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[Deboche]

I thought I'd create a topic for imagining what the final version of DF will be like so we can share ideas, maybe come up with cool suggestions and argue about ridiculous little details. Let your imaginations run wild.

Let's assume, of course, that all current and future bugs are fixed and FPS is not a problem ever, no matter the population, size of the embark or any other considerations.

And I think at this time it's impossible to guess what the ideal number of dwarves for a fortress would be. Not so low that things like an economy, politics and standing armies don't make sense but no so high that it becomes unmanageable.

Military

Several rows of high fortified walls built against the side of a mountain, with spikes, traps and arrow slits, a metal drawbridge, catapults and ballistae built at strategic points, boiling oil to drop over invaders.

Enemies digging into your fortress doesn't seem realistic or interesting to me so I won't consider that.

There are ranks in the military. Pubescent dwarves are busy resuplying the marksdwarves, injured dwarves or corpses are carried to the proper locations.

If the enemies make it to the front gates, a device powered by animals and/or prisoners has moved the normal marketplace and inn - complete with kitchens, stables, main square and other leisurely buildings - and replaced it with a maze of narrow corridors riddled with traps. If after all this, the invaders still press on, they come to a huge room, walls too high to see the ceiling, arrows, bolts and rocks coming down on them and in a few entrances they see rows of dwarves making a stand with heavy shields and pike. Naturally, the floor is also trapped.

The important thing here is that all these defenses are necessary because of the numbers, technology and abilitiy of the enemies.

Economy

You can choose what type of economy you want. Close off your fortress completely or let foreigners come in to trade; have no poverty or create slums, crime, beggars and so on; let all classes intermingle or separate your fortress into several zones - one for rich people, one for nobles, one for scholars, one for artisans, one for other species and lowly rabble.

Garbage

At the moment, it's unsure whether there will be feces and urine but I'm assuming there will be other forms of garbage than just worn clothing and corpses. I think I'd make some holes in the nice streets to dump all garbage onto running water which shoots out the walls into the moat. In the not so nice streets, it'd be open air.

Alternatively, all garbage would be easily disposed of in the city and somehow end up in a big underground room where criminals scrape for food. When it fills up, we burn it.

Art

Most of us hate nobles but I like the idea of a dwarf rising to power on his merit. I would have an elite of the best dwarves living in a perfect city, away from the rabble, where everything is lavishly decorated and they spend their days reading and writing, dancing, playing and listening to music, with windows that look onto sealed parts of the caverns where animals frollick. They can also go hunt. Fountains decorate the streets, booze is stored in gigantic barrels built into engraved walls so that it appears to be coming out of animals' mouths and food appears as if by magic in communal or private dining rooms(Hopefully it can be done with moving fortress parts).



Feel free to make up your own categories of what you'd want to see in the mythical final version of DF. Also, I hope this topic hasn't been made already with much better ideas than mine...

[cochramd]

Enemies digging into your fortress doesn't seem realistic or interesting to me so I won't consider that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_(military)

Anyhow, to be on topic, my understanding of cavern "biomes" is that if you open up all 3 cavern layers and wait long enough, you will see every kind of subterranean animal possible in a single fortress. I'd like to see actual cavern "biomes" like the ones on the surface, meaning that any given fortress will have access to only a portion of all varieties of underground plant and animal life; the flip side of this is that would be a greater total variety of underground plant and animal life. (Only 6 underground crops? BOOOOOOORRRRRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNG)

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

If you open up all 3 cavern layers and wait long enough, you will see every kind of subterranean animal possible in a single fortress.

Is that the intended behavior? I have absolutely nothing except plants down there.

[Psieye]

have no poverty or create slums, crime, beggars and so on; let all classes intermingle or separate your fortress into several zones

These are micro-scale details. Macro economy would be achieved when it's possible to flood the entire world's supply of [trade good X] with your brand. As in, every civilisation in existence uses e.g. gold goblets made from your fort. When you make an adventurer to visit some human castle after your fort retires, you'll see those same goblets made by your fort complete with your 'logo'.

The important thing here is that all these defenses are necessary because of the numbers, technology and abilitiy of the enemies.

Not necessary when you send your armies off the map to pre-emptively raze their sites.

Enemies digging into your fortress doesn't seem realistic or interesting to me so I won't consider that.

A modder has already achieved this.

I hope this topic hasn't been made already with much better ideas than mine...

