Holy carp, why do you exaggerate? It takes my dwarves less than a day to cross the fortress. At that rate...assume 1.5 days per map tile to be nice to Silver...that's 24 per region tile...crossing a Pocket world would take only maybe a single year, and that's if you're far away and taking a liberal estimate of time. If you settled the opposite side of a big world, it might take a decade or two to get a caravan to you, but what are you expecting, and how long do you think it would have taken a bunch of heavily-laden wagons to travel from somewhere in Africa to China in the 1300s?
I sent a squad of crossbows from the upper left to the bottom right on a 2*3 fortress map. It took three days. That's fine if you're fighting isolated skirmishes that nicely stand in line to be slaughtered, but if we want some coordination with the outside world (siege relief etc.) that just won't do.
(In addition, that's 56 squares per day. A medium world map (1/8 of a planet, judging by the climates) has 48*16*129=ca. 99000 tiles which means 1767 days are needed to walk the distance: 4,9 years of uninterrupted marching without resupplying, sleeping, battles, diplomacy, avoiding obstacles etc. The crusades took less time to march about the same distance, while doing conquests, diplomacy, trade, backstabbing, conquests, setting up a local governance, crowning kings, and they were still home sooner than the dwarves even would have arrived.)
Enemy recognition is a rather specific requirement, and one that will have to be adressed sooner or later anyway.
Wild animals are enemies. Wild animals are everywhere. Why does it need to be addressed, if we're not even sure if this idea should be added at all?
Because dwarves shouldn't panick if they see a wild rabbit. Toady's adding non-lethal combat intentions, so even most animals would try to scare their enemies away first anyway, and that can be handled in economic mode.
So, now I need to wait until the messenger reaches my mayor to get back to fast-time and get some stuff done? Or do you mean actual military, and fail to realize the number of challenges and playstyles that do without for whatever reason?
Anyone with official capacity, as the intended design choice is to have the player issue their commands as a kind of muse of dwarves with actual official functions. It would take a dozen seconds, since all the game has to do is to calculate the path and show the messenger running it down. Nice announcement of an important message. The importance of messages is configurable, we already have that.
"This guy's not important, I can ignore him." This is a completely arbitrary thing. Sorry, but just because the player says it's not important doesn't mean it's not. Soon you'll need to get back to the fast-mode combat problem that your idea has.
If the player says so, it is. Or should they ask your advice first?
And what do you mean by "you can only wring so much efficiency out of them?" If dwarves suck so much at handling time-sensitive issues that you want Toady to spend years rewriting the basic engine, then obviously it can be improved. Are dwarves as efficient as they can be or is there a reason for your idea
You can only wring so much efficiency out of the dwarves, because they only walk appr. 55 squares a day. You can't make them haul an item 80 squares in one day with that constraint, no matter how efficient you make their decisions. "Make dwarves more efficient" is just too vague to be a useful solution for anything, it comes close to the "Improve the game in every possible way" suggestion in the eternal suggestion list.
Hm...so you're saying that forcing the player to play 72 times slower isn't anything? Okay, clearly we aren't thinking the same things here. I'm saying that playing that slow would suck, because presumably it would take 72 times as much real-world time to do the same stuff in dwarf-time. It might be neat to go to slow-mode sometimes to watch the dwarves run about, but usually I'd rather have a fortress that's getting stuff done. Therefore, random points of slow-mode (when I'm likely watching something other than dwarven life) would be BAD, in my book.
It's no more forcing something than we're "forced" now to use the q key to make changes to workshop orders or we're "forced" to feed the dwarves. It would occur only at crisis moments, and I'm very sure you're looking at the game then (the game already pauses when caravans arrive, enemies arrive etc...). You'd resolve the crisis, and then normal fortress life can go on. It would probably cost less real time than now, because time-sensitive issues would be concentrated rather than mingled with normal economic issues. Right now the game "forces" me to reissue orders that get canceled due to a temporary resource shortage, while combat is going on. As now constantly switching views between your production place and the combat, that's forcing the player.
Disagree, there's no button to be pressed and there are no efficiency differences between modes.
Yea, yes, so you say. Everything has to be PERFECT for there to be no efficiency difference--and if there isn't, then dwarves can handle every-second-counts situations as well in fast-mode as in slow. And how is there no button? You only go to slow-mode when the game tells you to, in those time-vital situations? Then why the *&$% do we need to include a slow-mode at all?[quote/]I say it so, because it is. I merely make some changes in assigned action allowances, productivity per calendar day stays the same (see OP). The reason switching to crisis mode happens is because you can't abstract combat as well as economic actions, but there is still a need to stay on the same time scale as the outside world, if we want to interact with it. Which actions are candidates for crisis modes is open for discussion.
I have pointed out time and time again that it does not take a freakin' week to walk down the hall in Fortress Mode. I have crunched the numbers with some estimates that were VERY generous to your cause, and there is anyways no reason that the merchants couldn't run at one abstracted rate more appropriate for their relevance to gameplay and to realism while the fortress runs at a different abstracted rate that optimizes gameplay enjoyability. Some sacrifices must be made.I consider an occasional slow motion scene a more acceptable break from reality than living in a kind of time bubble isolated from the outside world, IMHO.
