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[ravaught]

So romping around in the golden meadows of 0.34.06, I started once again to realize things that seem out of place in the Fort, and thought I would point some out.

One of the things that stood out quite clearly to me was something so simple that it boggles the mind. Simply put, there is no direction built into the game. Now, we can argue semantics about whether DF is a game or a simulation, but the truth of the matter is, whatever the case, it is PLAYED like a game. With that in mind, I had a few random thoughts that sprung forth like a elf launched from a draw bridge and ricocheted around the otherwise hollow caverns of my skull for a bit.

Fort Direction:
Expedition Leader Advisor - As is, the expedition leader doesn't do much. Perhaps it would be helpful to have him offer advice to the player. For example, if there is something that your fort is missing, perhaps he would bring it to your attention. Even better would be if this advice was taken directly from the negative thoughts of the other dorfs. So, if 25 of your 40 dorfs are upset about not having a bed, your Expedition Leader would have "We need some more beds. Too many dorfs are sleeping in the dirt." or some such. This would give you a one stop place to check for what is missing. This could also be extended to include things like needing to create more stockpiles to deal with cluttered workshops, hunters to deal with wild animal populations, making sure that dwarfs are assigned to professions for the jobs that have been ordered(so you don't have jobs sitting in the queue simply because no one is assigned to do it), it could even be used to mention things like not enough bedrooms, or not enough room to sit and eat in the dining hall.

Tasks from your dorfs - These could be simple things that your dorfs ask, that offer some kind of reward, however small. Again, these are used in much the same capacity as the adviser, but will deal more with production. For example, if too many of your dorfs are missing socks, you would get a task from your dorfs to create 30 socks. The reward in this case is actually already built into the game, where the dwarfs get a bump to their happiness, but perhaps an additional global bump could be added as the overall community feels that their wants are being looked after. These tasks would be non-critical tasks, such as requests for a certain number of furniture items of a certain type of material, or a particular type of pet. It could even be used to mimic popular trends. Perhaps different religions or castes have different tastes(in addition to individual dorfs), and depending on which group has the largest majority of members different things will be in style and thus in higher demand. You could even make some of them trade offs. This group wants these items: If you complete it, you get a bump to their happiness, but their opponents lose happiness. All of this would, I think, add a sense of personality, a sense of flavor that would make each fortress a little bit more unique. It could tie in well with the new undead arc as well. Perhaps a certain superstition holds that necromancers dislike this symbol of a particular type/material. Your dorfs, the recent victims of necro attacks, suddenly want some of them. Or perhaps other civs that have been victimized want them.

Civ Mandates - Another thought, for the mid/late game, would be to have other civilizations begin making demands/requests about how you run your fort. For example, the humans begin to pressure you to supply them with wood while the Elves of course pressure you to use less. Maybe the Elves have started a genocidal attack against the wren people and ask you to cleanse them from your lands. Again, here the system could work with both positive and negative impacts based on your choices. Maybe the humans like the Wren people, or your home civ has a treaty with them.

Anyway, however you look to achieve it, the overall idea is that there should be a system built into the game to direct the player as to what could/would/is beneficial/detrimental/necessary. The idea is to give players direction beyond the simple fail conditions. Losing may be fun, not knowing why you are losing can be extremely frustrating though, and trying to sift through the thoughts of every dorf in your civ in order to determine what the hell is going on is too tedious to be practical all the time. It is excellent for advanced players that want to customize everything for each of their individual dorfs, but it is too much for people just starting out.

As always, I welcome any comments, criticisms, complaints, curses, and most especially free drinks.

Regards,
Tony

[NW_Kohaku]

Nice rant.  Only free drinks I have around right now are tea and water, though.

First off, on the expedition leader, that's supposed to be "you".  The game is supposed to be played through the eyes of the fortress "official positions", and at first, there is nothing else but the expedition leader, so there is no functionality put on the expedition leader above and beyond the simple ability to access Fortress Mode interface in and of itself. 

Expedition leader goes to someone else automatically until there are no remaining dwarves left to control the fortress, at which point Fortress Mode ends. 

That's the functionality of expedition leader.


