Bay 12 Games Forum

Now that I've got the fundementals down I'm finding much of the game just frustrating and tedious. I have too many dwarves immigrating. Is there any way to turn it down? I'm only in my third year in a very inhospitable climate (tundra) and I've 131 dwarves. I really don't know what to do with them all. I would put more in my military but I already have 20 and they seem to be able to take care of any goblins without even a scratch. Also it seems far too easy to attain sufficient wealth to take everything that I want from the caravans (and that's not much. Why do they have so much useless crap? Oh probably cause everyone else only sells their useless crap like I do!). What do I do with all my dwarves and all my junk?

Build a bigger fortress?  Seriously, I always need more dwarves (I modded my population cap up to 300) so that I'd have more haulers and such.  I try to keep the military minimal, because I need them for other stuff.

Start making some picks/axes/crossbows and mine out huge areas to give every dwarf a room (yes, I *have* done that with 300 dwarves, and they were 3x3 rooms, too, with all the stone dumped into a quantum stockpile... they also had chests and cabinets), deforest the place, put up a maze of traps, get the military training with crossbows, get multiple copies of every single shop, discover some magma (you DID embark on a place with magma... right?).

Set up the useless migrants to specialize in one skill or a few related skills (e.g. cook + food hauler).  Set up carpenter's shops with make beds, barrels & bins all on repeat.  Set up a huge farm and put your 50-60 farmers to good use (some of whom should be exclusively farmers).  Get a clothesmaker set up and have a few clothesmaking shops that have every job on repeat (the jobs themselves rotate, so if you put 10 things all on repeat, you'll cycle through them).  Same deal with leather, but I usually make only armor (including helms, etc.), water skins & backpacks.

Get magma smelters set up and start melting all the goblin crap + whatever else you've got (all on repeat, of course).  Carve out giant entire z-level stockpiles, mass dump the stone from them, and tell your dwarves to store furniture or food there.  If you have sand (you DID get sand right?), crank out green glass stuff, too.  Especially menacing spikes.  But raw green glass isn't bad, either, if you want to train up a gem cutter/setter.  Speaking of furniture, make a dozen or so mason's/craftdwarf's/mechanics workshops near the quantum stone stockpile and put them to work.

In short, once you get enough dwarves to give them massive amounts of work, FPS is your main limitation.  I get things to the point where the stocks are full (e.g. 10k food & booze) and then let the game grind away without me, coming back to check for ambushes/traders/diplomats/migrants/moods.

Could be fun to get raided by ents (and elves) if you were too quick to deforest the place.

Your woodcutters could be in for a surprise.

And I love the idea about plant-based vermin control.  Especially if they eat the damn things, rather than hiding them under your bed, the way kittens do.

Quote from: Capntastic on July 04, 2010, 03:09:09 pm

Quote from: Cruxador on July 04, 2010, 01:43:49 pm

That would require significant rewrites, and the gain is small.

Nontrivial rewrites aren't 'significant'.  It'd take some doing but it'd be worth it.

Admittedly I know nothing of programming so how would this be hard?

Depends on how things are set up.  The only person who actually knows whether it's hard or trivial is the guy coding this.  Anyone else is just guessing, unless Toady One has made a proclamation somewhere.  I can make an educated guess, though.  I would expect it to require changing what type of object room ownership references.  I'd expect the hard part to be making sure that a room assigned to an empty noble slot doesn't show up as "unowned" and therefore claimable.  But that's just a guess.

It would definitely be a convenient feature, though.  Especially if you've been having trouble with crystal glass loving nobles.  I mean, my mayors tend to have their unreasonable mandates ended by magma, so...

That would make towers a lot easier to deal with if you didn't have to rip their floors apart manually to make new walls inside them.

Useful during big wars when everyone is dead and you want to turn their beds into charcoal for swords.

Maybe the low quality beds...  But I'd much rather burn elven goods, instead.

No elven goods?  Kill more elves!

Are idols even in the raws?  I was going to play around with modding them, but it looks like they're hard coded or something?  I even opened the exe with a hex editor and searched for the string "idol" (it's only in there once).  Of course, changing things with a hex editor seems to lead mostly to random crashes.  Hrm.

