Bay 12 Games Forum

I play straight up vanilla for starters.  No tilesets.  I grew up playing Rogue-likes, so uckily reading ASCII hasn't been a problem for me for a very long time.  No mods.  I find there's generally enough diversity and challenge without ramping it up.  I do alter the init options a bit, so there is that. 

I don't use DF Therapist to manage my dwarves.  I've run multiple successful forts at 180+ dwarves without a problem.  I assign jobs to immigrants when they walk in (unskilled types usually end up as masons), so I usually have a pretty good spread of jobs initially.  When the number of dwarves in my fortress gets above 80 or so, I stop caring about each individual dwarf.  If I have a job that needs doing in my fort, I find a handful of idle dwarves (of which there are plenty) and turn the appropriate job on.  It's an iterative process.  At some point in a fortress' life, I have enough jobs turned on on enough dwarves that when I want something done, my dwarves spring into action without me worrying or cursing their laziness.

Yeah, at the 180+ population point, it runs slow, but I fold it into how I approach the game.  I generally run the fortress in the background and check back on it every now and again.  And while it's running, I read stuff, or work on other projects or whatever else.  I don't really get worked up over how slow it's running.  Mostly my forts end because I get bored with them and run out of ideas on how to grow them.  I'm really looking forward to the addition of inns and other means of interacting with the outside world, since it'll give me additional in-game goals to reach.

I rely on traps only when I'm just starting off and haven't had a chance to develop a military.  Once my military starts getting its bearings, I deconstruct the traps (or reposition them to act as a last line of defense; usually cage traps).  I leave my fortresses open, with one or two strong bottlenecks that I position my dwarves at.  Early on, I relied on archers, but realized that I didn't mind losing a few dwarves here and there to invaders or rampaging megabeasts.  It just adds to the background story.

I've never tried to manipulate the artifacts that my dwarves make.  I actually enjoy watching one of my mooded dwarves run all over the place and look to see what object they're dragging back to their workshop, even if it only lead me to say "Aww...just an oak log".  I don't really bother training up my weapon/armor smiths (I'm not sure I've ever had one get above proficient).  I don't delve down after the deep blue metal.  It's been a while since I've actively used magma too.

I'm probably not the only one who plays like this, but some days, it seems like I am.

I've discovered that dwarves who are assigned to one train at a weapon rack or armor stand will train there even if they're not currently on duty.  I think this means that if a dwarf ever finds itself in the position to be idle, instead they'll go and run through individual training drills on their own.  The combat drills don't take precedent over an actual job that needs to be done.  Now this could very well be a bit of common knowledge that I've somehow missed, but I haven't heard anybody mention it before. 

I had previously only used beds as a source of barracks, and had my squads training in them, but I had never noticed any of my dwarves spending their down-time training.  I decided to use armor and weapon stands in the fort I'm currently running, and decided to use those as the training areas, rather than the beds.  Now I see dwarves training, unprompted.

I have plenty of blocks to build all sorts of constructions.  But they're all in different colors (orthoclase yellow, microline blue, granite grey, and rocksalt white, with a smattering of petrified wood red).  Which means that I can either wait for enough rocks of the right type to be produced, or I can build my fortress so it looks horrifically colorful and random.   

I suppose I could always just go ahead and build stuff now, then replace it when I get the right colors. 

I love that when megabeasts get wounded during world gen, they stay wounded when they show up to attack your fortress.  Especially when said wound it their right rear leg and it causes them to fall over unconscious the second they arrive on your map.  Even better is when they slowly crawl toward your fortress, leaving a trail of blood in their wake, and the rest of your dwarves go about hauling wood back inside.

"Eh, wot's tha'?"

"Oh, that's Ade Suckerwastes.  Ee's a hydra wot's been threatening Timberwake since I was a wee 'un.  'spect he'll get to the gate some day.  Leaves a bloody mess though!"

I've been reading the Illuminatus trilogy recently, and I can't help but think that with some tweaks (ok, major tweaks), LCS could be turned into a conspiracy type of game.  Rather than working on changing government, you work on changing/controlling society and fighting against other conspiracies (Discordians vs Illuminati, or what have you).

Not really sure how I'd go about making such a change, but it's crossed my mind recently and I thought I'd toss it out there to see if there's anybody else who thinks it might be a neat thing to work on.

Didn't see anything referring to this idea in any of the core or bloats (though, I really only skimmed). 

Have each town, outpost or retreat (or any other kind of settlement a race uses)  develop a local industry.  That is, something that it's good at producing. 

For humans, most of the smaller villages and towns should probably have farm production be their primary industry, for export to the larger cities.  Another possibility could be mining towns, with forges and the like.  Another could be textile production.  The bigger cities could have artisans who could turn raw products into finished products.  Similar focuses could be implemented for each of the other civs. 

The idea would be to make this all highly abstracted during world gen.  Warring civilizations could target specific towns who have a particular industry they'd want to disrupt (target mining/foundry-type towns to disrupt weapon and armor production, target farming villages to disrupt food production, etc.)  Thieves could target locations that produce finished goods, rather than raw materials.

Likewise, this could have an impact on population migrations, based on what profession a person has.  The cities would attract a higher percentage of skilled craftspersons, while costal cities would attract fishermen.  Mining towns and foundries would attract miners and smiths, and outlying towns could attract higher numbers of rangers and hunters.  Potentially, you could set it up so that the cities attract larger numbers of adventurer types so that, when your adventurer wants to start up a party, he goes to a tavern in a big city and asks around (could the production of people crazy enough to go adventuring be considered an industry?).

I think there's some potential here, and I think I've really only skimmed the surface.

Has anybody played around with this to figure out how long a growing period the numbers correspond to?  The wiki is silent on the topic, near as I can tell.

Ok, so you can create food stocks that store just seeds, plants, animal fat, or whatever else you have handy.  How do you set up a stock that only accepts prepared food?