With that said, one of the most crippling problems DF has right now is exactly what you are getting at - interface opacity, and a difficulty for players to ever really get a real grasp of what is going on inside their fortress, especially if they are relatively new to the game. 

What you are talking about is basically half tutorial, half better game interface feedback mechanisms, and the game as it stands certainly needs improvement on both fronts.

There actually is something of the rudiments of the "tasks from your dwarves" function in the game for a while, at least, back in 40d, I remember it, where if you have forgotten to cut down trees and your woodworker industry has shut down for a while, your woodworkers will run into your mayor's office to complain about how they haven't been doing work (and hence, getting paid) in a while.

It's not something that is a easy-to-see thing in the game, however, as the game tends to bog you down in so much job cancellation spam that players don't even bother reading red text in the alerts bar anymore.

Which is the problem - the game is just... stupid when it comes to information.  We get fed tremendous amounts of junk data, but so little information, that the Signal gets lost in the Noise.


Also, keep in mind that "Fortress Starting Scenarios" are planned - eventually, we'll be sent out with a "Your civ is sending you to mine iron.  You must send back shipments of X iron bars per year," -type of goal. 

These are some pretty radically different types of ideas, however.

One is an interface issue, the ability of players to see and interact with their data in a meaningful way, the other is about overall fortress goals and interaction with the wider world, which is a completely different subject, and one that is much more likely to receive attention.

[Urist McSpike]

In many sim/builder games, the player has a council of advisers to give them this kind of direction.  It seems like the Noble/Admin screen would be the logical place to have this kind of function - not from every noble, just a select few.  Maybe not even some kind of interactive setting, like the Bookkeeper's precision, but a simple display list.

The Expedition Leader/Mayor/Baron is, I think, the dwarf who always gets chewed out when others are unhappy & demand a meeting.  So they should give the generic "needs/wants" complaint list.  Your Militia Commander could give advice on the state of defenses & the military - need more recruits, armor or weapons, etc.  The Bookkeeper or Manager could comment on running low on food, drink, raw materials, or that you have excess whatever in the stockpiles.

 

[ravaught]

Kohaku>

I wasn't ranting, or at least not trying to. I just happen to be a long winded sort of person. I find that adding a bit of background/circumstantial information helps clarify the idea much better than simply: Give the player some feedback about where they are screwing up.

You are right in that the idea encompasses more than just tasks. Feedback is a crucial element. Of course, this IS an interactive media so feedback should be fundamental to the whole exercise. You are also absolutely correct about the tremendous amount of data the player is expected to sift through. Part of design fundamental studies is learning how to get the player to absorb the maximum amount of useful information with the minimum amount of effort and attention, so that their efforts and attention can be focused on action instead of searching for clues. There are some really basic means of doing this, many of which have been used in some form or another before. However, most of them have been used many many times precisely because they work!

Examples:
A generic resource counter across the top or bottom of the screen, or perhaps in the empty space under the menu. It would contain the sum totals of all Dorfs, Lumber, Stone, Ore, Cloth, Leather, and Edible food/drink, Season, Year, and age of the fort. This would not be used to supplant the stock screen, but merely to give the player a few vital stats without even entering the menu.

^{D:%d W:%w S:%s O:%o C:%c L:%l F:%f Dr:%dr Summer of 289, the 18th Year of FortName}

With a glance you would have a rough indication of the overall status.

So all of that I really agree with you on, however, I disagree with your concept of the expedition leader. In DF, you have no avatar. You have no direct control over any specific creature, so saying that the expedition leader is your avatar doesn't make sense. McSpike hit the nail on the head in regards to what I was aiming at here. The Expedition leader, since he is not your avatar, could serve as a generic interface between you and your dorfs. Sure, you can still read their thoughts, but when you want quick summary of information, you talk to the Dorf that has the info, your Expedition Leader. 

While a tutorial would be nice, that is not what I am looking for here either. A tutorial, ideally, will only give you enough information to allow you to interface with the game, leaving the exploration of depth of gameplay up to you as a player. What I am proposing is more along the lines of a dorfish cattle prod, something to move the players in a direction, any direction(even the wrong one), when they begin to stagnate.

