Bay 12 Games Forum

They're almost cool, almost useful and almost competent at their chosen task... except they show up with useless equipment and get their asses kicked.  When its not artifacts in place of weapons, its still no-quality silver swords and no-quality armor.  Which is kind of okay, it means I get the artifacts some are inexplicably wielding, but they're clearly not doing what they're supposed to.

Suggestion:  we should be able to reequip them with better gear.  Either directly through a military screen (but still not giving them squad orders), or better yet we should be able to make fortress-produced gear available for them to reequip.  Possibly out of a weapons/armor stockpile with a setting to allow visitors, but I'm not attached to the exact implementation.

So I'm going to need a 50 z-level pump stack to bring water from the caverns to my hospital.  So far so good, but that's a lot of doors using the standard design.  (While I could make them, they would slow me down on something I need up quick.)

Wiki says "use ramps in place of channeling" to minimize doors and access tunnels.  For some reason I'm having a hard time visualizing this.

To be sure I'm understanding it: I would designate a ramp up underneath each tile that would normally be channeled out in a pump stack, correct?  So a 4-z side view of the middle of the stack would go:

0^M^
^M^0
0^M^
^M^0

where ^ = Up Ramp, M = mine, and 0 is an undesignated block that I would otherwise mine, but here I'm leaving to the mercy of the ramp up below it.  And the pumps are built so the input tiles go on the inward ramp and the output tiles go on the only (designated) Mined tile.  This arrangement comes out equal to channeling out tiles as in the basic description and the animation?

And a secondary question, since I realized I've been using stairs for up/down travel from the very beginning, with ramps only for the trade depot entrance.  What are your layouts for, say, a central staircase using only ramps?  Or for bedroom complexes using ramps?