Print

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

[Phleem]

I've been enjoying DF a lot, enough to send in a nice donation, but there are a lot of things that I find painful. I decided to make a list. Some of these no doubt have workarounds that people will tell me about, which is good. Others are reflections on the priorities of the developers, and not likely to get changed, but I thought I'd at least post them for people to see.

To be clear, I enjoy the game and appreciate the work and creativity that goes into it.

That said, here's a list of things that I find frustrating and not fun (with a lower-case f) in 31.25:

* Scanning around the map with "k", "v", or "q", and needing to switch to one of the others is annoying every time it happens. If it's unfeasible to add a new combined mode that lets you inspect things but still drop down into the ordering mode, how about an option so at least the cursor doesn't jump away back to the default position each time you toggle between "k", "v", and "q" modes?

* Moving from a dwarf selected in the military screen to go inspect their condition or inventory is many clicks. Please add an option to the military screen to zoom to a selected dwarf. And zooming back from a dwarf to his squad in the military would be nice too.

* Military dwarfs not actually wearing their armor: part of the reason to need to switch back and forth to the dwarf's inventory screen is a sad tendency for soldiers to run off to combat when requested while not wearing the armor that you might expect. You can have the happy green check marks for gear showing up on the military screens, but sometimes you'll find they are not actually wearing what they have allocated. Usually I find this out when a copper axe lops off some useful part of your dwarf. Losing is not as fun when it because the game interface has lied to you. Suggestion: Add a second check mark for "actually wearing item".

 * Finding a particular dwarf out of dozens on the unit list (or Armok help me, hundreds) is long and slow. Sorting options on the Unit list would help save a lot of keystrokes: Alpha by name, arrival date in fortress, by attribute, by type (dwarf, deceased, invader, tame, etc), or by user added tags would help. Also by typing the name to search.

* Making soap: please fix the mixed buckets problem, and allow prohibition of cooking all forms of tallow, not just ones that I already happen to have in stock. And it would also be good if it were easier to stop Urist MacOCDHandWasher from using up the soap before it can get moved into the hospital stockpile for those few bars I manage to produce every year or two. And why the heck don't caravans sell soap?

* Training madness: trying to understand how to get meaningful training improvements through the seemingly magic combination of squad size, composition of skills, barracks layout, etc is frustrating. Having to decide whether to train 12 months a year verses 6 monthes and so trading off happiness for training is a fun gaming sort of decision, but spending hours trying to figure out why the three man squads aren't sparring much and learning it's because of things like a member is stuck in a loop trying over and over to equip a cave bat leather cap that for some reason he can't get on is not. Or that each time your master armorer produces a new piece of armor there is a mad shuffle of upgrading interrupting everyone. The suggestion here is to simplify this system so you are not trying to micro manage each dwarf's environment, either by making the difference between micromanaged and not micromanaged less huge or by eliminating some of the complexity of the different sorts of training.

* Missing trade liaisons: It would be nice if meeting the representative of other civilizations was higher priority than gathering thistles, or at least if you didn't have to turn off "dwarfs gather food" for every single one to keep your broker from wandering down to the plump cap fields instead of doing his job. Suggestion is to either add a setting for the broker that says to "wait for meeting", to make the "all dwarfs harvest" options allow you to specify individuals somehow, or some other solution to avoid missing so many liaison meetings.

* Requesting generic products from trade liaisons: I don't want to go through all 100 different kinds of leather and tell him that I like each one. I don't care which kind of leather you send me, any will do please. Suggestion is to add generic "leather" and "cloth" categories to liaison meeting screen.

* There are never empty pots at the still. As far as I can tell, I can limit the number of pots that are assigned to all the other stockpiles to try to prevent them from being used, but I have many other stock piles, and setting the "max barrels" on all of them is clumsy, because it will keep going up over time and there are many places to change. Maybe a way to have "min barrels empty barrels" would be good?

* I often don't realize I have cluttered workshops. A visual indication that a workshop is cluttered would be great.

That's a few ideas for things that would make things more fun for me. If I'm lucky every one of these is just my own lack of clue and some helpful people will post easy workarounds!

[Darkweave]

This should help with the military:

How I get weapon-masters with legendary fighting and good shield skill in 12 to 18 months sans danger rooms:

Create squads containing five to six dwarves - I find this to be a good balance between training time and micro-managing
Set them to train all year round - leaving it at 10 minimum is fine in 31.25
Have them sleep in the barracks
Ensure they all use the same weapon type
Ensure they all have waterskins and backpacks
Have a food & booze stockpile in the barracks
Set them to active

Military dwarves level up skills like student, teacher, observer, concentration and organiser over time. Later in the life of the fortress when you expand your military it may be worth splitting off your first few squads to train new recruits. Having some masterwork beds, statues or a mist generator in the barracks ensures they never get unhappy due to long patrol duty. Combining the mist generator with flooding functionality can be very useful to get your military some swimming skill.