[NW_Kohaku]

I didn't mean "rant" as a negative thing, it was purely good-natured. 

Besides, trust me, I'm probably the single most long-winded person on these boards.  So again, "rant" is a positive when I use it.

I'm guessing, then, that you are another grad student that has taken classes on game design?  Some of these design choices fly in the face of what you may have been taught, I know. 

However, there's a problem with keeping a hard-coded stocks readout on your HUD.  What happens when players mod that?  What happens when players want to completely rewrite things from the ground up?  You need to have a moddable interface just to keep up.

Besides, I've played RTS games before - those tiny indicators at the top of the screen?  Not easy to keep track of in the heat of combat at all.  Until that little voice pops up saying you require additional pylons, you've probably got more important things on your mind. 

However, with that said, playing with a third of the game screen displaying just the buttons you can press, and another third of the screen displaying a typically rather useless mini-map, there are plenty more things that could be put into a HUD that goes while the game is running.

This, however, is a dedicated "Interface" thread that needs to be made separately.

So all of that I really agree with you on, however, I disagree with your concept of the expedition leader. In DF, you have no avatar. You have no direct control over any specific creature, so saying that the expedition leader is your avatar doesn't make sense.

Man, I get a lot of mileage out of this quote...  Here goes again:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Toady, where do you see the ability of players to affect AI behavior?  Will we see something that goes more towards having the ability to directly script dwarven AI to use certain items or take certain actions using some logic operations or a rudimentary scripting ability?  Or do you see this as being more a matter of dwarves having to somehow learn how and when to properly perform actions or use items from the properties they have in the raws alone?  While I'm obviously interested in the effects this can have, I'm also interested in what sort of game design philosophy you have about what level of control you want players to be exerting over their dwarves.

At the extreme end of the potion/material discussion, out beyond what maybe anybody was asking for, I'm absolutely against having to master some sort of scripting language just to get dwarves to poison their weapons.  At the same time, it'll be difficult to get dwarves to use certain exotic syndrome-causing materials in a reasonable way that satisfies a player, especially one using potion mods.  Maybe it'll end up being usage hints in the raws and classifications in-play for use in the military etc. with some sensible defaults.  Ideally they'd be able to handle it like food, water and alcohol (to the extent those aren't broken), and perhaps those would be brought into the same system.  For more exotic actions and random weirdness, maybe there are cases in the mods where you'd really want to write some kind of script down, especially for a non-dwarven mod race that does something or other, but that level of support is pretty hard to prioritize when I don't really need or want it for dwarves.

On the other hand, writing from the perspective that every command the player gives will be credited to fortress position holders, if an appropriate official were to order that a liquid, with usage hints/whatever in the raws, will now be used for something entirely outside those bounds (like coating a weapon with syrup), that action might be anything from brilliant to quirky to wasteful to tyrannical to suicidal, depending on the situation.  The dwarves aren't currently capable of judging their officials and it's a very difficult problem most of the time.  If a randomly-generated creature has a weakness to syrup, maybe coating the weapons with syrup is simply a practical strategy, and in that case syrup wouldn't have the "weapon coating" usage hint in the raws.  That coating action is entirely up to player ingenuity, much like ordering the creation of a complicated machine, and it's a reasonable thing to allow.

Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build.  It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected.  The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview.  If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed.  Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.

Toady recognizes that it isn't the way it is right now, but that he wants to push the game more and more into being a game where you know what your fortress bureaucracy knows.

You don't know what's in your stocks until your bookeeper knows.  You don't know what your fortress's goods are worth until your broker can estimate it.  You can't see the health screen until you get a Chief Medical Dwarf.  Many positions in the fortress exist to be the enablers of new menus, and that list of positions is growing over time, although it is yet to be perfect.

[ravaught]

I didn't mean "rant" as a negative thing, it was purely good-natured. 

I'm guessing, then, that you are another grad student that has taken classes on game design?  Some of these design choices fly in the face of what you may have been taught, I know. 

I am a game design major, yes, but not a grad student. I am also a IT professional for a geological surveying company, but that is only for the fringe benefits.

