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Messages - irmo

Pages: 1 ... 25 26 [27] 28 29 ... 40
391
DF Suggestions / Re: Furniture/crafts realism
« on: February 05, 2009, 03:15:50 am »
Quote from: Neonivek on February 04, 2009, 12:27:00 pm
Blunt weapons truely became popular in Europe when there was a Taboo against causing people to bleed (mind you... blunt weapons could and often did cause bleeding).

Um, no.

392
DF Suggestions / Re: Dwarves can fail
« on: February 04, 2009, 10:06:38 pm »
Quote from: tsen on February 04, 2009, 09:23:27 pm
In defense of the idea of craft fails, I remind everyone of the false consensus effect and accompanying issues with meta-cognitive skills. Specifically, the average person believes that he or she is better than at least 67% of the rest of the population and without solid education or practical grounding in a discipline, will often feel that his or her skills are up to par or excellent when they are in fact quite poor.

And why do we care about this?

393
DF Suggestions / Re: Swimming And *DROWNING* NPC's
« on: February 04, 2009, 04:05:05 am »
Quote from: G-Flex on February 03, 2009, 10:12:15 pm
Make it depend on strength and agility despite the fact that it's something you need to learn how to do, and can get much better at with practice?

Yep.

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The problem you've identified is not that swimming doesn't require skill, it's that dwarves don't normally use it and that there's no good way of training it.

I didn't say swimming doesn't require skill, I said that Swimming should not be a skill in the game.

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Also, keep in mind that skills are meant to be universal. Humans and elves need to swim too. So getting rid of the skill would be, well, bad.

No, getting rid of the ability to swim would be bad. My point is not that dwarves hate swimming and therefore shouldn't know how to swim. My point is that dwarves need some basic water-survival ability without me having to do stupid tricks to train them, and then it doesn't make sense to have everything from "Novice Swimmer" to "Legendary Swimmer" when it's possible to swim with no skill at all.

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So basically, instead of getting rid of the skill, just give dwarves a bad thought from swimming if they hate it so much, and/or lower base swim speed/breath-holding, and a way to train them if necessary without having to make elaborate traps.

The alternative to getting rid of the skill is not to further gimp their swimming abilities. It's to give them a way to train it without being told, such as, during some of their breaks, finding some shallow water and going for a swim. For safety reasons this might need an activity zone (so I can suggest that they swim in the nice clean pool instead of the carp-infested river).

Or, for simplicity, just create them with Competent Swimmer skill and we don't have to worry.

By the way, "bad thoughts" as a balance mechanism are seriously overrated. I don't know what Toady's doing right now, but it ought to be either sleeping or fixing the "Legendary Dining Room" cheat.

394
DF Suggestions / Re: Swimming And *Drowning* NPC's
« on: February 03, 2009, 08:12:34 pm »
Congratulations, you've figured out why the Swimming skill is a bad idea.

Swimming is not a normal dwarf task. It only gets used in emergencies. Therefore, nobody gets to train it unless you institute elaborate and silly measures to force them to train it. Therefore, when an emergency does come, they die. And you can't really foresee those emergencies, so you can't even train your population in an intelligent way.

Just make it depend on strength and agility.

395
DF Suggestions / Re: when artifacts gain magic, more decorations (magical and non)
« on: February 03, 2009, 03:08:53 pm »
Quote from: Heph on February 03, 2009, 10:02:09 am
If there are any, cause toady made the following an longterm Arc:

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WORLD GENERATION PARAMETERS: Allow some degree of control over the world and the more sweeping aspects of play. Possibilities include control over terrain, magic, religions, random vs. stock creatures, fantasy vs. a more 'historical' (ie human) feeling. Ideally, the variability would allow you to move between standard fantasy, fairy tales, mythic fantasy and gothic fantasy, for example.


So if you dont want artfacts just set the magic low.

I hate that argument that to much "fantasie" makes DF unplayable. The amount of fantasie in an DF world will (hopefully) be custizeable so nobody has to deal with flaming swords or the Master ring if he/she doesnt want to.

