Hi everybody,
I've been playing DF for about three months now and never posted before because every question I had was already asked once. But now I have three suggestions. I didn't think it was appropriate to make three different topics of them so here they are.
First of all, I'm sorry that this post is so long. But I couldn't make these suggestions without explaning how and why I came to them.
I'd like to say that these suggestions are all based on personal preference rather than game improvement as such, however, of these three I think that it might also be useful and/or fun in general. Please do not think that I am not aware of the possibility that what I suggest here might go against the original intention of DF or something , but I don't know exactly how much DF is based on player suggestions so I thought I'd give it a try. But having read this, you can understand why I elaborate on each suggestion with an purely personal reason.
First a small background story on how I came to these suggestions.
I once played a pen and paper RPG where I was Snorri the dwarf, that went on a quest to find the ultimate artifact:
The Endless Flask of Ale.
He found it! Ever since, in any RPG I hosted, the party could randomly encounter Snorri and his mates, getting incomprehensibly drunk and destroying the place. DF gave me the idea to create Mabduggeshud, or AleFortress: Snorri's place.
So I started digging. The basic idea is this: I have a main entrance one level below ground level, with room for a trade depot. This area has been channeled so it counts as outside. An double upward ramp leads to ground level, a double stairway goes down. At the ramp are two doors and at the stairs are two doors, all operated by levers. This way I can switch doors so that I can still trade with caravans while the fortress itself is sealed off from the outside world. Provided nothing bashes them down, of course.
I have a secondary entrance that leads to two 10x6 bridges behind each other, on top of which I designated a meeting area. Since there is no direct link between this hall and the main fortress, only fresh migrants can use this meeting area. Under the bridges is a 6x20 pit that goes down 10 levels. The bottom is accessible from my fortress. The bridges are operated by a lever, and when new migrants arrive I set 'dwarves cannot go outside'... Snorri was not a social dwarf. I have underground farming plots and a fishing area so the dwarves inside can sustain themselves perfectly without having to go outside.
I sell the dead dwarves equipment to the caravans in exchange for whatever whimsical preference Snorri has at that moment. This is good because I don't have time to craft items; all the dwarves are nearly continuously partying in the huge meeting hall full of tables and statues that are all assigned. Trading doesn't always work in time because of the same reason, but that's both perfectly normal; of course Snorri and his mates are drinking all the time!
So here's the first suggestion. It might be fun in general if a dwarf in a fey mood could claim a brewery and then create an endless flask of ale. This flask would only be useable by the creator and his closest friends of course, since it wouldn't be fun if the need to brew would disappear alltogether.(Though I'm not sure if the friend system only designates dwarfs as friend=0 or 1 or if there are different levels of friends, and maybe the idea of a dwarf creating a magical object in a brewery might be too farfetched.)
The second suggestion: the ability to mark dwarves as hostile, or mark them for capture. For myself, I'd use it to decide that one dwarf had just said or done something that upset Snorri, and then him and his mates would beat the life out of him or throw him in jail for a while. In my fortress, the jail is in a burial area so the dwarf can ponder about his words while laying on a pile of dead dwarves.
For general reasons, I think this might be useful to prevent dwarves that are going to go berserk because of a fey mood or anything from destroying the place. Possibly including many reasons which I cannot know simply because my community is rather small, thus preventing certain events based on how many dwarves you have from happening.
The third one is an option in the unit menu where you can instantly see which dwarves are set to which tasks, for example a secondary menu where you can select tasks and then the names of the dwarves set to that task appear, and you can instantly remove/replace them.
OK, that's it. Time to get back to Mabduggeshud. 
Author
Topic: Three suggestions (Read 605 times)