However, there's a problem with keeping a hard-coded stocks readout on your HUD.  What happens when players mod that?  What happens when players want to completely rewrite things from the ground up?  You need to have a moddable interface just to keep up.

Depends on how he counts them. If he counts using any material with a certain flag, then it wouldn't hurt at all,(i.e. [USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:WOOD:WOOD_TEMPLATE]) since even mods must have this flag in for the item to be used as wood. This is essentially what your stocks screen does anyway, if I am not mistake. But I digress, I was not trying to turn this into an interface thread.




Man, I get a lot of mileage out of this quote...  Here goes again:

Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build.  It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected.  The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview.  If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed.  Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.

You don't know what's in your stocks until your bookeeper knows.  You don't know what your fortress's goods are worth until your broker can estimate it.  You can't see the health screen until you get a Chief Medical Dwarf.  Many positions in the fortress exist to be the enablers of new menus, and that list of positions is growing over time, although it is yet to be perfect.

Knowing what you bureaucracy knows if great, but again, that is not the same thing as having your expedition leader as an avatar. Having the expedition leader as an avatar would mean the exact opposite of this. It would mean that you are controlling him like a marionette.

Let's pause all talk and thought about UI and interface here though, because it is completely derailing this suggestion. This suggestion could be summed up as:

Add advisers and basic quest style objectives to give a player direction.

i.e. Urist has cold feet, make him 30 pairs of socks. (At which point the player realizes that they have NO clothing industry at all because they have been too busy chopping off the face of a mountain and making it into little blocks, and has to begin to set one up)

or

Expedition Leader: You're people are tired of only eating plump helmets. They would appreciate it if you did something.
Manager:Your Craftsman are not able to keep up with the demand. Perhaps assigning more craftsman and building more workshops would be handy.
Broker: Here are the current trade mandates: Blah
Militia Commander: You're military is too small. Give me more cannon fodder.
Militia Captain: My troops are tired of the barracks, perhaps sending them on patrols would help break up the monotony.
Sherri ff: There is still a killer on the loose, be on the lookout for anything suspicious.


None of these things in or of itself is major, but they would all perhaps trigger the player to think about something that perhaps they may have been neglecting, thus giving them some direction in which they could move. This is irrespective of new interface options. It could be added to the thoughts of your nobles, really, though that would be a waste of a really good opportunity.

[NW_Kohaku]

Knowing what you bureaucracy knows if great, but again, that is not the same thing as having your expedition leader as an avatar. Having the expedition leader as an avatar would mean the exact opposite of this. It would mean that you are controlling him like a marionette.

I never said nor meant that the expedition leader is meant to be an avatar of the player.  (You don't have any more special control over them than anyone else, after all.)  I said that the game is meant to be played as though you were a sort of zeitgeist of the fortress bureaucracy, and that you only know what the bureaucracy itself knows. Further, the Expedition Leader is simply the most basic component of that bureaucracy, the one thing that must always exist in the fort.

The Expedition Leader is, as Toady said, the mouthpiece for your orders, like the captain of a ship at sea.  Without the Expedition Leader, a Mayor, a Baron, etc, there would be nobody giving orders, and nobody aggregating the information you need to make decisions, and as such, you can no longer see or do anything.

There is a broad gulf between that, and assuming that you are in direct control of a single, individual dwarf.  It is like the difference between playing a strategy game where you have a "general" unit on the board, and a first-person game.

Add advisers and basic quest style objectives to give a player direction.

<advisor stuff>

Perhaps you play a little too much Civilization?  I've grown a little tired talking about the X4 genre's failings...

Anyway, it would take more work than you think to add that in - for it to make intelligent and helpful advice or "quests", it would actually need to have a firm grasp of how the fortress actually worked, and that would require some rather delicate AI understanding of how the game was going.

To go back to this, for a second:

Depends on how he counts them. If he counts using any material with a certain flag, then it wouldn't hurt at all,(i.e. [USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:WOOD:WOOD_TEMPLATE]) since even mods must have this flag in for the item to be used as wood.

Actually, no, that's not how modding necessarily takes place.

