Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, there are two problems with picks - neither is necessarily a 'bug', but certainly a poor simulation, as someone put it.

-The game does not differentiate between a miner using a common mining pick, and a trained soldier using a pick-like weapon made for combat, such as a war hammer or halberd with a spike on the back. Yes such weapons did exist and were good at piercing plate, but this doesn't mean a tool made for mining rock should be as effective, and neither should a guy who has never done anything but mine rocks all his life be able to use such a weapon in combat as effectively as a trained warrior. Not that a legendary miner should be helpless, I sure wouldn't want to pick a fight with one (no pun intended), but should he really be more effective than a legendary axe/sword/speardwarf? I really don't think so.

-But let's make the simplifying assumption that a dwarven mining pick is actually designed for combat, and mining rock is good practice for picking goblin brains, then we still have problems with the 'war pick' as a weapon. Since studies comparing actual combat effectiveness of medieval melee weapons are next to nonexistant, I am reduced to quoting Wikipedia - hardly a reliable source, I know, but this all should be common sense:

The horseman's pick was often used as a means to penetrate thick plate armour or mail which the standard sword could not. However, a number of drawbacks limited the weapon's effectiveness. Its relative heaviness made it unwieldy and, thus, easily avoided. The injury caused by the weapon was also small and rarely immediately fatal. Additionally, if swung too hard, the weapon often became embedded in the victim or their armour, making retrieval difficult.

So the pick penetrates armor great, but it's slow to swing, easy to avoid, difficult to parry with, etc. Thing is the game doesn't model any of those things - all weapons from daggers to war hammers swing equally fast, all weapons have equal chance to hit and parry, the only difference is the impact they make - and in that respect the game is somewhat accurately modelling the pick as a better way to penetrate armor than a sword or axe, but without modelling all the weapon's limitations, the balance is thrown off.

As far as dying of thirst, it's really not a very enlightening death message - if a dwarf is for any reason unable to access supplies or unwilling/unable to care for himself, thirst is what tends to kill him. The most common cause of thirst deaths for me is injury: a dwarf who suffers major injuries and goes to "rest" (as opposed to "sleep", which is what healthy dwarves do) is completely dependent on other dwarves to bring him food and water; he will die of thirst if no one does. This is the only time you actually need water, by the way, healthy dwarves prefer alcohol but injured ones must have water. He's brought water by someone with the "feed patients/prisoners" labor, and all dwarves have it on by default, but unfortunately it seems to be a pretty low priority job - it may be that all your healthy dwarves were just too busy to bother bringing water. If you have injured dwarves and some labor to spare, it's a good idea to have a "nurse" or two with no labors assigned except recovering and feeding wounded, just to make sure it gets done.

Also make sure you have a functioning well, you have designated it as a water source, and you have buckets available - however if any of those is your problem it should be obvious, you'll get a helpful job cancellation message when a dwarf tries to bring water and can't for one of those reasons.

Dying of thirst can also mean a dwarf got trapped somehow (either physically, i.e. built a wall between himself and drinks, or stuck in a badly assigned burrow, or trapped by a hostile goblin or even animal that scares him). It can also mean the dwarf got so unhappy he went crazy/melancholy/whatever, at which point he stops drinking and eating and will die of thirst eventually, effectively suicide, there's nothing you can do once a dwarf gets to this point (happens if he's unable to fulfill a strange mood, or just too much unhappiness from normal causes like friends dying).

Of course as long as Atir lives, migrants will continually be showing up, making themselves at home in the haunted corpse-strewn upstairs, and very likely coming to an untimely end before the next wave shows up. A great subplot to the hermit-ing itself.

Worst thing I see about current interface is how inconsistent it is.

Designating stuff, stockpiles, zones and burrows - enter to start, enter to finish. Building anything (including farm plots and floors) - uhkm. Similar action (rather similar), different controls.

Some menus use +-/* for scrolling, others use arrows (help topics use +- for example), yet others use mix of that (picking dwarf skills on embark - arrows to chose, +- to increase/decrease; setting up trade agreement - +-, up-down to choose, left-right to increase/decrease).

Some workshop actions aren't bound to any keys and you have to pick those manually (smelter, kiln, glass).

Some workshop actions can be ordered even if you don't have required materials (melt objects), for others you have to get all required stuff first (melt ore).

You need k to view an item in a stockpile, but t to view an item built. Even if both are just statues. Or chests.

When viewing a list of dwarves through job or unit list, c centers screen on a choosen dwarf. From health menu it's r.

I am sure there are more inconsistencies like these.

Amen to all of these - particularly nonsensical little things like the separate 't' command, why does that even exist? For over a year of playing I didn't even know about 't', I figured if the game was going to tell me details like descriptions of a constructed statue or the weapons in an already built trap, I'd be able to access those details through the 'k' screen - where else would they be? And since those details weren't available through the 'k' screen, I assumed there was no way to view them; why would anyone make a second obscure command that serves no purpose except to cover some of the things that the first command logically should (but doesn't for no apparent reason)?

Sorry, don't mean to rant, I've made this mistake too - when you're adding some little piece of functionality to a hugely complicated project, it's easy to overlook something similar that it logically should be merged with or at least be consistent with. But now that we're looking at the big picture and these inconsistencies become obvious, I'd love to see more of a priority put on smoothing them out.

Yeah the blue metal was deliberately made extremely light, it's meant to be similar to Tolkien's mithril. It's intended that this makes it terrible for blunt weapons - more of a quirk than a bug.

Specialization is much more effective, but assigning every labor to everyone is easier - and it does actually work. It's up to you how much 'work' (micromanaging specializations) you actually want to do, sounds like you're trying to do too much currently - just keep in mind that you don't really need to do it. Personally I specialize metalworking and a few other key professions (brewer, cook, sometimes crafters), and then everyone else is a hauler/mason/grower/furnace operator/butcher/etc; i.e. 'everything else'. It varies over the course of a game too, I micromanage labors a lot more when I have <40 dwarves, and generalize more as I get into the 100+ range.

And it's been said but it bears repeating: Dwarf Therapist is must-have, it makes any level of specialization for any number of dwarves an order of magnitude easier.

Quote from: Mephansteras on July 08, 2011, 11:29:59 am

Go look at your config files. One of them controls key bindings, and was probably changed in the graphics pack.

I checked and weirdly it hasn't got them any different than what they are normally. To be clear I downloaded from the 4th link on the first page. I made sure my keyboard is working and it works on all my other DF game installs when in Fortress mode. This one seems to be the only exception. Thanks for the effort though. I'm stumped though for the time being what might be wrong.

I didn't change the keybindings in making the graphics pack - they should be the same as vanilla DF, which is < and > for up/down z-levels (meaning you hold shift+comma or shift+period). I just redownloaded the file to double check that, < and > work for me, not sure what to tell you =/

Maybe try changing the binding from within the game? (hit escape while in fortress mode, choose key bindings, general).

If I recall correctly, Toady said somewhere that reintroducing underground rivers depends on the 3d mineral veins getting implemented first (they're scheduled for release 2). I guess 3d underground rivers might eventually be placed by the same algorithm that places 3d underground mineral veins?