Bay 12 Games Forum

From my recollection, vermin don't die of old age at all in DF - if you capture one, it should last forever.

Well, now I have to give all of my dwarves a pet cave spider...

Lets suppose a meteor falls from the sky of considerable size, suppose its landing is equivalent to several tons of TNT. Lets also suppose the meteor also makes contact with a man before making contact with the ground.

When does it become a meteorite? When the man explodes into gore? When the gore covered meteor slams into the ground? Or does the act of touching the ground rewrite history, and it always was a meteorite?

I don't know why, but this question is haunting me.

Then the average amounts of metals should be reduced until big mineral rushes are actually significant, prompting big immigration, wealth, and so on.

I wouldn't hope too much for that. Realism in mineral scarcity could easily make DF a tedious exercise in finding a decent embark.
Of course, we can always reduce mineral scarcity, making things decent once more, but I wouldn't care to see if changed until prospecting sites was better developed.

I personally think its better to just assume that by choosing a site for a fortress inherently means its above average in mineral's. Like destiny or something.

Honestly, the ideal machine to run DF something like a custom built FPGA or ASIC, just to optimize its memory requirements. Or at least a CPU with an insanely expensive and large cache.

Tragedy simulation

That should cover most use cases, or at least the worthwhile ones...
I thought about genocide simulator, but we also use controlled tragedy, such as the child care.

Yes, this is a good suggestion for a hopelessly broken system.

Whoever thought that dwarves being unable to pour water onto a tile, but being able to build a scaffolding so they could dump it down another Z-level, all the while micromanaging the designations manually, was a good work-around? This, and other versions of this, are a good interim solution.

Feel free to continue arguing about the energy source of the caverns. I have yet to see a good solution to the problem.

Personally, I would like to see an ability to place various cavern moss onto bare stone, and after a few seasons produce some soil. Hopefully it would be a part of a much greater farming arc, which includes various levels of soil exhaustion as well as an explanation of the energy source of cavern plants. I'm not against transporting soil, but it seems quite likely that above ground soil would be substandard for cavern plants, and cavern moss could help reinvigorate exhausted soil.

This post is primarily related to the ability to grasp large weapons with a single hand, but it also has implications for multi-grasping large weapons by small creatures...

All melee weapons are a lever, and most attacks utilize this, swings in particular. To move a lever you need 2 points of contact, a point where you apply pressure, and a fulcrum. There are actually multiple levers at work when swinging a sword, your hand makes two points of contact to hold the sword steady, and your point of rotation, such as your shoulder, makes a fulcrum for a larger leaver encompassed by the sword and your arms. For both levers there are 2 points of contact.

This is why some weapons are simply two handed in real life, you need to space those points of contact out to maintain control. When you are holding a sword, part of your hand is a fulcrum, and another applies a force to counteract the torque made by the fulcrum and gravity. Larger weapons have a greater torque, and because its a lever you can counter that force by spacing out the fulcrum and where your hand applies pressure.

This creates a real upper bound on how large a weapon you can wield and strength only helps so much. Its true that, if there is no limit to the force you can apply, then the distance between your fulcrum and that force can be as small as you like, but there are very real limits to that force you can apply, and it only varies slightly with increases in strength. Therefore some weapons must be wielded with 2 hands in real life (even if it can be held in certain positions with a single hand, control will be minimal and movement will be limited).

The same will scale down to dwarves, smaller hands mean smaller weapons for single-grasp. Smaller arms mean smaller weapons for multi-grasp. Though the issue is easy to scale for what weapons must be multi-grasped, its more difficult to see how it should scale for weapons that can't be grasped at all.

I agree strength should be a part of the role, but not the determining factor. In fact, I agree here size is certainly the determining factor, strength's role would be quite minimal and maybe even negligible in my opinion. I think the weight of the material has much more to do than the strength of the wielder, as such:

Seems like an adamantine anything would be light enough to swing around no matter what. With the incredible sharpness, the wielder wouldn't even need any force behind the weapon.

I agree.

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TL;DR: Melee weapons are a set of levers, and the space between the fulcrum and your point of force makes a much greater difference than the amount of force a stronger person can apply. Size really is more important.