Bay 12 Games Forum

In game day is not enough to do anything. The entire timeline would have to be changed to something more like Rimworld has in order for something like this to work, but yeah, that would solve most issues, because every day dwarves would have a time for eating, drinking etc. instead of doing it every X days like now. But that's too big of a change for now, so it's shouldn't be a part of this discussion.

"And, sorry, which army are you in where they make you stand on guard for several days without being able to drink water or sleep? That's just utterly inept management. Glad it's not part of this game."
In this game, when you embark, your miner can just dig through the layers of stone for something like a month without eating, drinking and sleeping or even taking a moment to rest and you're telling me that me wanting to have reliable military(that is able to stand their post for more than 5 minutes) is making drones out of them? That's silly. You're comparing that to real military and saying they don't spend days stationed without food and water You want realism? Make it that they leave their post after an in-game day, the whole squad, every day, to drink, eat and sleep within those 12 seconds. That would be realistic. And make them throw tantrums and riot if you give them kill order that takes more than 1 day at the time. That's realism, that's perfect gameplay. That's the challenge.
 
You're really sold on your idea of exploiting the military orders, and I'm not talking about putting squad on standing order for a month, they can't even keep up for couple of days without breaking up to eat/sleep/whatever they do. Immediately upon arrival half of the squad goes away to do whatever they want. THIS is stupid. Not the fact that after being on station order for a month some dwarfs go away to eat something. They have their stupid backpacks and waterskins for a reason and apparently they don't even work as they should. So your entire talk about military being drones is just invalid. I'll repeat: military dwarfs currently have a problem to stand their post for more than a minute. They are broken and need fixing. They can have bad thoughts about being stationed for too long, they can even throw tantrums, I don't care as long as they do what they are meant to do. And do it now, not in 10 minutes when I don't need them anymore.
You're mentioning that I'm the overseer, I'm the noble here and they disobey because they want to eat. That's fine too. But if I'm such a bad noble and they do it intentionally, I want to be able to punish them for not following my orders. It's either this, or they follow every order. You can't just give me tools that don't work and give me no way around it. That's bad gameplay.

Well, now we have bug that they drink beverages from their waterskins and immediately go to refill them, making waterskins useless. Also, for the most part it's an order that is meant to save the entire fortress, but if half of the squad would rather sentence half of the fort to death because they had to refill their waterskins or have a nap during the siege and you're ok with that, then I see no reason to even talk about it. There's difference between dwarfs becoming drones and dwarfs not being useless as military because they prioritize searching for a new sock over defending the fort during siege. In real life people were sentenced to death for sleeping on their duty so that others would obey and don't put the rest of them at risk. In real life soldiers don't just lay down on a ground and have a nap in the middle of combat, they also don't just wander off to eat something when given order to defend something. Does this make them drones? Not really, they just know how to control themselves. Military is not "hey man, could you perhaps go and kill that beast? You're tired now? Ok, maybe after you have a full night's sleep? You need a beer too? Ok, so how about next week then? You know, we're kind of in hurry, because it's killing people now... you don't care? Well, I guess I'll wait", it's more like "move your ass right now, I don't care that you're tired and if you don't go there now you will face consequences". What military dwarfs currently do in this game is generally called "poorly written AI".

While I personally think this change is not necessary, I wouldn't protest if support for that was eventually implemented, if people want it, why not. But on the other hand, this game has real issues, like big big issues with multiple aspects, that are there, waiting to be fixed/changed/adjusted, and I would be really pissed if something with as little impact on gameplay as pronouns would take priority over those matters. This happened to the sims 4, game that has really annoying bugs since its release years ago, every new expansion adds new bugs, but somehow, they couldn't find time to fix this, but apparently had time to implement pronouns that have literally no impact on gameplay apart from making a margin of players happy that their sim can be called "they" instead of "she" in the game. Everything else is exactly like it was, full of bugs.

So yeah, I'd say: yes, but there are bigger things to do first.

Btw, you should check out Noble Fates, not sure if it has support for modding this part of the game, but it already has more than 2 genders by default.

This thing is bugging me since I first played this game yeaaaaars ago. It's counter intuitive. You have to instantly build a well in every fort(and that can be either really easy or terribly hard to do, depending on your embark location you can have a river and ponds, or have nothing and the first carvern 50 levels below, in evil biome, good luck building entire windmill collection on your first year to pump out some water), because if your dwarf get injured, they will die of dehydration. That's stupid. Dwarfs drink ONLY alcohol, all their lives. They are grumpy when they drink water, and yet, once they become injured, apparently it's better for them to just die instead of have a mug of ale.
I can fully understand the need for clean water for... cleaning wounds. That's perfectly reasonable.
I could understand if drinking alcohol while injured would cause the wound to heal slower. That's reasonable.
I could understand if there would be some risk of infection if dwarf was drinking alcohol instead of water while being in hospital. Totally fair.
But death due to dehydration, because your dwarf broke a leg feeling of the tree in winter and you didn't build well yet as it's your first year after embark is just plain STUPID.

Water in hospital should be PREFERRED, if there's no water, injured dwarfs should drink alcohol. Every time this happens I'm rolling my eyes so hard that I almost have to put them back into my eye sockets. It's little things like that that generally make me want to quit the game and leave. Others are children playing by the water outside in evil biome during horrible sludge rain, getting killed and forcing everyone to get out to get their stuff and getting killed as well, or at least making people terrified because they were caught in evil rain... Or children playing with dead bodies in atom smasher forcing me to kill them(because they apparently totally ignore burrows while playing) before dead bodies stop being dead, thus making parents unhappy about the whole thing... But the hospital is by far the most annoying and stupid thing I have ever encountered in this game.

Beating is not death sentence. It's a bug not a feature.

I agree, guards shouldn't beat crafter to death for now making 3 figurines on time. That's just dumb. There should be some beating post that you could place in dungeon where guard would lead the criminal and beat his back doing some lacerations etc but not breaking bones, gauging eyes and piercing brains. That could be different punishment called "death by torture"

I would add to this the terrible scroll speed during trading and inability to select "everything except this" in the bin. I hate those freaking mandated objects getting into bin with 140 other items that I intend to sell.... Also "don't bring artifacts" button would be great to have.