I've been playing this on and off, just haven't posted anything. Just had wisdom teeth removed so I'm a little out of it.
I started a 1.2 fort, then restarted on 1.3 when that came out. I've only managed to make it 5 years in so far before giving up on my fort (didn't like it... built it wrong
), but the main goal here appears to be feedback, so I have some general comments. The earlier comments will relate to 1.2, and the later ones 1.3... sorry I don't know which are which.
Hopped up on pain meds right now, so make of the following as you will:
- Plants, e.g. plump helmet/pig tail, appearing twice in stockpiles menu. Only one of them works for stocking plants though.
- Turrets showing up with migrant waves. My first migrant wave had a slade turret which seems a bit silly. Not sure if it would work, but perhaps change turrets so there is a base turret (e.g. dummy turret) which could be upgraded in a turret workshop via an expensive imported item? Not sure how feasible this would be.
- Bricks being created as rocks, and then getting carved into blocks, which then get made into bricks again...
- Brick reactions listed as (5) yet only producing 4.
- Elves bringing metal arrows struck me as odd (e.g. steel arrows).
- Stonecutter workshop has annoying profession requirements. e.g. rock spike requires mechanics. This makes setting up workshop profiles a bit more awkward.
- Might be nice to add some [AUTO] reactions (e.g. for burning vermin) so they can get auto-queued like looming.
- Can make slade crutches, but not standard rock?
- Blast furnance didn't strike me as all that useful due to the limited number of reactions it can do.
- Can cut some weird stone types like bricks.
- Brimstone is very annoying as it's hard to stop masons using it. It's also yellow. I hate yellow tables.
- My first embark started with a phoenix on the map. Very, very brief embark. Very pretty fire though.
- Processor priority in the configuration tool cycles the wrong way for me... I want to click and make it realtime, not the other direction.
- Gaia map gens nice and fast, but desert one takes forever.
- Hard to find flat biome borders in gaia map.
- Miners with lung damage suck. Considered a way to heal them? Medical booth which takes rare stuff and heals dwarves maybe?
- Couldn't get golems to work (under 1.3?). I'd create a cast (e.g. bronze or steel) and then send a dwarf in to do the golem making job... and nothing would happen. I'd get a yellow flash as the syndrome cloud expanded, but no golem that I could see. Maybe I'm missing something... it's not very well explained.
- Vampires keep cluttering my temple with amulets after being sacrificed.
- Newbie embark could use some tweaking. 4 nest boxes with only 2 birds is a bit silly. Also best to mix male/female animals more - kitty explosion easier to deal with than 2 dead male cats. Pretty sure the embark comes with 2 hens and no rooster, and 2 male cats. I'd also drop some of the points from some of the skills e.g. masonry as more supplies might be more useful for a new player.
- Timberyard takes way too long to build because it becomes cluttered while building. Also not sure why you need so much wood to make a timberyard.
- A tech tree would be nice, or even just a list of what each building does. It's hard to figure out initially. A guide to early buildings to build would also be cool.
- Keep getting warlock ambushes early on, and they're kinda hellish. They'll completely obliterate a trade caravan before it gets anywhere near my fort.
- Maps seem a little too deep. I like some space to plan a fort, but don't need 30z levels of rock before the caverns. Not sure if this was just bad luck or not.
- It's hard figuring out the relative worth of different things. Really need a chart somewhere indicating which metals are good for what tasks. I'm assuming stuff like the heavy/dense steel is good for war hammers, but beyond that I'm at a loss.
The above is not a list of complaints - I'm finding the mod very cool in general
. Still figuring out how to play properly though. Haven't really messed with much of the 'advanced' stuff... having enough difficulty just keeping my forts defended against trap avoiding stuff.
Some other stuff I've tried:
- Timberyard - got the 1.3 tree farming stuff working. Seems to work well, though if you don't have many initial seeds takes ages to get off the ground (which is good). Not clear what the different wood operations do though (like bark removal). Some more guidance as to what each option does would be neat (e.g. "Remove bark (for seeds)" or whatever it actually does)
- Praying for metals - good for random useless migrants. Seems slow enough.
- Praying for help - excellent for vampires.
- Stonecutter - awesome for lots of stuff
- Stone grinder - found I didn't actually have spare stone for this thing - it all went into bins/barrels/beds/etc. at the stonecutter
- Furniture workshop - not sure I used this at all except to dismantle some early wooden beds.
- Golem workshop - built it, made some casts, couldn't seem to make golems though
- Turrets - kinda cool
- Landmines - didn't find a good way to use these.
- Finishing forge - Works ok. Just takes a while. Maybe add an AUTO option?
- Crematorium - Yay! Good source of ash for lye. Burning refuse burnt all the useful refuse I was keeping though .
Lots of stuff I haven't had a chance to mess around with yet.
My most recent MW fort is kinda stuck... I don't have a strong enough military to open the gates, and everything which shows up (migrants, caravans, etc) gets slaughtered. Going to restart with some sort of cheap as hell entrance death trap I think.