After an "extensive" couple months of wading through this fabulous game (All hail hypnoToady!), I compiled a list of things that might be interesting. Make the game more enjoyable? Well, maybe.
Interface / Internals
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- Have "struck down" / "bled to death" / "shot to death" messages for enemies as well as dwarves (so I can tell when a bad guy is dead and who gets the credit, as well as getting a good sense of who's winning a map-wide fight without having to scroll through hundreds of combat messages).
- Add a "clean" designation to the 'd' options, tied to the cleaning labor (perhaps even add a corresponding skill?). Have cleaning (walls/floors) require buckets of water and soap for wet or syndrome-causing contaminants other than puddles of water (e.g. mud, blood, vomit, deadly dust). Mandatory use of soap to get rid of the really disgusting stuff would also force the need to make more soap, above and beyond the needs of the hospital.
- Marching: add a toggle option to the orders menu (something like "Charge" <-> March"). In the "Charge" mode, each dwarf would move as fast as they could get to the right location (as current). In the "March" mode, a dwarf would only move towards the target location/enemy if they were within a set number of tiles (10?) of the rest of the dwarves in their squad; if not, they would move towards the farthest other member of their squad instead.
- Enemy Scouting: force all enemies to path using only what is in their line of sight, or in the collective line of sight of the entire invading force (assuming perfect communications). Those that can't see a path to a dwarf or inside the fortress will instead move around quasi-randomly looking for entrances, cause mayhem, or do other things. This would prevent the current trap/building destroyer pathing abuses to force enemies into deathtraps by knowing they will all walk towards the one way in from all points on the map.
Farming / Food
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- Should be more difficult; right now it's too easy to make enough food and drink out of a tiny farm. Recommend reducing crop yields to allow the possibility of a seed resulting in no plant if sown by an inexperienced grower (and thus, crop failures, starvation, and a reason to have good farmers, extra seed, and extra food/drink as part of the initial embark). Dwarves should have to develop experience in raising surface crops (in the same manner as training animals) to make them less bountiful (currently they are way to easy since they are all useful during all seasons).
- Food requirements for non-grazers: infinite quantities of pigs, cats, dogs, and turkeys makes meat/bone/leather/eggs far too easy once they've started breeding at an exponential rate. Cats should eat vermin, dogs meat, pigs can eat organic refuse, poultry ?? (longland grass or cave wheet seeds?). Ranching/herding should be a net food loss compared to farming because of the added benefit of leather, bone, and eggs.
- Fodder: an additional food category only suitable for grazers, presumably with an underground version (?) and an above ground (hay). Can be embarked, bought from merchants, or raised on farms in order to supplement grazing. Should allow more possibility of having grazing animals underground or in areas normally hostile to grazing (and before the caverns are breached). Delivery would work under current rules by having a fodder-only stockpile in the pasture (and disallowing it elsewhere, except maybe in a linked stockpile inside a cave or building ("barn") to keep it from degrading or being stolen/eaten by local wildlife.
- Blight: periodic event, trafficked in by contaminated seed or plant materials with the traders, or perhaps from external plant life brought inside by gathering plants. When a plot is infected, causes crops to wither as soon as they sprout. Would recover over time, but possibly not before starvation is a problem. Gives incentive to stockpile more food against the possibility of famine, as well as to diversify food crops (blight would only affect one crop at a time). Possible trigger of *PAUSE* messages "Your farms have been struck with <plant type> blight!" and "The <plant type> blight appears to be over!".
- Cattle Diseases: similar to blight, but for livestock. Trafficked in by similar wildlife in the local biome or infected tame animals brought in by traders. Would only affect identical (similar?) animals, again encouraging diversity of ranching (having all of your pigs suddenly drop dead is a problem if that's all you have).
- Food Poisoning: low-skill cooks/butchers/fish cleaners/cheese makers/milkers could create food products with a hidden [CONTAMINATED] tag that would lead to a minor syndrome in dwarves that eat the infected products (or prepared food made from those products). Would normally just result in vomiting/retching/fever, but for disease-susceptible dwarves might last long enough to cause dehydration and death.
