Bay 12 Games Forum

It would be much simpler to allow the player to "build" vistas, which have no material components & can exist anywhere. All of the line-of-sight calculations need only be performed at the time of construction, and saved as the "value" of the vista, so that dwarves standing on/next to that tile will appreciate it just like standing on/next to an expensive piece of furniture.

You would need to be able to manually go back and "refresh" vistas, however, to take into account changes in the view that may have occurred since the vista's original designation. Also, vistas would have to store at least two values: One for natural sights like mushrooms & waterfalls, & the other for gold-plated throne rooms, to account for dwarves who do / do not appreciate natural beauty.

I'd argue for a system that generates some odd connections as that would be realistic . . .

. . . So yeah, an ocean god should ride on ocean creatures, wear clothing made of shells and kelp and live in a fortress of sand and salt, but a god of murder or painting shouldn't be so picky. . . . If the DF god generator always made fortress gods with holy shields and freedom gods with bird friends, that would be boring and sad.  I agree that outright weird things like the Wind god being associated with Slug Men should be avoided, but I'd prefer crazy batshit gods to boring predictable gods.

I didn't mean to imply that I'd favor a discrete set from which the game must pull animals, only that it would be more likely to. I meant the "preferred" and "forbidden" pools of [animals/weapons/tools/other traits] to be exactly that, preferred and forbidden, with a wide gulf of "neutral" things between them. So a god of agriculture could still be pictured with a bellows, it would simply be more likely to see a plow there instead. Maybe there could be a "discouraged" pool as well, to allow for the possibility of "weird but not exactly stupid" pairings.

I'm all for gods and their domains going in all sorts of random-ass directions, as long as that direction is NOT exactly opposite of what would be appropriate. I once generated a dwarven pantheon where the god of rain was named "Fragrance". I didn't mind that in the least--what I did object to was that a different god in the same pantheon was named "Rain Rainflew the Rainy Sky-Heaven of Rain". True story.

So, since dwarves are no longer mandatory, will the game just be called "Fortress"?

It sounds like certain events should have both a baseline Happiness score, and a Novelty modifier which lowers the Happiness conferred by that event each successive time that it happens. Sure, when a new couple has their first baby, it makes sense that they'd be ecstatic. After the 20th time, though . . . you've really got to wonder.

Personality traits such as Curiosity, Tradition, and Excitement_Seeking should affect how quickly a dwarf doing one kind of job over & over gets the "felt stifled by the monotony of labor" thought. On the other hand, a dwarf physically separated from that exact same boring job, perhaps due to a stay in prison or hospital, should feel "glad to get back to the old grind", at least for a while.

Largely true, I for one would favor dwarven civs starting out with beer(s) only, being able to farm underground crops only, and being able to build a Brewery only. As the civilization develops [during worldgen], through experimentation and/or trade, they would learn how to grow surface plants, vint wines, and distill spirits. I have nothing against preventing Distilling from being researched until after there is sufficient glassworking / alchemical infrastructure to support it, I just wanted to emphasize how the game does, in fact, currently work.

No brandy?

Just pointing out that brandy is distilled wine, meaning its production would require developing two types of booze.

Don't forget that chemistry, including true distillation, is very much a part of the various aspects of cooking & brewing. To say that "alchemy has to wait until the proper tools are developed" would have the effect of making several plants unbrewable until the fort has at least a few pieces of crystal glass, which then have to be formed into exactly the right types of glassware. That doesn't sound like it would be a popular change.

In my head-canon DF, dwarves invent brewing beer, elves invent vinting wine, & humans invent distilling spirits, and the knowledge of the three forms of booze are exchanged through trade. Distillation, the most difficult and scientifically advanced process, is discovered by the humans because of their acceptance of fire & mechanics from the dwarves, and agrarian techniques from the elves.

Quote from: SixOfSpades on August 05, 2015, 12:35:11 am

Also a should-be: a Scullery workshop, to wash all of those mugs, and cauldrons, and ladles, and knives, and forks, and spoons, and plates, and bowls. Seriously. Have you ever tried eating a "unit" of stew, using nothing but your bare hands?

This would require proper implementation of ANY sort of eating containers and tools.  Which we currently don't have.  They're just "finished goods," useful to fill up traders and not much else.

Yeah. I see this as part of the main Kitchen overhaul. Knives would be useful to prevent dwarves getting irritated when eating a roast, and outright mandatory for cooking any kind of meat or veggies.

Even with proper use of eating utensils, and tracking their status as dirty or clean, I still don't see the need for a separate scullery.

True, both functions could take place in one workshop . . . you could also realistically craft stone figurines in the Jeweler's Shop, or even milk your goats at the Loom if you really wanted to. Modern residential kitchens perform dual-duty in one room. But commercial, industrial, and military kitchens do not, at least not as far as I know, the food-prep sinks are clearly separate from the dishwashing sinks. And DF kitchens are far more communal, industrial-grade than a single-family kitchen.

The main difference between a Kitchen & a Scullery would be plumbing. On average, a Kitchen would only need about 1 bucket of water for every 4 or 5 meals prepared, an easy job for the Cook's apprentice gopher. But a Scullery would need 1 or even 2 buckets per load (true, you can easily wash multiple dishes per load, but that means you need extra dishes to cover for the ones that can't be used because they're waiting to be washed), almost necessitating an aqueduct/pipe to be routed directly to the Scullery if it's going to be the least bit efficient, and then you have to have some place for all that waste grey-water to go (NOT anywhere near the communal drinking well, thank you).

Washing dishes at the Kitchen would still be possible, and in fact practical during a fort's early days. But as the population piles up, and their plates & forks do too, the Kitchen would become so clogged with Wash Dishes jobs (which take longer because of the water-hauling duties) that the Cook can barely even set foot in there. Time to dig an aqueduct for a Scullery.