Bay 12 Games Forum

If it was an awesome fortress and/or off to a good start before tragedy and/or !!tragedy!! struck.
Usually the second, for me.

Hm...If I got a spare vampire caught in a cage trap and assigned him to a chain before he could be freed, then forbade the chain...could I get a chained-up vampire, possibly for a silk farm?

About the title: Hello, Captain Obvious. Glad about your promotion.

About the topic: What did you EXPECT would happen?

Seal- or Polarbear- or Walrus- or Whale-men a la Inuit or Dorset.
Eagle- and/or Leopard-men a la Aztec.
(Feathered?) Snake-men a la Mayan.
Alpaca- or Cavy-men a la Incan. (Those last three can be mixed or chosen or something.)
Panda-men a la China.
If you don't add Aztec eaglemen, they could be used as something like modern Americans.
If you want to be silly, cheese-eating Primate-men a la French.

Side view

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Top-down view of top level

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That really shouldn't release the clowns. It doesn't form a break if you, say, construct that or dig it out, so why does it here?

I hope you won't mind if I make suggestions of problems for some of the points?
#3, for instance--a good problem is the fact that "combat" is hard to define. After all, a minecart bumping a cat or a dwarf falling a z-level involves combat calculations.
For #4, you left out drinking. Since dwarves currently eat three times in a month and a half, and drink six times during that time, presumably there would need to be three drinks at the three meals, a nightcap, drinking first thing, and probably one other drink, EVERY DAY. That means that (assuming we cut it to five drinks a day) the dwarf is pathing from bed to drink stockpile, from drink stockpile to food, from food to dining room, then work pathfinding, then to the drink stockpile and food stockpile in some order to grab a meal and drink, then to the dining hall, then back to work, then repeat that for dinner, then path for work or relaxation, then to the drink stockpile, then to bed, and don't forget there's usually at least a couple pathfinding routines per job. Assuming one two-path job per work period and just pathing to the meeting hall after dinner, that's around 15 pathfinding calculations per dwarf per day. And that is, I believe, the conservative estimate. In other words, if food's consumed at three a day and drink at a roughly proportionate rate...there's a lot of work to be done.
For #5, I'm not sure if larger stacks affects FPS, but having the stacks splint more (breaking one off a stack per dwarf, more or less, three times a day) would. I guess the distinction is more of a technical difference than one that really matters, but I'm a semantic.
Second #5: I recall reading that, in order to stop the perpetual motion generator issue, either around 100 waterwheels would need to be used per pump, or the water would need to flow so slowly that it would evaporate before the next bit was pumped. In either case, it seems to me that increasing the rate of fluid flow would probably worsen the PMG problem. This is speaking from one art hearsay and two parts wild guess, so you should say that this COULD happen. Also, floods would be harder to survive, but since you're living in a mine that's pretty realistic so that might not count. Except with magma, you should probably be able to outrun that.

It has no relation to quantum physics, but represents a big advance in zombology.

So I think I've got what enjoyment I could out of this version of DF, and am going to take another break from it and wait for the next major version.   Some things I would like to comment on:

Okay, first off: Why is DF now dull? I don't think you're doing it right. You're not supposed to survive, you're supposed to create.

Adventure mode sight lines:  As far as I can tell, the adventurer is the only unit in the world with any distance limit to his line of sight, in light or dark conditions.  If a creature is loaded and not occluded from view by an obstacle, it can see you.  I'm guessing that implementing sight restrictions on other creatures is something Toady plans to do, but then why only apply them to the player, even temporarily?  Why not make it all or nothing; have everyone's sight restricted or no one's sight restricted?  Either way, everyone would follow the same rules.  In any case, if DF is supposed to be realistic, then why not do away with the restrictions completely?  Seeing everything that's loaded is still only seeing a fraction of the distance that it is possible to see in real life.

Most of this is fine, but how far you can see isn't relevant for LOS. What's relevant is how far you can see and distinguish stuff.

Burrows:  Getting dwarves not to go places is still a nightmare and the one of fastest ways to lose interest in playing dwarf mode.  Haulers sometimes seem to not even pay attention to burrow restrictions, actually leaving the burrow and going outside during sieges, even after all items I could find outside were forbidden.  Again, it would be great to have a forbidden area traffic zone that actually forbids dwarves from going somewhere instead of increasing the pathfinding cost, as if there's a wall.  Burrows have been suggested for this purpose, but as demonstrated here, they don't work nearly well enough.

Burrows only restrict jobs, not pathing. That might or might not change in the future, but something to let you restrict pathing wil be.

Necromancers, werewolves, and vampires: Are awesome, and it would be great to see more features like this.  Although it would be nice if altering the vanilla secrets and curses were possible, instead of only being able to add new ones.

The second part is sensible.

Towns:  Great, but run really slow where the domestic animal population has exploded.  Also, while there's all the mini-forges and figurines for sale that I could ever want, weapons and armor are often not even available in shops.  And there's been two occasions when an item I bought failed to appear in my inventory, and wasn't in the stockroom either, so I basically got robbed by the merchant.

Still a bit buggy, but it's a big release. Also, bear in mind that most shops are there to tailor, not to adventurers, but to townsfolk. It'll probably be tweaked so that every non-pacifistic civ's towns all have at least some weapons and armor, but until then just wait a bit.

Evil Biomes:  Had a lot of fun and Fun in a half-neutral, half-evil embark, but fully evil embarks are something that I can't imagine being playable, even without the freakish weather.  A time interval between death and reanimation that takes into account the "when I get around to it" approach of the dwarves would help, or at least basing the speed of reanimation on how evil the biome is.

Elf. Seriously, though, there's lots of ways people have found to deal with the undead, and not every evil biome has them.

Ghosts:  Would be great if the dwarves would properly entomb remains instead of leaving them in the halls indefinitely, tomb space or no, forbidden or no, accessible or no, idlers or no.

They kinda do.

Minecarts:  Unfortunately, didn't stick with any one fort long enough to build the power plants needed for the rollers.  They sound cool though.

You know you don't need rollers, right?

Stone drop rate:  Love that stockpiles are usable upon mining them out now, but mining out entire limestone mountains to make enough steel for the army seems like it needs adjustment.

So, you like that there's not so much stone...but can't stand the paltry amount of stone you get?

In summary, it's better than 31.xx,  but it continues the trend of features that are only partly implemented, with the implemented part causing problems and the missing part containing the means to deal with those problems.  Again, I know it's a work in progress, but I think some things would be better left out entirely than half-done like this.  It's a great simulator, but the decisions being made about what to include and not include make me wonder if it will really be a great game by 1.0.  There are lots of games out there that are good simulators but not good games, and I'm thinking DF is headed in that direction.  It is fascinating to play around with for a while, but the fun wears off quickly and soon it just becomes tiresome and chorelike.
I am familiar with the standard responses that the more passionate members of these forums make when anything less than neutral is said of the game, and to them I say yes, I know.  This is my impression of the game, it's not quite favorable, and I hope that it might do some good.  No need to flame me, it's been done before and I probably know what you'll say already.  Toady has asked in the past for criticism, and I'm giving it without trying to be rude.  Please respect that.

I understand.