Bay 12 Games Forum

- Colorful rock types?
- Is there any exposed ore here?
- Mysterious white infinities among the grass
- Mysterious red speckles among the grass, with the normal ground type variation
- Mysterious red streaks by where rivers and streams brush up against pools of water on the ground, and small splotches of yellow in a few of them
- A new(?) pilcrow vegetation/tree I don't think I've seen before (or maybe it's just me)
- Seems to be more white/exposed stone in the grass than I normally see by my fortresses
- The white speckles are not multicolored like the mountain face
- Pools of water that fill valleys in the hills, and are above the base water level
- Rivers carve out a path through the mountains in a very basic way
- The current bridges are shorter than the width of the new widest rivers
- Where does the water go as it flows in?

Come to think of it, I've never seen any of my bone bolts show up in the ammo stockpile, or any bone crafts. That *is* fishy!

My latest fortress is on permafrost, with a few large predators. I started with a hunter, who kept two dogs with him. He was very good at what he did, and brought in deer, foxes, even a whole pack wolves. We had plenty of early meat and it went very well at first, as I dug for the river. Then he ran out of bolts, and proceeded to commit suicide by trying to wrestle with four wolves at once.

Maybe give crossbow hunters the option of cancelling work with a notice when they run out of ammo? I can understand fighting for his life if he's in mid-combat and suddenly realizes he has to use his crossbow as a club, but I watched painfully as he sauntered up and threw a punch (or whatever he was doing) at the nearest wolf, only to be promptly mobbed and torn apart. I don't mind unforgiving game mechanics, but that just seems stupid on his part.  

Things went well from there, and in fact I eventually recovered his things, but my fortress now has a major problem with the undesignating trees. There shouldn't be any pathing issues -- as I'm on permafrost, the river ice never even thins, so I have paths galore, and I haven't crossed the river, locked doors, filled channels, or had any cave-ins that would threaten the consistancy of my fortress. While we have a few big predators, they leave well enough alone, and rarely harass. I only have occasional deer and raccoon problems, but it's not a big thing, especially near my fortress. Yet there's one particular tree that's near my entrace, and I could swear I've selected at least half a dozen times, and it never gets cut down. Next time I look at it, it's not designated. Often I'll look over an area I designated for cutting and only a third or so of the trees are actually still designated!

Naturally, this leads to a huge problem having enough wood for beds and charcoal. Often my metal works are completely shut down due to the wood supply cutting off without me noticing, and just when I think I have enough wood to go on for awhile with beds and such, I'll miss a cancellation notice and have a dearth of useful furniture, with no wood for more, when I go to equip rooms for a wave of immigrants.

One bug I've encountered on this permafrost map is that the "fade away" rivers north and south of the map thin and melt by season, even though the actual river is frozen solid year round.

Am I mistaken in that weapon racks seem to default to "allow none"? I had one sitting useless in my fortress for a long time before I went to remove it, only to realize I could edit its allow preferences. Lo and behold, everything was red. If this is the case, it seems more intuitive to me that it should allow all by default, and only be more restrictive if you set it to be.

Would it be possible to set similar allow preferences for stockpiles? I'd really like the ability to sort my light stone and dark stone into a different pile, next to specialized craft workshops, while I keep my boring rocks near the door mason. This would also be useful for storing food by the kitchens, and seeds by the farms.

Sorry if I seem kind of dry and downbeat -- this game is great, but it's 3AM here, so I'm pretty tired and just going down the list.  

Sounds like a temple to some foul goblin god! Taking over the site and using that one as a place to dump goblin corpses would be fitting respects to their religion!

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Originally posted by Dreamer:
<STRONG>Not that this is a bad thing: I have to say, that for such a bloody game, Dwarf Fortress does spare us the decision of whether or not to kill something.  So while I'm all for other races having complex morals and alignments, I understand the need for something you can shoot and not bother asking questions.  Since Dwarven society is so complex, you need something you can beat up without feeling bad about it.  Stress relief, and all.</STRONG>

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In Escape Velocity: Nova, for the first time, you could join a pirate faction and have them portrayed positively from their own point of view. They weren't a pure chaos everybody hates them faction anymore, they were their own faction with a political agenda and if you joined them, you wouldn't attack your own ships.

In testing they found that people wanted at least *somebody* they could attack randomly, and after 9/11, some people wanted to kill terrorists in the game. They ended up creating mindless marauders that would just attack certain sectors indiscriminately and had no story development to them, just something to spice things up with a random bad guy every once in awhile, somebody who wasn't attached to any faction, somebody you could just blow up for fun.

For all the complexities of wars where you could join either side and see the same story from five different angles, ultimately they still needed something you could just kill.

Heheheh, I once wrote a rather lengthy academic paper on the portrayal of Orcs in games as a safe archetypal evil barbarian race in place of traditional racial stereotypes to the same effect. And signed the petition.

I've entered one of the underground cities in Turkey. It served as a retreat from invading armies, and was complete with hiding places, blockable doorways, fake hallways (to cause confusion and trampling in invading armies), and other tricks and traps designed to fight off enemies that tried to fight their way into the caves.

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Originally posted by Block_Stacker:
<STRONG>On the wall is an engraving of a city, a warehouse, a tradeship, and a worker.  The worker is busy delivering goods a warehouse. The city urgently needs more workers. The tradeship doesn't know why he comes here, this city never buys anything or sells anything.</STRONG>

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One of Impressions Games' many city-building games. I would say Caesar III specifically, but it's been a long time.

On the wall is an engraving of a H'riak Sporeship, a star, and humans. The H'riak Sporeship is falling into the star. The star is exploding. The humans are screaming. The humans are dying.