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.