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Messages - NW_Kohaku

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586
DF Suggestions / Re: If dwarf cannot do repeating craft job, suspend job rather than delete it.
« on: March 29, 2016, 08:03:15 pm »
While I fully agree it should be part of the base game, this is a feature of DF Hack, should you want to use it.

587
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: "Momuz Uzolikal, Dwarf Clerk necromancer - New Arrival"... What?
« on: March 29, 2016, 07:34:13 pm »
Incidentally, you don't need the necromancers to be friendly to weaponize them. Behold, the legend of Silentthunders. (See also the scientific experimentation upon "necrobacon" and how zombie pigs benefit from increased meat without any of the nasty taste of rotting zombie flesh.)

Basically, all you need to do is create a drowning chamber for livestock to create some nice corpses, put the necromancer behind some windows/fortifications, and then let the necro see something hostile to it, like a captured-and-released crundle or something.  The necro will raise the pigs to defend himself. 

588
DF Suggestions / Re: Courting rituals
« on: March 29, 2016, 07:24:51 pm »
There is no "zoom out" for fortress mode, and Toady tends to keep things the same between modes, so I suspect not. 

Instead, I suspect you just do a "courting ritual", and then maybe if two people are near each other, there's a preggers flag raised.

"Hey, baby, want to blow this Legendary Dining Hall, and maybe join me for some courtship dancing?"

I just wish DF supported some directional sprites.  I'd like to see one of those SNES-era Final Fantasy dances where they spin in place and jump.

589
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Life after Therapist
« on: March 29, 2016, 07:22:20 pm »
Quote from: Shonai_Dweller on March 29, 2016, 06:30:30 pm
Toady specifically said spreadsheet dwarf control is not the way he wants the game to be eventually, so not sure if he really learned much there. Stock control and other useful tools have been in the dev notes for years - and, sure, the whole point of having a suggestion forum is so he can see what issues people feel strongly about.

Yes, but the problem is, he's built a game where spreadsheets are the best way to visualize the data. 

I'm also not soon abandoning DF Hack as long as livestock can be "not interested in marrying" and require either DF Hack or extremely micromanagement-heavy manually pasturing each livestock animal and waiting for which goat gives birth to see which males are useless to fortress production. 

590
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Life after Therapist
« on: March 29, 2016, 06:08:52 pm »
Quote from: Shonai_Dweller on March 28, 2016, 11:45:38 pm
I think you're thinking of something else.
And yes, Shonai, I was thinking of something else, there is a new "labor manager" (amusingly, a part of DF Hack) put into the game that was basically Therapist inside the game.  Obviously, that's something entirely different.

Manager is perfectly functional for one-time needs, like needing 7 random things for a noble's demand, or producing 5 new steel spears, but it's less than ideal to work with for things you need on repeat, as it takes babysitting to keep up.  Having the capacity to set manager to maintain specific levels of goods at all times is far more useful.

If the manager is being reworked to finally be more useful, then all the power to it.  I still don't think it would be happening if players hadn't constantly complained about how unusable the interface is, or gone to such extreme lengths as DF Hack creating entire suites of interface tools to show Toady how to do it, though.

Quote from: Deathworks on March 29, 2016, 09:18:55 am
Personally, I am a bit disturbed by your seeming dismissal of people who do not use third-party tools when playing DF, especially since I belong to those people.[...]

Considering as this thread seemingly exists so that people can post links to images where they make jokes about anyone using Therapist having to be insane, that seems like a glass house allegation...

In any event, if you use small population forts, good on you, you very likely don't need Therapist or DF Hack to micromanage your dwarves.  I don't personally prefer giant, 200 dwarf fortresses or trying to take on the HFS with in person dwarf armies, but even in a relatively small 50-dwarf fort, there is plenty of reason to simply prefer not having to babysit each dwarf.

