Bay 12 Games Forum

Regarding waterwheels in a channel, I've got a similar setup in my current fort. Only I'm not using two lakes, I'm using streams on two levels (There is a natural waterfall from one down to the other).

I originally had my tunnel tap into the top stream, go down a couple levels of ramps, through a depressurizer, and then into a long channel and finally out a fortification carved in the cliff side and fall to the lower stream. But I found the flow through the depressurizer was too slow and the last third of my channel never got deep enough for waterwheels to work. So I removed the depressurizer and crossed my fingers, hoping the water wouldn't overflow. I had floodgates in place to shut it off if it did, but I didn't need them. Since it has an exit on its own level, it doesn't rise up and flood the waterwheel room.

My channel is only one tile wide. So far I've got a dozen waterwheels set up, which should be more than enough to power my magma stack, if I can ever get it finished. I've got no sand or iron ore on my map, so building magma safe corkscrews relies on importing materials.

I do notice that the flow in the stream below where I tap into it is reduced. The water used to be 7/7 deep right up until a few tiles before the falls, but now it gets shallow quite a bit earlier. It's only 1/7 or 2/7 for 10-15 tiles above the falls. I think if I had a wider channel for the waterwheels, I'd either have too little flow to maintain deep enough water, or else I'd drain so much from the stream that it would just become a trickle.

The well would sit at the end of a short corridor. The corridor would be lined with pressure plates all the way to the side of the well. These pressure plates would stop just one pump in an otherwise continual magma mister built in the four-pumps-in-a-squarcle design with one corner over the ground next to the well (right where a dwarf would leave a pile of grime).

The problem I see with this is how to get all those pressure plates to all just stop the pump. A pressure plate connected to a gear assembly toggles the gear. So the first plate would turn the gear off. Then the second plate would toggle it back on, and so forth. Plus toggles coming from the plates resetting.  It might work if things work like this:

1) dwarf goes onto first plate. gear toggled off
2) dwarf leaves first plate and goes onto second plate. first plate toggles pump back on, second plate toggles it back off.
3) repeat for the rest of the plates.

But I'm not sure the timing would work out right.

However with all the trouble of caging goblins and all the time spent dumping items (which would take time out of the days of the precious few dwarves I have working) I thought there had to be an easier way.

Sounds like you're short on labor and need some migrants. That way you'll have enough workers to be able to get rid of your migrants.

I wouldn't put the manager in the military at all. Nor any dwarf with important skills. All it takes is one lucky arrow and you've lost the guy that keeps production flowing and have to train up a new one. Training a new manager from scratch in a busy fort can be painful. You queue up orders and they sit there for months with red X's by them, waiting for Urist McNewManager to figure out which end of the pencil is which.

I usually make my expedition leader my manager/broker/bookeeper, plus giving him mining duty. Early on he's not very busy with the administration, so he can be available nearly full time for mining. Later on, as the administration load increases, I'll probably have a few other miners trained up, so I'll turn off mining for him. He can go back to mining when I have a lot of digging to do, and then have it turned off again when a caravan arrives.

If/when the manager/broker/bookeeper dies, I often end up replacing hims with 2 or 3 dwarves, depending on who I have with appropriate skills. If I've got an immigrant with decent organizing, but no record keeping, and one with record keeping, but no organizing, then one becomes manager and the other the bookeeper. And I set up a new office because they both need one. Someone with some appraising/negotiating/judge of intent becomes the broker at that point.

My Chief Medical Droid is also set to mining at the start, since he seldom has anything to do. If there are injuries, it's easy enough to turn off mining for him. But he generally is available full time for mining and is always my first legendary dwarf (except for strange moods).

I hardly ever assign a sheriff/captain of the guard, and when I do, I usually regret it. I'd rather have a noble slightly miffed about someone going unpunished instead of half the fortress tantruming because a dozen popular haulers got executed for taking stuff to the depot that was export-forbidden after it was already traded.

The militia commander is just the first dwarf on the list of the first squad, as far as I can tell. No special duties that I know of. Like any other soldier, he's in a somewhat high-risk position and only available part time for other duties, so I wouldn't give him any important tasks that might be time sensitive.

Soldiers of all ranks are good candidates for masons, mechanics, wood cutters, etc. Any job where you want a bunch around, but skill doesn't matter too much for most of them. Just make sure you have a full-timer also doing the job. For example, have a primary mason and set the mason's shop to only allow novice or better. So the hoard of unskilled masons can crank out construction work en-mass, while the skilled guy is back at the shop making masterwork doors. Since soldiers are typically scheduled to be soldiering most of the time, and off duty some of the time, having a few more or less of them is no problem if they're doing unskilled labor. Or you can just give them no jobs and let them do hauling when they're off duty.

Quote from: tommy521 on September 26, 2011, 09:12:28 pm

Quote from: Mitchewawa on September 26, 2011, 06:20:00 pm

Train all of your dwarves in spears; most of the time anything else will just tickle the balls of the demons. Spears pierce organs, everything else just scratches and bruises (and the occasional cut and fracture if you're lucky).

But do not leave it down to luck.

*Urist McAxeDorf uses tickle balls!*
IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE!!

*Demon uses endless flirt*
URIST MCAXEDWARF IS SURPRISED BY THE DEMON'S RELENTLESS ASSAULT!

Urist McAxeDwarf gives in to the pleasure!

Well, I started with rogue, back in the day. Then hack, then larn, then moria, then nethack, then angband, and a few other roguelikes tossed in along the way. So DF in ASCII was not a problem. If my 49 year old brain can handle it, your 14 year old brain ought to be able to.

How about your basic screenshot? I know it's low tech, but it should work just fine.

I have to agree that pump stacks are a nightmare. Am I the only one hoping that one day we would get just tubes?

Like you build one magma pump near the magma sea, and you connect a series of tubes that go straight up from it.

Of course the level the magma could be pushed would be proportional to the power you can give the pump, so you would have to redirect a lot of power to the pump at the bottom.
Would make playing with magma more fun imo(and thus would ensure more !!fun!!).

The trouble is that the type of pump the dwarves use (Archimedes' screw) can only lift water as far as its top end. It can't pressurize it, except by lifting it to the top of a column. So using one to push water up a vertical pipe wouldn't work.