Bay 12 Games Forum

Hello!

I have to disagree, although making it easier to disable them would be handy.

In their default settings, they ensure that you get a world with a little bit of everything in it - some high places, some low places, some dry and some wet places and so on. This is very important for new players who need to learn the game first before experimenting with exotic worlds.

In addition, the first group of minimum settings is actually quite neat if you wish to do a themed world - for instance, you can set up the region minimum for oceans in order to get a rather blue world (also consider increasing the two height variance maximums to allow for small islands). Or you can have a world centered on mountains by increasing the minimums for mountain regions. Or maybe you want a mostly evil world...

The advantage these settings have over other settings is that they do not actively shape the world. You can still have a world with tall mountains, even if you have a high ocean setting.

These rejects actually mean the following:
By setting the minima, you tell the game what your basic requirements for a nice world are.
The game looks at each generated world and compares it with your list.
If the world is not good enough to meet your standards, it is discarded as you would not enjoy it anyway.

This is actually customer service.

But as I said, an easy option to have "German customer service" may be useful (like how the mesh thingies work, it seems).

Anyhow, that is the way I see this.

Deathworks

P.S.: While I wrote, the data came in.

Look at the center of your settings: You have minimum terrain numbers for swamps, deserts, grassland, and forests. I suggest setting all these minimum numbers to 0.

Actually, just in order to see whether generation works, I suggest you set all of the following to 0:
minimum swamp (3 settings)
minimum desert (3 settings)
minimum grassland (3 settings)
minimum mountain region (3 settings)
minimum forest (3 settings)
minimum ocean (3 settings)
minimum hill (3 settings)
minimum low savegery
minimum mid savegery
minimum high savegery
minimum rivers (2 settings)

This should theoretically lead to at least reaching the wildlife message once in a while.
Are there actually creatures that can live in such cold temperatures? For hot temperatures, I guess there are fire imps and magma men and the like, but do we actually have glacier creatures?

Hi!

I am not quite sure about what you are referring to in the first sentence, but it seems that your second sentence is positive about me. Thank you.

Anyhow, I am definitely aboard with those saying that current megabeasts are in dire need of an overhaul concerning world generation. Some of the entries in the legends just seem absurd and seriously undermine the flair of the megabeasts.

And I also think that reducing the cluster size of giants is actually improving balance.

Anyhow, tomorrow Toady is planning to release the next version, so we will see how the changes to various aspects of world generation may in the end effect megabeast survival rates (I haven't seen any direct mention in the dev logs, but given the complexity of the game, they may benefit indirectly).

If we still have no chance for megabeasts, maybe we should try to find a good balance for clustering dragons, titans, hydras and the like - assuming that the observations I have made before are correct (^_^;;

Deathworks

Greetings!

Actually, as far as I know, semimegas don't reproduce. However, I think that semimegas respond more favorably to having more sites available (increasing the number of caves seems to increase their population tremendously).

The bad reputation they have is mainly due to giants and if you look into the raws, you will find the giants with a CLUSTER tag. Remove or reduce that CLUSTER tag, and suddenly all those giants rampaging thousands of times throw the villages disappear.

So, more powerful than the physical statistics seem to be the power of sheer numbers (^_^;;

Deathworks

Thanks, Qmarx.

That sentence indeed turned ambiguous. The intention was to say, as you pointed out, that a wall serves as a floor in the level above the wall.

I hope I didn't cause any confusion.

Deathworks

Hi!

No problem. Everyone is happy to see new faces who will probably come up with new ideas or antics eventually :) :)

Anyhow, about your new questions:

1. No, definitely no. You only really need to embark with an anvil if you either do not expect any traders at all OR if you are one of those pros who get their magma forges going before the first autumn (don't ask me how they do that, but they do, it seems).

Iron anvils are rather cheap, so you can easily buy it in the second year.

