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[Chief10]

Does Toady have any intention to balance old game features in the upcoming version? It's great that he is working on new content, but as time goes on he is making older features unbalanced/broken/irrelevant.
Specifically does he have any plans to increase the frequency of sieges, make pet/spouse deaths a bigger deal and make goblin/other deaths less significant to dwarven psyche, decrease military skill training rates, optimization (seriously I lose basically all of my forts to FPS death), etc. Also fixes to the justice system, namely your hammerer executing people for violation of production/trading mandates.

If he has no plans to do this should I post in suggestions? Or is that only for new content?

[gestahl]

The siege stuff might get messed with once we start being able to send our own. Dunno that Urist McFeels is all that broken, but watching trolls run in terror from tiny woodland creatures is a bit much. You want slower military gains? The reason there's all these exploits wrt military is because "here's gear, go be a solider" takes way too long.

The movemoent / combat split might be a move in the direction of optimization, but I'm pretty sure full multithreading just ain't happening for the sake of toady's sanity. Best bet is compiler optimization, which seems like its gotten quite good nowadays.

[Airgeoff]

I agree that some things probably need a bit of rebalancing, but that is going to continually be a problem as new content is added.  I'm guessing his plan on this is like his plan on fixing up the ui, wait until most of the content is in and then you won't have to do it multiple times. 

[Chief10]

You want slower military gains?

Absolutely, why do you not? You can have legendary, unbreakable dwarves from 2 in-game years of constant training. That's ridiculous. My military is able to defeat any threat before any threats ever show up. There is no fun in that.

[Borge]

Military training rates from simple demonstration and sparring should be 1/2 if not 1/4 of what it is now.

[StagnantSoul]

You want slower military gains?

Absolutely, why do you not? You can have legendary, unbreakable dwarves from 2 in-game years of constant training. That's ridiculous. My military is able to defeat any threat before any threats ever show up. There is no fun in that.

Okay, you go pick up a sword and train constantly for two years. You'll probably be one of the best swordsman on the planet.

[mobucks]

Very easy to lower the skill gain rate of individual skills for dwarves with modding. You can even do it to a save. Search skill_rate: or something like that.

[Salmeuk]

You want slower military gains?

Absolutely, why do you not? You can have legendary, unbreakable dwarves from 2 in-game years of constant training. That's ridiculous. My military is able to defeat any threat before any threats ever show up. There is no fun in that.

Okay, you go pick up a sword and train constantly for two years. You'll probably be one of the best swordsman on the planet.

Not sure if serious, but life isn't anime. Becoming the best swordsman on the planet would take longer than two years, and for some people it's entirely unattainable. Developing the physique is one thing that you could brute force over a short period of time, but anything related to muscle memory or precision would need to be learned from a more experienced fighter and practiced consistently for many years. Even then, you would to go and fight hundreds of different skilled swordsmen every year in order to claim a universal 'best-ness'. Considering how archaic it is, you might be surprised by how many people actually practice swordfighting in one form or another, so proving yourself the best would probably be an inhuman feat.

In game, I don't think it would do to model it quite so realistically but I would agree that absolute novices should struggle for an almost exponentially longer time than those with a master to learn from. Once you have that legendary dwarf, he should make it easier to train students. Some of this is in the game, but I would like to see the current training rates lowered.

[Loci]

Setting aside the digression on superlative swordsmanship, we had "worthless" training back in v0.34 and I didn't find it much fun at all. Players resorted to all sort of alternate "training": danger rooms, live training, shafts of enlightenment, etc., just to make their dwarves capable of surviving combat.

Keep in mind that 1) invasions are currently lacking the size, frequency, and threat of v0.34, 2) even legendary dwarves don't stand much of a chance against truly "challenging" enemies, and 3) there are already ways to make your particular game more challenging (e.g. evil embarks). If you still want slower training, try leaving your dwarves to perform "individual training" instead of group training.

[FrankMcFuzz]

Most of the stuff you mentioned is going to be looked at, absolutely, and has already been suggested. There's a military arc in the future IIRC that will look at all that stuff on combat, and probably justice at the same time (My current fortress is experiencing a tantrum spiral because the guards one-punch-kill any upset dwarves who deserve a 'beating'.). Commands atm are also silly because a Dwarf will meander to the spot where a monster was when the command was issued, sometimes walking right past the monster in question, before seeing the monster and breaking into a full killmode sprint. Military and training rates, as well as issuing orders, are probably going to be looked at a bit more in the future. It's all going to be fixed, I believe in Toady.

It's also insane to think that the FPS death won't be fixed between now and 1.0. But by then we'll all have supercomputers the size of a fingernail, and they'll be able to run Dwarf Fortress easy!

