March 6, 2024: Dwarf Fortress 50.12 has been released.
News: February 3, 2024: The February '24 Report is up.
News: February 4, 2021: Dwarf Fortress Talk #28 has been posted.
News: November 21, 2018: A new Threetoe story has been posted.
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Perhaps dwarves should quit and leave in disgust sometimes when things don't go their way. Now, they can become melancholy and sulk, they can gibber and run around dropping their clothes everywhere, or they can go postal. Perhaps a fourth option would just be to hit the road?
I think nondwarven immigrants should act like nobles, but perhaps with certain jobs turned on but unchangeable (a bit like the Dungeon Master). Perhaps you will one day find elves making Large Cloaks in the workshop, or a human peasant tilling the fields.
In addition to preferring rooms near the sunlight, they should act in accordance with their civilizations now; elves would of course not eat meat (and would maybe get a bad thought if they saw a dwarf doing so) or appreciate wooden furniture in their room (cloth bedrolls, please!)
Taking care of your guests should convey a benefit, rather than just avoid the wrath of their civilizations. They should come with more skills than your typical immigrant. Elf archers would be great in defense, and perhaps having happy humans in your fortress would bring more frequent caravans and favorable prices.
Also, their mood could fluctuate with your fortress's relations with their civilizations. They might get bad thoughts about feeling alienated if you maintain poor relations, or even turn hostile when a siege is nigh.
This gives me another idea though... how about a triple split-screen view with the fortress view on the left, the unit list in the middle, and the view menu on the right? Scrolling down the list would jump to the unit in the fortress, and pull up its unit info on the right. It doesn't have the nice table view of skills and jobs, but I would still be better than what we have now.
Tab should switch between modes like in other menus. One mode should be a concise list of units' skills, arranged like the military menu. With each skill abbreviated to 3 letters, maybe 10 skills would fit at a time, and you could scroll left and right between skills. Writing the skill names in different colors would designate the skill level for that dwarf. This way, you could easily search for an extra, say, leatherworker, and be able to find that one guy who did some leatherworking a few years ago but was moved to something else you don't quite remember.
Another mode should list currently assigned jobs in the same fashion. Perhaps you could even assign jobs the same way you can assign weapons in Military mode. Since tab switches between modes, you could easily match up dwarves' assigned jobs with their skills.
Finally, a mode that lists their basic status would be useful. It could use the same status icons that flash behind them in the game screen. That way you could easily look through to see who's unhappy, who's injured, which dwarves are recent migrants, etc.
An easier alternative to this, while not quite so useful, is to add + and - to the view menu, to scroll around among all the dwarves in your fortress. Rather than having to move the cursor around so it selects every dwarf and displays info about them, it would jump between units in the same order as in the unit menu.
If forging adamantine on an iron or steel anvil were to break it after every couple of uses (as adamantine is MUCH stronger/better than steel) this could perhaps do away with the annoying fact that metalworkers start with no skill in adamantine and therefore take forever to make anything. Since the purpose seems to be to prevent the player from churning out invincible adamantine items so easily, forcing the player to fabricate adamantine anvils first (with 3 wafers perhaps).
Immediately prior to a siege (and perhaps only when you have a neighboring county (Core28)), groups of refugees should seek shelter in your fortress. They might be already crippled, or unskilled peasants, or valuable blacksmiths, but they would not become part of the population or do work, at least not right away. They would have their own agenda, like nobles. Once you repel the siege, they would return home, and you would receive a reward of some sort from the Dwarven civilization based on the number of refugees you save. In addition, any refugees with a positive experience in your fortress (maintained a "very happy" or "ecstatic" mood, perhaps), might tag along with the next bunch of immigrants to arrive.
An alternative is to keep extensive statistics on what kinds of things get done in your fort, and report on them once you abandon it. It wouldn't necessarily give a value of each statistic. 54 suits of armor produced, 53,784 pints of alcohol ingested, 87 dwarves killed by elephants, that kind of thing. Maybe it could be factored into the Legends mode somehow.
