Bay 12 Games Forum

This is halfway between a bug and a suggestion. I've got two elf civilizations at war with me, and in sieges the leaders always ride giant birds. They aren't particularly dangerous. They mostly just buzz around with the flyer AI and cause job cancellation unless I've burrowed my civilians. My marksdwarves spray bolts into the air and eventually bring them down. It's a fun battle to imagine.

My complaint is that my marksdwarves always hit the rider and miss the mount. They won't start injuring the mount until the rider dies.
1) This makes no sense in terms of realism. If an elf is overhead riding a cardinal that's fifty times larger than an eagle, then it should be nearly impossible to shoot the elf and miss the bird.
2) Even if my marksdwarves could shoot the rider, I don't want them to. The giant bird is far more of a nuisance and threat than its rider. I want the giant birds injured and on the ground ASAP to face my melee dwarves. It takes a lot of time and bolts to kill the rider first when the mount is zooming around 10z levels overhead.

This is probably also true of non-flying mounts. The chance of hitting the rider vs mount should probably be based on the ratio of their body sizes. But for flying mounts above the z-level of the shooter, the mount should almost always get hit first.

The forest retreat Diamondcoasts has lots of animals:
Giant Dingoes
Giant Cougars
Giant Chipmonks
Grizzly Bears
Horses
Unicorns
Giant Deer, and
Giant Black Bears.

I sent 30 dwarves there on a pillage mission. They killed several historical figures, which is normal on first contact with a site. They also fought and killed the grizzly bears. Just the grizzly bears.

In my previous 44.04 game, missions against elf sites was a major PITA because all their animals fought on defense. There was no way to send dwarves toe-to-toe against dozens of giant animals, so the solution was to steal all the livestock with raid missions before attacking with pillage missions. It was a simple plan in theory, but it became very tedious to dispose of dozens upon dozens of stolen animals.

The rules have changed. In my 47.04 game, the animals at elf sites haven't fought on defense---until now. So it becomes important to know when the animals will fight and when they won't. My theory is that the grizzly bears were the only ones to fight because they were the only war-trainable animals at the site. But I'm curious to know if others have experimented with missions and found more subtleties to the rule.

Edit: Another mission came back with confusing data. The dwarves had to fight a named giant dingo, a named yak bull, a named black bear, and an unnamed grizzly bear and horse. I guess I should be glad that they didn't have to fight the giant cougars.

My goal is to build a library with knowledge of all the topics. To speed things along, I want to steal books from other sites. There are five great libraries in my world, and two of them are within my civilization. So how do I get copies of those books into my library?

Here are the options I see:
1. Wait for the caravan to bring the books I want. This could take a long time.
2. Civil war. Considered immoral and buggy.
3. Retire the fortress and steal books as an adventurer. Would this start a civil war?
4. Retire the fortress. Start a fortress in the other dwarf civ. Steal the books. Unretire the original fortress. Steal the books.

I've never seen a child do this:

Has anyone seen it younger?

I killed an FB in the first cavern. Usually I bring FBs into a training pit through an airlock system. But a lucky headshot killed this one too early.

I like to butcher FBs. It's a thing I do. So I forbade everything in the cavern and marched them down there. I had them dump some corpses. I built a butcher's shop next to the FB corpse and cut it up. I built a little wall and bridge along the edge of the screen to control any future FBs who appear in that part of the cavern.

In doing this, my FPS dropped by half, to the edge of unplayable. So I pulled all my dwarves back, deconstructed the butcher's shop, and walled off the cavern. But my FPS has barely recovered.

Is there anything I can do to reverse the FPS hit of walking into the cavern?

Edit: Never mind. It seems to have fixed itself.

Are items made from metal (candy) cloth subject to wear?

I'm not asking about weapon velocity. I mean time to strike. Do the different weapons take different numbers of ticks between initiating a strike and landing it? And what about weapons with different types of attacks, such as the short sword?