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[bjlong]

A quick set of thoughts about crises:

First, a crisis for this topic can be defined as any event that effects the entire fortress or burrow.

Second, in a crisis, every dwarf should immediately search for a crisis-related job that best suits their skillset. For example, if a dining hall collapses into rubble, cooks and brewers would start bringing food to those hauling rocks out of the dining halls. Medical staff should be waiting nearby to provide medical support. Everyone else should be hauling rocks, unless you cap the people hauling rocks.

This brings me to a third point: there should be "support jobs" created in crises, probably both automatically and by the player. These should be things like hauling bolts to your marksdwarves on the walls, constantly running the pumps that are draining the magma from your fort until someone can rebuild that wall, etc.

There's a big problem here, though: How would the game know when something is a crisis versus a simple seige that will soon blow over, or a minor cave-in?

[Silverionmox]

If the player says so.. They'll want to celebrate it afterwards though, and compensate the lost sleep, eating, etc., so you'll lose productivity.

[bjlong]

My thought on the interface end of things would be the player's alerted of the crisis and then taken to a screen with suggested crisis jobs highlighted.

[Sergius]

Dwarf stimulus package?

[Footkerchief]

It might be pretty difficult for the game to figure out the severity of a crisis, to what degree smaller crises are actually all part of a larger crisis, and to what degree a crisis has been resolved.  Like, really difficult.  I can't even begin to think of how to tackle it, although cause-of-death tracking might be a starting point.

[Zironic]

crises will be remembered by their leader.

When Urist McBush doesn't supply enough aid to the flooded burrows....

or when Andrew Urist McJackson puts down the North Carolina rebels!

[Craftling]

And Firefighters! With Moustaches! And Helmets!

[alfie275]

Maybe a menu with a button for each type the player presses then designates a zone.

[bjlong]

Yeah, this is more of a very long term goal than anything we could work with right away. Tracking causes of deaths and figuring out underlying causes of events would have to come first.

As for letting the game determine the severity of a crisis, I figured we'd leave that out of it. We'd just set a cutoff, like "x amount of things on fire inside the fort" "x amount of things submerged in y time" "x amount of dwarves killed" etc. by any one cause.

For flooding, couldn't we have the program track where the flow is originating, and highlight that on the map? We'd have to somehow teach it what the difference between an underground plumbing system and the residential areas is, but it's a starting point.

[Vattic]

A related idea, firedwarves, you could raise the alarms and draft dwarves into a firebrigade and they would aim to use buckets to put out fire. There would have to be an intelligent way to select which fire to put out, perhaps a new designation.

[Kanddak]

I don't think I'd want this to be automated, because it would be obnoxious. I might not agree with the game about what constitutes a disaster or how I want my dwarves to respond to it.

So I think we're looking for basically looking for two game mechanics here, which take some of the ideas we're seeing for the military in the next version and extend them to squads which are not activated into the military:
1. Ability to place civilian squads on-duty and in alert modes, so that your siege operators and lever-pullers will carry food and water, not desert their stations until released, and be far less sensitive to job interruptions by enemies. You'd handle small emergencies and routine sieges this way, by going to a squad you'd reserved for just such occasions and telling them it's time to go. It could be useful to prevent disasters by saying that one dwarf will be stationed by the emergency shutoff for the magma pumps at all times.
2. Better labor handling, so that instead of individually toggling a lot of labors for a lot of dwarves, I can take some squad and say "until I say otherwise, everyone in squad A has stone hauling enabled and nothing else, and everyone in squad B has health care enabled and nothing else" until the collapsed dining hall is taken care of. Squads could have labor settings like individual dwarves, and the on-duty status would determine whether dwarves used their own labor settings or those of their squad. This would be useful for organizing extra workers to handle larger disasters.

These sorts of things would have a lot of lovely uses besides handling emergencies. For instance, after a siege, activate a special corpse-hauling and trap-cleaning detail, and call up all the furnace operators on overtime to melt armor. Or during construction of a major project, take your pump-operating military trainees and press them into service as strong, agile masons & mechanics.
They would also provide useful occupations to migrants. Besides your military, your fort might also have a sizable paramilitary organization who keep the control rooms, siege engines, and hospitals manned, haul ammunition for crossbows and siege engines, and are available as labor for special projects.

I'm definitely in favor of being able to designate squads as firefighters and have them carry buckets at all times. They should probably use something similar to the way that soldiers presently select targets to pick fires to put out and wounded/unconscious dwarves to rescue. I order the squad into some area, and they start going that direction and dealing with problems as they find them. This should probably be a duty of the fortress guard most of the time, after the upcoming squad reform hopefully makes guards less irritatingly useless. Extra non-Guard firefighters could be drafted in small pre-guard forts or huge fires.
I'm correspondingly in favor of having more ways to set fires, and more ways to set your fort on fire. Furnaces and kitchens could be prone to accidents by unskilled operators, tantrumming or insane dwarves could commit arson (damn I'd love to see a dwarf fail a mood and proceed to set fires all over the fort), and sieges could do all kinds of fun things.

Oh, and if we have the ability to post dwarves constantly in control rooms, I think children and insane dwarves should love to pull unattended levers...

[bjlong]

Both of these mechanics would work wonderfully. As a note, the suggested jobs idea could be done later, when the AI is competent enough to run a fort on its own. Then the suggested jobs would be what the AI would do in that situation.

A few more ideas:

If there aren't enough dwarves tending to a crisis (Once we teach the AI what a crisis is), then most everyone in the fort should get bad thoughts.

Dwarven brigades, like military brigades during a siege, should have to be ordered when to eat, unless they're on the brink of starvation.

The civilian squads should be able to be stationed at a certain place if they don't have jobs.

Civilian squads should have an option to only accept jobs that start from a certain region. This would make the rock haulers take the rubble out of the dining hall, and not the ore from where your miners are digging.

Stockpiles should get priority levels, and dwarves should consider both priority and distance when hauling. So the bonecrafter could go drop off his bone bolts on a stockpile right next to him, and the haulers would bring the bolts up to the marksdwarves peppering the enemy with kitten femur death.