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[Sus]

I, for one, would welcome the "auto deconstruct floor" implementation. It would save a lot of tedious micromanagement, esp. when building tall archer towers. (You need a floor adjacent to the corner tile to build the wall there, and there's currently no "floor" on top of a fortification --> you need to build a temporary floor to construct the corner wall and then remove it. The floor material gets dropped into the fortification below and becomes irretrievable.)

Alternatively, add a walkable "floor" (like on walls) on top of fortifications.

[Jheral]

I would have suggested this if I had remembered to write it down. Good suggestion. After all, you can build walls on living rock floor, so why not on floor built from blocks? And if you're going to allow walls to be built on it, then clearly you should allow ramps and (up) stairs too.

This would be very handy for creating any solid-fill z-level above a walkable level, which I am currently doing in my fort, without constantly building and breaking down scaffold flooring (since floor isn't mobile, as true scaffolding would be).

It's interesting to think about the resource problem, though.

• If you build a wall tile alone, that's 1 resource unit used per square.
• If you build a floor tile alone, that's also 1 unit.
• But if you build a floor and then a wall on it, you've used 2 units per square for a wall that's functionally the same as in point 1.

Perhaps the walls constructed in two steps, first floor and then wall, as in 3, could take longer to deconstruct or destroy with siege weapons when that's implemented? Or you could just say that you've traded some resources for a measure of convenience.

Another option would be to implement true, portable scaffolding, but I don't know what that would look like -- although it's been suggested several times, I note.

Or maybe have walls cost 2 to begin with?

As an aside, I find that bridges generally work well for scaffolding purposes - much faster and easier to deconstruct, plus they give more floor space for less material.

Oh, and +1 to the suggestion; having constructed objects be unchangable and impossible to build like that makes little sense. Just like with engraving constructed walls, this is something I feel should be added to the game.

[Aegis]

-i^2

I see what you did there! 

This suggestion would also work well with stairs, ramps and fortifications!

I mean, when a wall is one Z level below it looks/behaves like a floor when viewed from above, and yet you can build whatever you like on it! Even floors, incidentally. 

[GreatWyrmGold]

At first I thought I was going to make a complaint about how you were wasting stone or putting twice as much stone as you should be able to in one square, but...no, this is an excellent idea. Except for the double speed part. I think that this special kind of de- and re-construction should take as long as it would to de- and then re-construct the floor or whatever into a wall or whatever.

Maybe a special subfolder in the Designations menu? There's be an option for ramps, and you'd select constructions, then masons/carpenters/whatever would come over and turn the floors/walls/stairs/etc into ramps. There would, of course, be similar options for all constructions.

This isn't just a walls/floors annoying thing, though. It can reduce stone wasted to sit at river bottoms. It allows staircases to be rebuilt more easily. Putting up barricades in constructed (probably aboveground) fortifications becomes easier and more reasonable. Et cetera.

[Bloodspoiler]

+1

[Loud Whispers]

Loud whisper, may we know why?

+1/-1

The auto deconstructing thing kinda sold me, sure it'd be good, and it'd be easy and useful but it's not realistic... _{(Yes the irony here ;p)}.

[Gizogin]

-(e^i(pi))

[Funburns]

How come I can't find a maths equation complicator on Google? This is something that should exist.

Wolfram! Sic!

...

This is a good idea in both the replaces-floor and over-floor versions, for different reasons. For the latter, imagine the floor as being rebar in the walls to create cave in resistance, as per the suggestion about making double built constructions hardier against siege assault. Or would rebar be better modeled by requiring a wall to include both stone and armor-usable metal bars?

[ravaught]

Two things on this... First, +1 to the idea of building walls on floors. -1 to deconstructing the floor if you do it.

Instead, I would like to see walls build on floors be stronger than walls not build on floors. I could be mistaken in this, but the way that I envision each cube of space in DF is that it actually consists of 6 face spaces and a center space. Ceiling/Floor/Four Walls/Center Space.

Digging into a room on the same z level removes one Wall space from the room you are leaving, and one Wall and the Center space of the room you are going into. Channeling into a room removes the Floor space in the room above along with the Ceiling and Center spaces in the room you are digging into.

Of course, I know there are issues with this. Smoothing the Wall or Floor space does not remove these spaces, it simply smooths them, and does not consume the tile. Building a floor consumes only the floor space of the tile, but prevents some, but not all, other constructions. While building a wall space consumes the whole tile. The only sense I can make out of that is that Dwarves like to build their walls really thick.

But, back to the topic at hand, smoothing the floor and constructing a floor should give you incremental bonuses to the strength of your wall against the attempts of building destroyers. This gives you a choice between trading off using fewer materials for the same construction or having a stronger construction. It would also add some strategy into what is built where. For example, building your outer walls you might build on top of floors to make them stronger, while inner walls are build on smoothed or bare floors because they do not need the same level of strength. Of course, construction time would scale according to the number of steps you take to complete your walls, so you end up spending time and resources and getting durability in return.

And since this thread is on the topic of walls, I would like to offer up two more suggestions regarding wall strength.

First, walls that have walls adjacent to them on more than one side should be more stable because they are being supported. In this case, having walls two or three tiles thick would have and much higher durability than a single tile wall that is more than just the sum of it's parts.

Also, this could be applied across Z levels, so that building foundations for your walls increased their durability as well.

So, for example:
 [] = base wall defence
[][] = Each wall would get +1
[][][] = The outer walls would get plus 1, the inner wall would get +2
[][][]= (smoothed floor below)The outer walls would get +3 , the inner would get +4
[][][]
====  = (Constructed floor below) The outer walls would get +4 , the inner would get +5


Anyway, just a thought.

[ArPharazon]

Why are constructed walls treated different than normal walls, anyway? It's illogical, nor does it have any gameplay benefit.

Though, I disagree with the suggestion. So long as we have utility programs that can just change the constructed walls/floors to natural, I'd prefer Toady to work on something that would make a difference in practice.

What would be nice is, if you could build "scaffold" objects, which sit in your stockpile like, say, buckets. Then, you can order a 10-tile high wall at once, and if you have at least 9 scaffolds, dwarfs fetch them (they collect them on the ground tile like workshop materials), build a temporary stack of stair-like "scaffolding", climb up, make the wall, climb down, and de-construct the scaffold assembly, returning the scaffolds to the stockpile. I doubt Toady would ever do this anytime soon, though.

[Sus]

What would be nice is, if you could build "scaffold" objects, which sit in your stockpile like, say, buckets. Then, you can order a 10-tile high wall at once, and if you have at least 9 scaffolds, dwarfs fetch them (they collect them on the ground tile like workshop materials), build a temporary stack of stair-like "scaffolding", climb up, make the wall, climb down, and de-construct the scaffold assembly, returning the scaffolds to the stockpile.

A great idea.
I foresee some problems with canceling the bottom tiles of a multi-z construction though.