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[Keldor]

Whenever a hostile creature kills another hostile creature, the dead creature's possessions/body parts should automatically be forbidden.  After all, the hostile monster that won the fight is most likely still there!  I've been having this problem with the local kobolds killing thieves and the like that wander too close to their cave.  Whenever this happens, I have to act quickly to ensure that I don't have a line of dwarves merrily rushing over to get themselves pincushioned by kobold archers.  Those that escape flee about 5 paces, until the monster is once again outside of detection radius, then often turn right back around to try to grab the same item that they were just chased off from.

While I'm on the subject, siege loot should also be forbidden until the siege is broken.

[Eagle of Fire]

I'm against having some loot automatically forbiden without a good reason. If you have a fortress built just right next to a kobold or goblin town, the danger of having aforementioned town include the fact that your dwarves will sometimes wander in that direction for reasons that the player think stupid.

I'm all into allowing stuff to be forbiden in sieges though. That's a reasonably good reason, especially when you are yourself forbiding your dwarves from going outside...

[Aquillion]

quote:Originally posted by Eagle of Fire:
<STRONG>I'm against having some loot automatically forbiden without a good reason. If you have a fortress built just right next to a kobold or goblin town, the danger of having aforementioned town include the fact that your dwarves will sometimes wander in that direction for reasons that the player think stupid.</STRONG>

The problem is that in this case, the player is able to forbid things manually, but if they don't, dwarves rush off and die.  This is a bad situation; it dull, repetitive micromanagement.  That should be avoided whenever possible...  forcing the player to constantly drop whatever they're doing to check the kobold cave adds absolutely nothing to the game.  If you want dwarves to randomly die because they make stupid decisions, that's fine, but the player shouldn't be put in a sitatuion where that level of micromanagement governs whether dwarves live or die; the game has enough micromanagement as it is, and we should try and reserve it for situations that are really important.

As long as forbiddings exist, the game should attempt to automatically apply them where they make sense.  Doing it any other way just makes for unfun gameplay.

(Also, keep in mind that this is not a "sometimes dwarves die" thing.  If an unforbidden piece of loot is lying near the kobold cave, every single dwarf who has item hauling on is eventually going to try to go and get it, and will eventually die.  Every new dwarf that gets item hauling turned on will run over and die.  The AI here is not killing them for "reasons that the player think stupid", it is being stupid.  Having every dwarf in your fortress automatically charge a known danger zone is not so much realistic stupidity as it is a bug in the AI that needs to be, in some fashion or another, fixed or smoothed over.)

In general, a good gameplay principal to avoid pointless micromanagement is this:  If there is only one sensible decision to make in a situation, or if one situation is obviously the sensible 'default', then that result should be automatically selected as the default by the game.  Forcing the player to take the same obvious actions over and over again does not add anything to the gameplay, and only adds to the difficulty insofar as you're forcing the player to struggle against the limitations of your interface.

With that said...  is there a 'danger zone' designation you can make to automatically forbid every item in it and keep your dwarves out?  That's what we really need.

[ December 27, 2007: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Draco18s]

There is a designation in 33g ([d][f]) that forbids items much like designating tress to be chopped.

[Hesitris]

quote:Originally posted by Draco18s:
<STRONG>There is a designation in 33g ([d][f]) that forbids items much like designating tress to be chopped.</STRONG>

There's a similar designation that can be used to reclaim forbidden items. Personally, I wouldn't mind having to use that in order to pick up the loot from fallen enemies; that can always wait until after the whole battle's over, whereas you can't really wait until the end of the battle to forbid things you don't want your dwarves chasing after, as by then you'd have already lost quite a few dwarves. Wait until it's all clear, then sweep the reclaim designation over the whole area. Voila. Or, y'know, never reclaim them, in the case of corpses deep within a monster-infested cave.

Ooh, just thought of an easy oversight to make if this were to be implemented; the bodies decomposing to bones might not auto-forbid, as they wouldn't have been dropped directly by death. Perhaps bones from forbidden corpses would come out forbidden as well?

[ December 28, 2007: Message edited by: Hesitris ]

[Chthon]

quote:Originally posted by Hesitris:
<STRONG>

There's a similar designation that can be used to reclaim forbidden items. Personally, I wouldn't mind having to use that in order to pick up the loot from fallen enemies; that can always wait until after the whole battle's over, whereas you can't really wait until the end of the battle to forbid things you don't want your dwarves chasing after, as by then you'd have already lost quite a few dwarves. Wait until it's all clear, then sweep the reclaim designation over the whole area. Voila. Or, y'know, never reclaim them, in the case of corpses deep within a monster-infested cave.

Ooh, just thought of an easy oversight to make if this were to be implemented; the bodies decomposing to bones might not auto-forbid, as they wouldn't have been dropped directly by death. Perhaps bones from forbidden corpses would come out forbidden as well?

[ December 28, 2007: Message edited by: Hesitris ]</STRONG>

Bones from forbidden corpses already do come out forbidden.  Already been taken care of in .33g

I agree that default state of monsters killed by other monsters should automatically be forbidden.  There shouldn't be any reason why a dwarf in my fortress knows that a giant cave spider in the next cave over has killed a giant mole.  Why should he suddenly B-line over too get a corpse?  It makes no sense.  If a dwarf kills it, or if a dwarf is killed by it, that's a different story.

[Aquillion]

quote:Originally posted by Draco18s:
<STRONG>There is a designation in 33g ([d][f]) that forbids items much like designating tress to be chopped.</STRONG>

Yes -- but do you have to do it every time new items are dropped?  If so, it's not really a good solution; the player should not be forced to constantly watch every part of the map at once, dropping everything they're doing to repeatedly re-designate new items as forbidden or risk having all their hauling dwarves die.

That's what I meant when I said that it's an interface issue; forcing the player to micromanage the forbidding of items in a situation like this is bad for gameplay.  Planning fortresses is fun; getting kicked in the teeth by the game's interface because you didn't carefully and pedantically repeat forbid-designations in the short timeframe given is not fun at all.  The interface and default behaviors should always be designed to avoid requiring micromanagement; the game has quite enough of that as it is.

[Draco18s]

quote:Originally posted by Aquillion:
<STRONG>Yes -- but do you have to do it every time new items are dropped?  If so, it's not really a good solution;</STRONG>

I'm aware that it's not the solution you're looking for--you do have to do it everytime--but it does make the process faster.