It's good to see the deluge in the first thread hasn't discouraged you!
- Channeling, as mentioned earlier, takes quite a bit to understand. I think my second fortress was more or less dedicated to get that to work as the first one repeatedly had dorfs dying to cave-ins when trying to channel a hilltop into a mesa. I don't know how to communicate how ramp digging works and what makes ramps passable (as well as their magic ability to shift directions they ramp up to suit what's above) in a useful pedagogic manner, though.
- Freezing, also mentioned. I don't embark in areas that freeze/thaws because the instakills of the phase changes. While laborious path restrictions and a liberal application of bridges can usually keep your dorfs off the death traps, visitors, traders, and invaders foul up the map with their drowned bodies (and the stress resulting from this). I don't know how to solve this issue in an efficient manner either.
- Much of the stuff in the first thread, of course.
- I'm rather pessimistic when it comes to the prospects of a good manual to help, as the current norm is to not provide any manual at all with games, and when they are available, people don't seem to read them (although people that expect everything to be intuitive will never have a chance to learn DF: they are simply way outside of a reasonable target audience).
I believe the wiki's starting guide to be a decent way to get started, but fostering a habit to look up things on the wiki may well be the most effective way to get new players to learn how to learn how things work.
- I'd say sieges have a lot of things causing issues for new players:
- Suddenly you find that you can't order squads to attack in a coherent manner (didn't really matter when chasing wildlife around, but would apply when a were shows up), but you will have to work around it by first gathering the squad behind a corner before you can send them at the enemy or they'll be hacked to pieces one at a time as they arrive. Still, there's no way to get them to disengage or otherwise control them when released as rabid dogs. There are ways to divide and conquer, but you'd have to learn those, which would require you to have reached a middling level of DF competence.
- X-bow dorfs performing suicide single charges when out of ammo rather than reloading.
- X-bow dorfs deserting from kill orders (of vengefulness murdering keas) to go training because they would have to move two tiles to get into range of flying targets (or other targets they can't path to).
- I'd expect every beginner to be caught by the "must have underwear" suicide runs by civilians onto the battlefield when a gobbo is cut down. After having this happening a few times they may learn about burrows and replace suicidal ventures with hauling cancellation spam (i.e. the issue that hauling items from outside of burrows results in spam rather than some kind of temporary suppression of each object rejected for hauling by burrow restrictions, at least for civilian alerts).
- Instant dorf breaking from the badly needed thrill of killing an enemy when the resultant corpse is seen. Extremely offputting, and covered int the first thread.
- Corpse induced hauler insanity (covered).
- Enormous cleanup task taking forever (covered).
- Kids picking up new underwear (possibly after the civ alert is lifted, if the player has understood how to use those) then deciding that the corpse strewn battlefield is the perfect place for playing (optionally getting a toy to play with before returning). Can be worked around with dedicated kid burrows they're removed from when maturing, but which newbie would realize that's an option?
- A more advanced issue is that walls can be climbed. I'd expect most newbies to think walls would keep enemies out, and that moats are great, rather than places for dorfs and enemies alike to drown after dodging and being a pain to retrieve.
- Dodging through walls tends to come as a nasty surprise, as it can more or less invalidate a fortress design (sparring with a moat or a drop on the other side of the training hall becomes a real, incomprehensible issue ["I keep finding my dorfs dead in the moat" is not an uncommon topic on the forum]).
- Getting hit by infiltrators is a nasty surprise, i.e. huge gangs of military visitors (I've had gangs exceeding the visitor cap in 0.40.12) visiting your early fortress in search of an artifact, one of them leaves and then sneaks back in in an attempt to steal it, and as soon as the one sneaking back in is engaged (by attacking or getting engaged by defenders while deciding to flee) the rest of the gang in the tavern goes hiddenly hostile (some attack, some run around in panic, some continue to socialize, all of them scare civilians, and none of them are displayed as hostile, so they're a pain to hunt down even if you have a militia to hunt them down with). For some reason, infiltrator gang members gradually turn into normal merc and monster slayer visitor over repeat visits if they didn't spring any surprise (the vast majority of the gangs don't cause trouble).
- Understanding that surface farming isn't season dependent while underground farming is is rather counter intuitive, although not a serious problem. However, I'd probably remove season restrictions on underground crops until agriculture is overhauled to remove a needless complication, and I think it's a simple raw change to 6 crops.
That's obviously not a complete list, but what I could think of while writing this post.
@mikekchar: I don't think your suggestion is made on the correct assumptions. I believe dorfs normally follow a pre calculated path until they discover an obstacle, then recalculate a path to the other side of the obstacle (sometimes including climbing even if there's a single tile longer walking path available if the climbing path matches the original one) to then continue on their way (possibly backtracking along the amendment path [it can get really silly when you have two single tile wide corridors between locations and dorfs meet, bump into another, both turn around, meet in the other corridor, turn around...]). I'd expect "major" path changers (such as opening/closing a drawbridge) to instead triggers reexamination of paths to targets than lie on the other side of the obstacle, rather than every path being reevaluated at every step.
When locking doors, I typically see the enemy locked out path all the way up to the door (well, not all the way in the case of building destroyers: they start to attack the door, implying they're not moving into the capture distance of it [the bug that causes building destroyers that get adjacent to an eligible target to fail to move away one step to reach the destruction distance]).
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Topic: *We need your help to save the noobs!* (Read 98420 times)