Bay 12 Games Forum

I don't believe it should 'require' soap. I mean there are plenty of other ways to clean, romans used oil and scrapers if I remember, some desert peoples use clean sand, ect

Soap is what we have in the game already, though. A washroom should absolutely require soap. There's enough wiggle room in that you aren't absolutely required to get your dwarves clean.

I'm still a little fuzzy on this point. What do I get if I give back the coin to the minter?

Something of your choice (with a current price of one coin of that denomination) from the fortress stockpiles.

There will always be extremists on both the left and the right, but reality generally lies somewhere in the middle. I believe there is room in this game for the concept of public property, or community property, owned and operated from the coffers of the fort as a distinct entity from the dwarves. Currently the game is almost exclusively a communist, left-wing view that everything belongs to The People, save a few small private items. Even to the point of being too much so, begging for a little capitolist innovation.

Fine, as long as it (1) makes economic sense and (2) doesn't disconnect the player's controls.

1. There's no reason to have a fractional reserve banking system in a community of seven guys living in a hole in the ground. This goes to what Dante said about the economy needing to kick in at some point.

2. When I order a tunnel dug out somewhere, the dwarves damn well do it, and don't say "No, it would be more profitable for me to open a cheese shop." This isn't incompatible with the idea of a cash or credit economy. However, if there is some kind of free market economy, then the player needs the tools to exert precise control. To name a few:
- Dwarves should never do any of the following jobs without being explicitly told to: Mining of any kind; construction of any kind; link mechanisms; pull levers. They should also never place or remove workshops, doors, floodgates, or traps except in their personal rooms.
- Forbid designations must be respected. If the player forbids a dwarf's personal property, the dwarf can't refuse. He might be automatically compensated in fortress credit, though.
- Only the player can designate rooms, and dwarves can't own or rent areas that aren't designated as rooms. This may require more kinds of rooms to exist, such as a "garden" where dwarves can build private farm plots.
- Labor settings need to be respected somehow. Maybe labor settings apply to fortress-ordered work, and dwarves do private work in their free time which may fall outside their labor settings.

Come to think of it, this could be a good way to have the economy incrementally switch on: As the fortress matures, the percentage of dwarf-hours needed to keep it running naturally decreases, and dwarves will fill in some of their free time with personal projects (crafts, improving their space, or trading) in addition to socializing the way they do now. So unless you're building a megaproject, training a huge militia, or suffering a labor shortage for some reason, your dwarves will eventually start making things to sell to each other or to caravans. They will build skill doing this, and will tend to do it in areas that use their existing skills, so you could sort of shape the private sector economy by training dwarves in skills you want to see.

This might put the player in the Fun position of having enough dwarves, but being too low on resources to pay them for any work. Here again, the government makes a promise for future delivery of goods, in the form of promisary coin. The idea being that in better times, the dwarves can come and trade those coins in to the Treasurer for meals, crops, or metals that they might want for their personal use.

This is the old economy system, going back to the 2d version: dwarves are paid in fortress credit, which they use to buy their stuff. There were some problems with the implementation (notably the fixed price structure for rent) but as an economic model it was a good fit for a small isolated outpost.

Then we have a system with at least two forms of currency, the food coins from the farmer, and the unspecified coins from the treasury. The treasury coins need more clarity, so let's say they trade for a bar of metal, as chosen by the player when he mints them.

I think you're getting your wires crossed here. First, the point of having a banker (someone who creates money for the community) is to avoid having Farmer Fikod write his own credit, which is then of questionable value. Instead, at the start of the season, Farmer Fikod writes a hundred plump helmet IOUs to Baron Bomrek in exchange for coin (or paper money or a letter of credit or whatever) to pay his expenses for the year, and then at harvest gives a hundred plump helmets to the Baron, who sells them back to the community.

Second, I'm not sure I see the point of coins backed by bars of metal. A coin is a bar of metal. The coins, in this case, are backed by the entire fortress economy.

The player is free to mint way more coins than there is metal to trade, which brings up more opportunities for Fun. If a dwarf goes to cash one in when there's no metal to back it up, what happens? "Come back later" can get old, and so it should probably cause an unhappy thought. So if the player chooses to set up unbacked coin, and not bother to back it up later, then the citizens could experience a lot of bad thoughts as they attempt to trade their money in for metal. They might even be less inclined to accept government coin while they are experiencing a bad thought from unbacked currency.

