User:Kwieland

My Questions yet to be answered

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

1. What is a tracker skill? My queen showed up and she has this skill.
2. 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?
3. Why do animals have a birth limit of 50? Can I change it in the init?
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. At what FPS do you call it quits and start over? I find 7 to be really undoable.
7. 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.
8. 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?
9. 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.
10. 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 16:52, 25 March 2009 (UTC)