Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[FantasticDorf]

Keeping population is part of the game.

A part of the game that sorely needs to be improved. In any event, casual mass slaughter as a means of population control isn't meant to be part of the game. At least not without proper consequences that are yet to be implemented.

Given that you can lose by simply having all your dwarves die of old age without new migrants, then i agree as a not-new player this would be frustrating for new players who think that their fortress is on a limited time tenure. Old and new player issue alike.

[snip]
+1 to the marksdwarf complaints. Those guys are a gigantic pain. A detail that I didn't see mentioned in the first 100-odd replies is that one can't use station orders to move them to the correct side of the wiki-standard 5x5 archery tower; doing so requires the much larger 9x9 version of the tower. The wiki only mentions that version in the context of climbers, which I haven't found to be an issue, in my admittedly limited and scattered experience.[snip]
As I think someone mentioned earlier in the thread, uniforms should default to replacing clothing. "Why won't my militia wear their gauntlets and boots?" is a pretty common question from new players (including myself).

Here here, i agree with the sentiment and i've learnt through due of bitter experience some optimal methods to train but not to apply them safely still. I still have never constructively found a reason to set up a patrol and had any other kind of schedule set activity (like guard) go pear shaped or very wonky while we're talking about the military. Military in general needs a rework or UI fixing for easier access for the benefit of all but especially new players since conflict with sieges and local threats is inevitable.

[Fleeting Frames]

A fortress that loses by having all dwarves die of old age is likely to be worthy to be placed in Hall of Legends, and a worthy DF goal in itself.

In any case I think by the time migrants normally stop coming entirely from mass slaughter you already have few feet under you in terms of experience and are outside the scope of this thread (provided it wasn't one of the newbie traps causing the mass slaughter, which current pop cap system might qualify as - editing the init is useful but unintuitive in 2019).

[voliol]

I'd assume Dorfson's "cheating with DT" means using DT to find out who were infected (and I agree that slogging through the combat logs to find out isn't much fun), although I wouldn't expect Toady/ThreeToe to necessarily know you can use DT for that, given that they usually don't take much notice of third party utilities.

I believe that issue might be helped if you could "ask" the Chief Medical Dorf and/or the Hospital for a report of things you'd need to be aware of (would also be useful in the far future when/if infectious diseases and the like are introduced). The medical screen leaves a lot to be desired with all the scrolling (spreadsheet, anyone?) both horizontally and vertically required to find if anyone needs attention. In addition to a summary, it would be useful to be able to sort the medical screen either based on user selected sort criteria, or, as a minimum, statically sorted to have the injured ones on top (and I'd prefer to have the ones that can be treated at the very top).

While it's sort of interesting to discover the havoc weres can wreak, dealing with it gets old fast. A newbie generally wouldn't know to look at the correct place until after being hit the first time, and if the game tutorial/introduction tells the player there are surprises that are not revealed it wouldn't come as a complete shock. Once the first "local" were turns, the game might tell the player where to look for it the next time, as well as issuing a challenge to sort it out (which would make purging the fortress of weres into an achievement candidate) rather than ditch the fortress.

Achievements have a lot of potential as "sneaky tutorials", tutorials that the player thinks they are following their own will while they are secretly puppets to their own greedy desire (for achievements). Jokes aside, when you pause a game with the Steam overlay, there is a "So close..." indicator in the achievement box. This indicator names an achievement that you are apparently close to unlocking, or nearly did recently. I am not sure exactly how this system works, but ideally it could be used to hint the player about a relevant problem/challenge when it arises.

E.g. a achievement "You no longer fear the night"="Overcome a Werebeast epidemic" that shows up in the "So close..." window as soon as an infected dwarf survives the initial werebeast attack (and an epidemic thus has begun).

I dunno if there is a corresponding feature in itch.io's system.