[Chief10]

Keep in mind that 1) invasions are currently lacking the size, frequency, and threat of v0.34, 2) even legendary dwarves don't stand much of a chance against truly "challenging" enemies, and 3) there are already ways to make your particular game more challenging (e.g. evil embarks). If you still want slower training, try leaving your dwarves to perform "individual training" instead of group training.

1) Right, which is why I favor slower training rates, so that dwarves have actual experience before they are "legends"
2) That simply isn't true, aside from undead/circus. Any werebeast, goblin, kobold, vampire, or megabeast is killed within a couple seconds by 3+ legendary dwarves.
3) Evil embarks are too difficult. I wish there was more of a middle ground.

How do you have dwarves do individual training instead of group training? Is there any way other than making smaller squads?

[Detros]

Keep in mind that 1) invasions are currently lacking the size, frequency, and threat of v0.34, 2) even legendary dwarves don't stand much of a chance against truly "challenging" enemies, and 3) there are already ways to make your particular game more challenging (e.g. evil embarks). If you still want slower training, try leaving your dwarves to perform "individual training" instead of group training.

1) Right, which is why I favor slower training rates, so that dwarves have actual experience before they are "legends"
2) That simply isn't true, aside from undead/circus. Any werebeast, goblin, kobold, vampire, or megabeast is killed within a couple seconds by 3+ legendary dwarves.
3) Evil embarks are too difficult. I wish there was more of a middle ground.

How do you have dwarves do individual training instead of group training? Is there any way other than making smaller squads?

Some dwarves in will do individual training when they are in inactive squads. See wiki for more.

[omega_dwarf]

Most of the stuff you mentioned is going to be looked at, absolutely, and has already been suggested. It's also insane to think that the FPS death won't be fixed between now and 1.0. But by then we'll all have supercomputers the size of a fingernail, and they'll be able to run Dwarf Fortress easy!

Lol. But probably yes.

I've been programming a voxel engine as a hobby for two years now (which is capable of rendering about a 2km radius of terrain at good speed ), and I can tell you that by far the hardest thing out of all the topics the OP listed will be optimization. It's pretty much the most abstract, time-intensive (with slow results), clever-thought-intensive, analytical, prone-to-bend-your-mind-over-itself thing a game designer has to deal with. Not at all insurmountable, but very tricky. Biggest issues in FPS seem to be single-threading and RAM-related with Dwarf Fortress, which makes it peculiar and a poor match for most hardware setups, which are geared towards multi-threaded, GPU-intensive games. So Toady is going to have to either find very clever, huge speed improvements on many things*, or rewrite some parts of the game (potentially a lot of it) to be multi-threaded - which still doesn't solve the RAM issue, but that should be getting better if the typical hardware progresses to DDR4 (has it already? Mine's not.)

* Pathfinding, active history, temperature, fluids, and probably plants/creatures (incl. sentient) - the most-discussed solutions being in pathfinding (like jump-point search, or similar improvements to A* - idk what Toady has already implemented), but all are important, and the others are harder for us observers to figure out without seeing code (we just know that it has an impact, whereas pathfinding is widely studied outside of DF)

Probably a lot of Toady's motivation for making this game is based on the development of new features, and not necessarily making the game playable. I can totally understand that. It will get better once he gets the "fun" developments out of the way and is left with trickier new features vs. equally tricky optimizations. Then he might choose optimizations for a while.

But, of course, see the above quote - he might never even have to optimize, given that DF is on such a long-term development cycle.

(Note: I've been trying to get DF to run well on my computers for a long time now, mostly unsuccessfully. So I feel your pain for sure.)

I think others have spoken to the rest of the things the OP mentioned. I will echo that siege frequency is a problem from a gameplay perspective, but sieges might be more realistic now (minus the micro scale of populations), since there are motivations behind them (although hard to diagnose.) Also, he said he thought he fixed a glitch in the next release that should increase sieges in some situations. Hoping for the best!

[TomiTapio]

You want slower military gains?

Absolutely, why do you not? You can have legendary, unbreakable dwarves from 2 in-game years of constant training. That's ridiculous. My military is able to defeat any threat before any threats ever show up. There is no fun in that.

Also, building a wall / raising drawbridge stops a whole enemy army. Blocking off the outside world is OverPowered. The enemy should be able to dig tunnels.
A 100-weapon 10-weapontrap corridor is also OP.
Slower skill learning is easily modded into the game.

[FrankMcFuzz]

Also, building a wall / raising drawbridge stops a whole enemy army. Blocking off the outside world is OverPowered. The enemy should be able to dig tunnels.
A 100-weapon 10-weapontrap corridor is also OP.
Slower skill learning is easily modded into the game.

Reading the update plans the other day, Toady's working on enemy diggers, ladders and also making them try to find an alternative route if they take a large loss in a particular area. So yeah, no need to worry about suggesting that, Toady's already implementing it (which is why we need more features instead of balancing old ones.)