User:Kwieland

Thoughts v.03

These are some of the things I am thinking about:

1. With the magma so deep now, you really have to think of a way to bring it to the surface. I've started a "stack" of pumps that are basically like this:

1 2 3 4

z channel floor channel floor

z-1 floor channel floor channel

with an access to the z pump via row 2. Since they are built on top of one another, they can all be powered from the top. I have magma at z=104, need it at z=128, so that is ~24 pumps, 240 power. My windmills only produce 20, so I'm going to have an array for sure. Then add in all the losses due to transfers and I'll probably need 30 or so. We'll see.

1. I just had a siege and several of my war dogs got injured. It was funny to see "McDog cancels clean self, dropped soap". I hate when that happens. Reminds me of the cat bug.
2. Attributes don't follow experience - namely if you look at a dwarf pre-"mood item" completion and post completion, they have the same attributes.
3. It ended up taking ~50 windmills. Wasn't that big of a deal. The multicolor windmills look cool.
4. Hostages are not immune from other friends of yours. I was transporting some prisoner goblins past the trade depot and all of a sudden the human swordsman comes over and kills the goblin. What? Yeah, it happened again with dwarfs.
5. I have not yet figured out how to de-activate soldiers. I have some ideas. I know I've done it before, because I started with a squad of 10 and only have 6 now, and 4 are not in the "no job" bug.
6. Forgotten beasts can be really weak. I has a war dog take one out. Yeah, it was that bad.
7. Training swords are not to be used as real weapons. The result is a beast with all "red" parts, but no fatal wounds. Like being stoned ALMOST to death.
8. Switching armor/weapons around takes a long time. So much for having a squad train (with training swords) and then be called to the front line. Doesn't work. Bad idea.
9. I have immense growth of subterranean trees/bushes on my z=-1 level. It is black sand. I don't know why I have not seen it in other places, though.
10. Turning off weather/temperature and partial print on in the init does absolutely nothing to my framerate. I'm at ~70 dwarfs total (including kids) and maybe 10 pets out of cages. The frame rate is around 12-17, which is borderline playable. When ambushes/caravans come, it drops really bad.
11. I have four mayors now. Talk about absurd requests/demands. Platinum bed? Come on!
12. I have an accessible depot, but the caravans never bring wagons. bug?
13. Blood should "clean out" after a year or so. My dwarfs track it all over. Then they try to clean themselves. Then they head to the well, clean themselves off. Finally, they turn around and get themselves all dirty again. Oh well.
14. Sand layers that are underground "grow" stuff. My next site I'm going to look for 2-3 layers of sand. I embarked on a heavily forested with "thick" growth and the underground sand grew tons of plants. The shrubs I harvested and was surprised to see them be plump helmets, pig tails, etc! Don't know why it surprised me, but it did!

My Questions yet to be answered

Please feel free to discuss these points on my discussion page...

1. I was reading the link on the wiki on the obsidian short swords. Wouldn't it be cool if you could make spears like these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tepoztopilli) as well?
2. What is a tracker skill? My queen showed up and she has this skill.
3. How many spaces between a catapult and a enemy have to be in order to not scare the civilians away? Does anybody actually use siege weapons for weapons?
4. Why do animals have a birth limit of 50? Can I change it in the init?
5. After I killed the goblin king in a siege, I haven't been attacked in five game years. Why? Random? Does that mean the goblins are gone? Certainly makes the fortress less fun. UPDATE I finally had another siege, so it must be random. Seriously like 3 game years with no ambushes/attacks.
6. What is the ratio of children to workers in your current fortress? I have 228 dwarfs (max in init at 200) with over 70 kids.
7. At what FPS do you call it quits and start over? I find 7 to be really undoable.
8. My most recent start was a farming start with moods in mind - only farmers. I build a magma forge and made them dabbling in one of weaponsmith/armor/metalcrafting. So far, both my moods have yielded armor (one was possessed, though)! When the seeds are all planted, I have them harvest plants. The herbalist skill levels up very quickly so you get stat bonuses (agility, esp.). Also, you generate a lot of 1, 2 unit things, so I had a cook do basic food until he (she?) hit adept, then switched to lavish meals. Also, brewing, cooking, milling, plant processing, plant gathering are all non-mood skills, so the dwarfs do those as well. I bought out the first caravan on three or four plump roasts (over 3k each!). I wasn't cooking ale, either. Legendary cooks make meals (say with stacks of plants) worth over 10k each. So, you only need a few to do it. Turns out you need a lot of bags, especially if you are milling dyes.
9. Instead of blasting my rocks or making rock blocks, I've decided to make rock crafts. That way the fortress value increases, dwarfs get skill, and all the rock is gone! In my newest farming community, I've set a fun max of 1k rock at one time. We'll see how long that holds up. Anybody else tried this?
10. I was pretty frustrated one time. I didn't realize that it was the ELFS and not the HUMANS comming to trade, so I moved a lot of things to the depot. When they left, all the dwarfs had to move them all back. I've found that you can simply forbid the items (using t to view the contents of the depot). Surprisingly they still show up in the trade screen (it even shows the bin as forbidden!). Then the dwarfs leave it there. Once I empty a bin, I simply view it in the trade screen and reclaim it.
11. A manager gains experience based on the number of task items OKed. Not completed. So, I fill up the queue with ~30 tasks of 30 each of "collect sand" or "collect webs". When they are verified, I delete them. Then, with no other jobs, the dwarf becomes legendary in a season or so. This is equivalent to the bookkeeper exploit, I think.