Edit:

Spoiler: A picture of the feature: (click to show/hide)

[Pillbo]

Small suggestion that I think would make the game slightly less confusing- give pets singular and/or less Dwarfy names.  It would help make it more obvious when looking at a list of names or a body part on the ground if the name was visibly unique from dwarves similar to the same way elf, goblin and human names usually are. I've had a lot of 'oh crap who died' moments after finding body parts and for noobs it can take a while to figure out that leg is from someone's pet duck and everyone is fine.

I'd prefer unique names for pets (Shadow instead of John Kennedy), but even just leaving off first names and keeping a compound-word singular name (Gemcloistered instead of Melbil Gemcloistered) would be a really helpful way of quickly recognizing the game is referring to a non-person.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

^Seconded. This is already how it works for wild animal histfigs, so pets wouldn't be a huge leap from there.

[voliol]

^Thirded. And for tame animal histfigs as well. I got dozens of war horses from the latest human siege in cages, and they are all single-named.

[FantasticDorf]

^ Fourth'ed, even for players who are quite used to it, its extremely hard to identify animals post sending out your own raid with war animal assistance then calling back a war animal (individually) who became historical thinking it was a person on on account of them having no skills but take up residence off site.

Same kind of structure but a small symbol, custom or otherwise like // or ; with a description "'Mountainjumped'//Horse" (or) "'Mountainjumped';Horse" for contextless situations where you're going off name alone.

[Untrustedlife]

Hey there Zach hope things are going well health wise for you

Werebeasts never really bothered me, i just locked up my fortress when they came.

However, i have some adventure mode complaints if that is alright. I love adventure mode but the issues with it can be very stark at times.

I have played dwarf fortress for going on 8-9 years now  and so i hope this adventure mode feedback is actually considered seriously:

1. Water instantly freezing has killed several of my adventurers and that can be incredibly frustrating. Because one second i'm swimming, next i'm encased in ice. And i  like to put alot of time into perfectly customizing my adventurer. Its just a really silly way to die and it would be better if ice froze slowly, eg it warned you and it took some time for it to actually freeze so i could get out of the water instead of one second its fine and the next its suddenly ice.

2. Also, why don't all shops in towns accept their own civilizations currency, that can be just annoying if you built up currency and want to buy a sword or something in a city that you know accepts the coins you have only to find out they dont accept the coins of their own civilization in that one shop.

3. The "you are a killer" thing in adventure mode needs to be reworded badly i mentioned this in FOTF before and tarn said he was open to changing it, so i hope he does, it makes sense if its murder (and they do call you a "murderer" when it is actual murder) but if you kill a beast or something the NPCS will always say "you are a killer" and its so stark compared to anything else even if that kill is like a cyclops or something, and that has come up many times on the adventurer sub forum with (new) players thinking npcs think they are a murderer or bad person  for killing a beast when really it just means "you took a life (be it a beast or a human, or a bandit or whatever) They will be like "you are a killer, you are also a defender of the helpless" and crap like that and its just strange that the killer part takes priority over anything else and sometimes even is the only thing said even if what you killed was a bandit or a monster its just worded badly so badly that it confuses new adventure mode players all the time. From my experience from catching streams/lets plays/being on that subforum. I have seen SO MANY people just get incredibly frustrated and kill everything/quit after they see that after they like kill a bandit/monster because to them it feels like the game, is giving them a huge fat middle finger for their efforts when it really shouldn't.

4. Please allow us to filter rumors better in the rumors screen, having to scroll through to look for specific kills is a nightmare. And it definitely puts off new Adventure Mode players and even veteran ones.

5. Minor gripe,  when you create a new identity it gives you a massive list of gods but no information about them,  unlike what it doe sin fort mode, that would be a nice QOL feature (If it actually gave you some info, like their spheres). It also gives a massive list of civs and no information about them. (It would be nice if it at leasttold you what race made the civilization)

6. Fix bragging, bragging barely does anything instead you always have to bring up specific rumors/tell stories for people to care about your kills. And those screens as i said earlier have their own issues that need to be addressed. I have seen new players try to brag and have nothing happen to their reputation and they quit because of this.

