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I really like the new system.

127 (35%)

Better than before, but more needs to be done.

93 (25.6%)

It doesn't make a difference to me.

41 (11.3%)

The changes don't really address my issues.

6 (1.7%)

I don't like it at all.

35 (9.6%)

I have mixed feelings on the matter.

61 (16.8%)

Total Members Voted: 362

[slink]

I hadn't intended to post in this thread even though I voted, but since I did so by accident I might as well continue.  I voted that the change doesn't address my concerns.  I wasn't concerned about how much stone was dropped and nothing that I wistfully wish to come about is advanced by the change.  However, it seems to be a part of minecarts and wheelbarrows, so I accept the change gracefully.  It's not that I was particularly wishing for minecarts and wheelbarrows, either, but they sound like an interesting addition to the game.  I do enjoy the mechanical aspects of DF.

My main concern is a potential shortage of building material in the colors of my choice.  That's been partially addressed by getting more than one block per rock.  I didn't usually build with blocks, but I don't mind doing so in the future.  As an aside, I can't see how adding a step makes building faster, that is, using block instead of stones.  But again, I don't mind that change.  The part that has not been addressed, at least in my mind, is the potential loss of rare colors through probability.  I enjoy using realgar for my shops, if it is on the site.  If there is four-stone pocket of realgar, chances are high that I will only end up with one realgar stone.  Shops are not built with blocks, so I can't get back the three lost stones for my buildings.  Likewise furniture requires stones, and again the rarer colors could easily be in too short supply.  I could mod around this by changing the colors of the available stones for every embark, in the raws for that save.  It's a nuisance, but I can do it.  Or, I can create stone at my smelter.  This is much easier, but leaves me feeling vaguely dirty.  Better dirty than unhappy, however.  That's what playing a game is for, to be made happy, right?  If I wanted to be made miserable I could go read the news headlines.  Again.

It will be an interesting change in my outlook on my founding Dwarves.  They have always been seven peasants with picks, who dug like crazy to provide a home for the migrants to follow.  Over the years they became Legendary +5 miners, and were the only miners ever present in the fortress unless a disaster killed all of them.  Their clan was MacUthar, the Firsts. 

With the new system, mining will be like wood-cutting, skill-less with regard to results.  It can be handled like non-shop masonary work, something done by the masses.  In fact, I am thinking of dividing my hauler-class citizens by gender.  Males will cut wood and females will dig stone, when required.  Everyone will build walls and haul stuff.  Loss of speed will be off set by large numbers of hands.

That leaves me to decide what to do with my founding seven.  Being head of a clan of untrained laborers is hardly an honor.  Perhaps they will become the masons and engravers of the fortress.

[NW_Kohaku]

I would prefer then that the challenge came in the form of a cave-in or a crop blight.  Because if the challenge is predictable and constant, all it means is a bit more hassle in setting up a new system to deal with it -after which the game is no more difficult than before.

Actually, "crop blight" (or rather, pests in general, which can include things like locusts or fungal rot or just an infestation of caterpillars) is a major part of the continuing Farming challenge because of this. 

The thing is, however, if you manage it well, resource limitations should be a concern throughout all of your fortress's lifespan.

In games like, say, Supreme Commander, you have really only two resources, mass and energy, and energy is created through reactors you set up with mass, so mass is the real core resource.  It's generated constantly, but the constant flow you get in is limited.  Everything you try to build takes mass, but unlike most strategy games, you don't pay an up-front cost, it just takes, say, 10,000 mass total to build a thing, and a given worker can build 3 mass per second of materials, and you have an income of 120 mass per second.  Once you have spent the total mass you need, you get your thing you were building.  Dumping extra workers increases the rate you can spend your mass, but if you hit the maximum rate of mass income, it just slows all projects down equally.

As an RTS, of course, you're constantly building massive armies and throwing them at the enemy in massive hoards, so you need constant replacement units. 

This works as well for the organic resources of farming, as food and wood and clothing and maybe organic alchemical resources if we get them in later will all be resources we are constantly consuming and replenishing, as well.  That is the other point of the farming improvements; making fertilizers into a functional cap on the output-per-year of a farm. 

This can be done to a degree with inorganic/mineral resources gained from mining.  While technically not inorganic, coal, for example, is a resource you're going to want to continuously develop and consume.  If weapons and armor degrade or need repair, metal may eventually be something that you need to have in a steady stream of supply, as well. 


With all that said, however, I do believe that the notion of an unpredictable mining feature would be the best feature. 

From a gameplay perspective, we could start with geologic formations as well as 3d veins to make the actual topography of a stone layer a little more interesting.  If we have unusual structures, it will help make the exploration of the otherwise generally boring stone formations more interesting, especially if we hit surprise magma tubes or high-stress formations.

