Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tilmar13]

@PatrikLundell I understand how they're useful, but I was just making the point that they often aren't worth the hassle. I do believe that silver whips are still god-tier, though it has been some time since I made a lasher (I mostly play practitioners of Kisat Dur when I bother with adventure mode)

I remember burrows were really confusing for me at first (and I still avoid them except in emergencies), and it took me a while to figure out that a burrow was not a dig designation. However, the major issue with designations in my opinion is channeling. Unless you take the time to babysit your miners and slowly designate each level in sequence, designating to channel through multiple floors tends to cause either cave-ins or abandoned designations. As a noob, I ended up abandoning several forts due to those mining accidents.

I think all the "noob-traps" can be removed by creating a tutorial world of sorts. Several features in this world would be disabled (invasions, unwanted guests, vampirism, etc) and a text-based tutorial would walk the player through the basics of building a self-reliant fortress, how to navigate each of the menus (because really, the menus provide almost all the information you need to succeed, it's just hard to find the right one), how to troubleshoot a dying fortress, and provide both a video link (to someone playing through the tutorial) and a link to the bay12 forums.

I'd definitely appreciate it if more data could be moved into the raws, but that may just be me.

[PatrikLundell]

@Tilmar13: The introduction of digging priorities essentially solved the "dig a big pit" problem for me. I just designate the first level as 1, the second as 2, etc., and that's worked for every well cistern I've dug in quite a few fortresses. However, I'm usually using 2 miners (from the starting 7), and very occasionally a third: I assume hordes of miners can cause issues.
Very occasionally there's a "pillar" left behind somewhere, and that requires some effort to get rid of (build a staircase if more than 1 level, or a ramp is one level and remove after use).

If a tutorial is made, mining priority usage ought to be introduced, although I'm not sure it should be the first thing covered, or if there ought to be a return to mining to introduce it.

While more data in raws is generally desirable, it's not something that would affect newbies.

[Pillbo]

@StolenScience (& wierd): The "stuck in a location and starve to death because climbing is not an option" was addressed a number of releases ago. This has lead to a new problem of dorfs digging a chute feels like they need to eat/drink/sleep and climb out of the hole and nobody will climb down to continue the task[...]

It has? I've been playing 44.12 and I've had to deal with dwarfs stuck in trees in every fort I've had, and I also get the digging, leaving and not returning problem. Are they really not getting stuck in trees anymore for other people?  It happens all the time to me.

[DontMineYellowSnow]

@StolenScience (& wierd): The "stuck in a location and starve to death because climbing is not an option" was addressed a number of releases ago. This has lead to a new problem of dorfs digging a chute feels like they need to eat/drink/sleep and climb out of the hole and nobody will climb down to continue the task[...]

It has? I've been playing 44.12 and I've had to deal with dwarfs stuck in trees in every fort I've had, and I also get the digging, leaving and not returning problem. Are they really not getting stuck in trees anymore for other people?  It happens all the time to me.

Its still an issue in 44.12.

[Shonai_Dweller]

@StolenScience (& wierd): The "stuck in a location and starve to death because climbing is not an option" was addressed a number of releases ago. This has lead to a new problem of dorfs digging a chute feels like they need to eat/drink/sleep and climb out of the hole and nobody will climb down to continue the task[...]

It has? I've been playing 44.12 and I've had to deal with dwarfs stuck in trees in every fort I've had, and I also get the digging, leaving and not returning problem. Are they really not getting stuck in trees anymore for other people?  It happens all the time to me.

Its still an issue in 44.12.

They dehydrate and die in trees they climbed without stepladders? Please post a save to the tracker. The fix that was meant to solve it involved a timer that would make the dwarf realise he was in a tree after a while (not right away) and climb down (and not immediately climb back up).

Tree bug (ask a bug forum moderator to reopen and post your save there):
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9252

I believe there's another part involving dwarves being stuck at the top of stepladders which may or may not have been addressed.

Stepladder bug (still open, so presumably still an issue):
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=10376

[DontMineYellowSnow]

@StolenScience (& wierd): The "stuck in a location and starve to death because climbing is not an option" was addressed a number of releases ago. This has lead to a new problem of dorfs digging a chute feels like they need to eat/drink/sleep and climb out of the hole and nobody will climb down to continue the task[...]