Besides that, I find Therapist makes the game easier to simply visualize the personality of a dwarf.  Unlike many players, I prefer nicknames for dwarves that reflect personality or habit, not simple job function (a must for non-Therapist users), and find Therapist is the best way to understand those traits, rather than the overwhelming text blocks of the "details view".

That said, DF Hack allows you to set up scripts with conditional jobs, such that a new batch of alcohol is brewed when fortress levels drop below 40, and stop when fortress alcohol levels go above 100. Compare this to what I observe the typical non-DF Hack user doing, and just digging more stockpile to keep up with runaway production, and then quitting when they wind up with FPS death and complaining about how their severely unoptimized fort has severely unoptimized framerates. I think the DF Hack user is much more safely on the sane side, since we are not exactly the ones trying the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome.

Beyond that, having the capacity to "explore the rules" is very much one of the core reasons why players will play DF.  Maybe you "wonder" at it without looking at the real mechanics, but if someone is going to have any real understanding of how, say, minecarts work, they need concrete, objective measurements.  I'm pretty sure at some point, you've looked on the wiki or watched some YouTube guide that was filled with information someone else explored.  You don't understand minecarts without exhaustively testing them, especially as their mechanics are so wildly counterintuitive.

591
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Is it still possible to embark as a dead civ?
« on: March 29, 2016, 05:16:31 pm »
What's important to note is that often, a civ will have "landless" members.  A civ can have all its home cities conquered, but still have some of its members living as vagabonds in the wilderness "somewhere". You can often embark with a civ that exists merely as a few scraps of vagabonds whose population is too small to send any real migrants.

592
DF Suggestions / Re: Agriculture: A balance of simplicity and complexity
« on: March 29, 2016, 05:09:43 pm »
Quote from: Bromus on March 29, 2016, 12:39:25 pm
You seem intent on making your proposal(s) the only available framework for discussing DF agriculture. That would be fine with me if your handle was Toady.

I'm here to propose a different framework, one whose focus is the beauty of elegant simplicity. I look forward to discussing with anyone who wants to talk about agriculture in that way, rather than tinkering with the 1001 moving parts of your proposal.

Nice hijack tho,

-B

The problem with your statement is you clearly aren't suggesting something new, you're commenting on the thread that came before, which is obviously something that belongs in the original thread.  (And, again, you don't have a framework for how the player interacts with anything, you just have a couple variables you'd prefer be more prominent without even starting to grapple with the concept of interface.)

If you want Toady weighing in, the oft-overlooked header of the suggestions forum says the following:
Quote
BEFORE POSTING A SUGGESTION
[...]
    Search for an existing thread. If you find a thread similar to your idea, you can bump it to expand on the suggestion, even if the thread is old.

I am not kidding when I say that you can find dozens upon dozens of rehash threads that get met with the "here is a list of the dozens of threads this thread is exactly like", often posted by new people. In fact, it's to the point where it's often a joke on the boards that "it was inevitable", and part of the lifecycle of a bay12 poster to post something dozens of other people have posted.

593
DF Suggestions / Re: Agriculture: A balance of simplicity and complexity
« on: March 29, 2016, 05:05:18 pm »
Quote from: Bumber on March 29, 2016, 03:30:37 pm
Keep in mind not all worlds will actually have magic. Cavern life needs a plausible non-magic reason to exist, or else it cannot exist in those worlds without.

The problem with that is, again, forgotten beasts, amethyst men, floating heads, nether caps, etc, are all in existence in all vanilla games.  The entire concept of the post-0.28 caverns system are pretty much absolute magic. Frankly, you can include dwarves and their magic stone-vaporizing pickaxes that make hollowing out half a mountain a faster and simpler task than building a single above-ground hut in that mix.

Dwarven civilization could not exist without magic, and so the only way to play a zero-magic game would be to turn off the whole underground, and cut tremendous chunks of the raws out. 

Quarry Bushes are not mushrooms, they are literal bushes with stone gray leaves and nuts that look like rocks.  Attempting to justify this with real science is just pure denialism.

