Balance, as broad as that term is, is just another symptom of how big the development load is for DF. "Animals" from a true balance perspective, are broke in more ways that one. Let them breed uncontrolled for 5 years and you can have a brainless military 10x the size of your fortress. I don't care how bad ass that troll is, throw 50 warhounds just at him and he's dead.
So I try not to take balance too seriously, because the lack of balance is what makes DF fun in the end. It's what lets you do all sorts of broken and ultimately pointless things.
My biggest objection to the speed difference between your average dwarves and dogs isn't that its unrealistic...it's that my dogs assigned to protect important dwarves are never there when I need them.
The pathing AI just needs another pass, like half of the game. If you choose to let one particular problem annoy you, it's a crap shoot when it will actually get development time back into it.
Although yeah, this particular one has been bugging me too lately. Trying to finish off an expansion to my fortress gates (again) and constructing one critical block results in a trapped worker.
After racing to get the worker out of the spot by breaking a hole in my defenses, no one will clear the rubble so I can plug the gap. So my defenses are open and the goblins can side-step my trap field, and the trader just showed up with their customary 17 goblins. Lovely. It made me put the game down last night (that and the time) because I just didn't want to deal with the hassle of it.
I guess a real pet peeve of mine is that dwarves tend to go after objects on z-levels above them rather than actually evaluating what's underground vs above ground, what's in a stockpile, what's not in a stockpile....I'm sure it saves on processing....but I have soldiers during siege conditions leaving my fortress to grab a shield that's been there since the start of the game. That's just bloody infuriating, especially when I have 15 shields SITTING IN THE ARMORY NEXT TO THE MAIN ARTERIAL OF THE WHOLE FORTRESS, TWO STEPS FROM WHERE I ACTIVATED THEM. I've screamed at dwarves more than once for that, and is the primary reason I scumsave, usually because I don't know about until I get the notice they're bleeding to death.
I know I should be using orders and forbidding/claiming left and right...but juggling all that for a yearly siege is just another set of tedious labors the player has to handle. Hopefully that gets addressed in full by the whole "dwarves sorting out their own equipment."
I believe in my heart of hearts that proper balance does not lead to more problems, but less. In the aforementioned example, a troll should be able to squash a half dozen dogs at a time. I had a dragon invasion for the first time today... very anticlimactic. He belched flame once, and I can't even tell who at, supposedly. No one appears to have even been singed. Then three legendary wrestlers killed him without incident.
Wrestlers.
Is there some reason the dragon is smaller than a wagon?
Anyhow... we'll see. I have some pet construction projects I want to do before DF will be a complete loss to me, and I cannot complain at all given the entertainment I have gotten out of it, but my involvement will likely slack off considerable after that if some of the really basic stuff is not handled. This stuff gets more and more important the further you try to expand the arcs.
And the single best thing about this game is how it generates stories, and there's barely anything to make sure you can actually FIND all the stories you generate. I can't count on my fingers and toes all the times someone has died and I have to shut down the whole game, save, restart, abandon fortress, go slogging through the history in legends mode, just to get an idea WHO killed the person to beg in with...
I respect the vision and abilities of the folks here, but there is a reason undertakings like this tend to be done by teams... I dunno. We will see what it looks like when the next version is out. But unless the army arc is more challenging than I imagine, it will just be redundant. All the combat is busted due to lack of realism, hence a lack of the feeling of immersion.
I have left off playing online games of various types on much the same lines. It gets to a point where for whatever reason, no one wants to listen anymore. Dogs being faster than dwarfs is BASIC. Dragons not being kill-able by a handful of wrestlers is BASIC.
Along the lines of your shield, I had a chamber I had dug out too openly for my magma supply to full, so I made it a little maze that channeled the magma back and forth to maximize the number of magma driven forges etc I could have in one spot. In the process, I used some doors so my dwarfs did not have to walk in and out of the maze I was creating following the whole route. I began backing the doors out and replacing them with walls. The dwarfs refused to remove the doors. I built an extra furniture storage. They still refused. I built a furniture storage specifically FOR doors. They removed all but one door and put them all in the non-door-specific furniture storage...?
I'll never know why they left the last door. The storage spot for doors remains entirely empty. The door melted in the lava.
Yeah, stuff like that.
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Topic: What turns you off about DF? (Read 313048 times)