We can augment these things with more deadly surprises underground, whether they are pockets of dangerous gasses, weaker stone that are more likely to collapse, tapping into a pressurized magma chamber that will explode if you mine too thin a wall next to one, or other things to keep miners on their toes.

Rubble, I still believe, makes the whole thing slower, which in turn, means that you will try to stop and make the choice of mining those things that give you the most return for your time, rather than just strip-mining everything without a thought, and hence, is required to make the rest of this more interesting.

Gasses and ventilation, likewise, is a long-term dream of mine, which adds many of the same logistics challenges that minecarts will add, although we will probably need either some sort of pumping system, or else a oxygen-producing plant that must be farmed underground to make the system have more meaning than just digging some extra air tiles. 

As I said in the other thread, something I'd hopefully like to see mining eventually become is something more akin to a board game where you would have a choice of drawing face-down cards from different decks that promise different things, or perhaps more like a game of minesweeper, where you have clues in the rock that tell you if you are getting close to certain types of minerals or perhaps dangerous events, and you have to make choices as to what you're going to risk mining into and for what potential goods. 

[bombzero]

Im slowly starting to like NW's conceptualization for the final game more and more.

[Graknorke]

I'm liking the minesweeper idea, I remember that on my first real fortress I embarked on a huge, shiny, obsidian mountain. I spent so much time digging exploratory tunnels while looking for a magma chamber or something nearby. Not a single one between the surface and cavern layer one.

So I'm pretty biased towards that, and I'm still bitter that I've never found magma on any world. I've broken HFS twice but never found magma.
As well as the fact that the feeling of resource management is great to me, that by, say, limiting the number of wood storage piles going into the barrel shops, I'm affecting so many parts in a hugely complex machine,lots of which I probably won't have accounted for. I like to mentally visualize a huge wall covered in gears, representing the resource system. When I decide to make adamantine,  I'm putting a gearbox between the adamantine supply and the system of the metalworks, and those changes will reach to even the furthest ends of my machine. /ramble

[Arkenstone]

So I'm pretty biased towards that, and I'm still bitter that I've never found magma on any world. I've broken HFS twice but never found magma.

You must have done so on the older versions then; with the current one, it's uncommon even to find adamantine before hitting the magma sea.

I'm not sure I especially like the change for several reasons:

1: A percentage chance--especially against the player's favor--makes it easy to get luck screwed at the worst possible times. Sure, if you are lucky and always hit a boulder 1/4 times you get the same amount of stone. Chances are, though, you might fail again and again and again and again and... get very little material. Likewise, you could get lucky (likely much rarer) and score lots of boulders. It leaves too much to chance.
2: Rare stone and ore might get really screwed over by the change, due to the above reason. Mine a cluster of 5 *insert rare stone/ore here* and roll within the 75% fail rate? Well, sorry, you're not getting anything. Tough luck with that Platinum cluster!

Other than that, it's a good idea as far as I can think of, I just do not trust the percentages at all.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong on anything I've said.

Also, partially ninja'd.

With a 5-ore cluster, you've got 23.7% chance of nothing.

Now, is that really a bad thing?  It's not like you're potentially going to wait a long time before mining it anymore.  If you were looking for such clusters, the randomness is just part of the luck of the draw, there could just as well not have been a platinum cluster there in the first place.  If it was just something you found while digging out a hallway; then oh well, you weren't expecting it to begin with.


As a side note, I don't really care for said small clusters of ore in the first place.  Native platinum has other platinum-group elements in it that make smelting it well outside of our tech range, and native aluminum doesn't even exist! (At least not that I've read...)  The only other small-cluster metal I can think of is bismuth, and if you want more of that just mod it to 'vein'.

[Martin]

Gasses and ventilation, likewise, is a long-term dream of mine, which adds many of the same logistics challenges that minecarts will add, although we will probably need either some sort of pumping system, or else a oxygen-producing plant that must be farmed underground to make the system have more meaning than just digging some extra air tiles. 

Well, I think the solution to ventilation would have to be cave moss, otherwise the caverns would be inconsistent with artificially dug out spaces. The caverns clearly don't suffer from ventilation problems, so that must be the cave moss at work. We'd need a way to muddy floors without the upper z-level and grow moss before a cavern is revealed (otherwise you might not be able to even dig to one). Show gas build-ups like miasma.