I made a mod for adding different glazes into the game, which required that I make an entirely new class of materials, called glaze powders, made by crushing the proper minerals into a powder.  Lacking any better place in the stockpile screens to put them, I declared them not stone, and bone powder, instead, because there was no better place to put them, and bone powder wasn't being used by the stockpiles screen, anyway.

Again, read this thread a little, and you'll see that you can seriously revamp the types of materials you have, how they are harvested, and what they are important for, and how important they are.

Now... tell me how that militia advisor is going to make a proper estimate of how many troops a fortress needs?  Is it just numbers alone?  What about training, what about equipment - a candy axelord can take out legions solo, but your entire fortress conscripted into the military with no training and low-quality weapons is hardly better than just plain civilians.  How will it assess the threats that the player will face?  Nevermind just the sieges that may come from various modded-in races, how will it assess how much military strength it takes to turn back a Forgotten Beast with an esoteric syndrome?  For that matter, does it take traps into account?  How could it?  When does a game recognize a drawbridge used as an atom-smasher as different from simply a drawbridge used to control the flow of traffic?  I have run forts completely without militaries at all before, and relied exclusively upon traps and repeaters and magma cannons and targeted cave-ins. 

What you are describing in that militia commander box is something that might work for Civilization, where there is a very simple way to compare the strengths of units with hard-coded abilities and defined opponents that are easy to measure, as well, but doesn't work in the far more fluid dynamics of Dwarf Fortress.  You're asking it to make a judgment that is extremely difficult to build a routine to check for. 

What about when the game changes its game balance, which it does quite frequently?  How much work will that be to update it?

Rather, if advisors are to have meaningful information, there should be screens for them that simply tell you the most relevant information in the simplest and cleanest manner possible, so that you, as a player, can make the judgment.  This would be, say, the military screen, which would innately be the militia captain's purview. 

The justice screen should exist to tell you that "a killer is on the loose", but likely shouldn't say it so bluntly, and should instead give you a list of all the unsolved crimes, the guard you have assigned, and perhaps an overall mood of the guard and the fortress in general.

[dizzyelk]

One thing I'd love to see is an overview of fortress happiness. A screen that shows you have X happy dwarves, Y content dwarves, and Z pissed off dwarves. The most common complaints about your fortress are: Not enough chairs (x *however many dwarves have this thought*) Not enough tables (x *how many dwarves*) and so on. I just find it a pain in the ass to hunt down individual dwarves and see what they're complaining about, even in therapist. Having all this information in a glance would really help.

[NW_Kohaku]

One thing I'd love to see is an overview of fortress happiness. A screen that shows you have X happy dwarves, Y content dwarves, and Z pissed off dwarves. The most common complaints about your fortress are: Not enough chairs (x *however many dwarves have this thought*) Not enough tables (x *how many dwarves*) and so on. I just find it a pain in the ass to hunt down individual dwarves and see what they're complaining about, even in therapist. Having all this information in a glance would really help.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that would be most helpful. 

Tying a contentment menu to some position like a Mayor (since they're the ones that take the complainers) to get a sense of the specific points of unhappiness as direct, organized information is the most efficient way to transmit information to the player.  (As opposed to asking the computer to make a subjective judgment on which task is most important for the player to take, or how to do it.)

[ravaught]

Perhaps you play a little too much Civilization?  I've grown a little tired talking about the X4 genre's failings...

Anyway, it would take more work than you think to add that in - for it to make intelligent and helpful advice or "quests", it would actually need to have a firm grasp of how the fortress actually worked, and that would require some rather delicate AI understanding of how the game was going.

Yes, I admire Civilization. Sid Meier is a brilliant game designer. No, I don't pay it often, or at least not in the last eight years or so. I was also a fan of Masters of Orion, Caesar, and a whole host of other 4x games, but I don't think the genre as a whole was free of shortcomings. That, however, is beside the point for one simple reason: DF is not a 4x game, it is a simulation, more along the lines of Sim City than anything else. Sim City also managed to get the advisor thing right, and it suffered from all of the same drawbacks that you mentioned below.

However, here is where, and why, you are mistaken(yet also somewhat correct, strangely). Even in a game like DF, there is a numerical balance that has to be achieved. If you can quantify something, you can balance it; and if you can balance it, you can give advice on how to reach/maintain that balance.

