Bay 12 Games Forum

The way you express that sounds redundant. Why expose liquid to freeze it only to unfreeze it with lava after? On the other hand that could work to make above ground farms.

What just occurred to me and probably will end up doing is this:

Level two:
#############    # - Ice
#.....#~~~~~#    ~ - Water
#.....X~~~~~#    X - Floodgate
#.....#~~~~~#    . - Ground to be muddied
#############

Level one:
#############    # - Stone
#~~~~~#~~~~~#    ~ - Lava
#~~~~~~~~~~~#
#~~~~~#~~~~~#
#############
I would dig on the icecap above the first stonecap a chamber with a floodgate on one side. And below it I would let lava flow while extending a little bit beyond the upper room to melt the ice there. Then I would open the floodgate from time to time to let water create mud on the heated open chamber above.

Farms don't require water; just soil. You can plant without watering.

Yeah but glacier maps don't have any natural soil type tiles. You need to get the underground tiles muddied to get working soil. And this is just temporal.

Surround the tunnel on all sides with magma.

Try dropping the ice in mass using a bridge.

These two might work. But the next question here is: If I drop the water to underground tiles below the icecap level they will stay as water even if I don't surround them with lava or will they froze eventually?

Related question. Do all water sources eventually evaporate if they are not connected to a infinite source like a river or brook? Because this might spell doom for the fortress eventually as icecaps don't regenerate.

Actually you don't even need to make bridges. If you start a fortress in a beach square that borders an island and a continent, then abandon without building anything, it automatically marks the island as connected to the land when before that it wasn't. You could then build fortresses in the island squares which reach all civs on the continent. This is more of a bug than a feature but I imagine it's difficult to detect if two land masses have been recently connected by a fortress bridge without performing an exhaustive path finding.

Micro-rant ahead

The mayor failing of ambitious strategy games is the excessive micromanagement they push into the player. Most if the time in very awkward ways. Not even reality is as complex as some strategy games seem to be. You don't have nation or army leaders choosing or tweaking every aspect of everything that's below of them.

The way in which DF almost succeeds (and eventually will) to handle such obscene amount of complexity is by allowing dwarves some amount of self control and governance. Granted, they are still very stupid and the game still requires a great deal of micro. But if it where a standard RTS without pruning any of it's details, it would be impossible to play.

If they get too ridiculous a hand-slap would be in order. A ban for repeat offenders will be enough to dissuade others.

I imagine it could be the only machine capable of running a Dwarf Fort with a pressure switch computer simulating another DF inside...

... or maybe Crysis on max settings.

I don't think so, they are made during world gen at the moment. Not even sure if they show up in the game.

Toady has said worldgen roads, tunnels and bridges will already appear ingame for the next release. But are currently buggy and might show disconnections here and there.

A Spore-like MMO system would work best for DF.

Everyone who logs into the server gets a copy of the most recent state of the world and the player can play either fortress or adventure mode on his own. And only once every logon or something the world status updates with all changes in the world done by others since the last logon. When the player logs out his changes are uploaded to the server. Discrepancies like two different adventurers killing the same enemy at the same time could be resolved simply by giving the killing title to the one who did it first before the world synch. But the other player won't lose stats or quest rewards for not doing it first.

Every adventurer would have to retire in town (and disappear temporally) before leaving the game so that his character won't be killed during the off-time. Player fortresses would stay on a semi-static mode (nothing changes but dwarves react to adventurers) during off-time. But players would have to create good defenses to prevent population decline due to "invading" adventurers. Starting fortresses could get a invulnerability period where no adventurers can arrive while their population is low or before x amount of seasons pass.

On the other hand, time would be something that is handled server-side but at a much slower rate that in the single player mode. Something like a single season per day or week. Certain amount of food would be consumed and produced abstractly for each day the player doesn't logs in. Every other activity or order would stay on hold until the player logs again. Siegers, traders, and migrants that arrive offline would wait until the player logs in before interacting with the fortress. And no other group of the same type is sent to the fortress until the player handles the previous group.