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[ryak2002]

you can always choose a site with an outdoor river since you can see these on the map.  No water issue at all then   :cool:

[Mechanoid]

quote:Originally posted by ryak2002:
<STRONG>you can always choose a site with an outdoor river since you can see these on the map.  No water issue at all then    

[MoonCabbage]

i forsee building a fortress on a glacier and having them all fall into a crevasse.

[nornagon]

FWIW, I'd much, much rather die an interesting and different way every game than win all the time. c.f nethack.

[Tommy2U]

Having a site selection screen show "No river" warning seems a simple and effective solution.

[SwiftSpear]

New user here , just read a good 20-30 pages in this thread.

Um, regarding the issue of dwarfs crafting and encrusting stupid things... one possible fix could be to restrict piles that any given dwarf working at a specific craftshop is allowed to pull stuff from.  If I don't want dwarfs encrusting mechanisms (which I think is a pretty fair demand) I can block mechanisms from being stored in the pile the jewelers shop is allowed to grab finished goods/furniture/other crap from and put them in a different pile.

This kind of solves the problem the same way we solve it right now in game, but it would have that extra AI layer that provides a bit of safety for the newer players who don't plan their fort out as obsessively as the more experienced players have become used to needing to.

Regarding other general development progress, no offense intended to anyone, but in all honesty, as cool as some of these new features are my biggest frustrations with the game right now are by far interface and bug problems.  It drives me nuts to no end when I set up a magma forge and general base on the far end of my fort, with the idea being that miners and metalsmiths could work autonomously without having to go back to the main base in order for any of their nessesities, and then just finding that 95% of my fortress spends most of their time trekking back and forth rather than just choosing an area to regular and staying there for the most part.  And the metal smiths don't even work the magma forges and smelters for a reason I can't discern, and nearly every strange mood dwarf I have gets stuck on a spot outside rather then claiming a workshop and going through their little ditty the way they are supposed to, and then a permaflood comes and destroys everything.  In terms of the game falling apart in the late game, what people seem to be attributing to unfinished features and poor game construction is IMO 90% that the game gets exponentially more buggy the longer you play.

Not to discourage feature development in any way, but I just wanted to put my 2 cents in.

[edit]I wanted to add a thought I had on location selection in the new version, now that the old system of deciding simply based on external factors won't be all players are concerned about...  How about tying some sort of point cost to more advanced site surveying information.  It seems some players would like a little more surprise when it comes to what they will encounter in their site... and it seems they would need a little more starting resources to establish as effectively.  And others don't want to be shocked to find there is nearly no water on the map they selected when thier strategy is heavily dependant on good water supplies.  To me it makes logical sense that dwarfs surveying in depth every site they encounter would take a lot longer deciding on a site, and would therefore have depleted much more resources in travel.  Of course if you don't want to suffer the loss of points for more detailed site information, you're probably the kind of player who's willing to cheat in the game for an easier experience anyways, so meh, you can cheat in the current version, nothing will change with the new one there.

[ July 07, 2007: Message edited by: SwiftSpear ]

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Another new player here who has just gotten to the point where the first nobles arrive (yeah, while I love simulation/strategy games, I am not really good at them; A great fan of SimCity, but always end up bankrupt (^_^;; ).

Because of that, my main experience is with the early game and getting the dwarves settled in.

Actually, the AI does not really pose such a major threat for the early phase of the game, even for beginning players. Of course, you need to heed the advice to deactivate hunting (currently more of designate for destruction), but besides that, things are not that bad.

As for getting over the first winters, the only thing you really need is a trade post and the availability of trade caravans. Have one or two craftdwarves continuously build crafts of whatever is available (especially bones/shells, but also rock) and you usually have enough trade goods to buy enough food from the dwarven caravan to get over the winter (at least during early play). Thus, rushing for the underground river is not really necessary.

