1. A global job allowance. Much like the per dwarf v-p-l, but global allowing us to turn off a whole class of job all at once without going to every unit that does it.
I recently decided to try something with a siege. I set up a backdoor into my fortress and lined it with a large number of stone fall traps. After welcoming the goblins to come in they promptly started dying. My dwarves though immediately decided they should run over there to reload the traps. There were still many goblins waiting to die. This created a very large mess.
However, learning on my part that they would consider reloading the traps above everything else, I would turn off mechanics for them so they didn't. It is far too much of a pain to go through every single dwarf to turn it off though, and then do it again to turn it back on. Global off please.
2. No children designation. I know I suggested a playground to keep kids occupied before. I would most like to see a "No Child" designation.
Very recently I went through my normal motions to drown yet another evil sheriff of Nottingham. Sadly, that act of opening the murder path to the outside promptly caused 4 children to get the idea of exploring the passage. They had already travelled it over 100 times, but they just had to walk there. I ordered the death of all of them.
The joys of drowning yet another evil sheriff did not outweigh the loss of 4 siblings in the minds of my young marks dwarves. One went beserk and began taking pot shots at his parents, another just threw a tantrum, other children just lay down and wept.
Thankfully though time reversed itself and none of that is remembered as having happened. Except for me. All because there is no way for parents to tell thier children DO NOT DO THAT!
3. Dwarven children that have reached adulthood still follow thier mother around. Please let them grow up! It is sad seeing a teenage dwarf in full plate aromor run around after his mother.
4. I am sure this has been suggested before, but we need weapons practice dummies. I would guess that at least to accomplished or professional skill levels should be able to be developed working with a dummy. Sparring is far to dangerous with unskilled yet strong and mighty dwarves.
5. Jobs need to cancel themselves sometimes. I have a bunch of stockpiles that I like to fill with stone. I can't have them continously filled with stone though, because that would actually slow things down during critical moments. So I set these stockpiles to grab stone when there is nothing better to be done. I can't always anticipate things coming up though. So when I remove stone from the list of things that the stockpile should get I would like it to remove all of the jobs for grabbing stone that don't currently have a dwarf assigned. It is silly having to wait for those 20 jobs to finish.
6. Reloading stone fall traps always drives me nuts. I have yet to see one of these traps figure its reload stone as the one that is right fucking there. Once I had a trap that was currently inaccessible pick a stone halfway across the world and directly where I wanted to build a bridge. The bridge kept being suspended until I could figure out that the trap had claimed that particularly ugly piece of sandstone. Is it too much to ask that the stone isn't chosen until a dwarf actually goes to preform the loading; and at that time he picks the closest available stone to the trap, instead of hauling one all the way there?
7. Proactive drinking. I like to keep my dwarves happy, it actually bothers me that they had a negative thought about being thirsty when they over slept.
On the other hand, they might have been right by all the drink they want. However they set off for a job at the other end of the fortress and then realize they want a drink. I would much rather see them drink early and for an appropiately shorter period before taking that job, than walk all the way there and be unhappy. Small check guessing how long it will take versus how long till they need to drink. Just drink early and drink often.
8. Do dwarves ever tire of having kids?! You would think 10 would be enough. I tried playing around with the baby and child ages in the raws too. There might be 2 different suggestions here. Limit on just many kids that woman is willing to pop out; and second disallow getting pregneant while she already has a baby. Then adjust the baby age up some. Dwarves are set to live 150 or so years after all, why shouldn't we baby them for 3.
9. Quick keys in building. I am sure I have read a few suggestions along this line. Building a bridge is a great example since you can use just about anything. I would love to have something displayed somewhere, maybe the bottom line. That says "(S)tone (B)locks B(a)rs (L)ogs" and the keys in parenthesis would jump to the first item of that type.
10. Piles, piles everywhere; and why does coal (under bars) mean charcoal too, flasks (under finished goods) also means waterskins, boxes and bags (under furniture/siege ammo [what kind of screwy grouping is that]) never grabs empty bags? Why do we have to enable and disable these things to see what is there? Screen space doesn't seem to be lacking, there is a big blank space just waiting for the enable. Just have all the stuff displayed there with nothing turned on and get rid of that stupid enable and disable. While you are at it get rid of those defaults, I can't even count how many times I went to hit F to forbid something in there and caught the D. Then I had to redo the entire piles settings. Modifying the settings for a pile is something that a new player isn't likely to figure out early and doesn't need those defaults.
So something like five suggestions here: seperate items more clearly, get rid of the enable/disable and its defaults, display all the choices, better coloring grey/light grey/white is not a big enough difference, allow quality distinction. I know I didn't explain all of them.
11. While I am at piles, from time to time I create a stockpile around walls and furniture. Then the development of things requires that furniture or walls be moved, however the pile is still properly placed. I would like to be able to resize the pile, fill in that missing spot, whatever. It is nice that I can p-x out a spot if I need to, but there is no way to define that back in. Some people are going to say so what, for those people all I have to say is pay attention. Pile 1 grabs things well before pile 20 and it can be important from time to time.
12. Armor. I still can't figure out why dwarves don't grab the best possible armor to thier specified level automatically. I also can't figure why when better armor is made they won't upgrade. Please can we get these things?
12. Again with the armor, this time a matter of the armor user skill. The skill should increase with just walking around in armor. If you need to prove this to yourself go out and get a pair of steel toed boots. After a day or two of walking around in them it will feel comfortable. It doesn't take someone actually swinging a hammer at your toes. Although that will give you happy thoughts if you are wearing them, if not you will likely have broken toes and one of us will order you drowned. Dwarves are actually sleeping in thier armor, don't you think that would teach them how to handle wearing armor better, or do you like like sleeping in steel toed boots?
13. The stay indoors order. I still can't figure out what is so hard about this for a species that is supposed to be wanting to that anyways. Reiterating something I mentioned above about children immedietaly deciding to explore a passage, well it seems there goal is to walk around outside. I also have another odd dwarf that wants to store a claimed turtle, however that turtle is outside. Can we please get these jobs and actions to check the orders before they start. If a child takes it into thier mind to wander to point f,g,h and that is within the outside X,Y,Z then it just should be aborted by the order. A dwarf shouldn't have to walk outside before realizing he isn't supposed to be there.
14. It might be concieveable to add an indoors/outdoors definition to specific locations. 80-100,80-100,0 might be what I would define as outdoors while 80-100,80-100,z!=0 would be indoors. I know some designation abilities were added, perhaps a simple outdoors demarcartion line would be enough.
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I am sure many of the above were mentioned before. I also don't expect any of them to make it to the next version, they are just food for thought.
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Topic: A stack of odd suggestions (Read 1223 times)