General Desired Improvements: User definable # of tiles to show in UI. Please, for the love of all that is good.
Take advantage of multi core processors. Path finding algorithms are well suited to being parallelized. (I've got a quad core and my game crawls when I get a lot of dwarves, 6 core processors are only 3 months away and it's only going to get harder to avoid writing code for parallelism)
A programmalbe UI SDK so others can create UIs. This would free you from the burden of building UIs and allow you to focus on stuff you find more interesting. Basically just a few methods that will give you the contents of a cell are all that're necessary.
CellContent getCellContent(int x, int y, int z)
void setCellAction(int x, int y, int z, Action action)
int[] getDimensions(); (X,Y,Z)
Ideas for fun new ways to kill stuff: Greek Fire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire Made at the brewery from dwarven booze of some sort and refined coal, put into barrels.
Can be fired from catapults, explodes and burns on impact. Also need some sort of trap based around this.
Archimedes Mirror: http://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Mirrors/Tzetzes.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Heat_ray Basically you make a "mirror" from a crystal glass block at the glass kiln, you get several of these mirrors to "point" at a spot they have line of sight to, each mirror increases the amount of energy placed on that spot by a factor of the weather. You get enough of these you can burn things. Quality of the mirror increases transmission %, with a masterpiece mirror at 100% transmission. With a bit of ingenuity a multi stage collector could be made for huge amounts of focused light.
ElectricityUsing mechanical energy (from a water wheel, or a dwarf with the pumping task), transfer that mechanical energy to some kind of dynamo (or some other older style electricity generating device), an ESD (electro static discharge) could be created for things that got too close, shocking them (maybe even death) at least stunning at high levels. Would only shock those wearing conductive armor.
MagnetismCan create an electro magnet (see above for electricity), could do comical things to creatures wearing magnetic affecting armor. You could lift them up, drop them, perhaps even crush their armor around them. Or perhaps pull their equipment off of their bodies. Or someone attempting to shoot metal arrows through a gap that is magnetized would find their arrows diverted.
General UI Improvements:
- In the (d)esignate UI section, have the first action be "selection", where you would select an area just like you would for mining. Then once your selection is made, you would apply an action to each square of the section. That action could be to dig, stairs... all of the usual stuff. But it would also allow for easily doing stuff like marking everything in a selection for forbidding or dumping.
- A better way to do construction, more like how you build bridges rather than the current behavior. Also, maybe a root level (next to designation) selection of "construction".
- On the stocks screen a way to do item selection by name similar to what you can do at the trade depot. Would make it much easier for tracking down individual items.
- Also on on the stocks screen the ability to mark for dumping/melting/forbidding of entire aggregates of items (the first view before you hit tab)