arc.  And Toady is most certainly already aware of the need to change projectile motion in the game for weapons at least.  I think it's pretty safe to assume the combat system and weapons properties as Toady works on the army arc is going to get a lot of fundamental changes. 

Speaking tubes?  Neat!!!  I'm all for it.  Though it might be out of the time frame, it's a tech plausible with the given manufacturing capabilities of the dwarves.

It got me thinking about other primitive telecommunications technologies (which many probably wouldn't be that related to this thread, but they are cool!):

Optical telegraphy (heliographs and other signal lamps, fryctoria, and smoke signals), audio telegraphy (drums, whistled language, whistles, horns, and other instruments), carrier pigeons, etc.  Links to useful wikipedia articles about them can be found here 

ALSO!  Sensory technology (some of which I think has definitely been suggested at least elsewhere):
non-magnetic compass/direction sensor, odometers, siege mining sensors...

I'm going to have to go through this and see if I can find any more measuring devices and sensors and stuff that were available in medieval and older times.  :3

LOL!  True dat, zwei!

From Dwarf Fortress Talk #4:

...Now right now the world is not so big that you can't walk across it in ... what does it take in adventure mode, I think you can step twelve tiles in day? I really don't remember. So if you're in adventure and you can go twelve tiles in a day then even in a large world you can go twenty or twenty two days to cross the entire world. So if you take the caravans time and up it up - up it up, up it up, that's great - if you shoot it up by like five times then it would still take a hundred days to cross the entire world, and if that's the case then there shouldn't be problems with not getting a dwarven caravan every year, even if they stop at various cities, even if they stop a city for like five days and move on...

The time taken to travel from one side of a large world to another isn't too bad.  22 days sounds right.  Given traveling a local tile in adventure mode takes 11 seconds, that would mean it would take about 25 days to travel from one side of the map to another on a large map.  Assuming you can move at an average of ~3.3 mph (avg. human walking speed) the entire time (no stopping for anything), that would make the map about 1990 miles by 1990 miles, which is a reasonable size. 

So, perhaps changing adventure mode time (or at least adventure mode walking speeds) should be a no-go.

So I have a suggestion that builds off of what others have suggested.

Speeding up movement speeds of entities in fortress mode might do the trick given the following are addressed:

1. Combat speed
2. Time taken to eat/sleep/drink/take breaks
3. Possible CPU issues (which might be impossible to take care of...)

I could be missing some very important issues... so my suggestion might be full of shit from the get go.  And if issue #3 cannot be taken care of, then this suggestion is totally pointless.

But, let's assume speeding up movement speeds doesn't require ungodly CPU abilities.

For issue #1, simply increase the speed of things in combat so that they match adventure mode time...

For issue #2, things get tricky.  A lot of these things have already been mentioned... Breaks could be left alone, but eating and sleep would have to be modified...    I don't like the idea of making combat units a special-case thing where they magically have different eating and sleeping requirements by virtue of their military designation.  This would be open to exploit...

We could keep eating/sleeping/breaks time requirements the same, but the major thing that this would eff up would be prolonged sieges.  If your dorfs take a month to sleep or something, and in the middle of a siege your military dwarf goes to sleep and then a 2-day-long prolonged assault happens in adventure mode time, then your dwarf is asleep for the entire damned time.  I could sort of live with it, but I know a lot of people wouldn't be able to, and I wouldn't be entirely satisfied.  I mean, I could totally see this not being as big an issue as people think, and I could explain at length what I mean at a later time... But I'll suggest something else for now...

What would be most satisfying to me would be to shrink the time difference gap as much as possible and live with the fact that maybe dwarfs might be eating several hour long meals and sleeping longer than 8 hour (in adventure time) increments.  To do so, first make fortress time a bit slower, as in have what would now be one year of game time be like one season of game time.  Job time requirements could be increased to compensate.
 
Focusing on eating, perhaps things could be done as suggested before: Effectively increase the yearly eating requirements by a factor of 4 or something (so, instead of eating as they do X many times a year, they eat 4X or more times a year).  Increase food yields per year to compensate.  Decrease the time it takes to eat by whatever factor.  Keep in mind also, the increase in travel speeds would make eating a bit less time consuming...

A similar thing could be done for sleeping. 

Ultimately what my suggestion would make fortress mode end up looking like, I think, would be largely the same, except instead of dwarfs being easily seen traveling from one point to another, the dwarfs would be jumping around.  They would still be going through places, it just wouldn't be visible.  I wouldn't mind that, myself.  Things would appear as normal if time was slowed to adventure mode time.  Basically, everything would be operating at the same time more or less between modes, with the exception of eating/sleeping/taking breaks. 

Perhaps I'm missing some very important issues.  But I think this combination of ideas could work!  Whatcha think?