Bay 12 Games Forum

Yup, Axedwarves for HFS next time. They don't have armor, so hammers are extremely inefficient (hammers being weapons almost entirely specialized for fighting armored opponents).

Also I believe that if the body is made out of something tough like metal, the brain is too, making it unlikely to trivially tear even when the skull breaks? Not an expert on that stuff.

At least #1 I know is planned already, too. So good news for you on that.

Not only does he plan to let you have that level of control, but he even said somewhere on the dev webpages that he wants to give you full control over ordering your dwarves to specifically build a limestone piccolo, and then specifically encrust that one piccolo with gems, and then specifically sew an image of the fortress' logo on that piccolo, etc.

Sounds complicated, but not difficult. Just a lot of micromanaging fairly straightforward decisions, I imagine.

The trickiest part is going to be making sure that all of your random dwarves that do one thing better than anybody else have backups that can fill their job when they're training or on duty. Like if you have one BEST armorer, you want to make sure you have another damn good armorer, more so than you normally might worry about.

Either that, or be prepared to wait 3 months for your armor order to get filled.

Simple fix to make everybody happy all at once--military and non-military skills--with barely any need for playtesting for Toady, and zero need for tweaking balance:

Just add the experience amounts per skill level per skill to the RAWs.


Done-zo.

You're making most of those problems too complicated. You can solve a lot of thing by just doing the exact same analogue of what the actual game does:

Important announcement: drops all pins to the floor and have the message raise in braille in the middle until acknowledged. Like normal game, basically.

Find nearest creature (like the V key normally): The nearest one that it is selecting at the moment just has its glyph flash (i.e. drop to zero, then reraise, drop to zero, re-raise) which makes it very easy to locate if, while reading the info off to the side, you see it's the one you want. Same goes for buildings, etc. Also, the actual sound of the pins "flashing" adds a second sensory cue to the location, without even havign to build anything special into the system at all. Merely a happy side effect.

Tracking a creature: Already a vanilla game feature that translates just fine: use hotkeys follow creature option. Now you just hit the hotkey and ta da, the display centers right on them (lots of ways to make center tile special and easily found which should probably be in place anyway. Simmilar to the little nub on the "5" key on most cellphones. Cheapest would be to just have the center glyph use pins made out of a unique material, as long as materials aren't overly used elsewhere).

If you want, give an option to either recenter or just make the relevant dwarf flash (you'd want the former in most cases, the latter in cases like directing a whole squad of military)

Also, what method is this going to use for detecting the tactile input of the user's hand? Pressure? Proximity Detecting laser grid?

Yes pressure. Pressure sensors are robust, unambiguous, and cheap. You don't even need to have a sensor/button for every glyph if you combine it with another dirt cheap mechanism like capacitance to see where your fingers are, and use staggered sensors and stuff.

But probably a pressure button for each individual glyph even would pale in cost to the pin mechanisms anyway, so whatever. Just a switch for each one.

You don't need as many glyphs as DF has, as somebody else pointed out. Like, you can have just one for all grass, for instance. One for all trees. One for all farmable ground, another for all rock.  You can lump tons of inconsequential animals together into a single glyph (one for capybaras and giraffes and benign things. One for all animal men. One for aggressive or dangerous fauna but not actively seeking you out. Another for active hostiles like GCS or yetis, trolls and such. One for all FBs and titans. etc.). To get more info you can ping them for more, but most of the time these are enough to be able to safely gloss over, is the idea.

All smooth or constructed walls could be one glyph, regardless of direction... same for tracks. On and on.

I'm too lazy to actually go come up with a set of abbreviated needs just for the sake of a hypothetical forum thread, but you could if you wanted. The resulting number might be pretty reasonable.  Like, around 100 or so?  Or it might still be huge, I'm not sure.

...? The definition of price that economists came up with includes my example of variable taxi fares, since it is defined as the actual exchange of assets that takes place.