Bay 12 Games Forum

Dear Urist MacMayor,

at first I was sceptical when you usurped the post of our modest, hard working long-time mayor with some smiles and handshakes.
I expected the worst from your fancies, but you suprised me with your affection to mechanisms, ordering them en masse and forbiding any export of them.
I honored your wishes and put these mechanisms to use in our at this time not so long cagetrap defenses. Mere days after the last one of these were put in place, an unforseen goblin ambush occured.
Their numbers matched the numbers of our cagetraps exactly.
If it weren't for your farsighted order of mechanism the whole fortress might have fallen to these invaders.
I salute you,wise mayor, and i'l order your private chamber to be stuffed full of mechanisms in all sort of devices.

Sincerly,
your Overseer

Thanks for your elaborations!
If i ever come to implement my barrage of fiery death against goblin intruders, i'll nickname the first dwarf to pull the lever after you!
My initial plan was to build a multilevel tower with a minecart on a retracting bridge on each level, feeding either a ramp or a roller. But with the minecart-stacking behaviour described by you, there might be a much simpler solution.

I'm a computational lingustics/computer science student with special focus on AI and statistical natural language processing.
For me, dwarf fortress incorporates nearly all of my disciplines. If I had not crippled my academic career for wife and children, I would ask toady for the permission to use DF as an example for nearly all the lectures I might have given.
-morphology: grammatical correct generation of Fortress and Group names
-syntax: Generation of artifact descriptions and historical events.
-AI: Pathfinding, agent theory(basic dwarf AI( and distributed AI (distribution of jobs und building orders)
-statistical foundations: hidden markov models explained by the behaviour of dwarven psychology (with happiness as hidden states and tantrum/party probabilities as emissions)

If DF was open source, i think it might as well be the ultimate sandbox for computational linguists and CS guys specialized on AI. I'm certain there would be dwarfen poetry slams and context-sensitive conversations by now...and dwarfen soccer games, of course.

To me, this idea begins to call for a neural network or markov model of relationships:

For every dwarf A assign relationship scores from 1.0 (loved) to -1.0 (mortal enemy) for every dwarf B(B|B != A).
Initiate with 0 for all relationships at the beginning, but assign rand(0.8-1.0) for close family (parent,children,spouse) and rand(0.5-0. for more distant family or friends.
If two dwarves (A and B) interact with each other, generate a agreement score between -1 and 1, based on base probability given by the nature of the interaction(say -0.1-0.1 random social interaction,-0.3-0.3 for serious interactions like fighting,yelling,consoling, making out, and -0.7-0.7 for extreme emotional matters like witnessing murder or cheese desecration,life-saving or mating) for number than multiplied by factors like nobility (class differences and how they are handled),labor,social skills and personality traits.
This agreement score would then added to the relationship score for the two dwarfes...and recursivly to all their friends and family,weighted by their relationship-scores and social skills like conversationalist,persuader and liar to simulate the spread of gossip and prejudice.
A statistical modellers wet dream! But i'm afraid that even with a very shallow recursion depth, this would eat up a lot of computing power. But social fluid mechanics might generate really epic in-game stories...and maybe render the game unplayable.

I searched the arcs and existing threads thorougly for "jusice","tantrum" and "psychology" and failed to find a thread that contains the same idea. Please have mercy on me if i overlooked something.

As it is, dwarfs seem to dish out their anger randomly while tantrumming. If dwarf A is angry about dwarf B killing dwarf C, he might kill dwarf D which was just passing by.
Would it be possible to implement a system of directed tantrums, that make dwarfs go after the (alleged) cause?
In the same example, dwarf A would specificially go after dwarf B, gaining much more happiness for beating him than he would gain from a random anger outlet.
Dwarf-perceptible causes could than be all living beings, so that military dwarfes would have a chance to calm their anger by slaughtering their enemies before going after their squad or civilians.
It might also be fun to have them recognize indirect causes, strangling the doctor for the passing of a loved one in hospital, or blaming the sheriff for a friend starving in prison. (Or even blaming the mechanic for a drawbridge-accident)

The concept could be linked to the justice system, so that the friend or family of a crime victim would go for the (alleged/framed) culprit if they felt his trial was to slow or his sentence to light. Or the familiy of said culprit would storm the jail to free him if they felt that he wasn't guilty or his sentence was to harsh. This behaviour might trigger a PART_OF_ANGRY_MOB tag, that implies the BUILDING_DESTROYER tag, allowing them to breaking down prison/guard captains office door.

There could be probabilities involved in all stages of this, allowing the misperception of the cause and the variation of the satisfaction of self-justice, so that punishing the "right one" might not quench the thirst for blood of the raging victim, still allowing classic tantrum spirals.

Again, sorry if this came up numerous times and i somehow failed to find it.

I'm still quite new to DF, so I'm not sure if this would work:
Let him stand on a retractable drawbridge with a locked (by the means of a door or drawbridge) room underneath?  Add a cagetrap (or several, if the lower room is larger than 1x1) to it for easy necromancer-recyclabilty.

I just lost a glorious fort to a rutherer: After the last goblin siege my animal stockpile contained about 15 cave crawlers, 10 Trolls, 20+ goblins...and a male and a female rutherer. I never encountered these before so i checked the wiki...
Wow, they are prime breeding stock? It must be my lucky day! So I trained them thoroughly, assigned them to a locked room...and watched them tearing my legendary miner apart who just came back from his break and felt like taking them for walkies.
So i sent my military after him, 6 steel-clad,danger room trained veterans wielding silver warhammers.
They make short work out of the rogue rutherer. I sent them into the animal training room to discover the remains of my miner so that he could be buried before going bad...
Well, it turned out my legendary miner was the wife of my militia commander, and after a glance of her dismembered corpse he decided to go on a rampage. He bashed the brains of his squad in without more than some bruises in return.
My marksdwarves burst in and nail his feet to the ground until they ran out of ammunition...than the proceeded to punish him for his crimes by bashing the butts of their iron crossbows into his helmet...until they die of thirst while the tantrum spiral already begins to flare...
The fate of my fortress was sealed by some curious children, which tried to catch a glimpse on the pincusion-footed, still going militia commander...only have the body parts of their parents thrown at them.
The Population went from 100 to 30(most of them insane) in a month after that.