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[darkevilme]

Okay s'been a few months now and i'll admit i'm getting impatient for the update. But that's silly of me as my estimate is four months to go. As the Great Toad does one section a month, there's 3 sections left unstarted and the last month'll probably be dealing with the missing parts of various sections.

Also, my memory is foggy and my searchfu has turned up nothing..is this the update where ranged weapon rate of fire gets fixed?

[mendonca]

Also, my memory is foggy and my searchfu has turned up nothing..is this the update where ranged weapon rate of fire gets fixed?

Fixed!?

They can only fire at a couple of dozen rounds a day at the minute ...

[Footkerchief]

Also, my memory is foggy and my searchfu has turned up nothing..is this the update where ranged weapon rate of fire gets fixed?

Weapon skills are kinda different now, so the ROF will probably be different, at least a little, but it's likely that it will still be too machinegun-like at high skill levels.

[SirHoneyBadger]

From my limited understanding, Toady's planning to update combat extensively, in one huge go. Provided I'm right about that, I expect that's where crossbow rates will get address.

[SmileyMan]

I dunno.  I think that the 'solution' to this would involve way too much micromanagement.

At the moment, yes, but if the presentation arc is to address this at some point in the future, then the game mechanic should go in now.

Viewing personalities is a bit of a pain now (you may have to go through several screens depending on where you're viewing it from) -- forcing the player to do it for every single dwarf they want to add to the military strikes me as excessive.

If, for instance, a whiz-bang UI has a panel that shows a dwarf's personality during any screen where an individual dwarf is selected, then it becomes simple.

  It's also a bit of a 'no-brainer' decision (players would always choose the dwarves with military personalities; your idea would only force them to waste time viewing the personality screen for long lists of dwarves before making assignments.)

If, of course, the player is trying to "win".  They might fancy experimenting with drafting the pacifists - the "Dwarven Amish Platoon"

[Dareon Clearwater]

I could see a degree of randomness coming in with huge squads or a captain's death going unnoticed in the spam.  Similar to how the counts of stocks will creep off precise if you set your bookkeeping accuracy low, military dwarves could start creatively interpreting their orders by shifting patrol/station points a few tiles (Especially fun with marksdwarves posted at fortifications), individual soldiers altering their duty rotations slightly, perhaps according to personality ("I want an extra month to drink booze and leer at wenches!"  "Oh yeah, well I desire MORE SLAUGHTER!  MORE PATROL!  MORE BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD RIVER!" "...Ookay, you're a freak, Urist.")...

I'm sure it would take more coding than I'm aware of, though.

[darkevilme]

Also, my memory is foggy and my searchfu has turned up nothing..is this the update where ranged weapon rate of fire gets fixed?

Fixed!?

They can only fire at a couple of dozen rounds a day at the minute ...

The trouble comes when it takes about a week on the same time scale for your dwarven warriors to close with the goblins. The crux of the matter is that even at short distances its next to impossible to charge ranged troops as they get too many shots off in the time it takes for you to close with them.

Also, my memory is foggy and my searchfu has turned up nothing..is this the update where ranged weapon rate of fire gets fixed?

Weapon skills are kinda different now, so the ROF will probably be different, at least a little, but it's likely that it will still be too machinegun-like at high skill levels.

I have no problems with Legolas mcbowmaster mcuber having a high ish fire rate, i just disliked yob mcbowbloke being able to fire a crossbow into some poor sod ten times in the time it takes the poor sod to charge across open terrain.

[Org]

Also, my memory is foggy and my searchfu has turned up nothing..is this the update where ranged weapon rate of fire gets fixed?

Fixed!?

They can only fire at a couple of dozen rounds a day at the minute ...

The trouble comes when it takes about a week on the same time scale for your dwarven warriors to close with the goblins. The crux of the matter is that even at short distances its next to impossible to charge ranged troops as they get too many shots off in the time it takes for you to close with them.

Also, my memory is foggy and my searchfu has turned up nothing..is this the update where ranged weapon rate of fire gets fixed?

Weapon skills are kinda different now, so the ROF will probably be different, at least a little, but it's likely that it will still be too machinegun-like at high skill levels.