If there is something in the AI or rather task handling that hinders newbies, it is workshop robbing. When you have a butcher and a hunter, I repeatedly get this annoying pattern:

- Hunter returns kill and puts it at the butcher workshop.
- A dwarf walks into the butcher workshop, gets the animal corpse and dumps it into the refuse pile
- Another dwarf (or sometimes even the same dwarf) gets the animal corpse from the refuse pile, drags it to the butcher and starts butchering.
- Before long, however, that dwarf disrupts the job in order to sleep or drink.
- Another dwarf walks over to the butcher, gets the animal corpse and dumps it into the refuse pile.

Thanks to a constant repetition of that pattern, I have seen more than one deer corpse rot away unused. Things like that are really damaging for beginning outposts as they usually don't have that much ressources to spare. Thus, I would really love to see items protected once they are being worked on in a workshop.

Nowadays, I have been able to provide enough food for my dwarves, but in the very first attempts, there were often vermin-eating phases which regularly turned catastrophic. The most frustrating thing were all the announcments "x cancels hunting in order to hunt vermin for food", "x cancels fishing in order to hunt vermin for food", "x cancels preparing meal in order to hunt vermin for food"... There was a point where the vermin hunting paralyzed the entire fortress. I had enough food stores provided I could get a dwarf to finish a prepare meal job before going back to rat hunting. In my opinion, that is something that can really frustrate a new player.

I agree that having your jeweller prefer to encrust flood gates rather than statues with jewelry is kind of annoying - unless you think flood gates make good furniture for your nobles' bed rooms...

I have just dabbled into the adventure mode, but I already noticed one thing that I personally think has more potential: Asking about surroundings. At the moment, it seems that you can get the same information, regardless of who you ask in a given village. This makes peasants rather meaningless since you can easily get all information you want just from the merchants and mayors you have to talk to about other business as well.

Personally, I think it would be a great feature if all villagers had an internal profile similar to that of the dwarves with likes and dislikes. However, that profile would be hidden from the player and would be used to choose which information the NPC could provide. For instance, if you had a forest-loving peasant, he could tell you about the wooded hills and the forest nearby, but would not talk about the dunes to the North. Or if we had a merchant who was a fan of the elves, she could tell you about the history of nearby elven settlement. And if you have the male supremacist, he may tell you about male heroes but somehow fail to mention that there also had been female adventurers reaching great heights.

With such a diversification based on easily identified topic characteristics, talking to different NPCs would become more interesting again in my opinion.

Deathworks

[Grue]

There is a problem with being able to put a fortress on top of human town. There would be two settlements on the same tile, and by looking at the world map only one of them would be visible. I can see all sorts of weird related bugs.

[Asehujiko]

Maybe the icons can switch like it now does in game when there are 2 creatures on the same spot.

[4bh0r53n]

another problem would be the lag, it runs slow enough with 80 or so dwarves, imagine the speed it will sink to when you add a bustling human town to it...

[Baneslave]

There is only one way: Capture humans and put them to cage to die slowly in hellish flames of dwarven magma workshops.

[Mechanoid]

quote:Originally posted by 4bh0r53n:
<STRONG>another problem would be the lag, it runs slow enough with 80 or so dwarves, imagine the speed it will sink to when you add a bustling human town to it...</STRONG>

Yeah but you dont need to manage anything that happens with the humans (yet) so in essence they're a free and perminate group of militia and military units.

[Skyrage]

Obviously all Toady has to do is set some kind of border or radius around existing settlements which disallows you to settle too near.

[Lokum]

okay so if we can build fortresses on a walkable tile, can I just build a fortress around an outside river? Kind of like how London was started.

[SwiftSpear]

quote:Originally posted by Lokum:
<STRONG>okay so if we can build fortresses on a walkable tile, can I just build a fortress around an outside river? Kind of like how London was started.</STRONG>

Ya, but dwarfs don't build cities/towns, they build mines.  We should probably put this idea in the chest for a while until the DF world is ready to handle things like players still playing what is basicly Dwarf Fortress, can instead make human settlements, or elf settlements, or goblin settlements.  Eventually it should be possible... but it doesn't really seem worth it at this point when the base DF game is still so rough.