This has happened before, of course, but it really hurt this time since I'd tried so hard to satisfy his demands. He had already claimed something like 3 bolts of silk cloth, steel bars, silver bars, green glass, turtle shell, rock crystals, marble blocks... and maybe something else. I checked his profile for favorite items... ruby, rock crystal, and moonstone, and produced matching items that I thought he might want, but I could not.
I know that trying to satisfy cryptic demands is part of the fun, but I think the game should let you know after the fact what the dwarf was demanding. That way, players can learn from their mistakes rather than being completely flummoxed as to the missing item.
The "Challenge Counter", which starts off low, should be incremented every day/month/whatever, and decremented every time the game throws a random external challenge your way, like a siege, or a frogman ambush, a fey mood, or any one of the future challenges like diseases/etc. The amount by which the counter is decremented would be directly related to the difficulty of the challenge. The current counter level would affect the likelihood of any challenge being introduced, in such a way that would make them less likely, but certainly not impossible, to occur when the meter is low, and very likely to occur if the meter is high. I realize that many challenges are dependent on other factors (like chasm monsters attacking more if you throw a lot of garbage down at them), but the Challenge Counter would only modify the current likelihoods, not replace them.
Obviously this would have the effect of spacing out the tough parts of the game, as well making "lucky" fortresses less boring to play. One less obvious benefit is that it would enable DF to have a "difficulty" setting when you start a new game. All it would have to do is modify the amount by which the challenge counter gets incremented every day. However, this isn't altogether necessary, as the choice of location (calm and temperate vs. freezing and haunted) already serves as a pre-game difficulty setting.
Perhaps a similar system is already in place, and I just don't know about it. I have, however, abandoned two fortresses because I got tired of waiting for something to happen. In one, I went 4 years and had already struck adamantium, and the worst that had happened to me was a few kobold thieves. In another, on the other hand, I was massacred by mandrills as I was digging out the first bedrooms. Losing is fun, but preparing for a siege that never comes is less so.
Bloat21 appears to discuss some of the planned Ghost ideas for DF.
Ghosts should not be created every time a dwarf dies, but the circumstances of death should affect the likelihood. Dwarves not buried quickly/properly would be more likely to return in the afterlife, haunting the site of their death, and those killed by another dwarf might return to haunt (give unhappy thoughts to) their murderer. Dwarves who die after being driven insane by a fell mood might return to possess another dwarf to finish the item they were unable to finish.
Perhaps legendary dwarf ghosts might even haunt/curse the item or location of their legendary craft under certain conditions, bringing ill fate to those who use it later. And I'm sure those humans would not be very happy when they return home, only to find that the artifact silver-banded, obsidian-spiked unicorn skull totem you sold them was cursed by the spirit of a powerful ghost!
quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>This last isn't exactly a trivial problem. The "just haul the closest to the closest" implies a lot of calculation. If you scatter haulers, items and stockpiles around randomly, and then ask what the most efficient hauling schedule is, there's a lot of processing to do. You can't have just the dwarf, the item or the stockpile running the show, it has to balance them somehow. Right now, the item runs the show, with the dwarf making adjustments afterward.</STRONG>
What if the dwarf chose the item ("Hm, I need something to haul... that doesn't belong there!"), then it chose the stockpile as soon as he/she picked it up? ("Hm, what should I do with this? I know, that looks like a good place to put it!")
That solves these three problems:
code:@ == O ==
code:@ O == O
code:== O @ O ==
As far as I can see, this method behaves better in every situation, unless I'm missing some options. It is, however, nonstandard in DF for dwarves to assign their own jobs like this.
On a similar note, I would also like hauling priority designations. For example, "Yes, Edem, I know I just mined out a huge tunnel, but I don't really care about those rocks and I need you to clear the farmland now." Or, "Sigun, the goods in the wrecked caravan aren't going anywhere, but the goblin corpses by the river have lots of loot, and they'll be washed away by the flood very soon! Go move those instead!" The only way to do that now is to designate all the spots you don't want them hauling from as stockpiles, which can potentially be all over the fortress. I suppose this is sort of similar to the "Burrows" work being done.
