Bay 12 Games Forum

You could still somewhat choose the dwarves, but you couldn't minmax them. Not so much "micromanage their histories" as "choose whichever of the dorfs at this tavern look good."

But for adventurers? This looks great!

Why, exactly, should there be so much a difference between adventurers and the starting seven?

Now, I personally don't like the current "just buy stats" system of DF's adventurer mode, but I don't understand why these should be so different.

To be honest, I tend to just "reroll" my dwarves until I get ones I like when embarking on a "serious fort" by simply looking over my dwarves and cancelling the embark until I get a set I think are interesting.  It's user-unfriendly, but it accomplishes something of the same goals.

Anyway, to get back to the OP...

You might also want to look at the Mechwarrior 3rd Edition rules. In that game, you had "career paths" that worked somewhat similarly.  Start with a family background that gives certain changes to your stats and skills, then roll dice to see some random event happen that can further change things.  Then, pick a childhood that fits the types of childhoods that family background will support, followed by another random event roll.  (This being a sanity check to make the daughter of nobility not get a "school of hard knocks" as a street urchin childhood.) When you roll, it has random chances to make good things happen or bad things if you really crap out.  For example, a farm boy/girl childhood will have random rolls where you might "be a natural with the tractor" and get +2 piloting skill, while the lowest possible roll is a tragic combine mishap that costs you a limb.

It also, notably, however, allows you to negotiate certain things with your GM so that if you wanted to be a mechanic instead of a pilot, you could fudge the +2 piloting skill event for a +2 mechanics because you "really took to the mechanics of the tractor" instead.

Regardless, I like the system more than plain point-buy systems because point-buys tend to result in boring, same-y characters that are, yes, min-maxed for the purpose the player wants to put them to.  The mix of choosing life paths and then having some random events makes for a more interesting set of characters, and it also inherently involves forcing some role-playing into the otherwise dry and boring choice of making your character in a non pencil-and-paper RPG where nobody is there to share in your RP if you do it on your own.

This could, of course, play in well with starting scenarios: You might have, for example, some sort of suggested pool of characters, so, if we're buying some characters of different backgrounds, you might see that "military dwarf" careers are cheaper if you're starting a border fortress, while "craftsdwarf" careers are more expensive in terms of the "political capital" you are spending to set up the expedition.  (It seems odd to assume you're literally paying for skills.) 

Skills are generally trainable on-site in Dwarf Fortress, however, so they're not nearly as important as personality traits.  Hence, I'd be more interested in having personality traits shaped (pseudo-retroactively) via the type of backstory you craft for each dwarf, with a military dwarf life path making one more inclined towards valuing military and law and being more brave, violent, dutiful, immoderate, and persevere more while having less respect for tranquility, less hope, and less abstract-inclined.

In general, the most important thing I do in looking over my starting seven is select my mayor and eventual baron.  I need someone who is a good "people dwarf", and who has preferences that are easily fulfilled, like preferring turkey or goose meat, doors, plump helmet wine, and whose favorite gems and metals are at least on the trade list from my mountainhome. I also cater my jobs to the personalities of my starting seven, and will "reroll" if I get too lazy a set of dwarves.  (I saw a thread once of someone who had a starting seven so lazy they literally refused to dig or start work on a farm and almost starved to death until migrants came in to save them by actually doing some work.)

A set of backstory choices with events that further shape and randomize would be much more interesting as a way of putting together a starting seven, and help get players interested in their eventual fates when they're starting out, and these are otherwise just happy faces with names and a few skill points.

And while randomizing the existence of adamantine may have a similar effect, I doubt anybody would use it. Not just reducing your chances of getting adamantine in an embark, but actually having the chance of no adamantine anywhere, is a bit scary.

Yes, that's the point I'm making.

My point isn't that randomly not having HFS in the world is a great idea, my point is that the actual effect of this suggestion is basically the same for a very large percentage of players.  I'm saying the suggestion is a bad suggestion specifically because it's functionally the same as not getting adamantine anywhere for essentially all intents and purposes.

Especially for new players, the players that the whole concept of the spoilers is aimed at, they aren't going to be reusing worlds simply out of a desire to reuse worlds.

The ultimate result of HFS rarity can simply be boiled down to a percentage chance of simply not having any in your game. Yes, you can reuse worlds, and hypothetically find some the next time, but what you're suggesting is that a majority of the newbie playerbase is going to go building a full-fledged fort, dig down to the bottom, not find a spoiler they hypothetically don't even know exists, and decide to retire there, so they can go embark somewhere else to have another blind random chance to see the spoilers?  That's not going to happen.

The only people it could possibly appeal to are the extremely slim minority of veteran players that are very well aware of the HFS and its dangers who are actually playing dozens of full-fledged fortresses without actually committing to any one, but want to have one fortress out of dozens to be "special" by being the one that has access to the bluemetal out of all of them... and again, that's still something that can be accomplished by DF Hack simply having some random percentage chance that changevein be run at the embark level as you embark, making the change on a per-embark basis. 