>And I think it would be really silly to introduce such a break in continuity of movement... Combat would seem to me as if everyone except for the combatants are statues.
Pretty much, so their actions stay congruent with the calendar, their productivity remains the same the whole year, while the dwarves that need it get their fast action. They become combatants too when threatened and flee at fast speed.
Wow, this is really...I'd come up with a rebuttal, but there's a perfectly good one in the post you're replying to.
I prefer a slow motion scene from time to time above living in a time bubble that runs on a different time than the outside world.
>when combat is occurring, (everything is) involved in combat in some way, shape, or form.
Most dwarves are inside a fortress, fighting usually happens at the fringes.
This isn't a bland strategy game, where no goblins can enter the fortress until they have killed all of your militia. It only takes a single goblin running inside to ruin your idea of "Civilians will never enter combat."
In that case those civilians join crisis mode and will be able to run away. What's the problem?
> What if such a stray arrow (or stray dwarf being hurled by a colossus) hit one of those non-combatants that is standing absolutely still
That civilian will most likely already be alarmed, since fighting happens nearby. In the rare situation that he's not, he'll become alarmed by being hit and will flee to safety if he can or cry for help.
And the fact that he is, relative to the combatants, a statue until such point as they scare him doesn't faze you a bit?
A carpenter in his workshop, focused on his work, is a sitting duck for a sneaking soldier.
>Everyone would obey the same rules regardless of game speed or what is happening / My suggestion would require fundamental changes in code for only one thing
On the contrary I'd say, you specifically mention different speeds, hunger rates, ways of moving about and production rates for both rates. Essentially, making an entire new game mode. Whereas I would only change the amount of ticks in a calendar day, and not even for all dwarves.
Different between modes, identical between parts of the fortress.
The only thing I would change is allocated actions for some activities. He would change all kinds of parameters between modes and mess somewhat with pathfinding too.
Taking reservations about in into account, I'd say that crisis mode should apply to any dwarf that's executing a military or diplomatic action.
Oh Armok, that's bad...it's not like the militia is ever activated except to deal with sieges, or that diplomacy is ever involved with anything but the occasional messenger from a nearby town...
If you want to do something with your soldiers, you'd like them to do it fast, so I don't see the problem. Patrolling and training can still be handled as economic actions. We already have a system to indicate message importance.
Panicked dwarves can't execute normal jobs and drop the stuff they're hauling... even disregarding that, every speed increase of some dwarves would be more than offset by the slower speed (per hour played) of the rest.
You're assuming an awful lot of perfection on the speed synchronization for someone who thinks we need to screw with the base of the game for dwarves to handle time-critical matters...
It's just mechanical. Non-crisis mode dwarves get much less actions, so they do less. No synchronization exceptions needed.
For the arena we'll probably want to indicate that all combat in a certain zone (or let's use a burrow) is not dangerous. We'll need something like that to have a functioning arena anyway, so that we can actually have spectators that aren't trying to run away.
Frankly, aside from this idea requiring fast-mode combat which kinda makes slow-mode significantly less justified to implement, I'd probably just designate the whole map as said burrow/zone, just so I didn't get a 72x slowdown in realworld speed whenever a badger got angry at a dwarf, or a dwarf fell off a ledge (it happens more than you'd think!), or the CoTG beats a criminal, or c baby bird lashes out at its broodmates, or a tantrumer punches a dwarf, and always lasting until the game decided the combat was over.
All these are examples of non-lethal combat as Toady has implemented it recently, which are likely candidates for economic mode, not crisis mode.
"What complicated checks?" What do you think slows down late-game FPS so much, goblin sappers getting into your motherboard? Or if you and ebbor mean the complicated checks to decide "It's time to enter...the Slow-Mode zone!", then you might have a point, EXCEPT that you'd have to check a few dozen conditions (probably) for every dwarf. And probably every other firendly unit on the map, if not every moving unit on the map plus sponges and airdrowning whales and fish.
Actions that are eligible for crisis mode would flag the dwarves as part of their activation. So, it's just checking the flags.
So, goblins shooting at dwarves or vise versa counts as "Crisis-time!", but dwarves shooting at wildlife doesn't count? See where FallingWhale has a point about your idea? Shooting a crossbow is shooting a crossbow, whether it's to feed your family, protect your fortress, or release your stress over miasma and dead spouses.
No. Eg. A dwarf getting his punishment by the hammerer or a dwarf getting hit by a goblin hammerer are two different things.
Soldiers training can be considered an economic activity, since there's about as much risk involved as with common economic tasks. Any live training would be rare enough to be done as real combat.
The above issues multiplied, PLUS the fact that live training isn't as rare as you'd think. Many of us currently use it aftr every siege, to empty cages and train recruits, and even if that's not always true there will always be people like that. Respect those who play differently than you!
They still can, it'll just happen in crisis mode or in a zone marked as non-alarming.
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Topic: Crisis mode - making time for resolving tight situations (Read 824 times)