Bay 12 Games Forum

Its really hard to make the pawns aware of their environment, and you're asking them to make subjective inferences to their surrounding to what the player has put down

No, that's utterly unnecessary. The player himself knows best what defenses he has put up, so he can do the analyzing. All the dorfs have to do is follow the orders more strictly, so technically speaking you don't have to make them smarter, but dumber.

Just having something like "hold position" as a command or option for the other commands would already go a long way, alongside fixing archer behaviour.

So, whenever I pick this game up again, it's always the same thing ending the fun.

It's the fact that dwarven military is largely not funtional and you have to rely on traps/walling in to defend against sieges.

Things that are particularly irritating:

 - Archers of any kind not picking up ammunition before going to battle, despite abundance
 - Archers never reloading once they run out of ammunition - instead charging the enemy
 - Dwarves leaving their stations and charging recklessly as soon as they have line of sight - makes the "Station" and "Defend Burrow" command rather pointless
 - Dwarves stationing several tiles away from where they should be stationed, often on different Z-levels, and therefore different floors with no line of sight
 - Dwarves leaving their station using ridiculous path finding, including climbing past your set up defenses - had a squad of archers climb down an impenetrable fortress to charge the invaders
 -Dwarves sparring rather than fighting the enemy that's standing 2 tiles next to them

Add to all that the amount of time and effort it takes to set up a military under the current system, it's just not worth it - and without it the game is pretty dull.

I feel like this should be a priority for development, since it's what makes the game either agonizing or incredibly boring after a certain point.
ALl the new features are nice and all, but if the game becomes unplayable after year 2, what's the point of it?

Starting as a dwarf in the most northern and therefore warmest civilization on the continent.

I begin to wander around the place and snoop through the living rooms, but all I can find is leather clothing.
I enter the meeting halls and ask about the local troublemakers and my whereabouts. Apparantly I'm part of the guard.
The mayor knows a great deal about local bandits and nightcreatures, and gives me specific directions. I promptly recruit 2 fellow guardsdwarves into my squad and set out on our quest to find the exit.
I finally run into the major staircase and descend a bit into the cavern layer, but find that the bandits will probably roam the surface and start to climb back upwards.
As I reach the ground level, I stumble upon the trade depot and try to trade for some better equipment, but all that is available is human-sized, so my own stuff will have to do.

We start wandering north towards a marked bandit camp. On our way, my companions start to butcher the local wildlife and I join in on the fun, after all some supplies are very welcome.
We reach the "Ravaged Desert", a vast plains of black sand, and continue our track north.
Large packs of coyotes are roaming here, but they put up no resistance as we hunt them down.

After half a day of travel we reach the bandit camp by night.
I creep towards them, and start to pick off the sleeping bandits one by one. Noone seems to notice me, not even the bandits standing guard seem to bother much. As I attack the bandits, my fellows guardsmen utter words of disinterest and neutrality.
Finally, only one sleeping bandit is left alive and I decide to wake him up to interrogate him.
A good kick in the teeth should do the job. But apparently he has sunk too deep into sweet dream land and neither my kicking, not my companions joining in on the beating can disrupt his slumber. At some point one of my blows proves to be too strong and a fatal punch to the head ends his misery.
Not much loot here, so we continue our journey, as there seems to be a civilized site further north.

As we reach it it turns out to be a hamlet, with cottages carved into the hill and some underground cellars. The village seems to be poor and everyone is irritated and intimidated by our armed intrusion. They seem to fear an invasion of sorts.
The mayor tries to make a run for it as I talk to him. I sheathe my weapons and appease him doing so, we finally exchange a few words and he has some useful information about the local surroundings.
We continue north, where there's supposedly another bandit camp near the ocean.

On our way we find many more coyotes and some leopards and panthers, the first ones to put up some resistance and fight back.
I grow a little tired of the slaughtering, but my companions relentlessly hammer away.

We finally reach the camp, and it turns out to be inhabited by a large band of kobolds. Finally some action, I think to myself.
I charge in, hoping to take the kobolds by surprise and ferocity. Only to find myself surprised, that instead of being met with daggers and bolts, I'm confronted with goblins cowering on the floor, crying in fear and anguish as I quickly dispose of the first of them.
Their tears and the fact that they are unarmed and not even trying to run away leave me wondering if my cause is as righteous as I thought it'd be. Only a giant pile of stolen goods in the middle of the camp seems to bear witness of their crimes.
I finish off the last of them, my fellows chime in with incantations of  "I don't care about this".

Browsing through the stolen goods reveals nothing of relevance apart from thousands of coins and armor pieces, which are too large. I grab two water skins to make sure I can carry some extra supplies and continue my way towards the coast.

We reach the shore after short travel and the weather seems to be decent enough to traverse to the other side, where there's another camp we have to raid.
I start to swim and about halfway to the other side: "You are encased in a block of ice".

The end.

So, I finally negotiate peace with the elves and they give me a tree-cutting quota because, honestly, I don't have time to deal with them and my ranged defenses are currently imperfect.  The elf diplomat proceeds to leave via the main entryway and gets slaughtered by my civ's dwarven caravan which is currently trading there and, apparently, still at war *facepalm*

Surprised your civ didn't declare war on you. Negotiating with elves.... tststs... you should know better

Dwarf and man turned into wagons.

Perished wagons raised by necromantic powers.

WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE?

For the first time ever, the game has decided to present me with me a truly decent weapon - an ≡iron shortsword≡.

Shortly thereafter, looting the corpse of some bandit ringleader, I find a ☼silver morningstar☼ and an ☼iron shield☼...

Now if I could only find my way out of these sewers...

I will be streaming Dwarf Fortress live every now and then from now on, despite it not being the most action-packed game out there.
If you'd like to watch, comment and make suggestions on my assembled contraptions, you can find me on twitch.tv/hscorp10.

I will make sure to leave a message here everytime I go online.

  !FUN!
\(^o^)/