How about DF being unplayable because Toady doesn't have time to test and balance it on "low magic", and then test and balance it again on "high magic" without breaking "low magic"?

396
DF Suggestions / Re: Mining is harder for Humans
« on: January 29, 2009, 04:40:21 pm »
In general I like this idea. I wonder if it would be possible to take the entire skill spectrum for human miners and move it down a few notches, so that they start at "Inept Miner" and cap at maybe "Master Miner". (And do the same with dwarves for skills like Grower and Herbalist, which aren't really their strong suits.)

One problem I see with this is that right now there's no way to restrict mining of an area based on skill, as there is with workshops. If you're digging out your grand entrance hall and want your master miner to do it, you have to shut off all your other miners and remove all other designations. Inversely, if you just want part of the mountain shaved off, and it's a good chance for your squad of noobs to build some mining experience, you have to shut off your master so he doesn't come and do the whole thing himself. Maybe workshop-style skill limits should be an option in the mining designation. (This also lets you do stuff like restrict gem clusters to Master Miners or higher, while the apprentices dig out the rest of the tunnel.)

397
DF Suggestions / Re: Cloth Constructions
« on: January 28, 2009, 08:24:15 pm »
Quote from: Sowelu on January 27, 2009, 12:40:59 pm
How would you build that ceiling...Designate it like a bridge?  Obvious problems with building a 6x6 floor that you can't stand on.

Like a bridge, exactly.

The problem I see with material strength values determining who can walk on surfaces is pathfinding. If the dwarves don't understand that this cloth canopy won't support their weight, they'll fall through it every time. Now if you make it out of giant cave spider silk, maybe it's strong enough to support one dwarf but not two. How do you handle that in pathfinding? It seems like it has to be a binary walkable/non-walkable choice at some level.

398
DF Suggestions / Re: [For or Against] Tunnelers units
« on: January 24, 2009, 04:13:20 pm »
Quote from: BonSequitur on January 24, 2009, 01:45:07 pm
What if tunnels dug by tunneling creatures were unstable, and automagically refilled after some time? This would balance out the extra difficulty of tunneling creatures against the sheer aesthetic/logistic damage they can cause.

This is why you need to read the rest of the thread before posting.

399
DF Suggestions / Re: Make starting equipment suck less
« on: January 10, 2009, 05:29:38 pm »
Kobold, do you have some kind of weird profanity filter that replaces the letter 'v'?

400
DF Suggestions / Re: Tools
« on: January 09, 2009, 01:20:39 am »
Quote from: Pilsu on January 08, 2009, 09:49:47 pm
Workshops should be built with the tools in them, not have every dwarf carry around a toy hammer

I agree with that, if you mean the tools should be built into the shop, like the anvil is. This avoids strewing tools around everywhere, and imposes some cost on setting up shops. Examples:

- Butcher's shop: Knife (possibly axe or sword? maybe any of these?)
- Leatherworker's and Tailor's shop: Awl
- Craftsdwarf's shop: Chisel (used for all types of crafting)
- Carpenter's shop: Axe (this is a key early industry so it should use a very multifunctional tool)
- Forge: Anvil and hammer
- Still and Tannery: Barrel (Still should also require blocks for a furnace)
- Kitchen and Fishery: Knife (Kitchen should also require blocks for an oven)
- Mason's shop: Hammer
- Farmer's workshop: Flail, maybe?

The knife could be a generalization of the dagger. The chisel and awl are new. Any of the hand tools can be made of any industrial metal, except the chisel, which has to be iron or steel.

The exceptions are jobs that don't use workshops. Mining, woodcutting, and hunting are already like that; add fishing (spear), farming (maybe shovel or something; they could just use their hands though), and engraving (hammer and/or chisel). These dwarves would go and pick up the tool when they had one of these labors enabled. If they have more than one, they should carry the tool for the job they're currently doing, and then switch it when they start on a job that requires a different one.

401
DF Suggestions / Re: Make blood an object
« on: December 30, 2008, 12:55:07 pm »
That's a lot of work for a pretty marginal feature.

