While it currently has little gameplay benefit, I like to build buildings or dig out halls that are multiple z-levels tall. It feels wrong to my imagination to have dwarves scraping the ceiling in my legendary dining hall or throne room, or for the imposing fortress wall to only be head height.
The problem in doing this is that the amount of real time it takes to build a structure is often not correlated with the size, but instead how many times you have to go back and queue new tasks.
Building large projects runs into tedious micromanagement because of this. The player must make small batches of tasks to prevent dwarves Amontillado'ing themselves behind a wall or stranding themselves by deconstructing a floor. This, along with having to designate lower levels of a building first, can result in the player having to make a few designations, wait till the last wave of designations is done, then making more, etc, sometimes requiring designating walls 1 tile at a time. This also applies to channeling - if not done from top down, you have to micromanage to prevent cave-ins.
(There is some overlap with Req515, but I think the problem goes beyond that? Sorry if any of this was changed in a dev update or suggested previously, couldn't find anything on it.)
That said, it wouldn't be DF without dorfs being dorfs. The current mechanics might also play into the "foreman" fantasy a bit, as you are managing your dwarves - if so, it might not be right to fix this entirely, but giving the player more options to deal with it would be nice. I'm very happy about bedroom zones and the ability to build on top of floor constructions, and I think construction itself could use some similar QoL improvements.
Some ideas:
- I found an old thread about prioritizing channeling tasks further away from stable ground. This also applies to deconstructing floors (especially if using them as scaffolding, where you must deconstruct one tile at a time). A similar idea could be applied to constructions to prevent dwarves from blocking themselves off. If that is too automated, a way to designate "no standing" zones or priority gradients would prevent the fiddly "make another dummy construction on the side you don't want dwarves to stand on and suspend it" you sometimes have to do now. This priority could only apply to contiguous designations if you don't want a priority system for every task (which is already a suggestion by somebody else) - I think it would be fairly easy for dwarves to check if there is a higher priority tile contiguous and reachable to the task tile they select.
- Dwarves could assemble a whole section of wall or floor at once, similar to bridges. It would be nice to increase the "umkh" limits beyond 10 too, though that might be mitigated with mouse interface.
- Dwarves could construct constructions on different z-levels, especially for constructing walls from above. This would allow you to designate an entire layer of walls at a time, as long as dwarves could get to the top. I imagine it would require some substantial changes to the code to allow them to construct a wall from any angle however - maybe a specific "wall from above" construction, similar to the channel/ramp distinction would be an alternative?
- Construction could be designated on top of other construction - walls next to unbuilt floor or on top of unbuilt walls
- It would be nice to force-designate a wall with unreachable or non existant materials. (This is probably necessary to enable designating walls on top of other walls due to pathing). I often want to make a wall out of a single material, but unless you have all the materials already, this usually ends up in me queueing up a few pieces, managing other things, then going back and queuing up a few more. Usually there's enough stone running around it doesn't matter, but if you're waiting on bricks or fancier materials (like the green glass for my underwater fortress) it becomes a problem. This probably requires changes in how tasks are handled to prevent dwarves from checking them repeatedly when no materials are available though.
- On that point, it might also be nice if there is a "temporary suspend" that is removed automatically after a while - I think I've had to manually go and un-suspend walls that were interrupted by another dwarf wandering over the tile.
- Some sort of scaffolding construction could be an alternative to many of these. The best option right now is bridges along a wall, supported by the layer below. However, bridges take a long time to build and deconstruct, and only go horizontal - a similar construction (that couldn't open/close) that is much more quickly constructed would be useful at the least. For vertical scaffolding, a construction that's like an up-down stair that can quickly be constructed and deconstructed but doesn't provide cave-in support would be useful. Maybe these could search the 5 tiles above them and place stairs there too, if empty (still deconstructed at the bottom).
I'll add this to the eternal suggestion list. Imagining what the dwarves build is still fun as is. Looking forward to the changes in the Steam release so far!
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Topic: Construction QoL? (Read 911 times)