594
DF Suggestions / Re: Titans are Immortal
« on: March 29, 2016, 04:53:21 pm »
Quote from: IndigoFenix on March 29, 2016, 02:47:06 pm
Worshippers of said beast might bar your way, making things more interesting.  It would also be a good idea if some megabeasts were benign - at least until you cut down too many trees and angered the Great Lord of the Fairy Forest.  Elves would suddenly seem a lot more justified.

The only problem with this is that we would need a lot more magical creatures, plants, and regional effects to be associated with the many spheres.  Toady was probably planning on making more procedural generators anyway though.

That pretty much was the Xenosynthesis suggestion. :P

Anyway, yes, it's probable the best way to handle such a thing is just coming up with ways to apply changes to a template creature, in the way that giant creatures are just creatures made bigger, or creature-people are creatures made humanoid-ish and sapient. Like I was saying over there, you could make "song sphere" creatures by making birdsong into something more like an actual chorus as per a Disney movie, while "healing sphere" creatures start regenerating like Wolverine.

595
DF Suggestions / Re: Necromancers and vampires getting powerful and experienced over time.
« on: March 29, 2016, 12:31:20 pm »
Quote from: IndigoFenix on March 15, 2016, 12:48:12 am
Necromancers, for one.  There is no way that glancing at a book for one instant grants you ultimate mastery over the dead.

Don't forget that you can read a book in an instant even with the barest minimum point in literacy.  That's at a point where you're apparently having trouble with words as long as "mastery" much less "necromancy", and yet you gain instant mastery over necromancy upon seeing the book, like the words literally jump off the page and burrow through into your brain and give you the skill...

... Although that sort of mechanic explains why books are single-use in RPGs...

596
DF Suggestions / Re: No automatic reload after firing
« on: March 29, 2016, 12:22:15 pm »
Quote from: GoblinCookie on March 24, 2016, 11:16:56 am
I was under the understand that the crossbow carries far more force than the longbow, penetrating armour better with better accuracy.  The only real advantage of the longbow is the sheer number of arrows that can be fired which on an open field battle is an important thing, since you can simply swarm the enemy with an endless barrage of arrows.  The reason that the crossbow was so prevalant was mostly because in many contexts (sieges for instance) ammunition is quite limited and the range is often short enough that accuracy and penetration is everything since if you miss or fail to bring down the opponant you may simply be skewered before you have the time to reload.  Relative reloading time does not matter so much if you can simply duck behind cover as soon as you have fired, something not an option on the open field.

Compare this hand lever crossbow to this windlass crossbow.  One takes seconds to pull, and the other takes a full minute or more.  One has a pull force barely above a child's throwing strength, the other can shove a bolt through a sheet of steel, at least at close range.  One was used on the field, the other solely for sieges when you could be assured of a battlement or pavise covering you.

The problem is that there is no differentiation in DF or in this thread between them.

Hand crossbows are dead simple to use, which is why the are given out to the conscripts, as Trappington mentioned, but the pull strength of those crossbows are too weak to penetrate any armor, so they were generally only effective against other hardly-armored conscript troops.

Quote from: GoblinCookie on March 24, 2016, 11:16:56 am
That said Agincourt was not due to the immense armour penetration capacities of longbows but more due to the weather, if the ground had been dry the archers would all have been slaughtered.

Incorrect.  It was due to cunning use of the land and the impatience of French commanders.  The English archers at Agincourt positioned their archers behind a dip in the land that was small enough to be nearly impossible to see from a distance so that the French would charge them not knowing it was there, but still large enough that a fully armored charger could not jump the drop without snapping its legs.  The French's own crossbow mercenaries, meanwhile, were forced to abandon their pavises to keep up with the French march to reach the battle, and when faced with longbow volleys and no cover when they had crossbows, they retreated.

