Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sophismata]

Having recently tried a game in an area without forests (not even shrubs) of any sort, I've come across three things that I find, at the least, interesting.

1. Levers: Levers, as has been said previously, trigger all connected mechanisms at the same time. However, it is impossible to alternate mechanism activation with a lever. For example, I hooked up two doors to the lever and pulled it, opening the doors. I then hooked up the floodgate, and pulled the lever. Because the doors are already "activated", they deactivate first and the floodgate won't trip until the second pulling. The second pulling, of course, opens both doors and the floodgate...

2. Stoclpiles can be assigned to take from other stockpiles. Indeed, the manual suggests using this function to, for example, divide a mining stockpile into ore, gems and stone, which can be kept closer to your industry. Unfortunately, while it is possible for one stockpileto take from many, it is impossible for many stockpiles to take from one. As an example, a mining stockpile can be set to take from stone, gem and ore stockpiles and will do so, combining all the material in one storage area. However, the reverse is impossible; assigning the stone to take from mining will cancel the gem or ore, and vica-versa.

3. No wood maps are exceptionally difficult, which is fine. Provided they are happy in other areas, your dwarves can survive without beds for long enough to grow and harvest Tower Caps. However, knowing that you have no wood, one would assume that's what the merchants would want to bring... at hugely inflated cost, of course.  .

[ August 28, 2006: Message edited by: Sophismata ]

[Mechanoid]

It is planned that the traders will bring and sell more and more types of goods as development progesses, until you can buy anything that's possible to make in the game (and then some, possibly; magic weapons on sale? i'm there!)

[Aquillion]

For the first one, I had a suggestion that would let things like that work, here.

For the third one...  I think that the first Dwarven caravan should always bring a few essentials...  a pickaxe and an axe, for instance.  I don't know about wood, though...  something about traders carrying plain, generic wood all that way seems a little odd to me, even if it does make sense.

A better idea might be to provide alternatives to wood in most of the other places where you need them...  at increased cost or risk or decreased effectiveness, of course.

One related thing that someone sort of suggested was an option to burn completed wooden items into charcoal/ashes, the same way you can melt metal items now.  This would at least increase the player's versatility in dealing with limited wood.  Perhaps there could also be an option to burn certain other items, like grass, cloth, pig tails...  of course, you'd need an awfully large amount of such junk to equal the wood from a single tree.  But it could be used to produce essential items in an emergency.

A while ago I suggested the ability to make silk hammocks as an alternative to wooden beds.  This would help a lot.  Really, in the real world wood isn't the essential part of beds anyway...