I've looked through several pages of suggestions and quite a few searches, so I don't
think these have been suggested before. Those that I have found, however, I'm making a more specific suggestion or a somewhat different take on things, so hopefully I won't have too much repetition.
1) Equipping soldiers
Currently, the order in which dwarves in Fortress Mode pick up equipment determines what they end up wearing. For instance, a dwarf that grabs a helm first will only pick up a helm, but one that grabs a cap and
then a helm will wear both. This only adds to the problems that are involved in getting your soldiers to wear the right items, because not only do you have to lock them in a room and redress them, but you have to do so
three times to get them to wear everything.
My suggestion is creating some way of putting "default sets" for each armor level into the game, either by fiddling with the size/permit of each item or else putting in some sort of list for each armor level or
something to get an end result that looks something like (for example) having a dwarf
Set to wear: Would equip:
Leather Leather Armor
Chain Leather Armor + Chainmail
Plate Chainmail + Platemail
...no matter what order that they equip the stuff in.
2) Sparring
Yes, yes, there's been a lot of sparring suggestions, but I haven't seen one quite
exactly like this:
Instead of sparring in the barracks, make a new sort of room defined from an armor stand and/or weapon rack for them to spar in. In this room, sparring damage is drastically reduced, to the point that serious injuries are pretty much unheard of. While this would have a similar end result to the usual suggestion of "make them pick up wooden weapons stored in the weapon rack", it has three main differences: 1) it would not require the player trading for wooden weapons; 2) it would be usable from a weapon rack AND an armor stand, whereas most suggestions would preclude armor stands; and 3) FWIW, it would not require Toady readding and debugging the weapon rack and armor stand container functionality, which
might make it easier on him (or might make it harder, but still, I figured the possibility was worth noting).
3) View champion/elite soldier info
Currently, when a soldier hits "elite" level, his info page ('p' hotkey) simply says that he need not work. This means that to change his equipment, you have to go to the military screen rather than just doing it from the unit info (which becomes just that much more hassle when trying to get your champions out of their -Copper Leggings-). Perhaps even worse, it no longer shows what squad he's in, so if you want to find his squad leader, you have to go to the military screen, find his name amongst a potentially HUGE mass of soldiers, and then backtrack up to his squad leader.
It would be nice if it still let us access all that stuff even on a champion. It can change to show that no, he can't work (such as taking away the deactivate, labors, etc. options), but it's a major pain to lose access to the militarily relevant information for the guys who you need it from the most.
4) Paired equipment made as one item
According to reasonableman, this one probably ain't gonna happen, so I'm sticking it in spoiler tags for the time being. I might come up with something better later.
It would be nice if paired items such as gloves, shoes, gauntlets, etc. were made as one item instead of two. I.e. rather than your armorsmith making a Left Gauntlet and a Right Gauntlet, he instead makes a Pair Of Gauntlets that has the same total protection, coverage, cost, value, etc. as one Left one plus one Right one. So gauntlets, boots, etc. would look like Greaves (which are a single "greaves" rather than one "right greave" and one "left greave" that must be equipped seperately). This would go for clothing as well, of course.
This would cut down on the number of item entires to keep track of, make it easier to keep everybody equipped properly (rather than trying to reequip a guy's one bad gauntlet while keeping his one good one), reduce the number of hauling jobs required to get the stuff to stockpiles, and reduce the number of melting jobs required to recycle obsolete ones.
5) Clothing repair
There have been some suggestions for clothing repair, but I'm hoping this specific implementation is original enough to avoid getting yelled at
Like other suggestions, this one involves the Clothier and/or Leatherworker make clothing patches. The patches could be used by dwarves (specifically, bought from shops, but that's optional) to improve the condition of their clothing. Unlike other suggestions, I suggest having a generic "one size fits all" patch, but requiring multiple patches to improve an item's condition depending on its quality. A basic item would require one patch, all the way up to a masterpiece item requiring six. Likewise, the jobs to create the patches would create multiples depending on what the quality roll is: a roll that would usually result in a basic item instead results in one patch, all the way up to a roll that would usually give a masterpiece instead giving six patches.
A couple sub-suggestions would be: 1) make a piece of clothing only able to be patched a certain number of times before it's just too far gone to keep saving; and 2) make certain materials require specific materials' patches (i.e. plant fiber patches don't work on leather clothing).