7. You knew this was coming, add meals to taverns, right now its impossible to meet the "fine meal" need in adventure mode outside of going to a player fort in adventure mode which is an issue

8. This is a big one, this bug was fixed but it resurfaced, you cant sleep in your abandoned fortresses anymore, and that is terribly annoying. Also it re-randomizing item placement every time you go there with an adventurer can be a bigger pain especially if you are trying to recover an artifact that wasn't on a pedastal



One thing i am very happy with though in order to balance out my negativity is that you added pinning events in the Q screen which is super duper handy! Please do more stuff like that.

Sorry if i came off as a bit irritated in that third bullet point, but i have seen so many new adventure mode players get so frustrated over that little thing that to me its a really clear usability issue. And i'm sure other forum folks could corroborate what im seeing with new players and that issue. (ill keep adding as a think of issues)

I think these suggestions would go a long way towards making adventure mode more noob friendly.

Just for reference heres a thread where numerous folks were confused about what "killer" means in df,
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=154199.msg6663058#msg6663058
It should be fixed.

[Rumrusher]

having poke around the unit memory and what the emotional phrases are, I think players are confused over what grim satisfaction means, which I feel like is more the unit felt a satisfied over the demise of a begrudged or hated enemy than person disillusioned by death so many times they start liking it. which means players who go on massive killing sprees are just making alot of enemies and causing the adventurer to treat everyone they are killing an enemy thus finding their death good. which ends up meaning the player might have to convince everyone the person they killed was an enemy so that when they tell the report of their demise they get a grim satisfaction than probably terrifying or apathy for not knowing who or what the person is.

good thing there's other ways to get fame, though I see this might cause ire to players knowing being a murder hobo is a tricky and probably not well liked career goal.

[Scruiser]

Having recently gotten back into playing, I was stumped trying to remember how soap production worked until I went back to the wiki, worked through the flow chart and then searched through my stocks on the status screen.  I spent ten minutes or so figuring out why I didn't have any tallow stockpiled, then another 5 minutes butchering animals, then I rushed back to the kitchen menu to forbid the usage of tallow in cooking.  When I finally got the materials together to make a single soap bar, I ran out of lye when I tried ordering up a batch of soap with the manager, and when I started making lye, I ran out of ash.  I had used the manager screen to order the production of the soap bars, so I got job cancellation spam while I worked to get ash and lye produced. Similarly I've been having issues getting instruments assembled in a streamlined fashion.  I order the production of a bunch of random pieces.  I order instruments assembled and I don't have enough of the right pieces and extra pieces.

So my suggestion to help the noobs avoid rage quit: A way of seeing entire production lines/industry flowcharts at once, along with the status of the materials and workshops needed.  With a manager appointed, the ability to order production of something with all the corresponding sub-production also ordered at the same time and the sequenced to avoid job cancellation spam.

This might be a bit unreliable with things that have multiple possible paths of production (smelting bronze from ore vs. bars for example, or mods with lots of weird custom reactions), but at least noobs (and players that haven't memorized the industry flowcharts) would be able to get something done when trying to get thing produced without triggering job cancellation spam or having to read several wiki articles.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Simply covering the manager in the tutorial would solve that. It already brings up the stuff you need to produce something automatically in the conditions menu. Make it all a little easier to navigate (pop-ups and whatever) and no great changes really need to be made.

[Scruiser]

Huh, well I feel stupid now.  I never really figured out the full options available at the manager screen, just the bare minimum as I needed them.  So really my suggestion is "just" a UI suggestion then, making the already present information and options easier to find, read, and visualize.

[Galap]

I think that having a worldgen option for setting how early (in population) the werebeast attacks can come is a good idea. That would give the opportunity to make everyone happy.

