Bay 12 Games Forum

Hmmm, I don't get it anymore. I setup a new experiment with student/teacher, just teacher, or no skill whatsoever, and the no skill is winning (trained up to 15 fighter / 10 axedwarf in little over half a year, while the two other groups are stuck at 5-7 axe and 8-9 fight. Armor and shield are 2-5 for no skill, 1-3 for teach or student/teach.

Once the teachers are also up to 10+15 I will setup some experiments with training noobs.

You can request items from your caravan liaison, especially stones, and they will bring 4 of everything you request. 4 cassetirite yield 32 bars of bronze; if you have enough fuel/magma you can also request bismunthinite and smelt 64 bars of bitmuth bronze using the 4 cassetirite and 4 bismuthinite. Since iron has many ores, you can probably request at least 3x4=12 iron ores = 48 bars. On top of that you can smelt down all the anvils, piccolos and other crap they bring, and anything that the friendly goblins take with them as an offering.

(actually this has inspired me to do a no-metals no-lockdown few-traps fort just to see if I can pull it off...)

dfhack has a fix for the overstocking bug, just uncomment the
binpatch apply hospital-overstocking

line in your dfhack.init file. I've not had any problems with hospital stocking since.

some items are very expensive when trading, to an absurd degree. Aside from lavish meals (cave crocodile egg roasts and similar can reach values well above 20.000 dorfbucks) most glass items are expensive, which is ridiculous since glass, if you have sand, is almost as easy to make as the wooden stuff. Try making glass serrated discs. The game is still under development and some things, like these, are unbalanced. Maybe once the economy gets reworked it'll change. For now, I just don't intentionally produce those goods just for trading.

At least glass crafts require some sort of infrastructure: you need to make (or buy) bags (=tails+farmer's workshop+loom+clothier), then collect sand at the glassmaker, then acquire fuel (=wood+smelter), then make the craft.

So, starting from nothing but an axe and some stone, making a single wood ball requires 3 jobs (chop wood, build carpenter, build ball). Making the first glass craft requires (plant pigtail, harvest pig tail, build workshop, process plants, build loom, weave thread, build clothier, make bag, build glassmaker, collect sand, chop wood, build smelter, make charcoal, make craft)=14 jobs. Even if you start with 5 bags (the default), it still requires 6 jobs, and it is more difficult to manage since those bags will be stolen to store seeds if you don't pay attention, and you need to juggle collect sand and make craft jobs. So, it makes sense that glass crafts are more expensive than wooden balls.

(If I were to design the economy, I would use the number of jobs, amount of infrastructure, and scarcity of ingredients as the determiners of value, e.g. every simple wood product made by a dabbling carpenter should have approximately the same value, say 9 for 1 (wood) + 3 (1 building) + 5 (1 job). Quality modifiers should depend on the product, eg a masterwork wooden pipe would by only slightly more expensive than a normal pipe (who needs masterfully crafted pipe?) but for more sophisticated goods such as weapons (utility increases with quality) or crafts/food (happiness boost increases with value) the difference is higher. For example, maybe a pipe or block as x1 for normal and x3 for masterwork, while a craft has .5 for normal and x10 for masterwork. That way, a beginning fortress would be best off selling raw ingredients and simple commodities, while a more mature fortress with a more sophisticated industry would sell crafts and other finished goods)

[and don't get me started on the stack multiplier in roasts. 5 leaves x 5 leaves x 5 leaves should yield 5 roasts, not 125 :-) ]

There really is no need for danger rooms. If you get dwarfs training effectively for about half a year - a year, they should be legendary in fighting + weapon and decent in the defensive skills.

The main thing is to get dwarfs training early, preferably before the first caravan. They don't need (a lot of) weapons and armor yet, just give them a barracks, some training weapons, and off they go. Once the first migrant wave in the second year comes in, set a lot of them to military duty. I generally recruit any dwarf with a military skill into the military. Disable all their jobs, get them into the barracks, and watch them spar.

Don't forget to activate the squads: set military alert to "active/training" and activate all sqauds in that alert (via (m)ilitary -> (a)lerts)

While they are training, set up your metal industry and get them some armor. I like taking some ore from the mountainhome to make sure I can get basic militia up by second spring. Whatever you do, don't postpone setting up the military until after you get your forges running, they need time to train and they don't need a lot of fancy gear to get started sparring.


[A surefire way to get a good military quick is to follow the embark guideline I posted in an earlier thread: 4 military dwarves, 1 smith, 1 doctor/broker/manager, and 1 grower. Bring 4 picks, 10 coal, 10 cassetirite, and 10 copper/malachite. Set the military to be your early miners. They don't have skill but will quickly learn in the soil layer, and 4 miners go pretty quick. Strive to get food+booze production and decent quarters, set the smith to make equipment, and you can start training in early summer with the four dwarves. By winter they should be legendary. For the military dwarves, the best skills to give them are teacher and armor/shield/dodge. They will learn the rest quick enough. Teacher increases the rate of skill gain through training quite a bit (contrary to what some people claim). Initially the fort will be sluggish as you only have 3 mostly inexperienced dwarves to run it, but by the time the migrants come in you will be fine. ]

Quote from: Ruhn on November 22, 2013, 11:58:07 pm

The next release will come like a Kobold thief in the night.  One overseer will be ready, another will be asleep.  One Urist will be mining, the other will be attending a party at the fungiwood table.

I'm going to guess that approximately 0 people got this reference, other than me.

http://xkcd.com/138/ ?

I suspect the ratio of demonstrations vs. sparring depends much on how many notable combat skills are actually present in a squad: a seasoned teacher with "proficient" and better skill in armour, dodging, shield, biting, kicking etc. will spend months or years teaching rookies the basics of those skills instead of engaging in sparring. The students will have very rounded-out skills eventually, but also take inordinate time to reach high weapon skills (which determines most of their offensive capability, provides a lot of defensive capability through parries/counterattacks and makes them safe from the buggy training unhappiness) because they spar so rarely.

This calls for some science in "best way to train recruits in one year". Assuming that we have a legendary soldier+teacher (which you can easily have by second spring) I can see at least three strategies for dealing with new recruits:

1) baseline: just put them together and let them train for a year
2) leader+recruits: put each leader with a bunch of recruits and let them train for a year
3) bootcamp: have each new squad train for 3 (or 6) months under the teacher, and then rotate the teacher to a new squad and let the recruits spar for the rest of the year.

The hypothesis would be that 1) gives best weapon+fighter skills but bad armor+dodge, 2) gives a well-rounded soldier lacking in offense, and 3) gives an ideal combination of good offense and decent defense. Given the results I posted earlier I would even suspect that (3) might have at least comparable offense skills to (1), but wel can test that out.

If I can get startdwarfs to work I will use higher numbers. Increasing the fps cap should also make it less painful to wait for them to finish training.

Question: Is there a way to get df to put timestamps+jobs in a log file (e.g. "[123] X starts 'organize dodge demonstration' [124] Y starts 'wathc dodge demonstration' etc). I know I can get spar results from the game log, but even there I can't see who the dwarf is (they are all "axedwarfs") and there is no timestamp, so it is pretty useless here.

iirc, dfhack has a feature to make you start with more than the standard numer of dorfs

Thanks. I couldn't find it in the readme file on github though, searching for either embark, dwarfs, dwarves, 7 or seven. Do you happen to know the name of the script/plugin?