Bay 12 Games Forum

I play with the MikeMayday set... I found it easy to start with the prepackaged gam and then got used to it. I never liked the standard non-quadratic curses set, though the 16*16 is pretty ok. It's only a question of being used to it or not.
I'm currently working on my own 16*16 tileset that's kind of similar to the Mayday set in style, but has no real "pictures" for objects. It's not very easy, but I'm trying to have tiles that look like game objects but are still easily recognisable as the letters they are... abstraction without too much abstraction, don't know how to explain it.

It would make for an interesting embark situation... 
...but it's like finding a 2x2 desert-glazier-forest-ocean site with  magma, river, interesting underground stuff, GCS and war with everybody... rather unlikely.

Well, Yeah, if you find assigning rooms or workshops to specific dwarves to much intervention, there is no way to divide them, no matter if it is a noble, regular worker, military or something else. When thinking like that, even giving work orders is intervening and should not be allowed... and dwarves will do nothing at all, without you telling them to do something, that's how they work.

Nobles do sit around in their rooms, doing nothing quite often. Building a pressure plate trap on the only way to the room, should work, as no other dwarf should enter a nobles room randomly (at least, if  there's nothing inside, that could generate a job)
Think of this:

^+++++d->to noble's room

^=pressure plate, connected to...
+=bridge (a lot longer than displayed; 15-20 tiles should be enough for anybody)

Urist McUselessNoble walks over the pressure plate on the way to his room, the bridge opens 100 ticks later, dropping him into whatever you like, preferably magma.

You could build a battle zone that's no more than 20*20 tiles, where all the fighting will take place. Build retracting bridges over a pit there. Pull the right lever, and all the loot will fall right into the stockpilie below, wher it can be sorted and put into bins... didn't try it yet, but I think, it's a great way to stop dwarves wandering around too much.

I guess the other dorfs still drank the beer later... would someone hand me the brain bleach, please?

I had a question in the "what's happening in your fortress?" thread, but didn't want to derail it, so here it is again: Is there a way to drop a dwarf (noble) down a shaft (about 25 levels) with the following conditions:

1)
No dust from a cave-in. There are stairs all along the shaft and I don't like my useful civilians to fall off and into the depth.

2)
Should be easily reloadable/rebuildable. I don't want to spend all year rebuilding the trap for the next year's nobles.

3)
The noble should activate the trap himself, either with a lever or a pressure plate, or multiple if necessary. Suicide sounds so much nicer than murder

4)
It should work automatically without me or other dwarves doing anything (especially manually locking doors and pulling levers)


the shaft looks like this:

XXXXX
X...X
X...X
X...X
XXXXX

X=stairs
.=empty space

The first plan that made me ask this question, worked like this: A supported floor with a support in the middle, on that support an unsupported floor (accessible with grates) and a lever. The lever is connected to the support. When it's pulled, the top floor with the lever-puller falls down and punches through the lower floor, producing a giant cloud of dust that makes dwarves fall from the stairs further down. The first and only pulling of the lever killed 6 and 2 more in a following tantrum... I'd like to avoid that in the future.

I specifically want to drop nobles down the central staircase, where everybody can watch. Drowning, burning, smashing, starving or dropping somewhere else is no alternative, but I'm alway open for better, overly complicated and dramatic ideas. There can never be enough interesting ways to kill stuff.