The armour switching can be a bit of a pain at times I agree but short of assigning items manually to each dwarf there isn't a whole lot that can be done at the moment as far as I know. Try not to have your barracks, armour/weapon stockpiles and forges too far apart. You could also trying setting all of your squads to have no uniform, produce a load of armour and weapons, then re-apply the uniform, hopefully they'll all pick up the armour correctly.

In the stockpile screen you can set a number of "reserved barrels". Set this to 10 and you should always have some spare barrels for booze production.

You shouldn't need all dwarves to harvest, just disable all other labours on your farmers and you should be swimming in crops. Disable most of the labours on your broker and maybe even have him double up as the manager and nothing else and he should be free for meetings most of the time.

I'd also recommend you try out Dwarf Therapist, it's a very handy tool for managing the labours of dwarves and allows you to sort by tonnes of different things including migration wave, squad, profession etc.

Some of your points will hopefully be fixed in the next release. Toady has alluded to changes being made in the way trading works for the next release so hopefully it will be a bit easier.


Apologies if you feel I've missed anything or been vague, I'm rushing this a bit as my girlfriend has work in six hours and I'm keeping her awake. I hope this helps. There is a workaround for getting the water out of buckets, hopefully someone can direct you to it.

[gahyoujerk]

About the pots and barrels never being empty for booze or food.  Make a good sized furniture stockpile somewhere near your food and booze production, mine is 10 x 10.  Now permit only barrels and pots.  Now you will have a stockpile where all your dwarves will put empty barrels and pots.  Also just create lots more barrels and pots.  I would say a big problem that cause this is you just aren't producing enough pots or barrels for your supply of things that fill them up.

About the clutter problem, you will see CLT everytime you go to your shop to assign orders.  But besides this clutter is caused by your stockpiles being full.  I had this problem cause I made too many beds and coffins accidently and filled up my furniture stockpile.  You can dump items you think you wont use much, to save stockpile space or create a new stockpile and getting your dwarves to take some items there using the q t command.

About requesting generic leather and cloth.  You can get quite a lot of cloth from the elves, they always come with tons of it.  I think the humans normally come with lots of leather.  If you request for leather or cloth from the liason then you're paying more of a price for the item then you would just buying it from the elves or humans.  The reason the liason is so specific is if you are looking for a certain kind of metal or leather or cloth etc that you just can't seem to find no matter what you do.

[crekit]

You never, ever, EVER have enough barrels. (or pots, but they look like tables in ironhand tileset so I don't use them much.)

[Endiqua]

There is a workaround for getting the water out of buckets, hopefully someone can direct you to it.

I believe the only workaround for this is during a trading opportunity, you can mark the water for dumping and request the bucket be brought to the depot.  It is possible (but I don't remember for sure) that milkers will also dump out buckets to be used for milking and then put the milk in a pot/barrel, but maybe someone else will know the "fer sure" on that one.

I played for years without using Therapist but recently gave it a try, and while I wouldn't say the game is impossible without it, it does facilitate task assignments and the like, such as "why isn't anyone milking, do I even have anyone set to do that?"

Re military - while in the military screen, hit e for equipment, then P for Pri/Assignments and that should show you what they've picked out for themselves, at least, such as a giant badger leather robe or whatnot.  Whether they are actually *wearing* it is a good question.

I tend to use Replace Clothing and Exact Matches once I know I have full sets of armor ready to go, and I specify the materials whenever possible.  For example, there may be a copper/bronze uniform and then I'll make the iron/steel stuff while they're wearing that, and then there'll be a steel uniform for them while I'm working on the candy armor, if I'm so lucky.  That way they aren't always saying "whee, new breastplate!  Screw patrol duty!"  When I'm doing a big upgrade, I'll put them all in the "Naked" uniform with no items, station them somewhere, let them strip, and assign the new uniform.

Re pots/barrels - you shoulda tried to manage this situation before rock pots and on a map with limited wood.     Seriously - lots o' pots are the answer here.  I have a dedicated stockpile and queue up 30 more whenever I see it's half empty, personally.

Agree on the trading on both counts - the specific requests are helpful when you want to please a particular dorf or when you've picked a Baron who likes something stupid, but it would be nice to have a generic "leather" or "meat" option. 

[Quietust]

For empty barrels, press "p" and increase the "Reserved Barrels" count - now dwarves will stop assigning barrels to stockpiles once there are only that many remaining, ensuring that you can use them for brewing. This has actually been in the game since the old 2D versions.