In general in relation to that, I think that the balance of death to external vs internal forces is a little too skewed toward internal now: a lot of the stuff that can attack you has been nerfed and/or doesn't always appear. for example, I see new players often asking things like "am I ever going to get goblins attacking?" And I think the undead need a bit of a buff again. Additionally, I would make it harder to wall yourself off and prevent enemies from coming in. A dirt wall construction shouldn't be completely indestructible in my opinion, for example. It would be a bit much for things to be able to dig in at you, but I think there should be some circumstances where constructions can be unmade by attackers.

However, I think the whole stress thing is a little out of wack. Specifically, the fact that dwarves get stress from seeing the corpses of sentients, regardless of whether they are enemy or ally, is rather extreme in practice. I think it is right and proper for there to be significant negative thoughts from seeing the corpses of their fellow fortressmates, but the effect should be a LOT less for those who have to clean up a bunch of dead troglodytes, or goblins that tried to raid the fort.

Ultimately, It's Fun to lose because you got killed by an enemy attack,  and it's also Fun to mess up when playing with water pressure and flood yourself or wreck youself with some self-made disaster like that. Unfortunately, it's not really so fun to have the thing that does you in be things like stress from having to bury the goblins, or a loyalty cascade that is completely inexplicable, even in hindsight. Or additionally, the inevitability of FPS death.

Also, It's difficult to get dwarves to train properly, especially marksdwarves; since it's really hard to get them to shoot at archery targets. It's really difficult to get dwarves to wear the right equipment, and often they get stuck in loops of picking up equipment before going on raids. Also, it's kind of annoying that dwarves can't use the same items/uniforms  for both civilian and military use (like the same axe to fall trees and fight, and the same crossbows for hunting and combat) and there's also the raid equipment corruption bug.


Obligatory other things:
yeah, there are a lot of really awkward things about the UI that need to be addressed. I know that's not supposed to be the point here, and that's why it's going in the post script, but here is the one thing about the UI that is by far the most frustrating:

Lists are unsorted and unsortable. Trying to find a unit to assign to a squad can be really troublesome: look at the main unit list, then try to find him in the assign squad list, which is ordered completely differently and doesn't color code the names like the main list. It would be nice to be able to manually sort lists, or use some sorting methods (e.g. alphabatic, or by material, or by skill, etc.).

[PatrikLundell]

I don't think this has been brought up earlier in this thread:

As far as I can see (Toady's FotF answer), the Villains release makes the (in)justice system your one and only defense against plots, which means it will have to be mandatory to set it up earlier rather than later (or never, as has been my case so far). This, in its turn, means the newbies will have to be informed, through some mechanism(s), THAT they have to set it up, WHAT they need to set up, and HOW to do that, as well as be provided with enough info on how to operate it.

I don't think the current situation a newbie is likely to end up in when (accidentally?) activating the system is a good one, i.e. random important fortress members being killed for crimes they didn't commit (mandate/export violations [retroactive ones at that, in the case of exports, and sometimes impossible to meet ones for the former {e.g. production of picks when there's no weapons grade metal in the embark and no goblinite has been harvested either}]), because the newbie didn't know how to reduce the punishment (of the player) to production shutdowns (through imprisonment facilities), or thought other things (such as a well) being more important to set up first.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I don't think this has been brought up earlier in this thread:

As far as I can see (Toady's FotF answer), the Villains release makes the (in)justice system your one and only defense against plots, which means it will have to be mandatory to set it up earlier rather than later (or never, as has been my case so far). This, in its turn, means the newbies will have to be informed, through some mechanism(s), THAT they have to set it up, WHAT they need to set up, and HOW to do that, as well as be provided with enough info on how to operate it.

Issues with how the system actually works (doesn't work) aside, teaching people how to play the game is what a tutorial does. Doesn't it?
Not much point in a tutorial that doesn't teach you the basic game systems.