Collapse is hard, mainly because it so severely infringes on how we build. It was very liberating to lose the 7x7 limitation, and it was frustrating to count wrong and bury your best miners. It'd be nice if they could toss up the same warning as before they're about to hit water/magma (Morul cancelled dig as it is likely to collapse the room). Though it would be cool if you could have different support sizes for different kinds of rock (obsidian will permit 11x11 while soil won't go past 3x3) and some non-blocking way to shore up the room. Maybe constructed floors automatically support the room, so you could do them in a way that still gives you freedom.

Earthquakes would be a nice touch as well - perhaps more frequent as you dig deeper, and stronger at depth. They'd randomly move light stuff around, heavy stuff at depth. Maybe collapse rooms at random that are built right at the edge of the limitation, and knock dwarves off of ledges, down stairs. That'd return a bit more of the flavor of the 2d version where the challenges would increase and persist as you dug deeper. We have a little of that now, but it's pretty tame by comparison.

[Martin]

With a 5-ore cluster, you've got 23.7% chance of nothing.

Now, is that really a bad thing?  It's not like you're potentially going to wait a long time before mining it anymore.  If you were looking for such clusters, the randomness is just part of the luck of the draw, there could just as well not have been a platinum cluster there in the first place.  If it was just something you found while digging out a hallway; then oh well, you weren't expecting it to begin with.

That's why I suggested the change to ore mining. Most of what we're using stone for is quarrying - and that's a real skill. But you don't quarry ore. You get the ore by brute force and crush it down. You can't fail to collect it no matter how bad you are at it. You can fail to recognize that there's iron in there, but I'm assuming we already know that we've hit magnetite. You can also fail to extract the metal from the ore, but that's not a failure of mining - it's a failure of smelting - so collect the ore at 100% and move that skill to the furnace operators - who are also skill-less.


And for the folks that are worried about running out of metal, my proposal would allow for non-vein ore to still be processed for metal. The yields would be low, and you'd have to trade out your usable stone for construction, but you'd get some fraction of a bar of metal out of every tile - if you're willing to spend the labor and provide the fuel to do it.

[Arkenstone]

The thing is, however, if you manage it well, resource limitations should be a concern throughout all of your fortress's lifespan.

In games like, say, Supreme Commander, you have really only two resources, mass and energy, and energy is created through reactors you set up with mass, so mass is the real core resource.  It's generated constantly, but the constant flow you get in is limited.  Everything you try to build takes mass, but unlike most strategy games, you don't pay an up-front cost, it just takes, say, 10,000 mass total to build a thing, and a given worker can build 3 mass per second of materials, and you have an income of 120 mass per second.  Once you have spent the total mass you need, you get your thing you were building.  Dumping extra workers increases the rate you can spend your mass, but if you hit the maximum rate of mass income, it just slows all projects down equally.

As an RTS, of course, you're constantly building massive armies and throwing them at the enemy in massive hoards, so you need constant replacement units. 

Heh... In RTS's I always just built up my base until I ran out of resources; then I felt sad that I couldn't continue building.


I'm not opposed to making mining take more thought, just more micro.  I'd rather be contemplating the best return on in-game resources than on play time.  If I wanted to do the latter I'd go play runescape or something.  Rubble is not required to counter strip-mining, any form of hazard would be sufficient.

Rubble, I still believe, makes the whole thing slower, which in turn, means that you will try to stop and make the choice of mining those things that give you the most return for your time, rather than just strip-mining everything without a thought, and hence, is required to make the rest of this more interesting.

Gasses and ventilation, likewise, is a long-term dream of mine, which adds many of the same logistics challenges that minecarts will add, although we will probably need either some sort of pumping system, or else a oxygen-producing plant that must be farmed underground to make the system have more meaning than just digging some extra air tiles. 

As I said in the other thread, something I'd hopefully like to see mining eventually become is something more akin to a board game where you would have a choice of drawing face-down cards from different decks that promise different things, or perhaps more like a game of minesweeper, where you have clues in the rock that tell you if you are getting close to certain types of minerals or perhaps dangerous events, and you have to make choices as to what you're going to risk mining into and for what potential goods. 

Then again, if we're going to that much trouble to make mining realistic, rubble would be little by comparison.

Besides, you really expect the players who think they're wasting their time hauling rubble to look for a better solution than "give up", whether that means ragequiting or just turning rubble off?