- Forage: invading goblins, elves, and humans have to eat. They bring food with them, but also harvest local plants, cut down local trees to make workshops (butcher, still, kitchen, and siege in particular), throw away refuse, kill and eat livestock left topside, hunt local wildlife, and generally wreck the local environment when they don't have an immediate way to get inside the fortress. Besiegers that start to get too hungery or thirsty (implying there is not enough food and drink to go around) will desert and retreat off the map, eventually leading to mass desertion when below the normal critical threshold. This would give a corresponding side benefit to embarking in a desolate area, since there would be little to live on for an invading army and they wouldn't be able to hang around that long without a significant baggage train or a quick invasion. A baggage train (e.g. wagons with food, drink, weapons, and ammo) would also make good targets for quick dwarf raids, since stealing or destroying them would break the siege that much quicker.
Craft
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- Tanning: should give off miasma whenever it is tanning hides. Tanning pits were historically always outside the nice parts of town because they stank so bad. Perhaps tanners could develop a resistance to miasma over time (sort of like daylight adaptation) so they're not perpetually unhappy.
- Tools: additional component of most crafting; each material should have a toolset associated that is required to set up the workshop (woodworking tools, metalworking tools, bonecarving tools, stoneworking tools, etc). Tools should only work on materials that are softer than themselves (so you can work leather and wood with stone, but need metal forge tools and mason's tools). Tool set quality contributes to workshop quality and speed. Dwarves with skills arrive with associated tools of comparable quality to their skill.
- Repair: using the clothier shop, thread, and a Repair clothing labor / seamsdwarf skill. Perhaps either removes a level of degradation or gives the 'repaired' tag to the clothing which mitigates or removes the negative thought for wearing tattered clothing. Ultimately, clothing that wears out completely could not be repaired. Equivalents for leather (requiring thread), wood (requiring glue?), stone (requiring cement?) and metal (requiring bars/fuel) would be similar, but depend on a degradation mechanic for items/constructions made out of those materials to be meaningful.
- Cooking with heat: to be particularly cruel...require fuel (anything flammable would be sufficient, wouldn't have to be charcoal or coke) to make prepared food or render fat in a kitchen. As an incentive, reduce the happiness available for eating uncooked food to make it beneficial to cook.
Equipment
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- Armor/Weapon degradation: right now, my weapon/armor smith runs out of work the moment he finishes with arming the whole militia with masterwork steel. Weapons and armor should degrade like clothing when they are penetrated, dented, or used to hit things that are harder than they are. This would make weapon/armor smithing a more valuable long-term profession.
- Cavedwarf Tech: allow flint, chert, obsidian, and glass to be allowable materials for battleaxes, made at a craftsdwarf workshop. Such weapons would be pretty sharp and massive, but easily damaged (shattered) if they were used to strike significant defenses (metal armor) and would degrade quickly. Similarly, allow wood and rock to be used as base materials for maces ("clubs").
- Throwing weapons: addition to ammunition load-out for military dwarves, allowing them to carry a small number of throwing axes, throwing spears, throwing clubs, or rocks. Dwarves thusly equipped would launch a salvo at short range just before charging into melee combat (but with a lower preference to any missile weapons they were carrying).
Materials / Constructions
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- Cement / Concrete / etc: can be made from limestone, rocks, sand, and water. Would probably require its own workshop to generate (similar to a kiln and glass furnace, but not requiring fuel). Can make concrete blocks, pipe sections, perhaps furniture. Would be quicker to make than carving the equivalent out of rock in a mason workshop.
- Fence: new construction like a wall or fortification, made of wood or metal (barbed wire). Only blocks passage for herd animals (smaller creatures, like dwarves, can crouch and slide between the horizontal members, bigger creatures just step over), and does not resist the flow of fluids or create support for anything above it. Compensate by taking less material (maybe 1 log or 1 metal bar per 3 fence sections instead of 1 per 1). Can be broken by a building destroyer (unlike constructions).
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Topic: Spam of unrelated ideas (Read 893 times)