Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Topics - Rondol

Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 5

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / the Water Table

« on: November 06, 2007, 06:59:00 pm »

So I can't dig any deeper because of "damp stone". Channels immediately fill with water. I'm assuming this is an aquifer? Not quite what I was anticipating... Rather disappointing. Rather irritating as well. I'm glad I have an abundance of wood to use.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Task Completion

« on: November 06, 2007, 03:14:00 pm »

I have discovered, through careful observation, that when completing any task (aside from hauling, herbalism, and workshop tasks), dwarves will, if possible stand to the LEFT of the target of the job. I'm not sure what their preference is if they can't stand to the left, but I assume it is "above". In addition, and this part is pretty obvious, they like to start with the top-left-most job available, and complete them top-to-bottom, then left-to-right. At least, this part is true of channel digging.

This usually won't matter. But if you're planning to do some large-scale channeling, it might be useful to plan accordingly to avoid dwarves digging themselves into caveins. And if you are planning to do a controlled cave-in, make sure the last piece of floor is on the left side, and is accessible from the left side! Otherwise your dwarf will stand on the collapsing floor as he disconnects it.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Starting area pros/cons?

« on: November 04, 2007, 05:26:00 pm »

Where do you prefer? I've found that placing your fort in a desert near a river works quite well -- you have a source of water, plants grow quickly near the river, it's fairly flat so you don't have to worry about Z-levels on the surface too much, and there's sand to make farms in. Plus, there's a fair chance of finding bituminous coal under the sand (if you dig around enough) since the rock type is correct. Of course, you do face the problem of having no harvestable wood whatsoever, and will have to rely entirely on imports for it. Luckily you can get some BIG wood imports, and wood is cheap, and all three caravans are willing to bring it to you. Plus, if you get coal, you don't need the wood for metalworking, at least.

By comparison building your fortress in a mountain seems to be a quick route to a very dry, very hungry death. Mountains rarely seem to have any water, and since there's no sand either that means no farmland. I don't think it's possible to survive in the side of a mountain.

I've heard of people starting next to volcanos. How does that work out? I've been avoiding them mostly because of the climates they tend to be in in my worlds -- namely, saltwater, mountain, and/or aquifer.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Anthills

« on: November 04, 2007, 02:39:00 am »

Did you know they can be made on ice? I sure didn't. But sure enough... spotted one the other day on the frozen river.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Steam traps

« on: November 03, 2007, 10:12:00 pm »

I'm assuming, due to the changes in the interactions between lava and water, that these aren't as practical as they used to be. Out of curiosity, however, has anyone managed to make one that worked? It seems to me that the use of a pressure trap to drop a large quantity of water onto another large quantity of magma ought to do it, perhaps through a setup like this:

code:


Side viewXXXXXXXXXXXX
      .
XX----X---XX
X~~~~~~~~~~X
X==========X
************
XXXXXXXXXXXX

where X is solid stone, ~ is water, * is lava, . is a pressure plate linked to = which is a bridge, and the - are floor bars. Of course it would only work once, but it should create a nice big blast of steam. Of course if you wanted to go for some more amusement you could probably put the bridge/water ABOVE the passage and the lava (probably flowing somehow, if you can arrange that) directly below it. Then the invaders cook a little, then get drenched before being steamed. Add a sprig of faerie wings and sprinkle some troll sweat on, and you should have a fine meal!

(A reminder... unless I say otherwise nearly everything I ever say is pure conjecture, based on what I know of the games mechanics. I am far too poor of a player to actually enact any of this myself... I have yet to get machines working for me properly, and I never beat the last version... but hey! I can still theorize, right?)

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Cruel

« on: November 23, 2006, 05:16:00 pm »

quote:
fixed a problem that allowed the undead to have feelings

That's not very nice, Toady. Zombies were people too!

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Freaking immigration.

« on: November 06, 2006, 11:12:00 pm »

I was hoping I'd have relatively low immigration levels for the first year or so, so I'd have time to get set up before needing to go dig a drowning room to avoid overpopulation and the starvation it brings. Unfortunately... no. I havn't even hit my first winter yet (winter in a freezing clime ... should be fun) and I already have 17 dwarves. 17!! I don't even have FARMS yet! I was hoping I could survive off the food the caravan brings, but it of course didn't even bring a bag of chips, let alone something I can feed 17 dwarves for the winter with. 8 would have been a struggle.

Well, I geuss I'll have to use my farms-to-be (which I only JUST got finished building) to drown these fools... and hope I make it through the winter.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Your most complicated artifact?

« on: October 16, 2006, 01:10:00 am »

My legendary miner/detailer/mason just became secretive and claimed a craftsdwarf shop. I hoped I had enough of the right materials... it turned out I did, fortunately, but after watching her pick up 2 pieces of onyx, a piece of jet, some horse leather, 2 sets of turtle bones, AND some willow logs, I began wondering what exactly she was working on. The result was:

Narumoz Togalshoveth, Rawnessrampaged the Stormy Mysteries, an Onyx piccolo
This is an Onyx piccolo. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is decorated with Jet and encircled with bands of Onyx, turtle bone and Willow. On the item are images of flies in Onyx. On the item are images of flies in horse leather. On the item are images of wild strawberries in turtle bone.

