I, too, get frustrated by the occasional need to create a burrow encompassing the whole world, punch a hole in it, and then assign a hundred-plus dwarves to it, in order to keep all but a few out of the hole.
Since simplicity seems key to a good suggestion, what I propose is to just allow the user to <f>orbid the burrow itself, from the burrow list, the same way you'd forbid an item. A dwarf cannot take jobs from a forbidden burrow unless he or she is assigned to it. Where a normal and a forbidden burrow overlap, and a dwarf is assigned to the normal but not to the forbidden, the lack of forbidden burrow assignment takes precedence.
A forbidden burrow used as a civilian alert could cause all civilians to leave that burrow.
You could even put curly braces around the burrow name and make it display on the map in lime green by default instead of the usual cyan.
If you need to keep only a few dwarves out of someplace, you'd still have to either add almost everyone to a forbidden burrow, or add those few to a whole-world-minus-some burrow. You could instead allow the user to forbid individual dwarves from a normal burrow, but the ideas are mutually exclusive, since otherwise you could end up with forbidden dwarves in a forbidden burrow, which makes no sense. Although a key to forbid all dwarves at once approximates the forbidden burrow concept, it's hard to see how it would work with the next parts of my proposal:
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Another thing that could be done is to merge pastures with burrows, adding animals to a burrow the same way you currently add animals to a pasture, with the <N> list (currently living on the <i
> zone screen). Animals would only remember their most recent burrow assignment, while dwarves can be assigned to many. This, combined with forbidding of burrows, will keep animals out of an area but let them roam free elsewhere. Animals should probably not be allowed to be assigned to forbidden burrows, eliminating the potential confusion when animals due to be milked, trained, etc. are assigned to one, but no dwarves. If animals sometimes get too curious about a forbidden burrow, such as occasionally when following an assigned creature in, it creates a job to lead the inquisitive animal back out again. If that's too computationally expensive, make animals respect forbidden burrows at all times, overriding following behavior.
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Still another nice change would be to color assigned dwarves and animals the same color as the burrow when highlighting or selecting that burrow from the burrow list, for a visual indication of who is assigned and who isn't. For forbidden burrows, you could highlight all unassigned dwarves and animals in forbid-green, the same color as the forbidden burrow.
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Example problem:Assign one dwarf to dump all battle detritus from an area into a nearby dump zone, rather than having to either wait for as many dwarves to arrive as there are pieces of junk or micromanage job assignments until the whole job is done.
Current solution:Create a burrow as big as the world, remove the messy area from it, and assign every dwarf but one to it. Optionally, create a second burrow covering only the mess, and assign the cleanup dwarf to it, preventing that dwarf from taking other jobs.
New solution:Create a burrow, forbid it, and assign that dwarf to it.
Example problem:Keep animals such as dogs and cats out of the underground tree farm, allowing them to hunt freely outside it but not trample the fragile saplings within.
Current solution:Create dog/cat "pastures" everywhere you want these animals to be allowed, re-assigning them as necessary for complete coverage.
New solution:Create a burrow, forbid it, and assign forestry dwarves to it (preferably ones who don't own a lot of animals). Optionally, create a second, whole-world burrow and assign those dwarves to that, too, allowing them to take jobs elsewhere if desired.
Example problem:Keep nobles from commingling with commoners (which Dorfimedes mentioned above; I don't do this).
Simplest current solution:Create a whole-world burrow, remove a portion just for commoners, and assign all nobles to it. Then, create a second, overlapping, whole-world burrow, remove a portion just for nobles, and assign all commoners to that.
New solution:Same as above. Two forbidden burrows, one in the nobles-only and one in the commoners-only area, would be an inferior solution in that it would not allow jobs in the large neutral zone. This is the case for which individually forbidding dwarves would create a more elegant solution.
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Topic: Burrow improvements (Read 1951 times)