It has? I've been playing 44.12 and I've had to deal with dwarfs stuck in trees in every fort I've had, and I also get the digging, leaving and not returning problem. Are they really not getting stuck in trees anymore for other people?  It happens all the time to me.

Its still an issue in 44.12.

They dehydrate and die in trees they climbed without stepladders? Please post a save to the tracker. The fix that was meant to solve it involved a timer that would make the dwarf realise he was in a tree after a while (not right away) and climb down (and not immediately climb back up).

Tree bug (ask a bug forum moderator to reopen and post your save there):
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9252

I believe there's another part involving dwarves being stuck at the top of stepladders which may or may not have been addressed.

Stepladder bug (still open, so presumably still an issue):
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=10376

Might be the stepladder bug then, I didn't think there were separate bugs.  I'm not sure if it involved stepladders or not, or if they climbed up with step ladders which were, for some reason, removed then got stuck.  I've deleted the DF files from the game since then but I was getting alerts that they were dying and if I didn't address them, the dwarves did, indeed die.  They were all stuck in trees.  Never really cared enough to bookmark a point and report it, I'd just teleport them to the ground and they went about their merry way.

[Shonai_Dweller]

@StolenScience (& wierd): The "stuck in a location and starve to death because climbing is not an option" was addressed a number of releases ago. This has lead to a new problem of dorfs digging a chute feels like they need to eat/drink/sleep and climb out of the hole and nobody will climb down to continue the task[...]

It has? I've been playing 44.12 and I've had to deal with dwarfs stuck in trees in every fort I've had, and I also get the digging, leaving and not returning problem. Are they really not getting stuck in trees anymore for other people?  It happens all the time to me.

Its still an issue in 44.12.

They dehydrate and die in trees they climbed without stepladders? Please post a save to the tracker. The fix that was meant to solve it involved a timer that would make the dwarf realise he was in a tree after a while (not right away) and climb down (and not immediately climb back up).

Tree bug (ask a bug forum moderator to reopen and post your save there):
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9252

I believe there's another part involving dwarves being stuck at the top of stepladders which may or may not have been addressed.

Stepladder bug (still open, so presumably still an issue):
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=10376

Might be the stepladder bug then, I didn't think there were separate bugs.  I'm not sure if it involved stepladders or not, or if they climbed up with step ladders which were, for some reason, removed then got stuck.  I've deleted the DF files from the game since then but I was getting alerts that they were dying and if I didn't address them, the dwarves did, indeed die.  They were all stuck in trees.  Never really cared enough to bookmark a point and report it, I'd just teleport them to the ground and they went about their merry way.

It's a pity. There's no way the one single person who makes this game can telepathically know about bugs that aren't reported. Game's too complicated for that.

[Pillbo]

Tree bug (ask a bug forum moderator to reopen and post your save there):
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9252

I believe there's another part involving dwarves being stuck at the top of stepladders which may or may not have been addressed.

Stepladder bug (still open, so presumably still an issue):
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=10376

What I've seen looks more like the tree bug. I've never thought much about it and generally just chopped the tree down, but I only ever know to because DF Hack gives the Dehydration warning. Next time I run into it I'll add a save to the bugtracker.

[Dorfson]

It would be nice to know how my dwarfs died. Usually I find only the corpse months later, with no log.

Werebeasts are a pain. I cheat with Dwarf Therapist, otherwise I lose the fort for sure.

[Shonai_Dweller]

It would be nice to know how my dwarfs died. Usually I find only the corpse months later, with no log.

Werebeasts are a pain. I cheat with Dwarf Therapist, otherwise I lose the fort for sure.

Coffins and slabs specify how a dwarf died. I find discovering what happened like this a fun feature of the game. Please don't remove it.

[voliol]

Werebeasts are a pain. I cheat with Dwarf Therapist, otherwise I lose the fort for sure.

There are methods for dealing with werebeasts. Sadly (?) Dwarf Fortress is a game where you have to adapt to whatever challenge arises, which means that a suggestion like "I dislike feature X" isn't very constructive if you seemingly hasn't tried solving it yourself. Now, it is possible that something needs to be done with werebeasts (personally I think they are fine as is), but you'll need to further specify the issue is for the Adams brothers to understand.

It would be nice to know how my dwarfs died. Usually I find only the corpse months later, with no log.

Coffins and slabs specify how a dwarf died. I find discovering what happened like this a fun feature of the game. Please don't remove it.

