Bay 12 Games Forum

What?  No.  Bad bad bad.  Some stones would be very suitable for mechanisms, some more suitable than a lot of metals.

Such as?

Stop being obtuse. Of course the fortress would have to be ventilated.

You proposed putting seals around the doors so that water vapor can't escape. How is that compatible with ventilating the fortress? Any ventilation ducts would also allow water vapor to escape, much more so than leakage around the doors.

Stillsuits too hot? Of course they would be hot. The desert is hot. Its called adaptation. You get used to it.

And one of the major adaptations we have to it is sweating, which turns a situation that will kill you in an hour (overheating) into one that will kill you in a day or two (dehydration). Stillsuits are functionally equivalent to having no sweat glands. This is not "too hot" in a "wearing a sweater on a bright sunny day" sense. This is "too hot" in the "cook your brain with your own waste heat" sense.

And if anyone wants to make arguments that go something like: "Blah blah blah abstracted blah blah blah too complicated blah blah" all that would really need to be done would be make the increased qualities have a relatively lesser effect. In other words:

If you're going to add a bunch of technical complexity for the player to manage, then managing it properly needs to do something awesome.

This is a problem with the way these abstraction/detail arguments play out. Someone proposes that some minor detail should be in the game, this is criticized for adding too much micromanagement, and the proposed compromise is that it should be there, and you should be able to micromanage it if you want, but the effect should be very small. This leads to a big smear of almost-meaningless detail overwhelming the game.

I think of distinct areas of the game that need to be managed by special strategies as "minigames". A good example of this is irrigation from the 2d version: channels and flows had some funny but well-defined rules and you had to learn these rules to be able to set up your seasonal farms and tree farms. Or brainwashing hostages in Liberal Crime Squad. Or the actual, formal minigames in a game like Mario Party.

In all of these examples, the minigame has its own rules, but the reward for playing it well has a decisive impact in the main game. (This holds even if the minigame is optional. You could get by in 2d DF without building a true irrigation system, and in LCS without ever taking hostages. But if you try, and do it right, it's a huge gain; if you do it wrong, you can get horribly screwed.) So there's a good reason to learn the minigame.

If the benefit from the minigame is that if you win, a few of your soldiers do 5% more damage, assuming they actually equip the higher-quality weapons that you make with your marginally better metal bars, then screw it. It's not worth the effort, especially if (since there's currently no way to restrict crafting materials by quality, other than chasing down every last -iron bar- and designating it for melting) the minigame itself is very tedious.

It's a good idea except that it's basically impossible to simulate. It requires knowledge of not only the mechanical properties of the weapon and armor, but the arm holding the weapon, the spine supporting the arm, all the anatomy under the armor...

LOL see the real problem is now everyone is so untrusting, and they are trying to apply it to middle ages, but back then, your word was your bond.

I LOL right back at your suggestion that medieval society was more trusting of foreigners than modern society. This is a business deal between traveling merchants and a frontier settlement. They might come back next season with your platinum chandelier and discover that you're all dead, and now who's going to buy this thing?

On the other hand they might walk out of the trade depot, get about half a mile, and get eaten by bears, so paying them entirely in advance is not so great either.

Realistically you'd negotiate credit with them, considering both the stability of the fort and the reliability of the caravan master, but in game this might be difficult (you can't see the guy and thus can't tell if he's a grizzled old army scout who was running caravans through here back when it was all goblin territory, or a third-born nobleman's son who doesn't know the sharp end of a sword).

This brings us to the second issue, that has crept in: Should an accountant, lost in the tundra, and forced to build a shelter from ice cubes, eventually gain enough construction skills to build elaborate bridges from ice?

No, he should freeze to death. The game gives you the ability to start with a mix of appropriate construction and frontier-survival skills. If you don't, and you embark to an inhospitable climate, you should fail.

This has less to do with the skills and talents of the dwarf in question being deficient, than the local level of technological advancement (zero, effectively) being insufficient to support his growth.

Given that we're talking about a small outpost of a larger civilization, and a culture of oral tradition, the "technology level" consists mostly of the skills and talents of the dwarves. This shouldn't be abstracted away.

They are standing on the shoulders of giants in the sense that they didn't invent mining or metalwork themselves, and they are bringing advanced tools to get started. But their "technology level" consists of what they know how to do.

A while back I proposed that an unskilled person shouldn't be able to start doing a job at all unless someone at the site has some minimum level of skill (probably the level above Novice). This represents the need for a trained dwarf to bring the knowledge, without actually tying up dwarves with teaching/apprenticeship jobs. It also makes the bazillion "Soap Maker" immigrants marginally more useful.

Just a short condensation from what ive read so far and my personal ideas:

1. Workshops should have a setting for speed/quality of work

Fail.

It's a counter argument.

The argument that everyone's giving is that "I could do better than fail at a craft--noone should ever ever ever evar fail so totally that it's not just a plain mug or something." This can be broken down into two assertions and a conclusion: 1) I am representative of the population as a whole; 2) I have not observed myself failing horribly at a craft or hobby like dwarven trades; C) Therefore, noone should be expected to fail horribly at any dwarven craft.

The counter-counter-argument to both of those is "You are not a dwarf."

Or, more to the point, "You are not a character in a video game." The problem with "crafting failure" is abstraction: Do we need to simulate every event of placing the chisel wrong and cracking something? Or can we assume that mistakes are part of the reason novices work more slowly than masters (they're constantly screwing up and having to fix it), and part of the reason their work is of lower quality, and so it's sufficiently handled by the existing system? The issue of material loss seems really trivial, except maybe for gems.

tsen is pointing out that by asserting 1), you make 2) invalid, as self-assessments are gravely inaccurate for the population as a whole. Moreover, the idea of a horrible failure is up for grabs, which means it's an inaccurate test against an inaccurate standard, amplifying the errors.

tsen is refuting an argument that has no merit to begin with, and doing so by arguing that we all suck and are probably wrong about everything.

As a note: I'm for crafting failures, with finer units of material and a scaling system for the failures. Controls for say "learning people/workshops/materials" would help this a lot. Someone who's learning to cut gems could be trained on glass while your legendary gem cutter could cut the diamond of awesome you just dug out.

I'm iffy on finer units of material. They'd require massive changes to the way stackable items work now, even beyond the stack-recombining problem. Ideally Toady would break down and decide how big a "square" is, in actual units of measurement, and then enforce size limits on how much stuff can fit into a unit cube, and express quantities in terms of that.

Other than that, if the finer units are there to allow for crafting failure, then your novice runs to the stockpile and takes out 1 unit of stone (from a boulder which contains 64 units). He carves it into a ring, and then at some point screws it up and has to start over. So he has to run back to the stockpile and get another unit of stone. And so on. Hauling cost to do tasks greatly increases. Plus there's the question of what happens to the failed crafts--metal could be melted down, wood could be turned into charcoal, but failed stone isn't good for anything.

(Please don't say "making glass" unless you've at least seen glass being made some time in your life.)

Oh, and can the now-62-unit boulder still be carved into blocks? Turned into a table or a floodgate? Can it be combined with other, smaller stones?