Bay 12 Games Forum

a simple 3D ascii would also be nice if you ask me(floating characters for mobs, everything else flat/stuck to ground).
No need for cheesy animations!

I'd go stick-figures based on body plan (i.e. tube arms, ovoid head/body, with some new body part tags for size shape, orientation), and overlay textures.

Go look at Spore creature rendering. Something like that would obviously work for DF. EDIT: Just came across the Spore reference a few pages back.

Quote from: magilla_guerrilla on December 10, 2010, 05:37:07 pm

Really the main draw for 3d for me would not be for animations or any such thing, but rather so I can view my fortress in all its glory in realtime!

Not having to scroll up and down through z-levels would be glorious.

Yeah gloriously uncontrollable! How are you going to select anything? Or see what is in a room? Maybe there could be a true roaming 3D camera, but that would make gameplay almost impossible in my view, and be worse than z-levels

My vote is for Isometric cut-away at the "current" z-level, with lower levels shown but greyed out (with the grey becoming black deep below ground). If you want to see the whole thing, you just go up in z-levels, and have a switch for the greying out.

Also, I was considering of making vases to store booze rather than barrels, so that I can save wood. But to make a vase at the kiln, other than clay I need fuel. How much fuel do I need? One log worth of fuel to make 1 pot, or is the equation more in my favour? Because if I still need a log, I'd rather make a barrel straight away - it saves time.

Not just time, but resources. There's no point in glass or clay pots until you build magma forges, since as you point out just build a barrel with the one wood. Go for rock pots.

There's no point with metal bins (or cages) until Magma for the exact same reason.

Lots of pumps on and just before the area you want to wall or floodgate off. Pump the water off the map or something

Encrusted gold crafts. Thousands of credits per mug/ring/necklace/whatever. With 3 gold bars, you can buy out a caravan without wasting dwarves moving stuff nor having your fingers rot after so many clicks.

I make a macro and just hit Ctrl-P once per page

Seconded the cage trap idea. Make him into a Zoo exhibit!

You only need to wall off your stairs entrance, put a few (just in case something else comes along) traps in a gap, and have your guys go about their underground stuff (maybe burrow and alert them so they don't go back to the surface, until he finishes with the expedition leader, and tries to get in)

Basicly all your "Lock your door" "raise your bridge" etc tips fail once a wave of migrants or some trader arrive. Both get slaughtered in no time and either your dwarfes get mad or the race of the traders.

Yeah, but that's never happened to me at all. No tantrums, no angry traders. I've locked plenty of traders out to save the fortress and they got killed, never had them siege me (but I do give a 100% markup on trades) So really there's got to be something else going on with your fort.

EDIT: I even once accidentally lowered a drawbridge onto a trader, turned out to be the head one i guess, and all the rest of the caravan turned around and went home that year without getting to the depot. They didn't even siege me then. And I think the biggest tatrum spiral I ever had was like 3 guys or so. I don't even build personalized bedrooms (just a bunch of undesignated single rooms with beds), or smooth the floors or anything, just a big dining-room, good food and drink.

And really, if 1 or two migrant waves get nuked, that's no great loss.

Why would I send out guys I spent hours training to die fighting a horde of goblin crossbowmen, just to save some guys generated by the Random Number Generator? And they are literally randomly generated the very instant that you get the announcement that migrants have arrived. Even the exact number of migrants and their pets is only determined at this moment.

some sort of hypertheoretical flooding mechanism.

What do you mean "hypertheoretical" flooding mechanisms? They work, they work 100% of the time and you don't have to have guys loading and unloading traps because they reset themselves. I can show you the design if you like (my version at least).

Also with the auto-flooding tunnels, you don't even have to know there's anything coming, you don't need to set an alert or have a burrow or pull a lever to be safe. Even the goblin's equipment ends up in an underwater compartment, so no dwarf tries to path to it during the siege.

If anything, manually locking a door or ordering troops around is "hypertheoretical" because if you are AFK or fall asleep that's not going to work, but the flooding machine carries on regardless.

I think there's still a bug where every metal item costs 1 metal bar to produce, rather than what it's supposed to cost (can anyone verify this is still correct?). When you melt down a breastplate, you get 0.9 bars back, eg 90% return (it's a glitch basically). So making a lot of copper breastplates is a good way to train your armourer up without using up too much metal. Or you could churn out some steel breastplates with a low-level armourer, then when he's gotten to a high level (on copper stuff), melt them down to make high-grade armour.

Don't forget all the cloth/leather layers you can have, as part of the uniform, and I hear some people have 3 mail shirts under the breastplate, so churn these out.

Also, buy out all the armour/weapon/metals the caravans/invaders bring, to use or melt down. btw, I even buy the wooden stuff from the elves, wooden gauntlets/helm/leggings are better than nothing at all, and they have wooden shields for sale too, saving on materials.

A cross between Poseidon Adventure (flooding/burning/collapsing, crawling through tunnels) and "Volcano", coz of all the tunnels and lava. Now there was a bad movie, but very DF