I do believe I considered that possibility in my post. It ended with the miner walling himself in with rubble.
That shouldn't happen - the miner should drag to the first tile that will
not cause a wall-fill. A simple flood-fill until hitting the first non-nearly-full tile would suffice, and flood-fills are
hardly difficult to program, and are already used in the game.
I still would think that any major excavation (meaning - you are removing stone from a broad area, like excavating rock to form an entire block of housing or a large room or excavating a whole vein of ore) would probably result in the "bucket brigade" where a wheelbarrow team would run from the mining site to the nearest cart stop stockpile and back while the miner(s) would be bouncing from one clear mining tile to another inside that work area.
I don't know about you, but that sounds to me like that arrangement would take a lot of micro to pull off.
Aside from the micromanagement of having a minecart track with stops (which you might consider micromanagement, but I don't think very many people are going to be terribly upset with the notion of using the neat new feature that we're getting), that shouldn't require much micromanagement.
Given how Toady has explained this, you'll have a stockpile for the carts to pick up junk like rubble, and a place where it will be dumped off. Presuming you have an auto-dumping site for rubble, you just need to swing your cart by that point. Aside from that, haulers will just take rubble from the mining site to the cart's pickup point. That should be as automatic as any other hauling job.
If you aren't doing anything terribly major, or if you're just doing a single tile wide hallway, then yes, it's going to be slower - that was one of the specific cases that are supposed to be slower.
I don't follow; are you saying that 1-wide hallways are supposed to be slower to carve out than 3-wide ones?
Yes, of course, that's one of the things I've been talking about - excavation of "wide" projects like housing will take less time than the ones that should be more slow, like long exploratory tunnels (which are typically the 1-tile-wide versions of tunnels). It's an entirely intended consequence to make narrow tunnels that go for length take longer while "breadth" digging should be relatively faster.
Part of the point is to make players rethink how they dig to play to what the mechanics incentivize, rather than keep playing the way they always played.
I am trying to work out if it is possible at all to include rubble in a way that 'ruins' the game for none (or at least few). If it is not, then it is my opinion that it should be off by default if included at all. I do not wish to argue the preceding sentence here, but am willing to on a separate thread if you desire.
The problem with that idea is that people will claim that almost anything can "
ruin" a game, especially anything that takes longer to do. It's an inevitable side-effect of having a game where there ARE going to be many different people with different playstyles that not everything is going to be enjoyed by everyone.
I mean, are you an Adventure Mode player? How many people in this thread are? If Toady spends a few more years of development time in Adventure Mode rather than Fortress Mode, that'll be hurting you guys indirectly, but does that mean that Toady shouldn't cater to the gameplay of people who
will enjoy Adventure Mode (and possibly aren't even playing the game yet, but will once Adventure Mode is more robust)?
Further, people claim improved sieges, especially tunneling units would "ruin" the game because those tunnelers would mess up the "natural" stone that they engrave in their legendary dining rooms, and they wouldn't want to have an ugly spot that isn't engraved.
Does that mean we should never have tunneling units or improved sieges? No, it would greatly enhance the gameplay experience for those who enjoy sieges and military gameplay in general. (And, for the record, I'm not much of one for military, and would personally be very annoyed at tunneling into my dining hall, but I still recognize how much fun other people are going to have with that.)
Saying that if anybody disagrees with the mechanic, then we shouldn't have added it to DF, we would have wound up not adding anything - what new features
haven't been controversial in DF?