Bay 12 Games Forum

If Dwarf Fortress was a movie, it would be banned in all countries I've ever heard of...

Only one problem... when should the paths be calculated?
Just imagine you have one very long U-shaped path and dwarves have to get from one end to the other. Now you dig a shorter way (directly between both "ends" of the "U") - your dwarves would still take the much longer way, because that's the one they know.
Ok, so the game should calculate a new, shorter path at this time, but how does it know, if something relevant changed? There's no way to know, if there's a more effective path, unless new paths are calculated all the time (or at least everytime something is dug out or build) - it would bring a minor speed gain in forts, where you don't build anything anymore, but how often does that happen? I say, that system wouldn't help at all unless there'd be a very complex method of determining, what is relevant for the current paths and what isn't.
Also, dwarves don't use the same path several times... one of the most common would be the path from the boozepile/dining room to a specific workshop and there are still hundreds of paths for every tile of the starting room. You'd start saving paths from every tile to every other tile. More than 5 Million paths for 48x48 tiles and one z-level, more than a few trillion for a reasonably sized map. I don't want my computer to save a few gigabytes of paths and search through all of them for the right one everytime someone needs to path somewhere.

Always remember, what looks so easy for the human brain like "just go from this room to that room and remember it for the next time" can be hard for a computer. Computers are very, very dumb, if you don't tell them exactly what to do and how to do it.

The only practical possibility, I can think of, is only saving major traffic routes that are frequently used. The dwarves would still need to use regular pathing from their current location to the beginning of the main route (that goes wherever they need to go) and once they'd reach that route, they would just follow the predefined path until the end point from where the regular pathing would kick in again. It's still not easy to let them know, which main route is the best for their current purpose, but maybe it's a tiny bit more practical than saving everything.

Please correct me, if there's something fundamentally wrong with my negative thinking.

Well, you can build raising bridges, if you really want to...   

Look at my shiny, epic +=Human Brain=+. All natural selection is of the highest quality. It is made of fine protein-based tissue. It menaces with axons, dendrites and synaptic highways. It is encrusted and encircled with electrochemically active fibers. On the item are deep-set folds and ridges to increase its surface area and number of neurons. On the item is a neocortex responsible for spatial reasoning, development of motor commands, language and conscious thought.

That's nice, but one of those useless artifacts. What would a dwarf do with a brain anyway? (except cook it)

ELEPHANTS!


They're like medieval tanks, only far less controlable and prone to trampling your own guys by accident or "accident"... who wouldn't want something like that in a fort?


Edit: And I don't mean strapping living elephants to dwarves as armor, though it does sound awesome.

Not necessarily, but they are rare. Major rivers almost always flow through flat grasslands/forests and those tend to have aquifers. Your best bet is to look near mountains or oceans (and dig down in the ocean biome)
A river flowing into the ocean is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting maps to play with anyway. Lots of fun engineering possibilities.

It's an old bug and basically the same as if you seize the goods from the trade screen. The merchants don't react to stealing directly, but see when they leave with less (in value) than what they came with. If you do it too often, sieges are to be expected, but stealing from a caravan or two usually won't make them angry enough. The exact numbers are not known and are probably somewhat random too.