Bay 12 Games Forum

Pretty much. Non-war animals just kinda run from enemies unless cornered.

You could train your engravers by engraving more. There are plenty of unimportant walls and floors in any fort to practice on.

Brilliant! "Oh, no! My legendary engraver died! Urist McSmoother, go smooth the caverns so I can train a new engraver!"
To say nothing of the jump in created wealth.

As for the skill merging suggested,
...
A lot of these skills are set for additions in the future, such as siege engineering getting more kinds of and improved siege weapons and wax working for making candles for lighting, or having their products being made more useful such as fertilizers from potash making when farming gets reworked, so changing them too much beforehand would probably be a lot of unnecessary work.

There's still A. a lot of skills that have one, clearly-defined use (like Milking, Lye Making, Potash Making, Soap Making...mostly farming skills), and B. a lot of skills with similar techniques (like animal/fish disscection and maybe fish cleaning and butchery) or which would logically be used together (lye/potash makers could be rolled into "ash proccessors," cheese makers and milkers could be rolled into "dairy farmers," etc). Unless lye making is going to have enough new uses in the future that are distinct from the new uses potash making is going to have, they should be merged.

Especially if we could make the original, what the movies made it out to be, and anything it between. Or anything else we could imagine, like golems. Or the corpse of a giant war tiger, who had its head and foreleg torn off by a dragon, with a dying master marksdwarf and an iron foreleg attatched to make a mighty warrior...

There are plenty of other threads here about Greek-Fire, and Explosives, and Gun powder.  That is not the proposed topic here, the point is to be able to generate enough HEAT to cause ignition in the other Flammable Items already existing in the game.

We're not limited to one, narrow topic of discussion per thread.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 09, 2012, 07:09:42 am

I hope you understand my doubt. A: Coal has impurities. It's not all carbon. B: If no one did it until the 1800s, there's probably a reason for that.


If we did, somehow, get pure sodium, it'd probably be sprinkled along the ground indoors. I seem to recall that the human body has enough moisture to set off some alkaline metals; if not, or if the goblins wear shoes, there might be dew on the ground to set off the trap. Obviously, dwarves would need to wipe their feet before entering...

I don't take any hard feelings to your concerns.  I also don't expect Pure sodium, and I don't expect it to be explosive.   Sodium burns energetically, and at a high temperature, when in water the rapid shift in temperature suddenly flash boils the water into steam it acts like an explosion yes because the turbulence and air flow take part of the sodium with it expanding the area and affect of the reaction.

And you are exactly right, as a less pure substance it should be less reactive, and therefore less explosive. Thus more stable for storage, and limited in applications to merely causing stuff to burn than explode.

I'm still having trouble seeing sodium being exracted at all, because the only method anyone's pointed to is out of dwarven reach by a few centuries.

What about that ottoman thing mentioned?

Rock pot + clay + fast reacting metal as a thrown weapon (thrown from another weapon, sadly.)

"The spinning clay bomb strikes the goblin in the face, bruising the muscle! The goblin is caught in a burst of boiling <metal>!"

I believe you mean rock or clay pot + any kind of explosive. Still amusing.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 09, 2012, 01:16:22 pm

Quote

It seems to me that nobody has opened the subject of Greek Fire yet. Let me do my take on it. Greek Fire is an isolated case and I don't think it should be in the game, purely because we have yet to understand what exactly comprises it.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 08, 2012, 07:32:14 pm

Greek-style fire might be possible, if Toady cares to take a stab at guessing how to simulate something that we're not really sure how to make now.

Yup. Nothing at all.

Greek-style fire != Greek Fire, just saying.

Dwarves != Greeks. Assuming Toady guesses the right formula for Greek fire, anyways...

Bulwersator: The problem is, DF isn't a basic RTS or whatever that can just go, "Hm, the dwarves have 17 axedwarves, 13 hammerdwarves, and 20 marksdwarves with a total attack of 210 and a total defense of 180; the goblins' troops have a total of 1,035 attack and 830 defense. The dwarves each get +80 attack and +50 defense." You'd need to figure out which side is weaker, and to be unable to fool it my having each dwarf come out one at a time to get the bonuses. You'd need to account for skill, gear quality, backup animals, and all of the hundreds of other possibilities that may affect one side or the other (dwarves can go into martial trances, necromancers can raise corpses for more soldiers, many mods add critters much more powerful than mere dwarves, etc). THEN you'd need to define the bonuses given. It's a pretty hard task.

Jake: While individual buildings, towns, temples, shrines, etc, having sphere effects sounds neat, but actual sphere-based biomes would still be a good idea. Otherwise, every embark in a forested biome would be more or less alike.

This is an even better idea than the title made it sound! Sign me up, please!

Would you mind PMing me when it's my turn? Maybe the same for everyone else?