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.

I use raised drawbridges as walls all the time, so I'm quite confident that a dwarf won't stand on a bridge that he's building unless he has to move items to clear the space.

Burrows restrict cleaning. I know this because I like to have huge bloody battles, and burrows are crucial to keeping civilians from trying to clean up the blood while the battle is still raging.

What about buildings? With kennels you could clean up 5x5 areas.

With constructions, there's a trick that I use all the time to make sure that my dwarves don't trap themselves on the wrong side of a wall. Designate the wall you want, then surround it with walls that you immediately suspend, but leave blank the orthoganal tile where you want the dwarf to stand. The AI will always steer the dwarf to a tile that doesn't contain a pending construction. It's probably designed to prevent the dwarves from cancelling each other in a large multi-tile construction. I've never tried it with floors, but I assume that it'll use the same code.

Some invading elves killed a cute little wild echidna that had been hanging around outside the fort. Then the necromancer king reanimated him. Now there are a dozen elite soldiers who pound day and night on this little undead soccer ball that won't die.

It's not a big problem. The soldiers are getting awesome XP, and I can eventually kill the echidna with DFHack. I just want to know why it can absorb limitless damage.

. . . picks are quite hard to come by in adventure mode, so if you wanna get going quick, start your adventure in an old player fortress with a stockpile of them . . .

Better yet, put them on a pedestal. Retiring a fort scatters loose items in stockpiles. Items on pedestals stay put and are easy to find.

In the "d" menu, if you use the "Set Priority" control, you can very greatly influence the dwarves' behavior.  It defaults to "4", with "1" pretty much telling them to get their butts in gear and get it done now, and "7" telling them to do the job whenever they don't have anything else to do.

Are you sure about that? I always thought that mining priority only determines which tile he goes to once he has chosen to mine, and not whether he chooses mining over some other activity. But I've never tested it.

There's a similar question on the Do Task Now! designation for workshops and levers. From the phrasing and context, I assume that it gives that task priority in the jobs list. But I would love to know for sure.

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.

I use a technique similar to Patrik's with the 1x1 magma chamber, except that I get rid of the magma with a second pump. It requires an extra step per cycle, but it also allows the minecart to stay on rails the entire time. I hate it when dwarves carry minecarts.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around Sarmatian's trick of using wheelbarrows to move minecarts. It sounds crazy, but I'm gonna try it.

If you want to move magma with minecarts on a larger scale, you can pack as many of them as you want into a magma chamber, and they'll all come out with 2/7 magma. You can even, in effect, manufacture magma this way, turning a single 7/7 tile of magma into (2 x minecarts) magma.

Or you could wait for the season to change again.