Bay 12 Games Forum

How much will multiple necromancer towers affect my chances of an undead siege? Does it change things at all? In other words...
How much fun am I in for with this embark? It's early autumn now, and nothing has happened yet. I'm getting a bit worried.

So I had my smith training with a small mountain of copper bars, doing copper battle axes on repeat for the woodcutters. I forget he's even there (magma forges make me lazy) and concentrate on getting a danger room set up.

Later, once I've got him up to Legendary, I tell him to start making steel weapons for my squads (crossbows and axes, and some silver hammers). When I finish those and the steel armor I designate a couple of squads.

I notice that after a season of danger room-ing, I've got two half-squads of legendary fighters/shield users, but only one of my axedwarves has equipped a battle axe.

Some investigating reveals that my latest migrant wave (all assigned to the Peon class, which includes woodcutting) had grabbed up all the steel battle axes instead of using the hundreds of copper ones in the pile. Since the military uniform specifically wants "steel battle axes", they didn't equip anything.

I managed to fix the problem by having the steel axes dumped, then disabling woodcutting for everyone and then claiming the axes so that my military got first dibs. My question: is there any way to prevent this happening when I want to add more dwarves to this military squad? The woodcutters went and grabbed the remaining steel axes again as soon as the military was done. Is there a way to specify equipment for non-military personnel?

So I had an idea to make the work orders screen a little more in-depth:

• Add in the ability to link together work orders in a sequence. This would mean you set a series of work orders, and the next order on the list isn't started until the ones before it have been completed, even if the jobs involve different workshops. So "Smelt hematite ore (30)", "Make pig iron bars (60)", "Make steel bars (60)", "Forge steel breastplate (20)" linked together would smelt the ore, then make the pig iron once smelting was done, then make the steel, and finally forge the armors. Assuming of course that we can change the upper limit of work orders to more than 30, which would also be handy.
• This could lead to doing nested work orders. In my head, once you have a sequence of orders laid out you should be able to save them, like macros, and have those orders transferred to different forts. Then other work orders could include those saved ones, ad infinitum. Include the ability to multiply orders by multiplying all the quantities involved.

Example:
STEEL_FROM_SCRATCH
  Smelt hematite ore
  Make pig iron bars (2)
  Make steel bars (2)

So if you input STEEL_FROM_SCRATCH (10), it automatically queues:
STEEL_FROM_SCRATCH (10)
  Smelt hematite ore (10)
  Make pig iron bars (20)
  Make steel bars (20)

Apply this to other things, like military equipment. Say you want to upgrade your military's outfits because you just finished smelting a bunch of steel bars:
STEEL_AXEDWARF
  Make leather backpack
  Forge steel breastplate
  Forge steel greaves
  Forge steel shield
  Forge steel high boot
  Forge steel helm
  Forge steel gauntlet
  Forge steel battle axe

Then when you go to the job manager screen, you just search for and queue up STEEL_AXEDWARF (10) to kit out a full squad.

Some common uses I can think of would be to queue up food and drink simultaneously, or make full sets of clothes in one go, or when you carve out a new series of bedrooms you queue up the coffers, cabinets, beds, and doors all at once with BEDROOM_FURNITURE (16) or whatever. Custom orders can be set to go either sequentially as above, or simultaneously like they do now. I think it would be a great addition to the manager screen, and would make things much better for the interface.