Bay 12 Games Forum

breaking a siege/killing an uninvited guest should generate about +200 happy thoughts for all dwarves.

You ought to be able to dump barrels of alcohol into a reservoir (if you have enough of it that is) and make a dwarven wine lake. complete with boozefalls and alcohol fountains!
*edit* although you'd have to make sure your dwarves are all swimmers or they'd all jump in and drown in 7/7 depth goodness!

[ December 15, 2007: Message edited by: puffs ]

Just allow holes to be dug with anything (at a penalty of course). You think a dwarf won't try to use a spear to dig a hole if he doesn't have a pick?

You don't like finding some small creatures?

I could see an alchemical explosive.

Ok, now that the pithy one-liner reply is over, I'd like to delve a little deeper and bring up some of my thoughts about magic.

If we are using the term "magic" loosely, as something that can't be explained by normal occurence or is something incredibly rare or counterintuitive and defies common sense, then we can escape the traditional wizard/sorcerer fireball-lightning-throwing machines.

The problem with this approach is that, when it boils down to it, true magic defies simulation. And since DF is taking the "simulate everything as much as possible" approach, magic is very hard to implement in a flexible manner. In fact, I'd argue that it's impossible to simulate magic in a game. You can simulate wizards, but at some point you need to define their abilities. These abilities will have to come from a set table or matrix, simply because there is no way for the game to create "new magic"/unexpected behavior on the fly. The amount of possible interactions is limited by the number of attributes and data you can manipulate.

That being said, there's a lot of room for creative magic. For example, you could hire a professional miner to dig out a cavern to check for certain ore, or you could hire a traveling rock-diviner to map the cavern for you without touching a single stone(with certain inacurracies due to the limits of dwarven communication, of course). A farmer tantruming because his wife died to wild animals? A priest will help him contact her soul and give him peace of mind (as well as blame her for all his troubles to her face). Want light in your mountain hall without having to leave regularly spaced piles of your !!XclothingX!!? Your neighboring civ has a pyromancer who makes ever-lit torches, only f1123 each! That possessed dwarf who made an artifact warhammer? Rumor has it that anyone who wields it develops a strange attraction to purring maggots after a while.

Often, the presentation of magic can make-or-break its perception. Magic should be unexpected, uncommon, and have effects that are unusual. Otherwise, it becomse a stale same-old and not very magical. The effects can range from useful to annoying, amusing to disastrous, but any magical abilities that controllable dwarves possess should be freak occurences (possessions/moods).

From there, you can designate what individuals and or environments possess magical properties or abilities. Maybe an enchanted forest biome has certain areas that make any dwarf entering it cancel his task: caught in an illusion with his dead father and the giant plump helmet that killed him, etc.
You can specify under what conditions they can use it - perhaps a traveling sorcerer wants money, items, or food... or in fact he just wants to see a guy who likes cats for their aloofness. Maybe there's a chasm which bridges itself for dwarves who handle stress well. Or a spirit that makes the river turn into a violent whirlpool every spring until you sacrifice a mule to it.

In any case, the basic thrust of this post is that however creative you decide to make magic, the most important way to set it apart from normal dwarf interactions is to make it non-micro-able.

What do you think breaktime is for?

See thread title. Since restricting traffic doesn't do actually forbid dwarves from stepping on a tile, this would be a nice option to have.

Another idea would be to have auto-forbid/reclaim zones.