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quote:
Originally posted by Grek:
<STRONG>Once they two get close enough they start sparring.</STRONG>
Are you sure of that? I just watched a soldier loitering around in front of the cave entrance, having a fag or whatnot. Then suddenly he bolted: sparring in barracks.
Now the barracks are a quite removed from the cave entrance. The average soldier, after having trecked that far, is totally exhausted and in need of a drink or two: That's how far it is.
So I wondered how the thought struck him and who he might be sparring with. My military being rather small, there was only one other soldier sparring. Although closer to the barracks than the first one, he might still have been 100 tiles away.
Although I'm not 100% sure of this, it looks as if sparring was a job like any other: dwarfs wonders what to do, dwarf decides on a task, dwarf gets there and does it (unless he's overcome by thirst, hunger, sleep, or any other distraction).
Remains the question wether two specific dwarfs decide on fighting each other (they *are* psychic) or wether it's a personal thing and single dwarves march towards the barracks in the hope of finding someone likeminded.
As to charcoal being insufficient for real life steelmaking: I don't know exactly when the idea of making coke came up, but it sounds reasonably modern to me. Certainly renessaince or later. Steel was known long before, although I'm open for the possibility that 10th century "steel" has little in common with what we call steel today.
And about where you can find coal: anywhere past the chasm, really. On rare occasions (in places where the chasm deep in the mountain), there may even be some small amount of coal on the outdoors side of the chasm. I've seen that once or twice in a dozen-odd fortresses.
Will they sit out the siege with your dwarves?
quote:
Normal dogs behave as normal dwarfs.
War dogs behave as soldiers with "harass dangerous animals" set to off.
Hunting dogs behave as soldiers with "harass dangerous animals" set to on.
And when assigned to a dwarf, their master effectively becomes their squad leader... Nicely put, and seems to sum it up nicely.
However, I came across an old post from Toady, about a bug where there were hunting deer. His post stated that "hunting" type animals are also trained in sneaking or ambushing (not sure which).
That's how I came to ask in the first place: there seems to be more to a trained animal than meets the eye (or can be found out by mere observation, no matter how careful one watches).
quote:
The only person who can reply with certainty is toady
I don't have a link to said post at hand; it was mentioned somewhere on the wiki. I'll edit this should I manage to find it again.
It appears that the trained ones are more dangerous and more willing to fight, although I'm not entirely sure even of that.
Hunting dogs roam quite a bit, but I still have to see a hunting dog actually track down some prey or assist a hunter.
Also, while I'm at it: will other animals become [TRAINABLE] if I add the statement to their description?
Not yet implemeted, though.
In one of my fortresses, I didn't strike the cave river as such, but a waterfall. I decided to keep digging in a straight line, ending up with a bridge across the waterfall and another just a few tiles deeper in the mountain that crossed the actual river.
Now, the interesting thing was that obviously, a waterfall is an attractive meeting place. More attractive than any statue garden, zoo or whatnot.
In my next and current fortress, I have found no waterfall at all, so I couldn't explore this further. But if memory serves, I've never noticed dwarves actually going to a waterfall I exposed while designing treefarms or mining for limestone. But in this particular case, where the main corridor lead right across a waterfall, most dwarves on break wouldn't go all the way to the entrance but stop at the waterfall. A few still went outdoors, of course, but fewer than I've ever experienced in any other fortress.
Now one might complain that it's not much of a difference wether dwarves go all the way or stop a few tiles short of the entrance. But althouh the waterfall was close to the gates, it still was about 1/3rd of the way to the chasm.
Is it that piercing weapons are more likely to stick? Do lopped off body parts get in the way? Does it merely depend on the quality of the mechanism?
All of these have been discussed, yet noone seems to know for sure.
[ April 06, 2007: Message edited by: schnobs ]
mechanisms: I don't think it's possible, but am not sure. I always just flip the switch and see what door / floodgate / bridge moves.
Wait a sec. What exactly do you want to do? You have cages AND floodgate linked to the same lever? And now want to remove some of the mechanisms? Where's the IRC channel again? Find me there.
#bay12games on worldirc.org
[ April 06, 2007: Message edited by: schnobs ]
quote:
Originally posted by Funkadelic Jive Turkey:
<STRONG>
Would de-fragmenting a whole bunch help btw? </STRONG>
Nah. I'm too lazy to really check, but I don't notice any frantic HD activity while playing DF. I don't see how defrag should help you with DF (though there may be other reasons, of course).
It really comes down to the CPU. All those dwarfes wondering what they should do next, looking for acessible job items, pathfinding through the fortress, that sort of thing. The animals surely have some impact too, but I don't think it amounts to much compared to the dwarves. Though I'd be curious to know for sure... so if you do kill your animals after all, let me know what happened.
Toady recently said he's improved at a few of these things. Or at any rate I believe to have read words to that effect. The next version may not only feature new maps.
[ April 06, 2007: Message edited by: schnobs ]
Starting at 85 fps, I'm now down to 20-25 on a 2GHz machine (2 actual GHz, I can't remember what pseudo-speed rating was stamped on the box).
Flooding my farms will incur further penalties, down to like 10 fps while the water is rushing in.