[greenskye]

My main concern is a potential shortage of building material in the colors of my choice.  That's been partially addressed by getting more than one block per rock.  I didn't usually build with blocks, but I don't mind doing so in the future.  As an aside, I can't see how adding a step makes building faster, that is, using block instead of stones.  But again, I don't mind that change.  The part that has not been addressed, at least in my mind, is the potential loss of rare colors through probability.  I enjoy using realgar for my shops, if it is on the site.  If there is four-stone pocket of realgar, chances are high that I will only end up with one realgar stone.  Shops are not built with blocks, so I can't get back the three lost stones for my buildings.  Likewise furniture requires stones, and again the rarer colors could easily be in too short supply.  I could mod around this by changing the colors of the available stones for every embark, in the raws for that save.  It's a nuisance, but I can do it.  Or, I can create stone at my smelter.  This is much easier, but leaves me feeling vaguely dirty.  Better dirty than unhappy, however.  That's what playing a game is for, to be made happy, right?  If I wanted to be made miserable I could go read the news headlines.  Again.

I can see your problem, but I think brainstorming some ways of solving the solution would be more beneficial.


First off, I never understood why we had skill based mining, but no method to control it. Without using complicated burrow setups, it was random which miner got which job. The idea of skill based mining either needs to be fully supported or just dropped as a skill.


If we bring skill based mining back (which I would prefer), this suggestion would work. Basically the suggestion is to add a new standing order that sets the minimum skill required to engrave something. I would change that to be decided on a per-designation basis. When designating something to be mined/engraved you'd be able to choose a minimum skill with the default being <any>.


Another thing I would add is the ability to set a default mining skill level for any stone that you have discovered. This would reduce micromanagement, by ensuring that any unskilled miners will cancel digging of any valuable stones. That way you don't have to fear for the ore you discovered while mining out your dining hall.


Another solution that doesn't require skill based mining is paint. I'm assuming all you really care about is color, not the type of stone. If so, creating paint by crushing stones of the right color could serve to meet the same needs. A suitable materials-to-paint ratio would be needed of course. Say, 1 stone per 10 tiles painted? This also could be handled via the designation menu with an option to choose the color. As an upside you could then have whatever color you wanted AND still be able to engrave!


Personally I have not gotten to the point yet where I care about my rainbow colored fortress. I just wanted to come up with some suggestions that attempt to look at why Toady made the change in the first place and offer improvements that allow for existing features to be preserved or improved.

[Martin]

Another solution that doesn't require skill based mining is paint. I'm assuming all you really care about is color, not the type of stone. If so, creating paint by crushing stones of the right color could serve to meet the same needs. A suitable materials-to-paint ratio would be needed of course. Say, 1 stone per 10 tiles painted? This also could be handled via the designation menu with an option to choose the color. As an upside you could then have whatever color you wanted AND still be able to engrave!

Yeah, paint is the logical solution. I'd rather expand the plant dye spectrum and use that to produce paint. Paints used to be produced from raw eggs with dye added, which would give you something to do with the hundreds of eggs you can collect from a half dozen hens.


Beyond simple color painting, it'd also be cool to have a painter paint in an engraving or paint crafts to add value.

[Arkenstone]

With a 5-ore cluster, you've got 23.7% chance of nothing.

Now, is that really a bad thing?  It's not like you're potentially going to wait a long time before mining it anymore.  If you were looking for such clusters, the randomness is just part of the luck of the draw, there could just as well not have been a platinum cluster there in the first place.  If it was just something you found while digging out a hallway; then oh well, you weren't expecting it to begin with.

That's why I suggested the change to ore mining. Most of what we're using stone for is quarrying - and that's a real skill. But you don't quarry ore. You get the ore by brute force and crush it down. You can't fail to collect it no matter how bad you are at it. You can fail to recognize that there's iron in there, but I'm assuming we already know that we've hit magnetite. You can also fail to extract the metal from the ore, but that's not a failure of mining - it's a failure of smelting - so collect the ore at 100% and move that skill to the furnace operators - who are also skill-less.


And for the folks that are worried about running out of metal, my proposal would allow for non-vein ore to still be processed for metal. The yields would be low, and you'd have to trade out your usable stone for construction, but you'd get some fraction of a bar of metal out of every tile - if you're willing to spend the labor and provide the fuel to do it.

Hm, that seems more reasonable.  If only it were that easy for the game to define an 'ore'; especially the modded-in kinds that don't use [ORE_METAL: ] or whatever that tag was...  But then again, that's as simple as adding a [DROP_ALWAYS] tag.

Still though, I don't care for the metagaming with the miners even with certain stone types, especially when it comes to ones you don't want.  I just feel that any significant difference in drop rates between dabbling and legendary miners would still come with this.


I think the best solution would be to simply assume that all dwarves naturally have the skill to extract usable boulders from the rock, but only skilled miners can do it swiftly.  Making 'ore' a subcatagory of stone (like gems) with 100% drop rate would not be a bad thing though.



PS @^: Surely only a pansy elf cannot tell the difference between the subtle hues of Granite, Gneiss, and Stibnite?!
(On a more serious note though, paint would be awesome but sadly is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.  Also, I thought most paints were based off stones and metals, with floral pigments primarily for textiles.)

