Bay 12 Games Forum

To use the surface for any elongated period of time, you'll usually want a wall. Could make it out of wood, as wood cutting is "sort of" farming.

1. Breed (trainable) animals = animal husbandry, which would be a subset of skill required for ranching = farming (in the broad sense)

2. Train them as war animals = adaption of shepherding practice (dogs to help drive off wolves) = farming (again, broad)

3. Grow fibrous plants and spin thread, shear woolly livestock and spin thread = farming

4. Create wall of rope-restrained war animals

And there is your Farmer Fortress Challenge Wall of Gibs (when the axegoblins show up, at least)

The stuff all getting sucked into one tile is a bug. Remember how, used to, a dwarf would deconstruct something and the item would appear where the construction was, sometimes falling off the side of a tower or down a staircase and injuring other citizens? The fix for that now pulls all items in a 16x16 block to that space, instead of just the one construction material it's meant for.

As for your dwarf ending up on top of a wall, that usually happens when a flyer (do you have fowl of some sort around?) comes down from on top of the wall into a tile where a dwarf is, "temporarily" swapping places with it, but since the dwarf can't fly down like the bird did, he or she gets stuck up there.

Quote from: Drazinononda on December 10, 2012, 06:20:13 pm

So basically what knutor said, except make shields instead of bucklers, unless you're going to be using mauls or greataxes for some reason.

I don't know that the weapon makes much of a difference, Drazinonoda.  Why do you say that?

I prefer bucklers to shields, even so.  Armor raises faster in the danger room with bucklers.  Shields cover more than bucklers, true.  That means more blocks and less armor hits during training, doesn't it?

They also take half the material of a shield, so if weight matters for speed calcs, a soldier carrying a buckler will get to his prey a step ahead or first.  Sometimes.  It only takes one hit.  Sincerely, Knutor

You are basing your choices on training scenarios, I am basing mine on invasion scenarios:

You are correct about the higher armor skill gains with a buckler, as well as the speed consideration. With training, either in a danger room or live practice (with captured goblins, say) these are definitely good things, as shield will raise quickly enough anyway and one wants one's dwarves to learn the other skills as well.

In an invasion, the considerations are slightly different. For example, there are few ways to filter out or neutralize marksmen among the enemy forces. I'll assume that the fort is laid out to force invaders to engage the defenders all at once in close quarters, to account for the speed difference of a single dwarf charging through a hail of bolts across an open field vs. an entire squad engaging the archers at once. At close quarters against a squad of archers (or worse, a squad of melee with an elite archer squad leader) the primary consideration is how many blows land, and while a strike blocked by a shield or buckler never causes injury, a hit against armor often does, with copper armor being the most likely to allow injury by non-blunt attacks. In short, copper armor is only as useful as higher-grade armors when considered against blunt attacks, where all armors are about equally ineffective. If you have invaders coming in, then the fewer dwarves you have passing out due to chipped bones or dying from headshots, the better.

As far as the weapon thing goes, I'd thought that multigrasp weapons played nicer with bucklers than with shields, but reviewing the wiki doesn't give me anything to support that the game differentiates in function between shields and bucklers, so I'll have to retract that.

As far as making sure you have enough of each clothing item, you can set up a production list in your Clothier's workshop and set each item to repeat. Workshops with multiple Repeat jobs cycle through them; so if you have cloth shoes, trousers and shirts queued up, all on repeat, the clothier will make a pair of shoes, a pair of trousers and a shirt and then start over again with shoes. It's an easy way to make sure you have enough of everything, and works with any material in any workshop, so the same could be done for metal or leather armor if you want to put everyone in the military.

So you had to add the raws in yourself? First off, you're not using 34.11 like your first post says, because that's the current version (including minecarts and wheelbarrows).

Did you add a reaction to any of the workshops to make the tools? Having them defined in your raws makes them exist, but until you also add a reaction to make them, your dwarves don't know what you want them to do with the wood you give them. Reactions are necessary any time you want to turn one item into another at a workshop, in your case a log (or metal bars) into a wheelbarrow or minecart. For an example, here are the reactions for bronze-making:


And here is the reaction for clay crafts:


You'll have to add a reaction like this into your raws in order to be able to build the tools you've defined. The wiki page on reactions should have everything you need for reference.

Go to the fast travel screen and Wait (not sleep!) for a few hours. He'll return to his camp, find you standing there, and give his little "I'm a scary man" speech, then you can kill him.

I have a sudden urge to make jog juice