So, I strongly suggest to dump the anvil and give each of your starting dwarves 10 job skill boosts (that's the max; besides giving each either woodcutter or miner, I suggest giving them a mix of job skills; first level is enough to get them started).

Buy the animals you wish to bring.

With the rest of the points, buy food and drink (mostly drink; it doesn't spoil that fast but is consumed quite quickly).

If you embark in a map that has any vegetation besides trees, I also suggest you do not buy any seeds on embark screen if you plan to do surface farming (which is currently very easy and quick to set up). Simply harvest the bushes and use the seeds once the berries are eaten or distilled.

2. Actually, the defense of the fortress proper is already taken care of with enough traps that anyone who wishes to enter has to walk through at least about 3 traps, no matter which path is chosen.

However, especially in the beginning, you will have a lot of dwarves running around on the surface and they will not benefit from those defenses - but this is only important once you get goblin assaults.

The first thing you usually get are kobold thieves (usually around the time the caravan comes). Once a kobold thief is found, simply draft the dwarf closest to him and station her at the position where the thief is - case closed (kobold thieves are weak!).

This is the reason why the war dog is not really necessary - if the passage is narrow and you have a lot of traffic going through it, someone will spot the thief. And any dwarf is able to kill off a single kobold thief without problems.

Otherwise, make use of the terrain.

Something to note is also that all terrain is currently sloped. Beforehand, we had cliffs dropping several z-levels with no way of climbing them, but for the sake of adventure mode, they have been removed from the current version.

Walking creatures can not climb up sheer cliffs, they need stairs or ramps. You can use that in your defenses to narrow the possible approach routes for invaders. The advantage is that removing ramps is done relatively quickly, as compared to building walls, and does not require material.

Just make sure you leave the clear path for the wagon of the caravan to travel, though (mind you, clear, not straight :) ).

3. For what purpose? If you are talking about defenses, there is not really a minimum, I think, although being one level above the attackers may be advantageous :) The important thing is that if you want to put archers there, they should have LOS of as much terrain as possible.

Here is also a little bit of oddity: constructed floors can not have any buildings on them as they are already buildings themselves (no building stacking!). However, if you construct a wall, one level above, it functions as a floor, a floor which is not considered a building.

This is important, because this allows you to place ammunition stockpiles into your archery towers, or have the barracks in there as well, making absense of soldiers less common.

4. Mmmhhh, I have to admit that I don't have any concrete figures there. But if you have 2 3x3 farms working and a still and a kitchen, I think you should be fine for the first winter.

So, good luck with your fortress, and please tell us if something interesting happens or if you need more help.

Deathworks

Greetings!

Scrolling and stoppage are in now.  Things like rewind/fast-forward aren't really practical without a lot of extra storage or a completely different way of doing things.

Thanks a lot, Toady! That is wonderful news.

I am really grateful, but while we are on the topic, I wanted to ask about another suggestion I thought I saw going around somewhere and which seems related:

History mode

That is, instead of starting a fortress or an adventurer, you can specify a number of years and the game will load the current world as it is and then runs it through the history simulator again for as many years as stated.

No other features added, just using the same routines and functions also used during the recounting legends phase of world generation. So, I imagine it could be implemented relatively easily (of course, I don't know the internals of DF, so this is just speculation).

Sorry about being so direct, but I simply had to ask. (Oh boy, I must sound like a really greedy person here (T_T) )

Regardless of this, just having the stop function makes me all warm and fuzzy.

Deathworks

Hi!

With so many people talking about mouse support, I believe I should point out that not everyone is strictly in favor of mouse usage.

Personally, I prefer the keyboard driven interface we have right now (it is not half as bad as people make it seem in these discussions), and whenever I update DF, complete mouse deactivation is one of the things I do in the init file.

I am not saying that people should not get their mouse support. But I hope that even once mouse support is implemented, all features will still be accessible via keyboard - and then keyboard alone (personally, I consider a mixed interface requiring usage of both keyboard and mouse to be about the worst you can get).

Deathworks