Why are all these citizens trying to trade their fortress coins in for metal bars? What they should be doing, if they have a surplus, is trading in for luxury goods, better rooms, materials for crafting, and so on. If none of that stuff is available, then they should start getting angry over being underpaid for their work.

The fact it varies linearly doesnt matter. I'm not measuring it at each instant, I'm measuring what it would accelerate it by over the whole time. And newtons third law. Equal and Opposite. If it takes 400 pounds of force, to pull a string back, then the string is pulling with 400 pounds of force.

But you would have to measure it at each instant. The string exerts some force on the arrow at each instant for some finite length of time, and the area under that curve is the momentum of the arrow at the end.

It would be a little more practical to calculate the force as a function of draw position, and integrate that to get the kinetic energy of the arrow. What really doesn't work is to set the force equal to 400 pounds all the time and assume an arbitrary time. What, the string pushes back with 400 pounds no matter how far it's drawn? So if I touch the string it will punt me across the room?

When you calculate that an arrow flies at 23,000 m/s, you're doing something wrong.

Once my force stops, it's gonna flip back with 400 pounds of force, which, will then transfer to the string which it is pushing, and as it's not pushing back any, it accelerates away. Newtons third law. I don't see why you cant see this.

That's not Newton's Third Law. Newton's Third Law, in this case, says that whatever force the string exerts on the arrow, the arrow also exerts back on the string. This is irrelevant, but it does show a problem with your arrow moving at 23,000 m/s, which is this: my mass is about 2000 times the mass of the arrow, so the recoil of the bow would throw me back at 10 m/s.

Of course I'm also putting 5 million joules into the arrow, which means that every time I shoot I'm burning about half of my entire metabolic intake for the day. And it's going to explode on impact with the force of a kilogram of TNT. What you're describing is an antitank weapon made out of a bent stick.

Well gas or steam pressure dont actually need a to calculate some "confined space". This stuff has to act like water just without gravity and surface tension thus a pressurised cloud of gas will expand. That said it might be a bit hard on the computational time but could work with Toadys waterphysics.

The water physics cheat a lot by assuming an incompressible fluid, and if you do this for air (1) you're wrong and will fail your fluid mechanics exam and (2) nothing interesting will ever happen because the static pressure of air is nearly equal everywhere. To make air pressure matter, you need thermodynamics (how much waste heat does that room full of smelters produce, anyway?), dynamic pressure (whoa CPU), or some way to mechanically compress air in a sealed space.

It also helps that your entire map isn't covered with 50 z-levels of water, whereas it would be sitting under a huge column of air.

I was unaware that many societies consider murdering celestial beings acceptable. Thanks for clearing that up.

Quite a lot of mythologies feature gods murdering other gods, without either of them being regarded as evil. All of the usual Greek gods (the Olympians)* had a hand in kicking the crap out of the Titans and throwing them into hell, but this doesn't make them "gods of evil". Loki isn't a god of evil; he's a god of trickery and cunning, which might read as evil to a culture that values forthrightness, but he doesn't embody all the qualities seen as evil in Norse culture (he's not an oathbreaker, for example).

The only Western religion that has a straight-up god of evil is Zoroastrianism, and even that's debatable: Angra Mainyu might not count as a god (in either the comparative-religion or the Dwarf Fortress sense) since nobody worships him.

* Except Dionysus, who is a special case.

On how to do this interface-wise:

My favorite option would be a q-menu command on the catapult for "take ammo from stockpile". This way you can put a pile of (stones/apprentice-work -copper serrated discs-/dead goblins/barrels of forgotten beast ichor) next to the catapult and you're guaranteed that your siege operator won't waste time running down ten flights of stairs to get the one perfect rock to shoot at the goblins. He'll go to the pile, grab something, and load it up, and other dwarves will keep the stockpile full with normal hauling jobs. And you have the (now very well-developed) stockpile controls to decide what objects are eligible for throwing.

Another way would be a flag similar to the dump, forbid, and melt flags, but that seems more cumbersome.

I am really disappoiinted the King/Queen isn't called a Thane. I think that should be changed ASAP.

I'm not sure why they would be. Historically, "thane" is roughly equivalent to "knight": a noble who serves the king in a military capacity, and may also hold title to land. If anything, it might apply to the mayor or captain of the guard after the King arrives.