I can't set them to be made only from metal or allow them to be made from gems or anything.

Am I attempting the impossible here, or am I doing it wrong?

I liked that idea and I would add something else:

Melting wood itens for a fraction of coal (just like melting metal itens);
"Melting" (grinding?) stone and glass into sand;
"Melting" everything else (cloth, bones, carcasses, etc) into ash.

This way, everything would be able to recycle. I would love to get rid of the infinite supply of trash from dead goblins into something useful.

Actually, to expand on this, it seems like someone else had an idea on how to 'recycle' stone that I also like:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=2784.msg46793#msg46793

And other people have researched glass (and pottery) making in more detail than I knew about until 10 minutes ago.  One of them said:

"For glazes you'd use quartz and feldspar sand. Usually you get both at once. That you only need "sand" to create glass in DF isn't that far from the truth. You're just lucky to get a meltable mix every single time. =)"

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=49525.msg1063566#msg1063566

So I might have been wrong about that part in the last post.

I've been thinking about a way to modularize traps and I've come up with this design by splitting up all the current traps into separate parts:  Actuators, Triggers & Power supplies.  I'm not entirely sure that all actuators should require power (e.g. dumpers could operate on gravity alone), but I'm not entirely sure that some shouldn't, either.

### Actuators ###

* Shooter
Shoots an object in an approximate cardinal direction (including up or down) when triggered.  Accuracy & power is dependent on the mechanism quality, item weight, etc.  Not as powerful as a ballista or catapult, so not exactly a replacement.  Yes, that means that it might go way off course...  This is for *objects in general* so you could, for example, load it with stone, anvils, booze, etc.  Or add a ranged weapon that fires in a certain direction.  You could also shoot a cage at someone, but I'm guessing it'd be pretty inaccurate.

* Dumper
Think of two big doors that open on command, dropping whatever is on top of them onto the square below and then closes up quickly.  This could drop the creature into a pit trap.  This could drop a stone onto their head.  This could dump a one-tile magma shower on top of them.  Fun!  Oh, and you could stack them.  Picture a stack of dumpers that all have stones on them--each drops stuff onto the one below.  Or load it with a filled cage and have it drop the animals from inside it (but not the cage itself).  Or load it with an *empty* cage and turn it into a cage trap ...

* Pendulum
Put a war hammer or a stone onto this and send your enemies flying!  Or a sword, axe blade, etc. and chop them up.  Maybe even a cage, though the weight of the cage would cause it to detach if it caught anything.

* Stabber
Great for spears... or swords.  More likely to jam, than a pendulum, though.

* Support
This is the same as what we have now, mentioned for the sake of completeness.

Power:
Hand Crank (Dwarf powered)
You can power pumps via dwarf power, so I guess you can use them to power a waterwheel.  This is just a bit more direct.

* Windmill

* Waterwheel
Same.

### Triggers ###
Pressure Plate
* Same as the current one, but also be able to trigger based on the *weight* of items on its tile.  In short, if you drop a heavy rock on one, it would trigger one set to that trigger type.  Oh, and it would be nice to be able to build any of the actuators on top of such a tile containing one of these, to allow more complex trap setups.

Lever
* Same as what we have.

Timer
* You can already make these (e.g. chained cat surrounded by pressure plates, just have to replace when it dies), but this would be a little more convenient.  Consider it the most optional of the bunch.

*************************

The fun of this comes from combination.  You link one pressure plate at the end of the path to a ton of dumpers with empty cages and catch everybody!  Until the second squad shows up and you're still reloading...

Or you hook them up to a pendulum... but now there's a delay to account for between the time the pressure plate is hit and when it activates, but at least you don't have to reload as much.

Or you make a stack of dumpers that feeds a shooter... and hook that to a timer.  Suddenly you have a semi-automatic catapult or something.  Pity no one knows how to aim these things.  Enterprising folks might even be able to use it to haul stone up a few levels, somewhat like catapults have been known to do (except that they can't send it to a higher z level).

I think there are more possibilities, but I haven't thought them all through yet...