Bay 12 Games Forum

So I recognize that supply and demand are harder to implement than the current system and more processor intensive, but the fact is that too many dwarves don't make enough money to pay rent and wind up getting evicted under the current system.

Here's how it looks to me that the current system is setup.
Nobles, weaponmasters+ and all dwarves with a legendary skill don't pay rent, and can take any unowned item for their own.
Dwarves who make stuff make some amount of money for each item they make
Farmers?  Unknown
Building stuff?  Unknown, but probably on a per construction basis.
Soldiers and Guards?  Seem to get paid pretty well, I'm guessing a salary.
Haulers get paid a small amount for every trip they make.

What this has meant in my fort is that unskilled labor winds up kicked out of rooms, non-legendary craftsdwarves wind up kicked out when there is enough of what they make for the moment, and most rooms are taken up by children, legendaries, and soldiers (who often don't even sleep there) as well as those with steady business (fishers and farmers, etc), many rooms wind up empty.

Obviously one reason that most pay is on a per item basis is that dwarves can have multiple jobs.  Assuming that soldiers get paid per time period it seems possible, though, that salaries can be programmed.

What I would propose, therefore, is that every dwarf with hauling jobs enabled gets paid a stipend, enough to afford a small room with a bed.  Non-legendary dwarves should still get paid for skilled labor, based on item quality when possible, but if they have hauling enabled as well this becomes additional supplemental income.  So a craftdwarf may sometimes have to move to cheaper housing if work is light, but nobody (except soldiers sometimes) has to sleep in the barracks if there are enough cheap rooms and they have at least one haul job enabled.

Oh, and what a cheap room is could be a user settable value, so the player can decide if it is value equivalent to a 2x1 with a bed and a door or a 4x4 with smoothed walls and assorted furniture.

It would obviously be nice if there was a more realistic supply and demand economy at work, but I think even a small tweak like this would make it so that fewer treasurers have to die in a pool of lava and people who don't want to turn off rent don't have scores of homeless while bedrooms lie unused.

So after many years, the king was finally arriving at my humble abode.  I went and checked out the immigrants as they came along, noting the worthlessness of each one as they came in.  Suddenly there was an alert.  A bronze colossus had arrived!  This could be trouble, the last one had taken a concerted effort of all of my melee dwarves to defeat.  I raised my defenses, put military dwarves on alert, tried to peg him with my catapults, and all the time the kings party got closer.  Suddenly before I knew it, there was the king, there was the colossus, on a collision course.  I ordered my champions to get out there and protect the king!  Hurry!

And then the Royal Guard who had come with the king walked over the colossus, raised his steel axe, and in 2 seconds he'd chopped the colossus down to a statue.  Ok, yeah, I guess the king chooses his royal bodyguards pretty strictly back there.  Time to get to work on that royal bedroom...

I've experimented a bit with Adventurer mode, and found that pretty much I die.  Sometimes it takes longer than others, but I've not found a combination or strategy that lets me get far.  If I bring a lot of NPCs, they seem to wander off by themselves and get attacked, if I try and wrestle I kill things slowly and get hit a lot while doing it, bows work pretty well, but I often can't see far enough to make them that effective, and they don't help much against gang tackling, throwing isn't bad, but when I made it my top item I started out with no weapons.  (Luckily you can find rocks)

So, any thoughts on best skill combinations?  Any thoughts on best early opponents?  Any thoughts on what to do when a goblin wrestles with you and breaks both of your legs so you can't walk?  Thoughts on what items you should loot and which ones aren't worth being slowed down by the extra weight?  Basically, if you've had some success in Adventurer mode, what strategies led you to it?

While my mind was going through all sorts of things for guard rotation and the like, but then I realized what was really needed was a building.

Basically you build a sentry post where you want to station a guard, 1x1 would probably be best, but it could be bigger if that would work.  Military dwarves could be set to sentry as a job (or maybe opened up to all dwarves as a possibility, but should be open to military) and they would arm themselves and go to the post and stand sentry.  It takes a set amount of time to complete the job and you can set it to recur.  It probably doesn't increase any skills and it definitely doesn't get completed faster by more skilled dwarves.  Since I'm not sure how the job task works, if one dwarf leaves in the middle of the job, another dwarf should be able to take his place.

Another way to do it would be to make standing sentry something that members of a unit would do while standing down, like weapon practice, and the sentry post is the object they interact with.  This doesn't make as much sense, but it might potentially be easier to implement and avoid having active soldiers leaving their patrol to go stand sentry.

I believe that currently you can station soldiers at a point to have their unit go there, but then I think you have to deal with the rotation yourselves, whereas with the job mechanism you would get 1)If there are more sentries than posts, those without a place to stand sentry would take care of other tasks or needs, 2)Sentries that need to take care of needs could do so and be replaced by others, 3) Sentries would go to the nearest open post, rather than a specifically assigned one, though you can make a spot more likely to get filled by putting a barracks nearby.

OK, so following a post on the gamespy forums I downloaded a copy of the game and played in the fortress mode for, umm, entirely too long (I was late for a job related appointment today).

In any case, I thought I'd throw out a couple of things that could potentially be easy to change and might make a difference.

First, when you build a smelter and try to smelt ore it will tell you that you need coal.  This should probably be changed to coal or charcoal since charcoal works and frankly more sites will have trees than coal veins.  

Second, I went an entire year wondering why I didn't have any fish in the kitchen screen despite the fact that my fisher was working constantly and filling up barrels.  Looking at them it says raw <fish>.  Of course, what I hadn't done was build the fishery to process the fish, but if it had said something like unprocessed <fish> or uncleaned <fish> I might have gotten the clue that it needed to be processed not just cooked.  (Luckily, the raw fish doesn't seem to spoil for some reason (at least when in barrels) so once I built the fishery I was able to start processing that fish pretty quickly.)

It also took me a long time to find out that it is the crafts workshop that produces arrows, rather than say the bowyer or the carpenter or the metal smith.  Though so far my guys have gathered bones for making bone bolts, but I've not seen any actually get produced.  A status screen that showed your various goods, where they were and which ones were in the process of being made would be helpful.  I thought I produced a bone crossbow but I have no idea where it is if I did.  Don't see anything in the weaponrack, but I think I produced the crossbow first so maybe it had no place to go and disappeared?

Oh, and I wouldn't mind an announcement when a building is completed.  The graphical representation is kind of sparse (I think because it is meant to be able to be placed underground) and a simple message letting me know a room is complete and I can start assigning jobs to it would be great and I doubt it would be frequent enough to be annoying.

So I was starting to expand my space in anticipation of more immigrants, getting serious about processing ore (though it will be nice if I can find more than just tin and silver), and even had something kill the local alligators (I'm not sure what, maybe my packs of hunting dogs and war dogs, maybe the guards for the dwarven caravans, maybe something else).  I'd made it through another winter, and got ready to flood the farmlands for their second year.  I set the floodgates to open and just after they were triggered I realized I hadn't locked the doors.  I quickly hit spacebar, but it got counted as a double hit, and the clock kept going.  Sure enough a horse and a dog were wandering through there and they managed to go through one of the doors at just the right time.  And of course, the additional room flooded... the one with the floodgate levers.  I was able to lock the doors leading to those rooms, and I have decent stockpiles, so maybe I can create a new farm before things get too bad, but I think next time there will be multiple doors between lever and floodgate, and I can't think of any way I could save that area now.