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Topics - John Johnston

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DF Gameplay Questions / Traffic designations, pathfinding and game speed.

« on: August 27, 2008, 01:29:45 pm »

Does anyone have any ideas on what combination of traffic zone designations will make DF (the game) run fastest? Is it preferable to zone main routes as "high traffic" or will this actually slow the game execution down (due to the additional "low step count" pathways possible)?

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / What... the...

« on: August 21, 2008, 05:19:46 pm »

So the Queen and King Consort finally showed up at my fortress, bringing their advisor (the King's aunt), four Royal Guards, and a Hammerer. The King had a long and dwarfly history of killing wildlife, but unfortunately had no legs. Fair enough; he was carried to the barracks to rest, and soon found himself ecstatic. The first thing the Hammerer did (and I tried various things to stop her) was to hunt down and beat to death three of my dwarves. Fair enough. Eventually she went to sleep and was locked in to starve.
Now the Queen wouldn't choose herself a bedroom, despite there being various Royal and Grand bedrooms unoccupied. Fair enough (yeah, I know, I'd probably have to assign her one myself, but I was curious as to whether she might pick one that matched her 'status'). Upshot was, she got unhappy, and started a fight.
Bam! out of the blue, "Geshud Dakosttishis, Queen has bled to death." Fair enough. A little surprising that they'd just up and kill her, but quite gratifying.
And then...
"Litast Oddomtaron, Advisor has been struck down."
"Obok Gimrakust, Planter has been struck down."
"Kol Shigosvabok, Planter has been struck down."
"Rith Urvadginet, Stoneworker has been struck down."
By the time Obok bit the dust, I was watching. One of the Champions (whose emotions were "Ecstatic" throughout and who had no wounds or "unhappy" state indicators) just switched onto a killing spree, running round the meeting area just randomly targetting people and killing them.
He was eventually brought down by another Champion (funnily enough, a much weaker one).
What on earth? One minute everything running smoothly, the next, the hallways are covered in bits of dwarf and sprays of blood*.

I don't believe the Advisor flipped over the death of the Queen - she wasn't even her friend, oddly, just a "passing acquaintance", she was the King Consort's aunt. There's nothing about starting fights or smashing things in her bio.

Any ideas? What made a normal, perfectly healthy, long-standing member of the fort who was (and remained) "ecstatic" go all Flippy? He was a "passing acquaintance" of the Queen, and no relationship at all with the Advisor.

On a happy note, the King Consort is still "ecstatic" in his barracks sickbed. He doesn't have any rooms or furniture either, but doesn't care.

*I realise these are often synonymous, but not in this case.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Dobbins are forever.

« on: August 18, 2008, 08:45:05 am »

Horses don't seem to have a MAXAGE tag in the raws and hence don't appear to die of old age. Is this a bug, or am I again being dim?

DF Gameplay Questions / Am I being really dim? (Babies)

« on: August 17, 2008, 03:27:46 pm »

I had thought that the population cap was the absolute number of dwarfs (all ages) in your fortress, and that the child cap was the number of children among those dwarfs.

Is it instead the case that the population cap is the number of adult dwarfs, so the total population of your fortress is (population cap)+(child cap)? That seems a strange way for it to be as babies and children are dwarfs just like the others.

Is that how it is though?

DF Gameplay Questions / Growing tower-caps and shrubs underground.

« on: August 15, 2008, 08:46:15 am »

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-3373-buriedevils

I don't understand exactly what is going on with the underground farming here. (There is, or rather was, a tiny underground pool in one corner of the map, which is why towercaps are growing at all).

This is what seems to me to be happening:

Underground soil areas at or above the lowest ground level (level = 0, the surface) in some cases grow towercaps and shrubs despite never having been watered.
But in some cases, they don't - the area round the big hole in the mountain (point 7) has nothing growing (please ignore the muddy bits that I watered, those do have stuff growing on them - that is rock cavern floor though, not soil).

Underground soil areas below ground level (level = 0) do not grow towercaps and shrubs naturally.
When they are damp, they grow towercaps and shrubs.
That makes sense, but also - when they are next to damp walls that have had water moving on the other side, towercaps and shrubs grow. Damp walls that have not water moving on the other side don't make shrubs grow.

It's confusing me. Anyone know categorically exactly what is going on?

DF Gameplay Questions / Justice Question

« on: August 10, 2008, 09:41:10 am »

I'm slightly puzzled by the state of justice in my current fort. In my last one, I did everything "right" - I had plenty of able bodied fortress guards, plenty of able bodied royal guards, a healthy captain of the guard, a healthy Hammerer, and I tried my hardest to fulfil every demand and mandate and to give the nobles appropriate rooms. I also had a very large set of jail rooms, each with a restraint, a bed and an individual food stockpile.
Despite all this, the default punishment for any offence appeared to be a hammerstrike (or several). I lost many dwarves to this.