Now... tell me how that militia advisor is going to make a proper estimate of how many troops a fortress needs?  Is it just numbers alone?  What about training, what about equipment - a candy axelord can take out legions solo, but your entire fortress conscripted into the military with no training and low-quality weapons is hardly better than just plain civilians. ..
How will it assess the threats that the player will face?  Nevermind just the sieges that may come from various modded-in races, how will it assess how much military strength it takes to turn back a Forgotten Beast with an esoteric syndrome?  For that matter, does it take traps into account?  How could it?  When does a game recognize a drawbridge used as an atom-smasher as different from simply a drawbridge used to control the flow of traffic?  I have run forts completely without militaries at all before, and relied exclusively upon traps and repeaters and magma cannons and targeted cave-ins....
What you are describing in that militia commander box is something that might work for Civilization, where there is a very simple way to compare the strengths of units with hard-coded abilities and defined opponents that are easy to measure, as well, but doesn't work in the far more fluid dynamics of Dwarf Fortress.  You're asking it to make a judgment that is extremely difficult to build a routine to check for.

With numbers. For example(and no these numbers probably wouldn't work, I would have to sit down and examine them more closely), you have 10 Dwarves in a squad. Each of them are LVL 10 in 5 of their combat skill sets. That is effectively 50 levels. Let's say that they are in steel plate, with steel being 30(used mat value, but you could use whatever numbers are most appropriate) points, plate being 3(according to the raws), for a total of 10 points defense per item, and a steel weapon, for 10 atk. So then, you tally up all of the armor that they are wearing, call it 10 pieces for simplicity, so you have 100 * 50 =5k Defense 500 Atk. Those numbers are meaningless other than as a way to track things. So, how do we know what a player needs? Well, attacks against your civ are not 100% random. The are partially triggered off of wealth, so that gives us a starting point. As your wealth goes up you start getting more difficult critters and in higher numbers. Same as if you dig to deep(which would also be a bit of good advice).  As your wealth increases your Advisor will check your Defense/Atk rating versus a rough guesstimate calculated evirons, wealth, and whatever else. If you really want to get froody with it, it could also count traps, the types of traps, number of attacks versus the number of dwarven deaths. All of this data is already being tracked. There is no reason NOT to utilize it to give players a bit of idea of what they might need to do. And as I mentioned before, advanced players would likely not even look.

Besides, why are you so hung up on the military aspect, which is only a very small portion of the overall game? Even IF Toady was not clever enough to come up with a way to have some basic guides for folks for the military aspect, there is still the rest of the game that it WOULD work for.

I am pretty sure Toady has said(repeatedly) that he is not interested in becoming beholden to support the modders. They would have to adapt. If you are playing a modded version, don't expect the advice to be 100%, which is what you are arguing about. Vanilla DF is no more or less fluid than any number of other well balanced games out there that use Advisers. If you are modding then you get what you ask for.


I am not certain why you are acting like I am trying to turn this into, or thinking of DF, like a 4x game. I tend to think of it as a violent version of Sim City, more than anything. It makes no difference that you gather Stone/Wood or that you have to have military and fight, the playstyle is fundamentally the same. If you took Sim City, and merged it with some of the other Sim series games, then gave them all beards and made them blood-thirsty alcoholics you would have DF.

Besides, having to work on an issue like this would also kind of force Toady to tackle some of the game balance issues as well.







 

What about when the game changes its game balance, which it does quite frequently?  How much work will that be to update it?

Rather, if advisors are to have meaningful information, there should be screens for them that simply tell you the most relevant information in the simplest and cleanest manner possible, so that you, as a player, can make the judgment.  This would be, say, the military screen, which would innately be the militia captain's purview. 

The justice screen should exist to tell you that "a killer is on the loose", but likely shouldn't say it so bluntly, and should instead give you a list of all the unsolved crimes, the guard you have assigned, and perhaps an overall mood of the guard and the fortress in general.

[NW_Kohaku]

You might want to correct your quote tags, there...

