Bay 12 Games Forum

They must put a lot of starch in the collars of their silk shirts.

The big difference between DF and a challenge-driven AI or DM is that if the AI decides it needs to send a siege of 500 goblins to challenge you, it just dips into the bit bucket and pulls out enough 0s and 1s to create 500 goblins, and throws them at you. It's a black box with your fort (or whatever you are running) on the inside, and the black on the outside. The AI can just create anything it wants to keep you challenged without having to worry about how that affects the rest of the world, since there isn't a "rest of the world".

DF, on the other hand, models the entire world. It tracks how many goblins are in that dark tower that's been attacking you. After sending 300 goblins at you last year, the tower might only have 400 goblins left, so it's simply can't send 500 this year.

This may not be the game that you want, but it's the game that Toady is building. He's building a world simulator, not a tower defense game. Now, hopefully he'll realize that the game isn't as interesting (or as ‼FUN‼) as it used to be and do something to give the sieges a little more umph. He knows that he makes his living on player donations, and if the players all get bored and quit donating, he might have to get a regular job. But he also has his vision of what he wants to make, and I don't think he'll give that up to satisfy people who want something different. I respect him a lot for what he's doing, and I hope he's able to figure out a way to both create what he wants and create something that users want. It's like trying to walk a 1 tile wide path over a 20 z-level pit, with spiked wooden balls swinging at you from time to time, it's tough to keep everything balanced.

Maybe just doing something to increase goblin population would help things. That could be done by making them breed faster, making them mature faster, or making them train faster. I suspect that any of those could be modded in as things currently stand.

He has plans at some point in the future to do a major overhaul of armies and sieges, but I'm not sure how high that is on his list, and could take years.

They should raise room value. So if you need a lever in your dining room, it would be a good one to use. Or you could just install traps in main hallways to give dwarves good thoughts as they go by (plus they might come in handy some day).

Ok, now this is weird. I just got this announcement:

Vucar Uniteoiled has been elected to the position of mayor of The Fountain of Balance

But my fort is not called The Fountain of Balance, it's HardyBeards, the Slim Mines. And as far as I can tell, I have no one on the map named Vucar Uniteoiled (or Vucar anything). I checked the 'u' screen and search for Citizens, Other, Dead/Missing, and I even checked the Pets/Livestock in case someone's pet bunny got elected (I have no idea how they run their elections in The Fountain of Balance). I also checked Dwarf Therapist, even going through everyone with a nickname to make sure it wasn't one of them.

I'm very happy for Mr. Uniteoiled, I'm sure he will be a fine mayor of The Fountain of Balance. But I have no idea why his election rated a zoom and pause in my fort.

Oh yeah. that's also a possible clue, when the announcement came up, the map was recentered on the southern edge of my map. Going to announcements and hitting 'z' on that one puts the cursor on the very edge of the map. I wonder if there is a batch of migrants about to arrive at that spot, and Vucar is one of them? Maybe the game still has him listed as being in The Fountain of Balance and picked him in the election, then decided that since he's almost at my fort, he should get the announcement. Dunno. I guess I should resume and see what happens.

Edit: Well, I resumed, and suddenly all 5 of my barons are Dukes/Duchesses. And I hadn't even gotten their rooms set up for them being barons. What's going on in this kingdom?

There's already a dfhack plugin called diggingInvaders that lets invaders dig. Dunno if it's works on the current version, though. The last activity on its thread was in June of 2014.