With my current fortress (approx the same population, 160+), I'm doing everything "wrong". I have no fortress guard and no royal guards. I have no captain of the guard, and when the Hammerers arrive, I lock them in their bedroom until they starve. I ignore all noble mandates unless they're trivially easy to fulfill ("make me GRATES!"), and I ignore their demands - not that I could fulfill them anyway, because I don't give them any rooms (and they appear to be too picky to take one of the (very nice) publically available rooms, which is interesting). There are no jail rooms.
And yet... out of nine sentences passed so far (none of which have been enforced, of course), only one is a hammering.

What gives? Anyone? Can it be that justice is so very dependent on the personality of the nobles that if you've got a bad bunch, it doesn't matter what you do to appease them, and if you've got a good bunch, you can get away with anything?

DF Gameplay Questions / Post-liaison caravan economics in long-running fortresses.

« on: August 05, 2008, 05:06:13 pm »

Both the human and dwarf caravans come with a representative attached, with whom your dwarves can negotiate as to which products you would like to import and export. It is entirely possible for these liaisons to die, and as a fortress gets older and older, the likelihood is you're going to end up with noone to request items from. There does not seem to be any mechanism for these liaisons to be replaced at present (I'm guessing that as the whole trading area is likely to be massively overhauled anyway, there's no point Toady spending any time on sprucing it up).

This is what appears to me to happen (39e, although previous versions as well):

Liaison is alive - you give them your requests.
Next caravan arrives bringing goods which are more likely to be those you requested eg. you request rubies, the next caravan turns up with rubies.
Liaison dies.
Next caravan arrives with goods similar to the ones you've requested before.

At this point, what happens appears to depend on what you buy. If you buy a load of wood, the next caravan to arrive will bring a shedload of wood. If you buy all that wood, the next caravan will bring even more; eventually, you could end up with a caravan bringing you just a massive quantity of wood, and maybe a couple of plump helmets or some rope reed thread.

Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on you! But it also seems that by selectively buying items, you can "keep those items available" - so if they bring lots of wood, say, buy any metal bars they bring and no wood, buy all their food, and the next one will bring more metal and food and less wood.

Now this is just my experience from a handful of long running forts and I could very well be wrong, so, does anyone have any more information (or just confirm what I've said is right)? Any good ways to manipulate the caravan when you don't have a liaison anymore? And any good ways of keeping the liaison alive in the first place?

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / My fortress is infested with children!

« on: September 19, 2007, 04:12:00 am »

It's a big fortress, and the population is hovering around the 100 dwarf mark. I'm losing a slow stream of dwarves to various causes ("I know, I'll just take that goblin head" *thunk* "out of the" *thwack* "trap" *spang* "argh! my pancreas!") ("Die, foul Cave Crocodile! ...glug, glug...") and the Fortress Guard and Royal Guard are full of cripples... but my problem is that there are 17 children and babies in the fort, 14 nobles, 13 Guardsdwarves, a small "real" military squad of 7 or 8 Champions and weaponmasters... which leaves precious few dwarves to do any real work. Most of the children were born in the fortress and are a few years old. Is this explosion of useless population a common problem? Any good strategies for working round it?

DF Gameplay Questions / Turtle Power

« on: January 31, 2008, 05:39:00 am »

I'm having a spot of bother with my current fortress - a complete lack of shells, which is causing a steady stream of deaths due to dwarves failing to complete their artifacts with that perfect spot of turtle shell.

The trouble is, I can see turtles wandering around outside, quite cheerfully. There is a brook on the map. My fisherdwarves are fishing, my fish cleaners are cleaning fish, and just to be doubly sure my hunters are hunting too. But none of them seem to want to kill, much less retrieve, a turtle. I have several food stockpiles, one of which is set up purely to store turtle (unprocessed and processed), and the others also have it enabled.

Can someone explain what I'm doing wrong? I've not had this problem before...

(for the curious, it's cost the lives of a dozen or so of the poor little souls so far; three or four have gone nuts, a couple were mauled to death by a Cougar before it comically fell into a murky pool (I turned "hunt" and "fish" on for a whole load of peasants just to try to capture everything on the damn map) and some others succumbed when my Cougar-hunting squad decided to exterminate a nearby herd of unicorns)

DF Gameplay Questions / Spring Cleaning

« on: March 05, 2008, 03:38:00 am »

Well, brook cleaning to be precise. I have a brook which has been filled with mud forever and a day, and the ground around it is also permanently muddy. The brook and the ground are outside. Any stone built on top of them takes on an unappetising muddy brown hue.