Well, there is Future of the Fortress in the General Discussion board where you can see glimpses of Toady's ideas. Are you familiar with the Hill Dwarves concept that he'll probably get to in oh... 6~8 years' time?

Anyway, it's nice to make these topics every now and then - gets new people in on the process instead of constantly re-reading the old ideas.

[cochramd]

If you open up all 3 cavern layers and wait long enough, you will see every kind of subterranean animal possible in a single fortress.

Is that the intended behavior? I have absolutely nothing except plants down there.

Have you got corpses/skeletons down there? Sometimes something will come along and kill everything before you get to it. Otherwise, well, in my previous fortress I saw lots of bugbats, green devourers and cave floaters in the third layer and seen none of them in my current fortress despite driving a few third layer species to extinction/ capturing and training them all, so I think there is some semblance of cavern biomes that restrict what species you see, but it's not like above ground biomes. I have not seen a fortress where the caverns didn't contain cave crocodiles, giant toads and giant olms and furthermore it's not like there's any theme to the list of animals that can show up. I want to see thick cavern jungles filled with tree-mushrooms, countless species of "fruiting" mushrooms and many, many animals; cavern "grasslands" where the dralthas roam and cave wheat and similar plant species grow wild; cavern "deserts" that contain very little water and life, though the species they contain are quite interesting; cavern "oceans" where I can hunt cave seals and cave sharks and cave whales......and so on and so forth.

[Deboche]

Enemies digging into your fortress doesn't seem realistic or interesting to me so I won't consider that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_(military)

Anyhow, to be on topic, my understanding of cavern "biomes" is that if you open up all 3 cavern layers and wait long enough, you will see every kind of subterranean animal possible in a single fortress. I'd like to see actual cavern "biomes" like the ones on the surface, meaning that any given fortress will have access to only a portion of all varieties of underground plant and animal life; the flip side of this is that would be a greater total variety of underground plant and animal life. (Only 6 underground crops? BOOOOOOORRRRRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNG)

I know it's happened in actual battles but here it's a different story. We're talking about digging much further down and through several layers of rock. It could be accomplished by goblins with trolls operating escavating machines or something but I still don't think it's efficient especially if the fortress in built on a high mountain.

Underground biomes are a cool idea, especially if they're not at all related to what's on the surface so that you never know what you'll get down there.

The important thing here is that all these defenses are necessary because of the numbers, technology and abilitiy of the enemies.

Not necessary when you send your armies off the map to pre-emptively raze their sites.

I hope this topic hasn't been made already with much better ideas than mine...

Well, there is Future of the Fortress in the General Discussion board where you can see glimpses of Toady's ideas. Are you familiar with the Hill Dwarves concept that he'll probably get to in oh... 6~8 years' time?

Yes, but it's important that the enemy is so strong it requires you to send those armies out or prepare to meet their raids at home or both.

I'm familiar with the Hill Dwarves and I'll welcome them in, house their populations and draft their militias when the enemy approach.

[cochramd]

I know it's happened in actual battles but here it's a different story. We're talking about digging much further down and through several layers of rock. It could be accomplished by goblins with trolls operating escavating machines or something but I still don't think it's efficient especially if the fortress in built on a high mountain.

Oh that's another thing I want: excavating machines. Anything from a handheld jackhammer to a boring machine or backhoe would please me. Oh, and we need draft animals to actually haul stuff and possibly power machinery too. And since the best hauling animals are also grazers, this would have to come alongside or after the update where we can finally feed grazers crops instead of keeping them in grassy/mossy pastures....the same update where all animals get hungry and have to eat, which will make keeping my large population of carnivorous livestock difficult but still doable.

[PatrikLundell]

I think sappers make sense, but there is a need for some counter measures (and I don't mean a sufficiently deep wall or moat), like the ability to cause smoke in the tunnels to suffocate and kill the sappers (magma works as well, but might be hard to get at, and smoke as a countermeasure has been used historically). Likewise, enemies could send sappers against your walls above ground as well, under protective cover of appropriate machinery. This would also naturally lead to siege towers and movable invasion bridges and ladders. Enemies should also be able to breach/destroy walls with siege machinery (probably catapults, possibly upgraded to onagers).
Since dwarven fortresses can be completely under ground, invaders should have some means to get in anyway.
Invader capabilities should be controllable, so if you don't want diggers, remove that capability.

Elves should have longbows that are as deadly as the historical ones were (i.e. penetrate full plate, a long range, and a large rate of fire, but requiring a huge amount of training before they're of any use (elves have a lot of life during which to train...). Some humans should use longbows as well.