Even with all that, however, you're still running headlong into the fact that even that extremely niche desire will become obsolete next update when Toady starts adding in cosmic bridges between different dimensions besides just the HFS, making fortresses have access to different places and metals, anyway, without the "you either have an end game or you don't" nonsense.

The other HFS options like spire size are, as I previously mentioned, not desirable either, because they just beg for players to game them for maximum exploitation at minimum risk.

It's not like balance was really important in a game like DF where you have so much freedom; Efficient or not, if I want my fort's economy to run entirely on buckets of cow milk, I can do it...

The thing is, that's really only true so far as gameplay choices don't have objectively measurable consequences... and they do.  But even then, that's not really the whole point I'm getting at.

Running a fortress entirely on cow milk is a massively sub-obtimal choice.  Whereas a single grower, cook, and having the haulers swing by to pick up eggs can cover basically all food needs with surplus food to trade away for profit, cows produce enough milk to only barely cover two dwarves' hunger per cow. 

If we assume that you can have a max of 50 cows, then because cows have an average max age of 15, you can assume you'll need 2-3 bulls, plus have about 8% of the population being calves, so you're talking about a maximum milk-producing herd of 43 cows, so you've got a fortress population cap of 86 dwarves IF you are absolutely efficient in running them.

That's before we even consider pasturing, the micromanagement that comes with having to watch to ensure you don't overgraze (even if given large enough pastures, animals in DF tend to get "stuck" in corners of the pasture and starve themselves to death), the amount of dwarf labor that will have to be spent milking and re-pasturing the cows, plus the micromanagement because of course the jobs will be canceled off of repeat when all the cows are inevitably milked at some point, but where there is no indication when the next milking is potentially available, meaning the only interface solution the game gives you is to keep spamming the order until it doesn't give you an error message.  Oh, and if you do have 86 dwarves, then you can't afford to have even the slightest gap in milking and cheesemaking, or you start sliding inevitably towards starvation...

The bottom line is that cow's milk just doesn't make sense from any rational standpoint.  It's like saying you have the choice to complete a marathon by crawling on hands and knees the whole way.  Yes, hypothetically, nobody's stopping you from doing it, but you're going to either quit early, get really hungry by about the third day of crawling, or just plain ruin your knees... and it's not like there's any advantage to crawling over jogging like you're supposed to.

Yes, sure, you can do anything you want in a sandbox, but that doesn't mean that game mechanics don't inherently have feedback upon the consequences of your choices, and implicitly, if not explicitly, make some strategies more effective than others.

Or in simpler terms, no, not everyone is a special little snowflake.  Some playstyles are just plain wrong. I can have my fresh embark full of naked dwarves with no training or preparation dig straight for the HFS, but all that does is lead to repeated crumblings. Any playstyle that doesn't ensure dwarves have access to adequate food and shelter is not experiencing the game in your own special little way, it's simply failing pretentiously.

Games are, fundamentally, sets of rules that provide feedback upon the decisions we are making, and the rules chosen inherently enforce certain types of choices to accomplish particular goals the game sets out for its players. For as far as there are goals set forth by the game, explicit or implicit, games not only judge whether a player is making an optimal or sub-optimal choice, but it is the very rudimentary purpose of games to teach players to act in the manner that optimally accomplishes the goals the game sets out for them.

The only reason DF is even capable of allowing so many types of sub-optimal choices in the first place lies solely in the fact that DF is such an easy game that as long as you accomplish a couple extremely rudimentary tasks, you can spend the whole rest of the game dicking around however much you want.

But even that isn't the point I was making, even that's when the game is working more-or-less according to plan. 

Game balance between food types is efficient or inefficient, but much of DF's game balance is straight up game-breaking bugs, and destroys all choice in the matter.  The new needs system has several forms of needs that are outright impossible to fulfill. From dwarves declaring they will not be happy unless they eat a non-existant animal to asexual dwarves uninterested in marriage complaining that their needs for marriage are not being met, the game's balance tips into simply needing to find exploits and workarounds to simply get past the broken parts of the game.

Considering you are meant to play multiple forts and adventurers in the same world I could understand why some might want HFS to not be a certainty outside weird sized embarks. Your option of randomising existence for the whole world at generation means you either get HFS in every fort, or none.

Personally I rarely mine the stuff. Just don't bother if RP doesn't call for it.

Practically speaking, however, that's not what usually happens.  Most fortresses take up so much player time that a new version will come out by the time they are done with the last one, or even in a single version that lasts long enough, there will be new mods players will want to try. At the very least, they'll usually want to regen a world for different worlgen settings and a chance at particular types of embarks, or they just want to see a different world history.  The end result is that players usually don't play multiple fortresses in the same world.  (There aren't really that many tangible benefits for doing so at the moment - playing/retiring a fortress and a series adventurers makes sense because they can interact, but different fortresses cannot.  The only time this might be different is one of those exploit embarks where people embark a continuous chain of forts to form a "bridge", but most such forts weren't actually seriously built, and the functionality they were exploiting has been patched out, anyway.)