[slink]

Another solution that doesn't require skill based mining is paint. I'm assuming all you really care about is color, not the type of stone. If so, creating paint by crushing stones of the right color could serve to meet the same needs. A suitable materials-to-paint ratio would be needed of course. Say, 1 stone per 10 tiles painted? This also could be handled via the designation menu with an option to choose the color. As an upside you could then have whatever color you wanted AND still be able to engrave!

Yeah, paint is the logical solution. I'd rather expand the plant dye spectrum and use that to produce paint. Paints used to be produced from raw eggs with dye added, which would give you something to do with the hundreds of eggs you can collect from a half dozen hens.


Beyond simple color painting, it'd also be cool to have a painter paint in an engraving or paint crafts to add value.

Paint would be a great solution, unless it required one bar of metal for every item painted in the color of the metal.  In which case one might as well build with metal bars.  Vegetable-based colors would also give me a reason to grow dye plants, which I don't do now.  Dyeing cloth for ropes was useful to me when livestock could be kept tied and not starve to death.  I sorted my breeding stock that way.  Ropes are also good for representing the concept of woven carpets.  Other than that, it is only for clothing.  We can't see the clothing, so why bother with the complication of dyeing the cloth?  I wouldn't even mind giving up some of the eggs, which we do eat in my fortresses.  Lots and lots of eggs.  Eggs are good for Dwarves ... or was that dogs?  I forget.  *grin*

[stinkasectomy]

goin back on topic (mining rates) - would most (or all) of peoples problems disapear by changing it from 25% from RNG to a 1/4 'counter" (where the first stone/ore of each type mined drops, and every 4th after it (so thats 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th or 4x+1)) thus we get approximately 25% (slightly more, more noticeable with small numbers)
each stone type has its own counter (only for stones that have been mined at least once to save on FPS?) so that you cant mine one ore and then 3 stone and maximise ore drops.


the question is, does everyone like randomness? i think most people actually would prefer it, but just putting out an alternative

[Martin]

Still though, I don't care for the metagaming with the miners even with certain stone types, especially when it comes to ones you don't want.  I just feel that any significant difference in drop rates between dabbling and legendary miners would still come with this.

Well, I was aiming for a split-the-difference solution. Mining is ridiculously easy now. It seems improper that one dwarf with a copper pick should plow through stone faster than a fleet of TBMs. So not only do they go faster, but they also get better at it? Thats a lot of benefit for the skill compared to other activities. Generally the reverse happens - if you want to produce a really high quality item, you need the skill but it takes the same amount of time as a novice to make a lower-quality item. The skilled person can choose to speed up, but quality drops - so there's the ability to choose the outcome.


And perhaps that's a solution. Skill gets you speed but you produce gravel instead of boulders to realize the speed. On the stone management screen in addition to setting stone as usable or not, you could set each one to not mine, to mine quickly (producing gravel) or to mine for resources (producing boulders but slowly). So if you were just going to turn your magnetite into iron, you could go for speed, because the gravel would work as well as the boulders, but you could still produce magnetite statues if you chose by setting magnetite to 'mine boulders', which you could still break into gravel later if you chose. Additionally, if you wanted dark stone for construction tell your miners to go quickly through the light grey stuff. Even novice miners could produce boulders, but they'd be very slow at it.


Either way skills your miners - so training them up you point them at some stuff you don't want and let them make gravel (which you could still smelt and get something out of), and set the stuff you do want to 'don't mine' and they'll naturally work around it. Oddly, in my proposal, the best thing to start them on is metal ore before turning them on the stone you want to quarry, so it even helps somewhat with getting that early metal operation going - though your less skilled furnace operators will get less metal out of each one. But this way you never lose anything through mining other than time. I think this would address everyone's issues. But I think mining needs to get slower overall. Hell, it takes longer for a legendary woodcutter to cut down a tree than a miner to dig out a bedroom from granite when you incorporate travel time.


And maybe that's another variable that should be in this - pick material and hardness of stone. We already fly through soil. Why not make copper picks slower than iron in turn slower than steel, and make mining in granite slower than sandstone slower than chalk? And then apply the above to that. Maybe the current legendary mining speed in stone is what you could do with a steel pick in chalk, but a steel pick in granite or obsidian is ~5x slower, and a copper pick in granite 3x slower than that.

[Niyazov]

Im slowly starting to like NW's conceptualization for the final game more and more.

Likewise. Hopefully we will also see a return of area-based cave-ins that coincides with introducing real mining concepts like longwall and retreat mining.