Coffins actually don't specify that, it is just the slabs that do. I agree with Dorfson that too little info is given the player, but corpse descriptions or adding reason of death to the burial receptables of buried dwarves are both methods I would prefer to outright telling the player.

[PatrikLundell]

I'd assume Dorfson's "cheating with DT" means using DT to find out who were infected (and I agree that slogging through the combat logs to find out isn't much fun), although I wouldn't expect Toady/ThreeToe to necessarily know you can use DT for that, given that they usually don't take much notice of third party utilities.

I believe that issue might be helped if you could "ask" the Chief Medical Dorf and/or the Hospital for a report of things you'd need to be aware of (would also be useful in the far future when/if infectious diseases and the like are introduced). The medical screen leaves a lot to be desired with all the scrolling (spreadsheet, anyone?) both horizontally and vertically required to find if anyone needs attention. In addition to a summary, it would be useful to be able to sort the medical screen either based on user selected sort criteria, or, as a minimum, statically sorted to have the injured ones on top (and I'd prefer to have the ones that can be treated at the very top).

While it's sort of interesting to discover the havoc weres can wreak, dealing with it gets old fast. A newbie generally wouldn't know to look at the correct place until after being hit the first time, and if the game tutorial/introduction tells the player there are surprises that are not revealed it wouldn't come as a complete shock. Once the first "local" were turns, the game might tell the player where to look for it the next time, as well as issuing a challenge to sort it out (which would make purging the fortress of weres into an achievement candidate) rather than ditch the fortress.

[Worblehat]

When I first played DF about ten years ago (it was when the medical system was known to be The Next Big Thing, but before it came out, if timing matters...), what drove me away from the game was the gigantic migrant waves. All I was doing was frantically digging more bedrooms, making beds, doors, food, booze, trying to figure out jobs for all the new dwarfs, and oh look yet another wave doubling the fortress size again! Since coming back this summer I learned that one can edit the population cap (the Lazy Newb Pack launcher is very helpful for this, among other things) and now I keep a very tight lid on it.

Re: werebeasts, my only issue with them is their stealth. A drawbridge isn't any use against things that aren't detected until they're at the drawbridge. My "current" (haven't played since this summer, but I've been too exhausted to play any games since then and I do consider it an ongoing fort that I'll get back to someday) fort got lucky and the militia hacked it down with no damage to themselves or any civilians. Could easily have been an instant loss though, despite a defensive setup that was at no risk of casualties while defeating a siege of armored undead from the local necromancer tower (siege size = fort size, which I thought was not how these things were supposed to scale, particularly when fort size = 24  )

+1 to the marksdwarf complaints. Those guys are a gigantic pain. A detail that I didn't see mentioned in the first 100-odd replies is that one can't use station orders to move them to the correct side of the wiki-standard 5x5 archery tower; doing so requires the much larger 9x9 version of the tower. The wiki only mentions that version in the context of climbers, which I haven't found to be an issue, in my admittedly limited and scattered experience. Not being able to tell Urist McIdiot "The enemy is on that side of the tower!" has definitely been an issue, however. If the station order told a dwarf to stand as close as possible to the designated spot instead of anywhere they feel like within a three tile radius, that would help a lot. See also a melee squad being told to form up in a corridor and ending up with half the squad in a storeroom on the other side of the wall.

As I think someone mentioned earlier in the thread, uniforms should default to replacing clothing. "Why won't my militia wear their gauntlets and boots?" is a pretty common question from new players (including myself).

[Inarius]

I never had any issues with gigantic waves of migrants. All I do is, very early in the game, building a mass destruction device, with extreme process of selection. Useless dwarves are locked and then killed with inventive ways. Actually, inventing these devices (locking a mega beast below and then send them to it, or in a 35 level hole, or hurting them to the extreme to improve my hospital skills, etc...etc...) is a big part of the game in my forts.
I always keep my fortress below 40 or 50 to save FPS, and complete the deaths with very special new one (warriors, strong ones, skilled on armory or weaponsmith, etc.). Managing the stress, also.

Keeping population is part of the game.

[DG]

Keeping population is part of the game.

A part of the game that sorely needs to be improved. In any event, casual mass slaughter as a means of population control isn't meant to be part of the game. At least not without proper consequences that are yet to be implemented.