And that is the crux of my argument - that for all practical intents and purposes, it might as well be a world without an HFS if it's not on the map of your fortress, because most players will never get another swing at finding one other than their standard one fortress per world.

Generally, it's considered better to dump water onto magma than magma onto water, but yes, a bridge will support magma if it is made of any magma-safe material. 

OK, I posted a bug report.

Also, I should link back to this thread, while I'm at it: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=157394.0

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on April 26, 2016, 02:11:50 pm

Quote from: PatrikLundell on April 26, 2016, 10:27:23 am

It greatly depends on what level of bugginess is required. Finding dorfs pining (distracted) for nonexistent family is easy. Finding a dorf who's not willing to commit to marriage that dreams of raising a family should be easy as well.  Proving that a dorf who is put off by the thought of marriage but dreams of raising a family can't be pushed into marriage is obviously harder.

It should be pretty easy.  DF Hack will tell you when a dwarf won't marry.

Yes. We're apparently talking past each other. The first example doesn't require anything at all, while the second one can easily be checked via DFHack. The third one, however, is hard because proving something doesn't happen even if you push it for an eternity takes, well, an eternity.
This save http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=11983 (posted for a vampire bug) has "Glassmaker" dreaming about raising a family, while refusing to marry, i.e. my second case.

Well, your last case is one that assumes there's a way for a dwarf that will not marry to get married, anyway.  I don't think there needs to be elaborate steps to prove that, it's asking for proof of something that Toady will know whether he has coded or not.  Besides, he only just coded in an exception to animals not breeding because they had "commitment issues", which was due to breeding being based upon having the "marriageable" flag, not simply an "attracted" flag under ORIENTATION.

How many floors do you usually wind up with in a decentralized layout? I'm hesitant to push them too far in any direction, and how big you make your rooms would also be a concern (dormitories and 1x1 beds without walls easier to fit around your industry).  It sounds like Toady is close to making the next release, so I'll experiment with broader, decentralized forts after that.

Since I can plug 4 workshops around a single stairwell, I can make arbitrarily many stairwells, and I tend to use the maximum populations to throttle immigration to waves of a relatively manageable 10 at a time (changing init settings to increment up 10 every year), I generally get by needing one floor of workshops unless I go on long enough to need maybe 2 floors at most.  Keep in mind, I don't need to have only one staircase, either.  For my smelters, which I keep on one floor just because channeling magma into multiple floors is more hassle than it's worth, I use multiple stairwells up to different floors.  My glass furnaces are just built around the point where minecarts drop sandbags and accepts sandbags back before being given the push to go back up. This is on the same floor as, but fed around a different stockpile (actually on the floor above) the metal smelters.

That said, workshops are not always on the same floors, spread out evenly.  My latest stone hub, for example, had a boulder depot for collecting stones and a mason that cut boulders to blocks, then shoved them into a minecart that pushed it down a floor into the actual quantum stockpile of blocks, around which the main masonry workshops (and stone craftsdwarf workshop) were arrayed.  I then shoved output from that into a minecart that took a one-tile trip to another hole to a finished goods quantum stockpile. Even six workshops were too many.  By contrast, the food production was up one Z below the surface in the soil in the center, directly above the dining hall with the food stockpiles on the floor between.  The dining hall had 7 stairwells upwards for access to the food and booze stockpiles, and those stairwells also went downwards to access the residences.  The standard dwarf's room was 4 to 6 tiles, arranged in roughly hexagonal pods of six.  I assign larger rooms to married dwarves who share the room (and give them an extra bed, besides).

I was challenging myself to use only ramps, not stairwells for my "main" fortress, (the up/down stair you can see is for an aquifer-to-cavern "chicken run", and not part of the "real" fortress) incidentally.  I was experimenting with the style to accommodate that, and chose at least 4 rather than 3 mid-game, so pardon the asymmetry.

In that fortress, the connections are through the corners of the quite large dining hall, and at the bottom of the residential stack, although it's worth again noting my fortress is also decentralized by height.  Using ramps, the deeper industries are also slightly further either North or East than higher-up industries. (You can see two of the ramps on the Northeast and Northwest edges, although no workshops are on that particular floor.)

My smelters, for example, were lower-down, because I wanted to keep the magma channels I flooded away from most of the other industries.  This included a sandbag dropper I mentioned previously that had to go through an aquifer, which was a bit of an engineering feat in itself.  Wood and cloth were similarly tossed down a hole to reach a mid-level crafting zone, although I merely required a hole for those, not a returning minecart to carry empty bags back up.

Wow, the combination of these two posts somehow made me think that this topic was from 2011, partially because I've been rereading my old posts and partially because nanoforts were added to vanilla in January 2015.

Yeah, well, sorry, it's been a while since I've run a "serious" fort where that knowledge would have mattered, so I obviously got a bit foggy on how it worked.  I generally run "experiment" forts that don't go on long enough/dig deep enough for candy to matter nowadays. I guess my last serious fort just happened to have its candy line up neatly by accident.