Bay 12 Games Forum

The way I see it dwarven magical pets would be automatons. And the way I see it a court wizard should be able to be any type of magician, once more types are put in game. But that's just my personal opinion.;

Personally I would like to start seeing more external utilities like dfhack actually being made obsolete. And while I suck at programming, even I can see that even if it was designed badly removing the limit shouldn't take more than changing a few lines of code.

What I think might be a nice idea is instead of the number of jobs being limited by skill, the manager would actually have to physically process orders and send messages around the fort and the speed he does it would be limited by skill. Though it would probably best to have basic books and libraries in first so that its not just an abstraction. As an example it could be that for each job he needs to check the ledger to see what materials are designated as open for each job, the log to see what workers don't have jobs and what workshops are open. He'd then have to send messages to the dwarves nessesary for the job. While it doesn't make sense to me that the number of jobs would be arbitrarily capped at lower skill levels, it does make sense to me that the efficiency of the manager would decrease exponentientially for each job he has to manage and more experience at managing  jobs would increase his efficiency and therefore his ability to handle more jobs. The books are just to make the game seem a bit less abstracted and would allow a player to check on a fortresses history in whatever industry relates to the type of book. Though it might be nessesary to incinerate the books every five years for fps reasons.

When it comes to making formations in-game, I think it would be awesome to need a large open space in your fortress where your Militia Commander would drill formation exercises

And of course how much they drill would determine their speed at changing formation [say from a column for traveling (maybe 2 wide and five deep;almost perfect corridor size, but we don't have size fifteen squads, though combining two squads should be possible) to a line for fighting(maybe 2 deep and five wide)] and of course their ability to stay in formation while fighting and their movement speed in formation as well.

I do think the direction system is a bit clumsy. They should be able to wheel the formation to face any direction. Of course you'd need to designate relative directions where each dwarf in the formation is supposed to face [shieldwall all in one direction, turtle type formation would have each dwarf pointing at a different direction.

Instead of having preset shapes I think it might be more interesting for players to be able to designate the relative positions dwarves stand and when in formation they'd try and stay in those relative positions if the terrain allows it. There'd have to be some option for what dwarves must do if other dwarves die and relative positions are left open.



It'd also be interesting to set the relative positions of different formations for control over entire armies. Like the roman maniple system.

Though one thing I find a bit difficult to figure out is how much control the player would have. I wouldn't trust the ai to pick what formation is best. But I don't want the player to have as much control as an rts. Maybe an emphasis on tactics where the the squad menu is changed into more of a tactical command system where you can tell squads or groups of squads what formation to take and where to move. but it would be more like setting up hunting or fishing labours. It'd need to have a high priority so your dwarves don't comit suicide when you tell them to retreat. But when not following orders [like when traveling to a from set order stations] they'd have  a certain amount of freedom. Like if they run into enemies that outnumber them and they cant get to a station you'd a an announcement that they are holding back. Or if theres a stockpile on the way they might ressuply. And thye might skirmish with enemy is not specifxally told to hold back. I don't lnow. This still might be tooo much control but....

   You can't start talking about where technology should lead until you properly work out it's beginnings. There is  a linear progression of a sort with technology. It starts with needs. A need to even the odds against better designed creatures is how we got our start. No claws? Fine make a knife. No thick fur coat? No problem, take one by force using the knife. Ok, Uhngar is dead any one got a plan B? Attach knife to stick, throw spear, collect loot, yay!!!! Now we come to observation, some one had to realize that that Giant Sloth fared better in the cold than they did. This of course means that they also formed a clear connection between the fur and surviving in the cold.
To put it in a better way it works like this

Personally I don't see a problem with simplifying it. A civ with level one mining tech can't dig down, level two can only dig one z level through soil, level three can only dig soil, etc [though it'd probably be culturally important to default dwarves at a minimum of five or whatever other random number, though other races would have their own specialties, and possibly events might cause races to get lower than their defaults, like elves being forced to hide underground or something]. Level one metalworking might only be working with copper. I'm not sure what the next stage would be. I believe that historically that bronze is slightly better than plain iron, but iron was more common which was why it was adopted, until they worked out steel at least. I may be wrong though. Steel would probably at the current tech now with candy being the most advanced level.


If you want a start point at the start of history gen you'd just have the races start at their miminum defaults and then have events determine the spread of tech. It shouldn't take long for a civ to get to get to the current level and in a standard worlgen without fiddling with advanced features their should always be at least one dwarf civ at a standard tech level (if possible) and the average tech level of the world should probably be part of basic world gen. Though maybe there should be separate options for "good" (dwarves, elves and humans) civs and "evil" (goblins) civs to make fiddling with difficulty easier for players who don't use advanced world gen.

I've suggested before that having other civs have different tech levels would be an interesting way to change the difficulty [whether or not they tunnel or use siege engines in sieges, availability of certain tradetrade goods, etc.]. I think it might be irritating if your starting civ is of a low tech level, but currently since theres no range limit on how far from your civ you can embark [though logically there should be, so I'll admit this argument isn't very good] you can just choose a high tech civ and still embark where you want.

In the actual fort I don't know. Since it is the mediaval period as far as I'm aware there'd be little dedicated research and most of it would be carried out by master craftsmen. So maybe a variation on strange moods could be used. But an RNG could get annoying with tech.

What there could be, similar to animals, is your civs familiarity with certain materials, similar to animals. Take the Japanese as an example. Their ore quality, as far as I am aware, is crap. But the Japanese swordmakers compensated by making works of art. They might have low ore quality but their familiarity in techniques used to work he steel created very high quality blades. In the fort if you use a certain material a lot there'd be a few minor bonuses that start to stack up

This thread gave me an odd thought. Its just a thought, not  a suggestion, because it'd kill the fps, but realistically many rivers would flow down slopes. The only place you really see rivers changing z levels is waterfalls. Realistically in areas with a certain level of elevation you should see rivers moving down ramps.

if pets can be given equipment the first thing I'm going to do is mod in war elves and give them wooden crossbows with wooden bolts. It'd be nice if pets could be given labours as well so I can  give them wooden training axes to cut wood for my fort but that's kinda offtopic to the thread.