I've tried washing more water over them, but it doesn't remove the mud. Is there any way to clean this area and get the brook back to sparkling blueness?

DF Gameplay Questions / Grave goods disposal.

« on: March 03, 2008, 09:01:00 am »

A great philosopher once wrote: "When it's all over we still have to clear up."

As every map goes on, I seem to end up with odd bits and pieces of clothing lying around all over the place. Some of this belongs to dead dwarves, some of it belongs to live dwarves. None of it ever seems to get shifted - not to a tomb, and not to coffers/cabinets/whatever.
Dwarves will move this kit if they need to build something on that precise spot, but that's the only time they do move it. They won't dump it. Thieves can occasionally steal these items (huzzah!) if they can get to them.

Does anyone have any good ways of getting rid of this junk? If you try to build a crushing bridge over it it'll be moved (so perhaps it could be done with a bridge one z-level below, and undermine the object so as to make it fall onto the path of the bridge; if you have the space to build it), directing magma onto it would be a major operation and not really practical... I guess perhaps making some kind of corridor around it and then building walls inside the corridor one at a time would force the dwarves to move it one step at a time along the corridor but that'd be insanely time consuming. Or maybe mod in more kobold thieves (if that can be done) or rhesus macaques or whatever to get the outside ones.

So, anyone got a good trick?

DF Gameplay Questions / I'm melting.. melting! Or not, as the case may be.

« on: September 19, 2007, 03:33:00 am »

I've got gazillions of iron objects knocking around the place in a big fortress and I'm looking to melt them down. When I look on the stocks menu, there are loads of metal items listed. Some of these I can set to be melted using "m". Some of them won't allow me to set the "m" tag - I guess these are things like items being worn or weapons that are part of traps.
When I set my smelters going the dwarves will melt some of the items... but by no means all of them. They get to a point where there are still a couple of hundred objects marked for melting (including things like narrow iron chain mail sitting in bins next to the smelter) and then complain that there are no objects to melt and cancel the task.
What's going on? Am I doing something wrong?

In a similar vein, I have loads of junk marked to be chasmed using the "c" tag in the stocks menu. The dwarves don't want to cooperate even if they have no other particularly important jobs to do. Any tips? There are several entrances onto the chasm that they could use if they wanted to, and they *do* dump body parts and stuff in there when there's been a fight; they just don't haul the stuff I've marked.

DF Gameplay Questions / So, these Sieges, then - do they ever end?

« on: September 12, 2007, 03:47:00 am »

My apologies if this is a dim question, but...

...do besieging goblins ever just give up and go home? The Wiki hints that they do ("...pray you can last the winter..."), but it isn't definitive, and I've never seen it happen yet. What's the deal?

DF Gameplay Questions / Glaciers and Immigration

« on: September 07, 2007, 04:43:00 am »

Hi all, I can't find the answer to this on the Wiki so I thought I'd ask:

I've started a new fortress on a glacial map (partly for the FPS boost, which is great, the game really flies along) with no contact with any other civilisations. My original seven dwarves are all still alive and the usual metalsmith turned up at the usual time. The metalsmith did not have a spouse with him. No other immigrants have shown up and the fortress is now in its third year. My question is: is my fortress doomed to remain childless? Will I ever see new immigrants, or if not, if I meet the requirements for nobles, will they turn up (and maybe bring their spouses with them)?
I can't tell if I've met some of the vaguer criteria for nobles to appear, and it'll still be a while before I have enough mushroom wood to start minting coins or weapons. Is it worth my perservering, or are my dwarves doomed to a lingering extinction?

DF Bug Reports / [38c] Babies keep a-comin'

« on: March 13, 2008, 06:30:00 am »

(Due to the unfortunate demise of my home computer, I'm running DF in the background at work. I copied my save folder across, but decided to turn down the population cap because my work machine couldn't cope.)

Anyway:

My fortress was on a population cap of 110, and had a population of about 107, with baby cap at 15/20.
I then moved it to a population cap of 60 and baby cap of 15/20. Two and a half game years further on, lots of babies are still being born - population is now 116 (with 18 children) and my mayor now has ten children, two of whom were born over those two years! I could see how she would maybe have her ninth child if she was already preggers when the limit was lowered, but think something odd is going on if she has managed to become pregnant at least once after the limit has gone down. There's at least two dwarfs in the fortress who've had two children since the cap was lowered.

Reckon this is just due to my repeatedly changing conditions in the init file, or a real bug?