402
DF Suggestions / Re: Requests vs Demands
« on: December 29, 2008, 03:32:08 am »
"Princes were taught a thing or two about being rational, as they were taught to play a little lute and dance a passable ricercar. But what drove their actions was their own force of will; in the end they did as they pleased, rational or not."
-- Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

It seems out of character for nobles to willingly back off from their demands just because something is rare, expensive, or impossible. To the contrary, the more rare, expensive, and impossible it is, the more Baron Urist is going to believe he's entitled to have one in his dining room. That's the difference between nobles and everyone else.

I'd rather deal with the problem of impossible noble demands by having them use their political connections and buy whatever weird thing they want if the local dwarves don't provide it quickly enough. Of course they'll buy it on fortress credit, which means that when the caravan arrives, you'll have to pay for it, probably through the nose.


403
DF Suggestions / Re: Magical tunnels
« on: December 23, 2008, 03:47:42 am »
Quote from: Silverionmox on December 22, 2008, 11:00:51 am
Thereby completely invalidating the goal of having a fortress.

Agreed. The point of siegers having tunneling units is to give you something else to defend against, not something you can't defend against.

I'm in favor of individual units being able to teleport in, for spying/sabotage/theft purposes, but if they can teleport entire armies in, there's really no defense. "Find the guy maintaining the portal and kill him"--sure, while you have a goblin army wreaking havoc inside your walls, you're going to hunt down and kill one wizard. And then you still have a goblin army inside your walls.

No thanks.

404
DF Suggestions / Re: [For or Against] Tunnelers units
« on: December 21, 2008, 07:00:11 am »
1. For defense against tunneling, I like the idea of building walls of steel (or harder stone, once that concept exists)--though this should only slow them down, not stop them completely. Other than that, what you do is not send your warriors out to the tunnel entrance and into the tunnel and attack their miners from the rear. What you do is think like a dwarf. You see the path their miners are taking and dig your own tunnel across it, so that they eventually break into your tunnel. Into which you put soldiers, war dogs, traps, or a million gallons of pressurized water.

2. I posted this in the other thread, but to anyone concerned about the aesthetic effects: What would you think if underground squares that were completely blocked off with walls (natural or constructed) became invisible again? Then you could seal off the tunnels with constructed walls and they'd go away, at least until you reopened them.

405
DF Suggestions / Re: Goblin advanced Sieges
« on: December 21, 2008, 12:55:40 am »
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I've already posted twice on this today, but I'd like to see Combat Engineers- Siege Engineers, Masons, Mechanics, Miners, and Siege Operators. It's not so much I think digging is necessary, just that I want it with everything -else-. I want everything the game can throw at me thrown at me, and I want to triumph over it. Sieges need to be pants-wettingly terrifying, and they're not. If I can do it, I want the game to be able to do it. And I can sap a goblin tower into a dust cloud at the bottom of a 15-z-level drop, so they should be able to mess with me if I can't take them down and stop them.

On this I totally agree with you.

I still think there should be different degrees of sieges, but (unless you're playing very badly) they ought to mostly track the state of fortress development. So there's terrifying because it's seven civilians against seven goblins with weapons, and then there's terrifying because you have a well-defended fortress but they're digging under your walls, bridging your moat, picking the locks on your gates, chucking Greek fire through the windows, and poisoning the water supply.

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You don't want to play that game? Turn it off in the init file.

It seems some people will not be satisfied unless they can build right next to the biggest, baddest goblin tower in the world and not have their precious fortress layout disturbed, even while they're digging tunnels into the goblin tower, so sure, give them an init switch.

As for the aesthetic problem: Tiles that are completely blocked off by constructed or natural walls should be re-hidden. So post-siege, you can fill in the goblins' tunnel and it will be invisible again except for a single constructed wall at the entrance.

(Optionally, this could be done through a "hide" designation that resets visibility based on whether any dwarf currently has a path to the tile. With this, you could seal off the ends of the tunnel, leaving a void, and then hide the whole thing. It becomes invisible unless someone digs into it again.)

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