Bay 12 Games Forum

On the one hand I can kind of see where you're coming from. On the other I'd like to see more creatures that make the DF world distinct. I mean, where else can you find fluffy wamblers, fire snakes, and moghoppers? Or beak dogs, for that matter.

The horns/antlers issue I believe is because those have been bugged up til now, and IIRC fixing that flashed by in the dev log; so we can hope for antler and horn and ivory(another reason to hunt elephants instead of just avoiding them!).

My guards need something better to do than make my nobles happy with hugs and justice.

Sigged.

On topic: I concur that this is a military function and would be well assigned to military dwarves. It could be within the purview of the Captain of the Guard... but having the fortress guard do it would be an excellent idea too.

But then, the FG will be a squad under the CotG in the upcoming version. So maybe just having any squad assigned to the area of a checkpoint, handle the lever as appropriate, would work.

I absolutely *love* the notion that wagons won't instantly bypass a site because the depot is momentarily inaccessible. They might have a fairly short tolerance before they turn around and leave, if they can't find a path at all, but they should at least check in. Even if I then open the gate myself.

Also, having wagons that don't have a clear path instead follow a road until it comes to a halt(or rather, a few squares short of it, to be sure the guards don't wander under a bridge) would be a good way to handle that part. Having wagons follow a road in general would be very welcome, and would make it feel a little less tedious to build them, knowing that they do more than just keep trees from growing.

I will note, first, that I tried searching for a similar suggestion, and none of the threads I looked in had something like this. If I missed one, sorry.

The liaison is spammy and worthless and it should be (in a free market economy) simple to say how much you will pay for an item.

There is no haggling, either the other side want's to send goods at the price you set, or they don't.   Simple as that.

Doing business without haggling is a recent innovation. Trade is subject to two things: how badly the recipient wants it, and how hard it was for the caravan to get it(demand and supply, respectively). In modern times prices are set, but historically that wasn't always so.

But even if it were, the trade liaison's meeting is not just a simple sales transaction. You have goods you want, and you want to get a low price for them while still making sure you get enough. The merchants have a similar agenda of their own. Both of you are trying to get the lowest prices for the things you buy, and the highest for the things you sell; and the agreement you reach sets prices for the whole year.

So maybe the spam can be toned down, but the liaison being there makes perfect sense. And trade agreements will be even more significant if, say in the caravan arc, more than one merchant from a civ starts coming per year(without triggering multiple liaisons).

We don't need to be interrupted 4 times and adjust the sliders every time for the liaison when the poster is right, we could easily send a paper stating what we will pay for an item with the caravan.  And they can send one with the caravan stating what they will pay for certain items.

I think the only time the liaison screen should come up is if we DON'T have those sliders set in a sub menu (As kinda a noobie protection) and it should tell us that we should adjust them because it strengthens bonds or some such.

Getting rid of the sliders in the frequent meetings with liaisons is exactly the point, though I still say that from the perspective of your dwarves, they ARE conducting negotiations. If your broker(or leader, for dwarves) is better at getting his/her way, you'll get a deal that's better for you - but mercantile between civilizations is rightly a matter of negotiation. Just because the actual haggling is done by the dwarves without being explicitly depicted(especially with non-liaison civs) doesn't mean it isn't there - and it belongs there.

But yes, a simple "The meeting with the liason has started - you may now make requests to the liason by accessing the Trade Depot" message would be vastly superior to the spammy "black screen, five seconds wait, sliders, black screen, five seconds, sliders" system we have now.

Well, not exactly what I have in mind, though it raises an important point. I'd intended that you could access the trade preferences through {n}obles -> {s}ettings on your broker at any time. It is worth advising the player, when negotiations begin, that it's the last chance to do so before the contract is set for the year - in the form of a message in the normal scroll, most likely. Though if the player has never touched that screen, an initial greeting message(like the one that exists now, but with the added advice to go into the {n}obles screen to change these settings, or possibly an option to go directly to the settings screen from there) followed by the usual delay would be good; and after this delay, you are presented with the opportunity to inspect both the import and export agreements, and there see any prices which are not standard.

Doing them both consecutively, rather than with the pause that exists now, would make the liaison that much less troubling.

Even if the meeting itself winds up taking just as long, removing the player interruptions(and the bug that lets them progress while, say, plotting an exploratory mining shaft or the new expansion of your living quarters) would make the process less aggravating.

Oh - and maybe increase the meeting priority at the same time(but still let "Trade at depot" trump it).

The biggest problem with the goblins is not so much the quality of their wares as in the material. You alluded to it in your post.

If goblins stop having access to giant cave spider silk and the like(except for maybe local leaders and such), this will be made much less unbalanced.

In general, civs use materials at random when it really ought to be weighted by value. Such weighting would, I think, be fairly easy and straightforward to implement, and would make it far less annoying to buy, say, bags of seed, flour, or dye.

Hah I like the completely unnecessary demonic leader part.   Especially considering that their demonic leader generally dies instantly from the heat when he spawns in that kind of HFS.

In that case:

I don't think approaching foods from the idea of "what can they be cooked into?" is a good one.

Play CivForge or anything else that expands on item_food and you'll see why.

Instead, it should consider "How can this ingredient be prepared?" Milled seeds are good. So are whole ones or crumbled ones(rock nuts instead of walnuts?). In fact, letting the cook do the grinding, rather than having EVERY seed be millable, would be good; mass milling reserved for things that are ONLY used that way, never as whole seed.

And then, the item_food definition could specify what cooking methods/ingredients are allowed. Biscuits wouldn't have a sauce(but a more-complicated variant might). Roasts wouldn't use more than a unit of flour(for gravy etc), whereas biscuits might ALWAYS require flour and be primarily made from it. And so on. With enough possibilities, the procedural definition could still result in some interesting and/or impractical outcomes, but less so than biscuits made entirely of minced booze.

Edit: Forgot to fit this into the original thread. Anyway, this notion would involve a great many more COOKABLE_* tokens, which then are parsed by the individual recipes for the particular food the cook has decided on. COOKABLE_SEED_GARNISH, for instance, could allow seeds for a particular plant to be used as a whole or milled seasoning; COOKABLE_NUT might imply the same but also suggest that the seed has more "meat" and could thus be crumbled, rather than only ground or whole; etc.

There's nothing to keep a specific society from being intolerant of homosexual relationships, though. It could be an ethic.

That said, it'd be more sensible once there's more than one relationship per dwarf. The upper nobility(i.e. baron and upward) would be under immense pressure to carry on the lineage; they would have an official consort who is to provide them with babies even if they have a same-sex lover that's their "primary"(the one they actually want to talk to when upset, say).

But leaving all that aside - seconding the requests for A) screenshots and B) game version.