Anyway, I simply wanted to make clear the distinction between the two different types of games, and why things that are possible in those games are not as good an idea here.  I talked about that militia advisor as only a single example of the problems that can be faced - I could do the same for any of those other advisors.  Military, however, is simply far more difficult to pin down with a single simple formula, as I will discuss later, and so it makes a more perfect example of the problem I am talking about.

Further, to disagree on a point is not to make a personal attack.  I believe you generally have a good idea, but that certain aspects of it require revision and reshaping towards an idea that would be of greatest benefit to the most players.  Your statements have a tinge of defensiveness about them.

Giving players some sort of advice on how "best to achieve balance" does not make as much sense when players are totally free to choose what sort of balance they want to achieve.  As I said in response to Dizzyelk, giving players access to more concise and meaningful data is more useful, as it allows players to make these determinations themselves, rather than relying upon a formula hidden away in the game to try to make a guess. 

To go back to why I picked the military specifically, I can often go through most of the game without ever having to use my military, as I can simply rely upon my engineering to accomplish more reliably through careful forethought what others prefer to find in visceral direct combat.  These are two entirely different playstyles, and neither one should be excluded from play.  To make a one-size fits all advisor, it will have to be ignorant of one or both playstyles.

Likewise, you start talking about very simple formulas when you are talking about how to make these calculations... but trust me, combat in DF is anything but that simple.  A silver sword is useless, but a silver warhammer is deadly.  Smaller targets in armor which have brains to smash are more vulnerable to hammers than other targets, while megabeasts are pretty much purely spear territory.  Creatures without internal organs to damage, like thralls, are something you need to go after with cleaving weapons like axes, meanwhile.  Only bisections put them down for good. 

Likewise, fortress wealth is a total joke.  If you let your cook foolishly make a masterwork roast, your fortress value will skyrocket well beyond what mere steel weapons and armor will net you.  Value has little meaning in-game, where the only thing that matters is having the necessary raw materials to satisfy your needs.  A fortress can be bursting at the seems with value, but not have a single scrap more metal to put into building weapons.  Further, as I had already discussed, the amount of actual metal equipment you have in this game has absolutely nothing at all to do with how effective your military will be in a fight.  Pit some copper-clad recruits with maces and no shields against some legendary swordsdwarves with leather shields and decent swords (I don't think obsidian swords are fixed yet, but they would be the thing to compare against), and see who wins.

Finally, Toady doesn't want to be "beholden" to modders in the sense that he doesn't want the game to be unplayable without something like Lazy Newb Pack, or to have an only API-based interface.  That is not to say that he isn't planning on converting darn near every part of his game that he can into something that can be either procedural or modded, because that's exactly what he intends to do.

The reason Toady is leary about an API is because he doesn't want to have to constantly update it with every new change he makes to the game... and this sort of advisor would require exactly that, which is a core part of the problem I am talking about that you do not address directly.


Again, to push this into the realm of "what I agree with" rather than "what I disagree with", I believe that Dizzyelk is heading in the right direction.

What we need is more menus and data screens that show us the detailed information we need to make informed decisions on our own, and understand why we might need to focus more upon one aspect of fortress building over another. 

Simply doing what an advisor tells you fosters only a shallow understanding of how the game works, and DF is not the sort of game you can get by without understanding what is going on. 

Giving more meaningful menus to do many of the things we already do will not tax Toady overmuch, is more likely to be accomplished, and will help players more in the long run.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Wow...That's a lot of text.
Okay. Here's my thoughts, grouped into two three convenient spoilers.

Spoiler: Interface (click to show/hide)

We could really use a better interface. No doubt about it. I like the idea of having "counters" along the edge of the screen telling you you have X rock (defined as non-economic hard coulders), X wood (defined as logs of a material with the [WOOD] token), X edible food (obvious), X drink (ditto), etc; HOWEVER, this would doubtlessly cause sufficient lag to counteract any positive effect this would have on the game until such time as quantum computers or whatever become commonplace. So...yeah. We could use a better interface. But how could it tell us what we need to know? I'm about to explain one idea.