So I was wondering... what sort of bizzare complicated 20-ingredient artifacts have you come up with?

(By the way, the dwarf (who is now ultra-mighty, unbelievably agile and unbelievably tough) happens to love onyx and hate flies. Why she decided to make flies on her piccolo, I'm not sure.)

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Use for artifacts?

« on: October 06, 2006, 05:32:00 am »

I don't know if this has been thought up already -- perhaps it has -- normally I would have done a quick search but I'm particularly lazy tonight and am multitasking. However. I'm aware that as it stands, the creator of an artifact will simply carry that artifact around for eternity and never use it. But if that dwarf were to die, say by 'drowning' on a 'farm', would his artifact become available for use?

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Liason difficulties

« on: November 01, 2007, 04:23:00 pm »

Has anyone else been having odd things happen with your outpost liason? My current fort just had him show up, and he'd been chasing my leader around for a month or so. He just won't stop his other business (of hauling mostly) to talk to him.

Similarly my broker didn't seem too interested in hanging out at the trade depot, so I had to have some random guy get over there so I could do a little trading. Seems like the dwarves put the administrative jobs pretty low on their priority list.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Corpse-in-a-cage

« on: November 13, 2007, 05:32:00 pm »

So a caravan just arrived, bearing two cages. Within the cages were dead animals. I guess they didn't survive the journey?

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Annoying dwarves

« on: September 29, 2006, 06:00:00 am »

I swear, these things must do stupid things specifically to piss me off.

So I was playing around with channels, and made a pond. Waited a while for my dwarves to fill it up, a process that took stupidly long due to dwarven idiocy... Basically they walk to the river (rather than a well -- Why do they insist on filling buckets from the river anyways? Makes watering wounded irritating) then walk to the middle of the pond, dump the water, and then dump the bucket and return to whatever else they were doing. Which leaves the next poor sap who wants to fill the pond to give me a couple error messages before someone decides to put the bucket away. Eventually this led to me making extra buckets. After a while I got annoyed with the whole pond thing, and tried to turn it back to a channel. This resulted in even MORE errors, because the bucket (I had used the others for wells) was sitting in the pond again. I would get 200+ identical error announces in a couple seconds. So I turned it back, let it be, and tried channeling it to some other water, to solve my frustration. Well, it worked, but the miner who did the work, my legendary miner, was almost as brilliant as the guys who couldn't find the bucket: rather than get OUT of the water after finishing his canal, he swam down the canal, into the pond, and attempted to cross the pond. In the process he drown square in the middle of the thing.

Seriously. Either canals should be dug from just outside, or dwarves should learn how to get out of the water. I've seen them do similar things before; I used canals to make the outside river harder to cross, and upon completion, the miner swam upriver back toward the fort, and drown.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / the Dwarven "Jesus"

« on: September 19, 2006, 01:33:00 pm »

First off hello everyone, I wandered over from the IVAN boards after hearing about the game a month or so ago over there... Yeah... in IVAN, dwarves are a thing to be feared for their gunpowder backpacks.

Anyways. I have a story to share. I don't remember all of it, it happened in mid August, so... But anyways. Here's what I've extracted of it from my memory and my chatlogs:

Somehow, one of my dwarves was injured, by an elephant I believe. He was lying in bed in the upper left corner of my (very small) fort. I had struck and was mining/processing silver, and had decided to put up some marble doors just for the sake of using the marble. So my mason goes out, grabs a hunk of marble, and starts heading for my mason's workshop, when suddenly he was struck with a strange mood. I checked him out... turns out he was possessed. When I unpaused, he walked accross my finished goods stockpile, dropping several high quality silver trinkets.

How? I don't know. He was carrying marble. This got me thinking, "Hey, he's like Jesus! Except instead of water-to-wine, it's marble-to-silver." I let him go again, and he makes a beeline for my wounded dwarf. Upon arrival he simply stood over the bed with his marble stone. I think he managed to heal the dwarf, in fact, because one of his injuries had lessened while I checked. But this made a creepy image -- imagine, if you will, a dwarf with a smashed-to-crap leg, lying abed, with another dwarf with firey possesed-looking eyes towering over him. This went on for quite some time as I continued my work in other portions of the fortress.

The story ends when the possessed dwarf goes insane and coats the room in dwarf blood, then goes in the hall outside, knocks a couple other people around, and then loses a wrestling match to a hastily-conscripted recruit.

This fortress, along with most of my other ones, was abandoned when everone began to starve and go slowly insane.

DF Gameplay Questions / Trade roads

« on: November 04, 2007, 06:24:00 pm »

Does it matter where you have these leave the map? Before the Humans arrived I built a 3-wide road all the way out to the left edge of the map. The human wagons came in from the upper right, much to my irritation. That road took a LOT of stone blocks, and to have the humans completely ignore it...

DF Gameplay Questions / Bodyguards

« on: January 04, 2008, 03:12:00 pm »

quote:
# added entity tags to control whether bodyguards are present
# made bodyguard types depend on entity

So wait... does that mean that when the human king comes to siege me, he might have tamed trolls as bodyguards? Because that would be damned cool.