Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, if I had a good way to keep track of what they wanted and who wanted them other than writing it down twice a year somewhere, maybe.  As it is, I just kind of look and say, oh, double value on crowns, that'll be good for the stonecraft sales...  sort of like with nobles price settings and wages, where I have no way to change them, so it is just irrelevant information to me.

Hmm, there's an idea for making nobles earn their keep.  Make their quarters part of the fortress defenses!  It is the nobles' responsibility to defend their people after all, so put them up there with the military.  Lets your royal guards see some action too.

For practical purposes, probably you would build the rooms and use them for stockpiles until nobles arrived.

I tend to engrave walls and floors in selected rooms (noble's rooms, meeting areas, dining rooms, tombs) but then toggle the display off for the floor engravings since those are so distracting.

Well the Baron/Baroness/etc meet with Ambassadors, which I guess frees your mayor from having to do it.  (Letting him get back to listening to dwarves complaining about the lack of good paying jobs)

Never said it was a big help.

They usually seem to become baby factories as well, since, you know, not much else to do...

OK, this is really weird.  The guy who makes the Exile/Avernum games was my college roommate.  It is bizarre to think that his game has influenced what two different people on this forum think of when they visualize a fantasy monster.

So, this is not anything that I've tried, but it seems like an interesting idea.  One issue with logging is that while it is renewable, saplings can be trampled on, killed and become dead wood clutter instead of usable trees.

A possible way to minimize this would be to use traffic zones.  Set up paths set to high traffic to go out into the forest and branching off a bit.  Set the rest of the forest to lower traffic settings or forbidden.  This should cause dwarves to follow the set paths until they get close to the target tree, then make a beeline for the target tree once they get close.  This should concentrate most of the foot traffic to specific zones and make it more likely that saplings will be able to grow up off that path.  You might be able to help even further if you use these paths to divide your lands up into zones, and only log in one zone at a time rotating through the zones.

There is an additional advantage of this.  If you know that most of your time your outdoor dwarves will be following set paths you can use those areas for guard towers, traps, military patrols and be more likely to be near where a dwarf would be surprised by enemies.  Or at least increase the amount of time that the dwarf will be travelling near protection.  (Unfortunately, I doubt that the dwarf will take traffic zones into account when running screaming away from the enemy, so we can't expect that the dwarf will lure the enemy onto the path).

Presumably these paths will also affect how your hunters and herbalists do their jobs, and in the case of the herbalists, you may want to designate plant gathering in the same area as the logging so that their trampling gets cycled as well.  (Though most likely by the time you are being this organized about logging, you are finished with gathering).

This can also be useful for tower cap farming, and while you are less likely to encounter enemies there, it has the added benefit of decreasing the trampling of spider webs that can be harvested.

Of course, at the moment this is all theoretical, but I see no reason it wouldn't work.

I managed the road requirement pretty easily by using dolomite blocks to build with, and making it 4 spaces wide.  Blocks of economic stone are sufficient to the task.  What you probably need to do is remove your rough stone roads and replace with smooth ones made of blocks of whatever is common at your site.  If that isn't sufficient, build towards one of the other sides, or build a courtyard or something.  I'd guess that it is the move from unworked stone to blocks that is the improvement you need to make.