Armies and individual groups of soldiers should be controllable, not just rush headlong into battle. Shield walls and the like could be used against hordes of undisciplined barbarians (but bigger at times: think goblin trained and equipped ogres in addition to trolls).

I wouldn't mind a few additional civilized races, possibly some that are only encountered in the caverns. A clear candidate for a super "race" is the circus. Multiple intentionally playable races would be nice (playing the bugged save where the embarkers turned out to be elves was interesting and surprisingly playable, given they're not intended to work (yet)).

I definitely like the cavern biome idea. There are rudiments there (like treeless mud covered caverns, for instance), but it would be nice if it was fleshed out. The DFHack region-pops script displays what creatures are in the region, and it does not (at least not always) list all species. I encountered Green Devourers for the first (and only, although I had two encounters) time a couple of weeks ago, despite over a year of play. An underground wool source (apart from the inaccessible trolls) would be nice. Underground rivers could be interesting (and might even allow for underground boat transport outside of the embark area).

The ability to actively trade with other settlements would be nice, but that, as well as conquests and civilization wide control probably would require a mode where you don't control each fortress at the level of control as you do now, as it would be very messy to juggle multiple fortresses concurrently. However, construction of consecutive fortresses that were competently managed automatically such that its capabilities (in terms of production, defense, and military training at least) remained intact might work.

More machinery to do clever/stupid things with is nice, of course.

I've thought of the idea of moving soil to reshape the terrain to your liking (including hanging gardens, of course), and you might replace muddying stone with e.g. grinding stone to sand that you then moisturize.

Magic is a huge can of (interesting) worms. In many settings you might wonder why people work at all, given the immense power of magic, and why have armies clashing when the super mage can just get annoyed and destroy them all with a wave of the hand? Balancing magic is a delicate task.

A bit more challenge in the food industry, without adding a lot of micro management. It should probably be tuneable to allow for a reasonable challenge to the experts, while not making it impossible for the newbies. As it currently stands, my main problem is to curb over production. Leather, for instance, is not a practical locally produced source of clothing because of the immense mounds of meat and bone generated by the huge herds that need to be slaughtered. That's a bug, to some extent, however, since leather currently don't have a size (or one size fits all, if you prefer).

[Sutremaine]

I would have an elite of the best dwarves living in a perfect city, away from the rabble, where everything is lavishly decorated and they spend their days reading and writing, dancing, playing and listening to music

Seems like a waste of good smiths to me... >_>

[Deboche]

The food industry is interesting because ultimatelly it would require fertilizer, hoeing(possibly with machines or animals) and much bigger farms than you have now. There's also the soil fertility issue where grazing animals are concerned - if not sunlight, what's making those plants grow? This would be a nice industry to have but would probably scare newbies. Maybe DF with a difficulty setting?

Ideally, I'd love it if we could have a huge stone and metal contraption - wind, water, animal or prisoner powered - that automatically harvests a field with metal or glass blades, collects or shoves all the produce onto a container, then rakes everything as it contracts back into the wall. Then if feces are implemented they're stored above the fields and a pull of a lever drops them for instant fertilization. Planting the seeds would require a bit more delicate work maybe.

I would have an elite of the best dwarves living in a perfect city, away from the rabble, where everything is lavishly decorated and they spend their days reading and writing, dancing, playing and listening to music

Seems like a waste of good smiths to me... >_>

Come to think of it, smithing is probably leisure to a lot of dwarves.

[Finn]

Sorry for being a killjoy, but there is a whole entire forum dedicated to this exact topic, complete with fancy php scripts and "organized" feature threads. Just pointing it out in case anyone is unaware. Carry on.

[Deboche]

What? Where is this?

[Psieye]

Sorry for being a killjoy, but there is a whole entire forum dedicated to this exact topic, complete with fancy php scripts and "organized" feature threads. Just pointing it out in case anyone is unaware. Carry on.

Technically, that's for suggestions. This thread has no delusion that anything we say would influence the final version. It is just a place to imagine with no tethering to reality.

[Deboche]

It's supposed to be what we imagine the final version will be like, while aware that such a thing may never happen.

[Catfishboss]

Enemies digging in your fort sounds fun but maybe a little too much fun. There should be a way to counter this maybe make smooth walls impossible to dig for the invaders? Much the same as in the game called dungeon keeper.