597
DF Suggestions / Re: Allow the fortress to construct the instruments of its immigrants
« on: March 29, 2016, 11:13:20 am »
Quote from: Dirst on March 21, 2016, 06:33:28 pm
I'm not sure it makes sense that every Tom, Dick and Urist carries around full blueprints for every musical instrument (and later, recipe) in their cultures... but immigrants should bring along their limited skill/knowledge for making the stuff from their home cultures, perhaps with the ability to transmit that knowledge via books and scholarly apprenticeships.

This will limit you to crappy foreign instruments until you get just the right migrant, but it's realistic.

I don't think some items need blueprints.  I believe that the reason some cultures have veils and others don't is not because a culture hasn't properly researched the idea of a piece of cloth over your face as much as because it's not one of their customs to wear one. 

If I can make a mandolin, there's no reason I can't make a sitar if a lot of people come up and ask me for one.

What this would really need is not technological change, but some sort of interface for cultural changes brought about by contact with other cultures, and how "cosmopolitan" your fortress is becoming...

598
DF Suggestions / Re: Agriculture: A balance of simplicity and complexity
« on: March 29, 2016, 10:57:26 am »
Quote from: Bromus on March 29, 2016, 08:56:41 am
Quote
I also again have to ask why you're holding an argument explicitly about the Agriculture Rebooted thread in a separate thread when you're basically going point by point through that thread... It's much easier for people to track every argument about the thread when it's actually contained within the same thread.

Because that thread hadn't been updated in nearly a year and, at 31 pages long, has some serious TLDR baggage. [...] So I decided to propose a slightly less detailed, yet still profoundly effective approach based on my real-life experience.

[...] Finally, I know you put alotta work into the Rebooted post, and I applaud you for it. I definitely still think it's worth a read, and that's why I linked to it near the top of my original post. But please know that I am not just out to steal your thunder, troll, and/or endlessly rehash old arguments. I feel like my ideas are worth a new post, and not being buried under 31 pages of details and commentary.

Here's the thing: As much as it might be "TLDR baggage" to have all the discussions on a single topic in one place, what happens when splitting what is basically a single conversation into multiple new topics and then letting those new topics fall off the front page?  If you weren't going to read the single thread you were responding to in full, there's no chance the next person who wants to argue with that thread is going to search for, much less read any subsequent discussions.  What happens when there are a lot of people who want to make an argument about that same topic?  You wind up with dozens of new threads responding to an old thread, and it becomes an ontological mystery as to who is responding to what when threads get cross-quoted without even being linked.  (And please quote with links.  Either hit "insert quote" and crop down to the part you want to use, or use [ url=urlname] and [ /url] and "copy link address" when right-clicking the "title" of a post.)

The reason I just copy-paste a response to a "no poop in DF" argument is because these arguments pop up once every other month. There are dozens of threads arguing this same topic over and over. (There used to be people just copy-pasting the lists of "previous threads that cover this exact topic" just to show where the argument had already been.) Part of why that topic is 31 pages long (and it's called "Reboot" because it is a reformatting of the argument of a 60-page long thread to cut down on the TL;DR) is that I have already put down point-by-point responses to arguments like "no poop in DF". So, yes, I realize you don't intend to rehash the argument, what you're doing will unintentionally lead to it. 

Furthermore, your good points will be lost if it's not in the main thread.  Again, that thread is a result of argument with dozens of people over years, and making a consensus position that took everyone's input into account.  If I didn't randomly happen to stumble into the suggestions forum at this time, I'd have no knowledge of this thread and no chance to really modify the main thread.  Hashing over different points of view and working out the differences makes for a whole greater than the sum of its individual's points of view.  If dozens of people just say they want some thing, and a few dozen others say they want some mutually exclusive thing, but none of them ever talk to one another, it results in losing the chance for people to understand the different points of view, and create a single suggestion that could actually answer everyone's concerns.

