Bay 12 Games Forum

It would probably screw a lot of players up to have menus function consistently, but after getting used to using the same set of keys to navigate and select from menu lists, gameplay would be a lot smoother, and those keys could be freed up for consistency with other functions, and more esoteric and isolated functions could be integrated into related menus. It's been a long time since I played Fortress mode, so there are probably some reasons I've forgotten for these multiple keysets to move the same directions through menus, but I haven't forgotten how I had to adapt to the keybindings in the first place, and how much quicker it could've been without the user-contrary interface.

My Adventurer mode experiences are more recent. A good acid test for whether a function could be bundled into a menu is to ask how long it would take players to notice if the hotkey were removed. If the "m"ovement wasn't there to toggle a single movement option, who would miss it? Now there's a whole menu of movement options, that seems the likely place to look for this setting if it were needed. Conversely, players would notice right away if they didn't have a key to toggle sneak mode with; some playstyles are wholly based on it, but everyone has a use for it on a regular basis.

The "I"nteract key so rarely has any function at all that you could easily forget it exists by the time you have in inventory something it'll work on. Why not add it to the inventory menu? The hotkeys for manipulating inventory, wear/remove/put/throw/etc, are useful in regular play, but they'd also be useful when you're looking right at the item's properties or description in the inventory menu. Why not drop it or eat it or put it away without having to pedal back two or three menus to open another and then hunt for the letter matching the item you already had selected?

Trying to swim safely through uneven waters is inconsistent to the point of interface screw. Most of the time you're slowed down with a selection list of only one option: to move the direction you had selected in the first place. You could assume the choice was already made when pressing ALT-<direction>. Even if the extra keystroke was needed or desirable, the times a second option appears, it's presented in the same position as the non-option you've been drudging through. This is like swapping 'yes' and 'no' in dialog trees just to fuck with players -- it's funny when done occasionally, but not when it's done many turns in succession.

Decapitate is such a lovely word, almost as satisfying to say as to do. There should be better words for hacking off other bits, too. 'Demanuate' just doesn't have quite the same ring. Maybe cutting off fingers would be 'postdigitation', and bisecting a torso would be called 'trunkation'.

Seems it took awhile for latest updates to affect my world, but I can now use the minecarts I found laying around. What's more, my strikes are passing momentum to bodies, so I'm seeing a lot of them fly 1-2 tiles. Even an iron knife throws bogeymen back. I haven't decided whether this is more or less annoying than impalement -- apparently superhuman agility isn't enough to spear them in the air, so I have to wait for them to land to hit them again.

If you can sleep in them, why not fast travel across them? It's rarely an issue except around cities with such an aggregate that they form a great wall of lairs. But if the threat is gone, do they need to slow down movement?

Four ambushes appeared on the edges of the map, in different directions and far from any of my dwarves, pets or war animals. All smaller than the usual raiding parties, all with a dwarven member, and all immediately started attacking the dwarf. Not one of ours, though; we've only had one child snatched and he's probably still too young to be sent back as a warrior.

Two dwarves died and their parties left the map, one fought to a crippling stand-off with a single goblin, and one swordsdwarf/priest wiped out his whole unit.

The tower I have serves my needs pretty well within the constraints I had to build it through, but I suspect it could be done better in the future. I started with the mini-reactor design, with a wheel alternating each side of the pump per level:

|||||          |||||
|++||          |W#||
|+PW|          |WP+|
|+PW|          |WP+|
||#W|          ||++|
|||||          |||||| = wall                      + = floor                       # = uptake grating
P = pump                    W = wheel

It generates about 40 surplus power per level, fluctuating +/- 20%; not very efficient power per wheel, probably due to the empty space required for the next wheel up. How could this be done better in as tight a space possible?

Chimps and cheetahs may seem exotic to us, but we don't live in a nation 80% covered in a biome they commonly inhabit. Instead of hardcoding, perhaps it should be a function of population and coverage within the embarking nation's territory. If you have lived in a jungle country all your life, horses and goats may be exotic to you, but tigers not as much.

I wanted to check some of the latest features, so I genned a small world, picked a point at random and embarked Play Now!

Those dwarves were tearing around the place. I've played a huge fortress with a combined dwarf and animal population over 500 for so long, I forgot how fast they were able to move. I reloaded my current fortress for comparison, and yeah, they moved slow as molassas. It could take them 10 mins to finish a simple dump job. When I turned on FPS display, I saw it was crawling at 5-6 FPS, but I never notice unless the interface itself slows down.

So this is the point of 'FPS death'? Really? Cause I'm trying to imagine how a massive fort would even be manageable if everyone moved at the pace of a fresh embark. I doubt I'd be able to pause fast enough often enough keep track of everything going on across the board. I sure wouldn't be able to get anything done faster, not in game time or realtime.

It seems a lot less like 'death' than 'comes with the territory'.