I have no problems with Legolas mcbowmaster mcuber having a high ish fire rate, i just disliked yob mcbowbloke being able to fire a crossbow into some poor sod ten times in the time it takes the poor sod to charge across open terrain.

However, some of us do. While the bow, I'm okay with, maybe a little slower, but a Crossbow IRL will never fire that fast, as it takes awhile to reload.

[isitanos]

I dunno.  I think that the 'solution' to this would involve way too much micromanagement.  Viewing personalities is a bit of a pain now (you may have to go through several screens depending on where you're viewing it from) -- forcing the player to do it for every single dwarf they want to add to the military strikes me as excessive.

Not if the game gives you hints right on the military screen as you review each dwarf. It could be just a general evaluation such as "This dwarf would make an excellent/good/average/poor/terrible soldier", a abbreviated list of positive (green) and negative (red) relevant traits, or both. You can always go to the personality screen to double-check especially interesting dwarves.

Optionally, a captain/recruiter skilled in appraising dwarves for the militia could be required to get those hints.

[Sunday]

Yeah, I was thinking that (if you wanted a military composed of dwarves who like fighting) you'd have to let the general/captain of the guard know.  He would perform a job like a book-keeper, and give you a list of, say, 2x the amount of dwarves you asked for (in case a bunch of your legendary weapon-makers are on it), arranged in order from most military-oriented to least, personality wise.

You could just skip it and draft dwarves in an emergency, but - like a real-world draft - you're probably going to get a lot of dwarves who don't really want/are not very good at fighting.

[Karlito]

Isn't it the job of the military to break down soldier's personalities and turn them into emotionless killing machines?

[Neonivek]

Isn't it the job of the military to break down soldier's personalities and turn them into emotionless killing machines?

That is what the game currently does. You will notice Drafted Dwarves slowly becoming hard if you check their personality pages.

[Toady One]

what interface elements, besides the military/squad screens, have you upgraded (if any), and could you give a brief overview of what kind of changes we can expect?

it should be possible to add (some sort of) menu to the game that lets you switch grid size/tilesets at runtime, through using the same mechanism that works when switching between fullscreen/windowed mode.

I'd never considered this before, though, and didn't give it any thought when looking at the code before. Also, there might be code inside DF proper that would protest. So, Toady, any comments on this?

how about dynamic resizing?

I don't want to get into another general UI discussion in this thread, but anyway, for the first part, nothing specific aside from the screens I've hit going through here, and the 40d# stuff.  Nothing to do with additional tile support and so on.

As for the rest, whatever is in the released UI code contains a lot of the necessary code, although there are still the problems with screens that don't react to the new grid sizes to begin with and screens likely wouldn't react any better if the window is resized.  It's not insurmountable but it's not something I'm looking forward to.

With the new note system, can you zoom to the points from anywhere on the map, or do you have to find them yourself?

There's no point/note list, so it's not something that happens right now.  Zooming on the note screen is for locating current patrol waypoints at this point, and the current hotkeys are for general zooming.  I could put in a point list at some point, at which point hotkey points might become obsolete, but I'm not sure when that would be.

Do the changes to military organization mean that the Fortress / Royal Guards will be more under the control of the player now?

A bit more, yeah, especially in keeping with the notion of the baron/count/duke as a more player-involved critter.  You'll still likely want to schedule enough of them for officer duty to avoid incurring thought penalties, but if you want to use them as a regular squad the rest of the time, that should also work.

Right now my primary use for the military stuff is to draft dwarves so I can move them where I need them around the fortress.  Will this still be a possible use of the military stuff?

It might even be easier in a way with the new permanent station points.  Hopefully the later changes having to do with burrows and all the rest will mitigate the need for this sort of thing, but yeah, it should still work.  You might need to fiddle with schedules or the new move command a bit.

In interviews, Toady discussed making truely nation sized populations possible via abstracting.  How will that effect Fortress mode?  Army mode?  I know it's not coming in the new release, but it's something to think about.  With thousands of dwarves possible on a single location, how will the process be able to show them all to the player of fortress mode?

