Bay 12 Games Forum

Something wrong with affirmative action and anti discrimination laws?

Ok maybe they're not super effective all the time, but forcing quotas sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

Possible, sure. You'll have to go without beds, buckets, and splints though.


You can get 3 wood by deconstructing your wagon. As for your dwarves not chopping wood, sure you have an axe? Even a wooden training one will do.

Ugh. I'll agree with that article as to the cause of the riots (lack of jobs, failing at school, kids feeling stuck in their situation); I don't agree as to the cause of the causes.


Someone else can tear it apart thoroughly, but two things that struck me as horribly wrong are these:

Despite the huge amount of evidence of the harm this causes children (mothers of children on the “at risk” register, for example, are five times more likely to be single teenage mothers), the Labour government made single motherhood an attractive proposition.

Since 1997 a single mother of two children has seen her benefits increase by 85%. We watched the effects of that policy play out on our streets every night last week.

Lips said bitterly: “Not one teacher cared about me. You know when someone cares for you because they are on your case.”

Do I even need to explain why?

Thank you everyone it is exactly as I have feared hah. Although is there a way for me to... explicitly state use my 4th core? I assume the computer uses them in order right? so then that means that the 4th core is more than likely less used.

Your OS handles that. It'll portion out processes to different cores in an effort to keep any one core from hitting 100% (and thus slowing things down). As such, it's very likely DF has a core all to its own that it's using 100% of.



Anywho first thing I'd suggest is turning off temperature if you haven't already. Got me a very large boost in frame rate.

Re: Tunneling creatures.

This would be nice and all, but I'm not sure I like the idea of them only tunneling if they have no other route. I'm reminded of those tower defense games where the things attacking you only think to beat town your towers blocking their path if they have no other choice. It doesn't make much sense and is way too AI abusive to have them walk through your maze of traps instead of going through a 1 tile wall.

Perhaps they should constantly tunnel through natural walls, leaving constructed ones alone if at all possible (but still beat them down if reasonable). May as well have some up sides to building your fort out of constructed walls, as they can't be engraved.

Having [the magma sea] occasionally rise and lower wouldn't be such a challenge as a pump can be submerged safely.

I really like this idea. Might be killer on framerate though.

i think that the problem is related to that every map has the "same" geography :surface,soil,stone,1st cavern, 2nd cavern, 3dr cavern, magma + cotton, clowns.If you settle in any place you can be sure that there will be cotton,magma and caverns (not on that order) or maybe the dead animals zoo.

This is a worthy point to make, but I think it can be solved by making those features less predictable in what they do. So we can still have cavern 1 2 3 then magma sea, but finding out what each cavern does and figuring out how to counter its dangers should be the thing that is unpredictable. But yes, making the underground geography a lot more unknown is a valid solution.

The aquifer idea is only a temporary solution, and some players see it as more of a blessing then a curse. In order to make the caverns a more nastier place, we need nastier beasties. Currently [AMBUSH_PREDATOR] tag doesn't work so Giant Cave Spiders won't sneak up on you. We need to bring these creatures back, along with more tougher creatures. Finally the fog of war in the caverns shouldn't be permanent. If you haven't scouted a place for a few months it will gradually refill with blackness (this may also have a positive effect on framerate). This means when a forgotten beast appears on the edges you don't know it's there if it spawns in a black area. Visible range should also be reduced to 5-10 tiles around the dwarf instead of giant cells. Some of the more nastier creatures also could use a trap avoid tag.

Some of neat points here.
- New barriers and obstacles (be they aquifers or something else) being more of a blessing than a curse doesn't necessarily sound like a bad thing to me. In fact, it sounds really nifty... provided they're still barriers. Even if someone has good uses for the aquifer, it's still going to take some effort to get through if they want to dig deeper.
- Definitely agree about nastier creatures and fog of war. I'll add though that I think they should get worse the further down you go. Cavern 2's monsters should be very much a step up in nastiness from cavern 1's, and cavern 3's a step up from cavern 2's. The magma sea's creatures should of course, be worst of all next to hell itself.

If the only underground thing of real value (magma) is not part of caverns, forcing people to breach caverns is not really proper answer.

This is a very good point. I will note though that caverns DO have one thing that can be very vital: water. Rivers and brooks aren't on every embark location. For the maps without surface water, utilizing cavern water can be a Fun experience. Also, GCS silk seems like it was intended as a risky but profitable cavern feature, except it's kinda lacking on both "risk" and "profit."

There should definitely be a lot more like that with the caverns though, I agree. More stuff that can't be found on the surface, especially stuff that requires making yourself vulnerable to cavern creatures to obtain.

I had an epiphany last night about what exactly it is that's currently bothering me about DF: Obtaining access to the lower caverns, magma sea and adamantine is too simple.

The problem in a nutshell:
Magma and adamantine are some of the most prized tools one can obtain in this game, for obvious reasons. In days past, it was cause for celebration if you actually found some. Not anymore, though; it's piss easy to dig straight down, completely avoiding all the dangers of the caverns, and finding magma + adamantine in the very first season with nothing but a single miner. It's too predictable, as magma and adamantine are now, for me at least, given parts of the early construction of every fortress. Is that how it should be?

Having early access to this stuff devalues many things. A volcano over there? Bleh, who cares? Nothing but copper on the map? No problem! Train up a weapon smith on bolts, an armor smith on shields, and in about a year you can crank out masterwork adamantine stuff. I want volcanoes to be useful and important again, and not just minor conveniences. I want copper, iron and steel to have more military applications than as bolts.


My proposed solutions:
Toady's a creative guy and I suspect he'd be able to come up with better specific solutions than I. So, here are some "generic" things I'd change; how to accomplish it should be up to Toady.

Make caverns be actual obstacles
Currently caverns are completely and utterly avoidable. If you don't want to deal with them, you can just wall up whatever holes you accidentally punch in them, then tunnel down through a pillar. In my opinion, it shouldn't be so easy. Getting past a cavern should require "conquering" it, or at least some creative engineering to avoid what it can throw at you. Barriers for avoiding the caverns could be stuff like underground aquifers or simple open space; imagine if caverns had almost no connections on the map between their ceiling and their ground. Or something else. Point is, I shouldn't be able to ignore them without doing some work to negate their danger.

Make things less predictable, the magma sea especially
There are almost never logistical barriers to setting up a metal industry directly over the top of the magma sea. The thing is simply very tame and unthreatening. Finding the magma sea should be one thing; using it should be another. As there's a hell of a lot of weight pushing down on it, why not pressurize magma from the sea? A different idea would be perhaps adding some open space and making it more like a cavern. When I find the magma sea, I should be saying to myself "hrm, how am I going to be able to utilize this?" Beasties there should be a lot scarier too, as they're made from liquid fire after all.

Adamantine. Actually I think this is more or less ok due to it being unpredictable whether or not you'll breach hell by digging it out. No real changes there, so long as it's harder to reach in the first place.


In closing, I just think that obtaining magma and adamantine should be a project in it's own. Something you work toward over the course of years, not a single season. Danger should go exponentially up as you dig further down.


Oh, and as a side note, I presume we're all mature enough to be able to discuss this sort of thing without quips like "well if it's too easy, make it artificially harder for yourself." Self imposed challenges are fine and all, but hardly solutions to problems with the game itself. Not to say you can't disagree with me about it being too easy, just don't try to use self imposed difficulty as a justification.

I like it when they bring trolls, so my main gate becomes rainbow colored rather than just boring old red.