[DFHack]# help diggingInvaders
diggingInvaders: Makes invaders dig to your dwarves.
Usage:
  diggingInvaders 0
    disables the plugin
  diggingInvaders 1
    enables the plugin
  diggingInvaders enable
    enables the plugin
  diggingInvaders disable
    disables the plugin
  diggingInvaders add GOBLIN
    registers the race GOBLIN as a digging invader. Case-sensitive.
  diggingInvaders remove GOBLIN
    unregisters the race GOBLIN as a digging invader. Case-sensitive.
  diggingInvaders setCost GOBLIN walk n
    sets the walk cost in the path algorithm for the race GOBLIN
  diggingInvaders setCost GOBLIN destroyBuilding n
  diggingInvaders setCost GOBLIN dig n
  diggingInvaders setCost GOBLIN destroyRoughConstruction n
  rough constructions are made from boulders
  diggingInvaders setCost GOBLIN destroySmoothConstruction n
  smooth constructions are made from blocks or bars instead of boulders
  diggingInvaders setDelay GOBLIN destroyBuilding n
    adds to the job_completion_timer of destroy building jobs that are assigned to invaders
  diggingInvaders setDelay GOBLIN dig n
  diggingInvaders setDelay GOBLIN destroyRoughConstruction n
  diggingInvaders setDelay GOBLIN destroySmoothConstruction n
  diggingInvaders now
    makes invaders try to dig now, if plugin is enabled
  diggingInvaders clear
    clears all digging invader races
  diggingInvaders edgesPerTick n
    makes the pathfinding algorithm work on at most n edges per tick. Set to 0 or lower to make it unlimited.

I've got a little confusion over skill names. I created a grid view with various scholarly skills, including one that shows up on the grid view as "Writing". I was just looking at the Dwarf Details pane for one of my dwarves, and he has a skill that is shown in that pane as "Writer", at level 5. But when I look at the Scholar grid, his Writing is only 1. Looking at the skills listed as being level 1 in the Dwarf Details, I see that Wordsmith is at 1, plus 2%. Hovering over the 1 for Writing in the grid, and it shows it to be 2.8% of the way to 2.

So I looked in the grid view for a skill at level 5 for the dwarf, and I see Prose is at 5.

So I think what is called Wordsmith in Dwarf Details, is called Writing in the grid view, and what is called Writer in Dwarf Details is called Prose in the grid view. It's kinda confusing. Is it possible to get the same names in both places?

Definitely set up a dining hall down there. You probably also want bedrooms for all the smelters and smiths (and assign them specifically). I've recently had a fort with the forges/smelters at the bottom and everything else up top. You spend a lot of time looking at idle smelters with the green A telling you someone has taken the job, but there is no one there, because he's on his way down.

And he probably stopped to pick up the chunk of heavy ore that was closest to him when he started the trip, so he'll be moving slowly. So linking your ore stockpiles (which should be next to the smelters) to the smelters will also make things quicker.

Might as well burrow them all down there, while you're at it. I think it has been reported that dwarves will sometimes decide they want food or booze that is on the other side of the fort, rather than the stuff that is right next to them. I'm not 100% sure that a burrow will prevent this, but it might. I know a dwarf won't accept a job outside his burrow, but I'm not 100% sure if they won't try to grab materials from outside the burrow (but I have a hunch someone will let us know).

With food, drink and a bed down there, and a burrow keeping them from going elsewhere, you should get good productivity. Maybe stick a non-denominational temple down there, too. I think that should cover most excuses that they'd have to ever make that long trip up and back down.

Now you'll just need a bunch of haulers to carry the food/booze/ore down and the crafts and whatnot back up.

Was surprised to get digging cancelled because of warm stone. None of my designations were anywhere near the magma sea. Looked and found that it was z-level 99 (counting up from the "bottom"). And the warm stone was obsidian. Hmmm, wasn't expecting a magma pipe. Dug stairs upward next to it until there was no more obsidian, then tunneled sideways to expose the top. It's at the floor level of the upper caverns. I wish I'd found this before I built my entire fort between levels -8 and -14.

Still, it might be worth it to rebuild up closer to the top. The latency of having dwarves have to climb all that distance to do anything near the surface really slows things down. My 3 legendary+5 miners could dig out a new fort pretty quickly. And I've currently got a couple dozen idlers that could be put to work hauling everything back up.