Fortress mode and anything that touches fortress mode (armies) are the main problems, because fortress mode can't accommodate large numbers and so will continue to make less and less sense.  There won't ever be 1000+ dwarves wandering around your fort, at least with processors the way they are.  So it'll be dealt with through various cheats and nonsense, such as your fortress only eventually containing elite/important/lucky people and only being attacked directly by the best squads of the larger enemy armies or at least by small numbers at a time.  Outside the fortress, you can have larger armies and fight larger forces, which kind of ties in with the notion of a broad spectrum of settlements arising around your fort itself (so the fort becomes more keep-like in a way, though not to the point of providing shelter to everybody in surrounding areas, though you could use external walls on the mid-level map near your fort for that purpose).  As long as you aren't zoomed in on it in fortress mode, it can be handled.  Army battles can occur in either the mid/world-level maps with the full forces, or zoomed in for specific interesting aspects of the conflict, with the number of troops loaded locally being metered, in frozen world time.  I think it can work, but your fortress will always be sort of an anomaly in time and space, in terms of how fast time passes (or how it stops passing suddenly) and how only a certain amount of critters can be stuffed in there.  The alternative is sort of a small-scale tribal warfare, which isn't satisfying for a general fantasy setting and doesn't give the world much longevity, or abstraction in the fort itself with units representing larger numbers of units, which I think kills a lot of what I've been attempting to do with unit differentiation, but mileage will vary there.

Adventure mode can make more sense since you have only a local picture that passes time in a more reasonable way (ie walking across the local map doesn't take 3 days or whatever).

Are we going to bee able to rename a squad?

Yeah, give it a nickname at least.

[Davion]

So it'll be dealt with through various cheats and nonsense, such as your fortress only eventually containing elite/important/lucky people and only being attacked directly by the best squads of the larger enemy armies or at least by small numbers at a time.

Yeah, I know Mount & Blade does this decently, in that the overland map can have armies with hundreds of soldiers, but then when you go in for a personal battle it'll do it in manageable waves so it doesn't destroy your computer. Of course if we're talking large scale thousand man armies then it might just be better to have a couple of waves of elite units to represent the army, rather then spending six hours of real time fighting off small waves as they spawn.

Regardless, it sounds good to me. Unfortunate that there can't be massive battles, but I guess that's the way it is.

...which kind of ties in with the notion of a broad spectrum of settlements arising around your fort itself (so the fort becomes more keep-like in a way, though not to the point of providing shelter to everybody in surrounding areas, though you could use external walls on the mid-level map near your fort for that purpose).

This could also be a way to cap out the fortress population to keep FPS manageable in that you could still be getting migrants to your area which boosts your population, but they go to the surrounding settlements and don't come directly to your fort except for special occasions or if you actually want them there. Then you wouldn't necessarily need all 100+ dwarves wandering around in your fort all the time in order to advance to king/queen/economy/etc.

[Toady One]

As far as massive battles go, especially away from the fortress, I think something like a zoomed-in 300 on 300 would be perfectly doable, as they aren't thinking about fortress inner workings and other drags.  Fixing some of the path-nightmare AI quirks would make that even more feasible.

But yeah, if we go for a mature world with armies of 200,000 and so on, most of the important action will be happening on the mid-level maps or even the world maps if the lines stretch that far.  It should still be really fun, but you wouldn't get to see the gory details unless you zoomed in on a section, in which case it might load up a little 96x96 or even 48x48 and stuff it full of critters and have them do their thing (a map that small would retain the sense of scale I think, but larger might end up better), having the result after a period of time resolve back up on the tactical map.  Haven't thought about the details that deeply yet, but I'm convinced even armies that size can be handled in a "fun enough" way.  As for the peaceful living and adventure mode visits to a capital of millions without it seeming cookie-cutter-stupid, I think I talked about that stuff a bit in the interview.  We have lots of ideas to make it work, but whether the end picture is satisfactory is something I'm not 100% sure about.  The fortress remains the least satisfactory part, but it should fit in all right, in an overtly gamey kind of way.