Bay 12 Games Forum

While I normally ignore any game on Steam that promotes itself as casual, the fact that this one has the audacity to compare itself to both Lemmings and Dwarf Fortress drew my attention.  I downloaded the demo, but I only had enough time this evening to play through the tutorials and one unimpressive effort at the tower defense game mode.
First impressions: It isn't really a puzzle game, so the comparison to Lemmings falls short.  It seems like you could get a level of anarchy almost meriting Dwarf Fortress levels, but this is mostly because your ability to direct your dwarves is minimal, and the Dwarves themselves are considerably stupider than DF's own.  It felt like watching an ant farm where the ants don't care if they find food, enemies, or deadly magma.  Still, I haven't tried all the game modes yet.

First of all, I'm very pleased with having memorials available.  I found them quite useful at the end of my first winter when seven ice-skating dwarves suddenly plunged to their cold, watery deaths.  However, there are a few areas that could use some polish:

1. In the build menu, I'd like to be able to distinguish between carved memorials (which I want to place) and uncarved slabs (which should remain in storage).  Even better if I can select which memorial by name, so the soldier memorials go in the barracks, the mason memorials go in the work room, the hammerer memorials go in the dungeon, etc.

2. On the carve memorial screen, I'd like some way to know which dwarves already have at least 1 memorial already carved for them.  I carved memorials for Urist McIceskater 1 through 6, got distracted, then had to look at all the finished slabs to figure out the name of Urist McIceskater 7, which I had missed.  Maybe some sort of color-change system like with the room assignment lists would work.

*. For all I know this is already implemented, and my dwarves are too boring/engravers too green to show it - Memorials can include engravings of the memorialized dwarf doing something:
"There is an engraving of Urist McAxedwarf and a goblin.  The goblin is headless.  This refers to Urist's slaying of Snotbox Grumpypants the goblin pikeman in 354."
"There is an engraving of Urist McFarmer and a field.  Urist is laboring.  This refers to Urist becoming a planter in 356."
"There is an engraving of Urist McGemdwarf and Shinyrock the perfect large peridot.  Urist is holding Shinyrock.  This refers to the crafting of Shinyrock by Urist in 372."

If we can set kill orders on anything/one, I see two immediate uses: executing cats (unlike nobles, they refuse to pull drowning chamber levers) and dwarf vs. dwarf arena combat!  Once guilds are in, the head of the miner's guild is definitely going to call out the head of the woodcutter's guild.

Quote from: numerobis on April 10, 2010, 03:06:08 pm

Quote from: Toady One on April 10, 2010, 04:57:13 am

Quote from: Khym Chanur on April 10, 2010, 04:29:56 am

Quote from: Footkerchief on April 09, 2010, 07:37:11 pm

There's at least one HFS spot in every 3x3 area or something. 

So if you embark on a 6x6 area, there might be four HFS's?

I think...  as few as 4 and as many as 17?

I'm counting 8 max, assuming the guaranteed-HFS-containing 3x3 areas don't overlap.

Nah, there wasn't enough detail available to do the calculations yourself:  They occur in every 2x2 section of the map, but a 2x2 placed in the dual of that grid has a (3/4)^4 chance of missing all of them.  A 3x3 on the other hand is guaranteed to have at least one of the 2x2s inside of it, so guaranteed HFS, but likely more.  A 6x6 that has 4 2x2s in the center has 4 guaranteed HFS, but 12 other possible HFS, so it ranges from 4 to 16.  There's also another HFS that is placed somewhere in the world map tile, and you might get that too for 17.  A 6x6 that is aligned with the 2x2 grid has 9 guaranteed HFS and the 1 possible extra (9/64 of the time).

^^From Toady himself. Anything over 2x2 is guaranteed HFS, so keep looking.  If you still can't find it, it may be a worldgen bug, so you should upload your save to DFFD and report it. 

The big thing with practice weapons is that the edged attacks are switched to blunt, so I suppose Toady's thought was that you can't make a hammer any blunter than it is.  Still, it would be nice just to have wooden hammers to train with.  The only hammer in my current fort is an artifact aluminum one.  I wonder how that will go with the wood training axes and total lack of armor

There are a lot of problems with dwarves not doing civilian work after being in the military.  My guess is that that is the case here.  The fact that moods are exempt from that bug is surprising, but I don't think the problem is the mood itself.

#5 on the Eternal Suggestions Voting.  If you haven't voted there yet, you should!  It also links to the main suggestion thread for that item, so you can see what all is being asked for.

Considering that most mammals are fundamentally similar, there's no reason to limit training to dwarf corpses.  Dissecting cats and pigs is still a standard part of biology training, so I'd say any humanoid composed of traditional tissues (NO magma man autopsies!) would work just fine.