6) Shorter titles
It would be nice to have an option to automatically abbreviate certain titles, rather than doing it manually for Every. Single. Soldier. when you want to be able to see a long-named dwarf's status or weapon of choice. The same goes for the longer-named items, as it can become difficult to tell what something is made out of - or even what it
is when it has a bunch of symbols and "narrow" on the front (with Giant Cave Spider Silk/Chitin being the worst offender). Specific examples of shortened titles and names:
"Crossbow" becomes "XBow"
"Marksdwarf" and "Crossbowman" becomes "XBow User" or just "XBow"
"Giant Cave Spider" becomes "GCS"
"-creature- Bone Bolts" (i.e. Goblin Bone Bolts) becomes "Bone Bolts"
7) Siege Engines
I'm modifying this one to take into account replies later in the thread.
Some suggestions for siege engine additions/changes:
--Scorpio: The name is tentative at best, but it refers to the siege engine I thought would be neat. The tl;dr description of the Scorpio is that it was a light ballista that, rather than firing rocks and heavy bolts, would be used to fire bolts with great accuracy. Its usage was, in essence, a giant sniper crossbow. The in-game version would be similar to the current Ballista, but with lighter damage, no knockback, and presumably faster loading. Ammunition would be created in a system similar to the Ballista, but with several shots per job (e.g. 3 arrows per log, 3 arrowheads per forging job, etc.). It would be made with fewer logs' worth of parts, either as its own parts or using 2 Ballista parts.
--Catapult: Fires in an arc, and deals damage to the place where it hits and all the surrounding squares. As another addition, different types of ammo could be made with different effects, giving an actual use for some of those animal extracts: an AoE fire round, an AoE poison round, and a cannister round that increases AoE area but decreases damage come to mind. Good ol' stone would still be perfectly usable of course.
8 ) Champion colors
It's cool for champions to have their own color, but when you have thirty guys running around that are all the same color, it makes it impossible to tell them apart at a glance. Is that a squad of spears you're sending to fight the Titan, or is it your mace squad going to try to club it to death? The only ways to know are to either check the squad's inventories or else memorize the names of (or give new names to) the members.
So my suggestion is to have their secondary color (the one they flash to) be dependent on which weapon they're legendary with, and as a sub-suggestion, have that color only appear when armed with that specific weapon.
As an example:
Urist McChopperdwarf is a Champion who is a Legendary Axedwarf wielding an Axe. He blinks between white and bright blue. Say you then give him a Mace to train with. He isn't Legendary with a Mace, but he's still pretty badass, so he blinks between white and dark red. When he becomes pretty good with that Mace, he would start blinking between white and bright red.
9) Man the battlements! ...no, not THAT side you idiot!
One problem that my Marksdwarves have is that each squad likes to spread out in a circle roughly 2 tiles away from the leader. This is all well and good...until you try to get them to man the fortifications. Then if you station the leader within 2 tiles of the fortifications, at LEAST one is inevitably going to wind up on the wrong side of them, and thus liable to get killed by anything from Lashers to your own Ballistae. If you station the leader farther away, however, you're only going to get one or two up against the fortifications, meaning that less-experienced Marksdwarves won't actually shoot through the fortifications. Both of these are Bad Things.
So my suggestion is that when you station a squad leader adjacent to a fortification, the other squad members station themselves on THAT SIDE of the fortification or any fortification connected to it and with a direct path to the squad leader.
I imagine the decision-making going something like this:
"My squad leader is next to Fortification A. Fortification B is connected to it. Tiles C and D are next to Fortification B and within 2 tiles of the squad leader. The WALK from the squad leader to Tile C is 2 tiles, and to Tile D is 105 Tiles. Therefore, I stand in Tile C. Period."
10) Another option for carried water
If you order a squad to carry water, they start to get bitchy about not having booze. If you
don't order a squad to carry water, they're liable to run off to the still when the enemy is one screen away. So my suggestion is to add an option to the squad info screen to make the three choices, "Squad carries and drinks water", "Squad carries and drinks carried water while on duty", and "Squad does not carry water".
-----Latest suggestions-----
#4 and #7 have been modified to take advantage of replies to the list. Many thanks to all for your suggestions about my suggestions
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Topic: A big ol' list of suggestions (Read 1817 times)