I realize that the current abstracted game speed has reasons behind it, but I think a real time game speed can add a lot to the game, and with imagination, all the problems with it can be worked out.
Big problem one is that you don't want to wait three real months for three months to pass in the game. You need to be able to tell the game to skip forward in time. You need the game to stop skipping forward in time if something important happens, like all the jobs you assigned (or whichever specific jobs you want to be notified about) are done, or the fortress is attacked. The game also can't keep track of every little movement of every entity while skipping for obvious reasons; you need to abstract that, and when the desired time is reached, entities should be placed on the map based on what they should be doing. I feel that this type of abstraction is preferable to the kind currently in place, because with my system, you actually can observe the minutiae being abstracted when you want to, and skip past it when you don't. I'm sure people can come up with other problems, but hopefully they will try to think of solutions to those problems rather than just saying the whole thing can't be done.
BENEFITS:
-Schedule. Your dwarves can actually have some kind of schedule rather than sleeping, eating, going on break whenever they feel like it. Most dwarves (excepting night watch military, for instance) would sleep during approximately the same time period, dwarves would go to the meeting hall in groups for lunch, etc.
-Day and night in dwarf mode. Right now it's perpetual daytime, and we can never have anything fun that can come from the cycle. We don't have to lock down the fortress at night to keep the night creatures at bay. Werecreatures are pretty much a joke because they wander onto the map transformed, but then the lunar cycle is soon over and they wander away again. This would also make the fire and lighting arc add to the fun of dwarf mode.
-Skip the boring stuff. Not only would you be able to watch your dwarves go about their lives in a much more natural way, a lot of the downtime associated with running the fortress would be eliminated. Assign a bunch of work (would help if work assignments were more flexible, such as designating veins which I think we're already getting at some point), then just skip forward until the important stuff is done. Automate micromanagement that isn't fun, which is suggested often anyway.
-Dwarves less stupid. The current form of the game is always inflicting on us inconsequential roadblocks to our progress, like "Urist McCarpenter cancels Make bed; needs log," even though Urist McLumberjack is outside chopping wood right then. Because no specific log is available right that second, all progress on the work you've assigned, as manager of the fort, grinds to a halt. With my system, you'd designate trees to be chopped and wood items to be made, and while skipping forward in time, those items would get made even if wood production wasn't keeping up. Maybe the game would tell you that the work was experiencing delays. Maybe you'd set the game to pause if work was experiencing delays so you could assign more dwarves to gathering materials. I think this would be a much more fun and realistic way of managing the fort.
I'm aware that this would be a fairly radical change. I do think that the game, after addressing all the problems that crop up, would be much better for it. Before posting, if you think of a problem that this would introduce, please try to think of a way to solve that problem, instead of just saying, "This would cause so-and-so problem, therefore the entire idea is bad."
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Topic: Dwarf Mode Real Time Game Speed w/ Skipping Forward in Time (Read 13715 times)