Comments/suggestions

1. Not having access (through trading/etc) to key materials makes things fun.
2. Why list all the deceased on the units page? Excluding them would make the list easier to use/more informative. I don't really care that I've killed Xing bob the kobold or the fact that I have 200 cats. I'd much rather a quick list, perhaps even excluding the 200 tame animals so I can quickly look at hostiles. Maybe an ability to hide them from the list?
   
3. Can we build buildings like selecting things? For instance, if I want to build lots of doors, pick one corner and then the other and then select the different doors?
   
4. Often times price, not distance, is the determining factor for placing furniture. How about including sort by price in the view?
   
5. When you link levers to devices, it doesn't show which mechanisms you're using. A list would be nice. Levers should also show what they are linked to.
   
6. Buildings designed by an architect should show what quality they are.
7. Why do dwarfs wander halfway across the map for a stone when one is right next to the workshop/catapult? It looks like the search algorithm just looks for the closest, not the closest walkable distance. For instance, if I have a catapult next to a wall and one stone on the other side of the wall but one three tiles away on the catapult, it will walk all the way around the wall (distance of 20 or more) just to get THE ONE.
   
8. When you build a door (or other such building) that only has diagonal access, the dwarf will not move anything in the square and will simply suspend the project. It would be nice if they "looked" at diagonals.
9. It would be nice to know what killed the dwarfs/about their skills after they die. Can this be in the epitaph on the coffin? For example a Thikot, a legendary mason, dabbling consoler killed by Hammertime the Hammerer on 22 Gabbro 214 .
   
10. Why do dead dwarfs still show up in the Justice tab? Isn't death the ultimate justice?
    
11. Hammerdwarfs of advanced fortresses become too strong/dangerous. Sure, you could kill them off. I hate loosing dwarfs legendary dwarfs to trivial things. I found that dumping the hammer will force him to drop the weapon (I didn't notice a negative thought because of this). Unfortunately, my fortress guards have been effective at killing my dwarfs. Even one equipped with a crossbow did one in. I have some legendary "Ooops" fortress guards, so I'm pretty sure any justice will mean death. I've already lost a legendary armorsmith! Next time, I don't think I'll have any fortress guards.

Last update --Kwieland 17:29, 17 April 2009 (UTC)--Kwieland 16:52, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Re "Trader"

You might be right - as soon as I made that edit I started having second thoughts, then got distracted. (But I know that the overall umbrella profession is not "Trader", as the prev. poster had edited in, and I undid.)

I don't wall in a pipe unless it's mostly there already from natural topography - in fact, I try not to go anywhere near where imps can fireball my dorfs. I wall in a small compound above my dining hall/kitchen area, w/ AG crops, a statue garden, and (if possible) water. Also an AG path to my barracks - if they want to sleep, they first gotta get used to the light. Later, I'll channel out some of that roof and put in a siege weapon practice range, with recovery channels for the ammo.

(And to answer one of your questions, yes, Siege Engines are used - catapults for practice and destroying/moving stone/killing wildlife, and ballistae for hosing down long narrow-ish corridors. The "scare distance" is about 5-10 tiles - it's not a totally hard number (and might vary with intensity of critter - trolls > marmots, for example, but that's unclear too.) The trick is to have the hall either dive under a balcony where the ballista are, or take a turn at about that same distance, with some fortifications/channeling to maintain that distance from the operators to the scary critters they're slaughtering.

Good articles under siege engines and the "see also" at the bottom of that page. --Albedo 22:25, 8 May 2009 (UTC)