Spoiler: Advisors, Complaints, and So Forth (click to show/hide)

Alright. Another idea that's been bandied about is the idea of having various nobles be "advisors," perhaps in a manner that has been compared to the Civilization seiries. NW_Kohaku has decried this idea as requiring the computer to make too many assumptions, which is right. However, it also fits in with the idea of "the player knowing what the beurocracy knows" that...she? For some reason, I always think Kohaku is a girl. Maybe it's the avatar. Anyhoo, let's say she's female for the purpose of pronouns in this post. Let's say that there's a bunch of problems in this fortress: The carpenters aren't getting enough work; a murderer (or maybe three) has not been caught; the fortress militia has taken heavy losses every season from ambushes, animals, etc; and the baron's mandate for three bronze items will expire in two weeks, with every similar faied mandate leading to an important metalworker being beaten within an inch of his/her life. The player opens up a new Complaints screen, or Advisors or something, (Capital 'C'? I don't think that's being used yet.) He sees that the mayor notes that several carpenters have complained about the lack of work; the sheriff is worried about the murderer(s) on the loose; the militia commander wants his troops to be better armed and trained so they don't keep dying every few months; and the leader of some kind of metalworker's guild is worried that one of them will be beaten if the baron's mandate isn't filled. There--all the biggest troubles your fortress has, in a way that isn't too unrealistic. Maybe the recruits dying a lot isn't because of a lack of training, but because you are dropping them into battle to weaponise them as zombies? (Not the best idea, but go along with it.) Okay, the militia commander still doesn't like how often his troops die. Maybe there's nothing you can do about the bronze issue because you don't have any tin and any caravans bearing bronze or tin got roasted by the semi-tame dragon that sometimes mistakes them for enemies? Well, all the more reason to be worried. In short, by conveying these problems as concerns of the administration, we (at least partially) bypass the issues of how you can somehow know all of this (it's what the beurocracy knows) and how relevant it is (it might or might not be, but if not, it's the dwarves' misinterpretation, and will doubtlessly get better as the AI improves). The militia commander doesn't worry about the number of dwarves he has, or how well-armed or -trained they are--he worries about casualties! The citizens don't worry because they don't have a single trap defending the entrance--they feel safe, because the goblin-sicle maker in the entrance hasn't failed once! In short, by focusing on the nobles' interpretations of the results, rather than the game's guesses as to what you have, we can deal with most of the issues NW_Kohaku brought up and start on the ones she's about to bring up about this idea.

Spoiler: Wouldn't it be nice if people put these long suggestions in spoilers? (click to show/hide)

Yes. Especially if they spoilered the quotes, so that you didn't have to read them again and so that they'd have a better chance of putting their responses on the correct side of the /quote parser...thingy.

Don't mind that last one overmuch.

[NW_Kohaku]

I can't remember where I have floated this idea already, but one of the things I'd like to see would be multiple alternate windows that can be opened in play, as alternatives to the mini-map. 

Instead of having some sort of fixed "W: ___" indicator, I'd rather see a full third-of-the-screen window that lets you select what items are tracked (possibly from a stockpile-style menu?) so that you can tell it to show you all kinds of wood in your fortress, or just the nethercap wood logs, or maybe hematite and then iron and then steel bars so you can keep an eye on your steel industry if that's what you most need to track.

Simply having a "these are the most important types of objects to keep track of" window that wouldn't have you constantly going through a no-cursor-memory stocks screen over and over again would be a major boon.

[ravaught]

Agreed. Hell, use the half of the normal menu screen that is not in use for it. Or, if that is too much clutter, put it in the same frame with the mini-map so you can just tab cycle through it real quick. The fact that neither of those would pause the game is a plus to.


@GreatWyrmGold : That is EXACTLY what I was getting at, I was just too wrapped up in the technical bits. That's Toady's job . Thank you.

[GreatWyrmGold]

See, that's why it's good to have a layman on the team for this kind of thing--you get too wrapped up in the minuidae to figure out the obvious solution. 

NW_Kohaku: You do make a good point. Maybe there could be a "Quickstocks" menu or something that gives you a number on wood logs/stones/meals/etc, whatever you select, possibly with customisable settings (i.e. metal, weapons, armor, and ammo for "Military;" stone, wood, metal, and so forth for "Raw Goods;" various furniture types for "Furniture;" etc)? Or is that more or less what you suggested, just worded differently?