(I should also point out that I wasn't even done writing the main argument until page 18 in the thread... Many people just "posted to watch".  When you get done with all the pro forma rehashes of the same arguments, you're already at page 12 and suddenly, someone TL;DRs and starts up the same argument again.)

In any event, I'm going to make the "substansive responses" in the Agriculture Rebooted thread.

599
DF Suggestions / Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« on: March 29, 2016, 10:56:48 am »
Importing an argument from another thread:
Quote from: Bromus on March 23, 2016, 04:40:18 pm
Spoiler: Original Post (click to show/hide)
And then responding to this:
Quote from: Bromus on March 29, 2016, 08:56:41 am
Quote
For that mater, the core of what I am asking of you remains unanswered: How would players actually interact with any of this data?

Building latrines, stables, stockpiles, activity-zones, and hauling water, manure, mulch, and querying farm tiles and farmers' workshops. I don't think the average player wants to have to deal with more greater quantities/qualities of soil amendments than that. Am I understanding your question correctly? I don't think I can get more detailed, as I am not into modding the RAWs or whatever.

No, I don't think you're understanding the distinction I'm making.

You are talking about items in the chain of production for the simulation, I'm talking about interface.  This thread is both about having a simulation, yes, but more importantly about the interface that allows the player to understand and interact with it.

See the images in the TL;DR post (or the whole post if you haven't read it yet), and then the Interface post, which explains in depth how the player would actually interact with this system.

To make a long story short, I am suggesting a whole new interface not dissimilar to the military screen, where agricultural activity (including ranching and forestry among others) are all scheduled by the player, then automatically carried out by the dwarves so as to eliminate the need for micromanaging a constant "add more fertilizer" button press that players, simply, would not remember to press. 

To this end, I don't see why removing one or two resources from the game really makes the game simpler.  Either you're suggesting a workshop and manual job assignment scheme, which would be massively more micromanagement-heavy and complex, even with less "moving parts", or you're basically just saying you want to keep the overwhelming majority of what I talked about, you just want to make "carbon" be "more important" by removing some of the other variables.

From what you've said so far, I get the impression that you're not actually interested in a simpler system, you're trying to argue against "NPK" in favor of "CN" because of a political/philosophical opposition to modern fertilization practices.  If so, that's perfectly fair, I enjoy such an argument more than arguing complexity of interface, but I'm still not sure what it is you actually want players to see when they are operating in this system that would be different from what they see in the system currently outlined.

Quote from: Bromus on March 29, 2016, 08:56:41 am
Quote
I'm not sure why people are so hung up on sevenths...
Because as a player, the 1-7 water-scale is the most immediately available presentation of an already-implemented finer-gradation than the all-or-nothing that-which-needs-to-be-dug and that-which-has-been-dug. Really, the programmable bits and the UI scale really don't matter so much as long as there is some kind of non-zero-sum spectrum of soil characteristics.

The thing is, it does matter significantly. Sevenths of water are crude and have to be handled with random motion taking place dozens of ticks for optimization reasons, but have to be large because they occupy 'physical space' to the point that they block portions of the map and force connectivity redraws.  Plants already have growdurs that are only checked in hundreds of ticks because they're meant to be slow and not take up processor time too often, but they are also still measured in the hundreds.  Sevenths need to have random checks, and that can mean forcing a dwarf to re-water a tile before he's even gotten to the next row of crops because of some randomly "bad rolls".

However, you do bring up the major, recurring theme I do have to bring home - players generally don't recognize the things they don't see.  This is the core of my argument of why we can have complex systems without making it seem complex to a player: They just don't see the complex numbers, they only see the simple ones.

The objective shouldn't be to make a simple set of interactions, it should be to make complex interactions where the numbers the player doesn't directly need to interact with are hidden.

600
DF Suggestions / Re: Move Harvest from Options to Hauling
« on: March 29, 2016, 08:57:08 am »
Why would you want to turn the harvest labor for children off? They literally have nothing else to do but eat, drink, sleep, and party.

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