Bay 12 Games Forum

The first thing I thought when I saw that picture was "stress ball."

:S

Yay! Armor! Shiny armor I might add. Now I can look pretty while I disembowel things.

Favor->Bengali: +10

The "dwarves stay indoors" feature is kind of broken at the moment, even if they go inside they'll do a little dance at the entrance. The next version will make getting your dwarves inside much less of a pain in the ass. You've got to make sure they don't have a reason to go outside, these are the steps I usually go through to give you an idea:

• Make sure you have a meeting area inside and disable any meeting areas outside, disable any sand collection zones if you have a glass industry
• If you have a well or cistern and you don't have any booze (monster!) make sure it's set as a water source and make it mandatory to use it via the standing orders menu, otherwise you'll end up with dwarves making a beeline for the nearest river or pool
• Disable all hauling possible in the standing orders menu while the gates are open
• Forbid every last item outside your dwarves might try to haul inside the fort
• Delete any outside stockpiles that aren't already disabled from the standing orders menu so your dwarves don't try to haul things outside
• Disable any other labors or remove any designations for dwarves that might endanger them, e.g. mining an outdoor vein, cutting trees, gathering plants, just about any outdoor designation... And if you've got workshops outside for some weird reason you should forbid them as well if you already haven't.

You can also draft dwarves to cancel their current job if you can't through the units list, and you might be able to force them inside by setting their squad position somewhere safe. If they get too close to the attacking forces though, they'll try to attack them. This doesn't work for jobs like eating, sleeping or drinking, you just have to make sure they do these things indoors, so beds are always a good thing to have; if you don't have beds they'll fall asleep and get butchered.

And of course, a military helps to make your dwarves a little safer when the gates are open and you're herding everyone inside

I think there should be an option in the init that simply announces it normally without zooming in. If it's something particularly important that needs attention RIGHT NOW (like a cave-in) the announcement text can blink or something. Meh.

Quote from: Amalgam on December 09, 2009, 12:28:49 am

I think one of the problems that may arise from this is that players may want more control over their players and will be independently managing things (where their character is concerned anyway) on their own a lot more, for example someone may want to submit a custom design for the tomb they're building for themself, though the idea could introduce an interesting element of cooperation since noone has to do what they're told to do. I think for this idea to work well the OP may have to upload a new map to the DFMA every post, or at least often. This will allow players to easily see their character's progress in whatever project they're working on and see what other players are up and analyze the fort's needs a little better to without the OP having to fuss around with a bunch of images and cropping. Of course, screens can still supplement storytelling in a big way.

This could also have some RTD elements if you want to go the whole hog, but I might be getting carried away here. Players could pm the OP secret actions ranging from "leave the rat the kitten caught on that jerkass Urist's bed," to "steal that magnificent artifact Cog made the other day" and roll a die to determine an outcome. A few levels could be dedicated to secret projects that wouldn't be uploaded to the DFMA, too.

Feel free to ignore my weird and complicated ideas xP

I was thinking along similar lines. I mean, let's say urist's player wants urist to have all the booze at any cost, he may mandate that his character work towards encasing the other dwarves in magma.  Dwarf Fortress PvP?

Yeah, exactly. But, then you'd have more of a competitive environment than a cooperative (or uncooperative) one, it really sucks to lose a dwarf you're attached to. So, I'm not sure any kind of excessively destructive antics between the dwarves would pan out. Dumping magma in someone else's room (when they're not in it, of course) and melting their statues is funny, but I'm not sure lethal combat (or assassination in this case) would work. Well, it could work, but it'd play a bit more like a game of paranoia than dwarf fortress if everyone got too crazy. DF + Paranoia could potentially be pretty awesome, but it'd be too different. A little sabotage (all in good fun) is okay though. The social interactions and stories are probably this idea's strong points, pretty much like an ordinary community fort, just with more player input. Or at least that's the way I see it, don't want to mess with success too much.

EDIT: Okay, a lot more input, but in the long run it'd be roughly the same. People enjoy community forts for the story the most. Assassination seems a little... Too game-like.

I think one of the problems that may arise from this is that players may want more control over their players and will be independently managing things (where their character is concerned anyway) on their own a lot more, for example someone may want to submit a custom design for the tomb they're building for themself, though the idea could introduce an interesting element of cooperation since noone has to do what they're told to do. I think for this idea to work well the OP may have to upload a new map to the DFMA every post, or at least often. This will allow players to easily see their character's progress in whatever project they're working on and see what other players are up and analyze the fort's needs a little better to without the OP having to fuss around with a bunch of images and cropping. Of course, screens can still supplement storytelling in a big way.

This could also have some RTD elements if you want to go the whole hog, but I might be getting carried away here. Players could pm the OP secret actions ranging from "leave the rat the kitten caught on that jerkass Urist's bed," to "steal that magnificent artifact Cog made the other day" and roll a die to determine an outcome. A few levels could be dedicated to secret projects that wouldn't be uploaded to the DFMA, too.

Feel free to ignore my weird and complicated ideas xP

I'm too unimaginative to figure how this would pan out, but I'd be willing to participate if someone organized it. I think you could easily make this into a turn-based roleplay with some interesting results, personally, but I'm not sure how many people here would play that. Surely someone, given the amount of forum games on other boards though. I think it would be an interesting experiment

I like Flying Carcass' idea but I think it'd be more likely to dodge off the edge