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[Fedor]

I have several troubles with the game that affect its overall play value, but the three biggest are these:

1) Dwarf labor management.  If it weren't for Dwarf Foreman, I wouldn't be having nearly as much fun - the in-game tools to manage dwarf labor are just too tedious.  The majority of players let many of their dwarves stand around idle or let them do stupid things partly because it's too much of a PITA to manually change labor prefs as often as needs to be done for anything like efficiency or (apparently) even safety.  I am also mourning the absence of a way to list dwarves by skill.   Every time I want to find the best mason to make doors for my King, or engraver to engrave the dining room, or soldiers who are dangerously near to becoming heros, or pick which previously-trained dudes to re-conscript when the goblins attack, I miss LaborDF.

2.  Lag.  ToadyOne has worked hard on this issue, and in the most recent version I can - for the first time since 2D - squeeze in an 80-dwarf fort with magma, as long as I'm careful to turn various options off, cage animals, and avoid intricate pathfinding and some kinds of hidden fun stuff.  Nevertheless, the "lag monster" lurks at the edge of nighmares for every fort I build; it's responsible for more abandonments than the goblins could ever hope for.

3.  Lack of an interesting underground throughout the game.  In the 2D version, you faced everything from river flooding, to wintertime starvation (missing and much mourned!), to antmen coming out of your wells, to respawning river, chasm, and magma denizens.  Difficulty level ramped up nicely as you dug deeper, exposed more features, and (if you weren't careful) allowed the nasties more ways to get into your fortress.  You could grow your own beds and fuel in all fortresses - not just in rare and (unless you cheat) random ones.  Monsters kept respawning, so you had to stay vigilant against threats from multiple directions.  The river had sand, which (again) offered a mix of danger (your dwarves could be drowned in a flood while collecting it) and reward (glass!).  Rock formations were far more varied and nicely banded - you never got entire screens of a single kind of rock.  Colored rock had increased value; if it wasn't the usual color, it was interesting both visually and economically.  Metal veins were abundant and guaranteed to be varied - you never discovered, halfway through a fort, that the only metals available on-site were tin, silver, and lead.  More valuable stuff was further away and more dangers had to be dealt with to reach and retrieve it, which meant that materials like bronze, brass, and silver could be helpful in the early game.  The nethermost depths really WERE the depths - far away, rich, and dangerous!

Other issues don't make the top three for me, but still merit attention (all have already been noted in this thread):

* Equipping, mustering, commanding, and caring for military dwarves is all handled by interface and/or AI inadequate for the Army Arc.

* Building constructions is extremely and unnecessarily time-consuming.

[dethb0y]

I am waiting until the army arc is in to worry about any other details. I play with stone smelting on (thanks, Teldin!) and so to me, rock is never an issue. I don't really sweat the little UI stuff - I'm sure once he gets to it, Toady will do as well with it as he has everything else so far that he's focused on.

I guess you could say I have faith in his vision and his ability.

That said, the best suggestion for rock I've heard so far is to have a difference between "excavate" and "mine", and that it have some kind of auto-stop when you hit (for example) a mineral vein or colored rock or gems.

[gimli]

Well I would like to see a minor fix what hasnt been mentioned so far. Balance ranged weaponry & traps, since both of those are ridicolously overpowered.

[Alfador]

The only problem I see with stone is thus:

When you try to build a workshop on top of an area recently mined out (or not so recently if you don't use stone stockpiles, and I don't), there are stones that need to be cleared out. No problem, right? The dwarf tasked to build the workshop will clear them out him/herself. Right?

If only. Unless there's enough room to move every stone to the nearest possible non-workshop tile to its original location, the construction will be suspended as inaccessible. And targeting those specific stones for hauling to a stockpile is impossible--you must manaully dump them somewhere and then reclaim them if you want to actually use them (I happen to like the aesthetics of microcline, thank you very much).

Of course, the easy solution is to mine out a much larger area than cramming lots of workshops into a cramped space where there's not enough room to shift the stone. But sometimes by the time I figure out I want to shove more workshops into a space I was planning to have fewer in, the miners are already off working on some other area of the fortress, and it's usually a pain to undesignate a line of squares just to shift their priorities over to expanding the workshop area.

Basically, I'm not for any change in the amount of stone... I'm for changing the way stone is handled by the dwarves.

[Puzzlemaker]

Why don't we just wait for the cart system to be implemented...

[Forumsdwarf]

My personal pet peeves:
1.  Not being able to zoom to objects, particularly dwarves, from the alerts list.
2.  Not being able to access information on war dog assignments from the same interface war dogs are assigned.
3.  Not being able to see who can and can't spar from the Military list.  [CNS injuries, etc.]
4.  Not being alerted when someone suffers a CNS injury (or any injury that prevents sparring).
5.  Not being able to filter while browsing the Stockpile list, particularly in those places where metal and nonmetal armor are mixed (i.e. pig tail cloth shoes cluttering the iron high boot list).
6.  Not being able to filter clothing (finished goods) stockpiles by non-usable.
7.  Not being able to filter prepared food lists for vegetarian dishes, particularly when trading with Elves.
8.  Not being able to choose to melt items from a bin unless I zoom in on each individual item.  I don't even get to see if an item in a bin is marked for melting until I zoom in.
9.  The ambiguity in the Stockpile screen over whether a particular item is "in use" or not.  If it shows 20 pairs of chain leggings and 10 are actually being worn that should be indicated on the list.
(Incidentally, what does it mean when an object is colored purple on the stockpile screen?  Marking an object for dumping colors it purple but unmarked items can also sometimes be purple.)

[Draco18s]

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>(Incidentally, what does it mean when an object is colored purple on the stockpile screen?  Marking an object for dumping colors it purple but unmarked items can also sometimes be purple.)</STRONG>

Forbidden or NOT YOURS will also mark as purple.

"In use" I think it blue.  I've seen some blue items and wondered what they were, I vaguely remember zooming to one and finding a dwarf carrying the item.

[Mikademus]

Ok, that was certainly a slew of posts about stones. If nothing else, the sheer volume of feedback and number of proposed solutions validate the claim that stones, or the management of them, IS a gameplay problem.

Summing up the debate seems to result in that:

(a) stones need a better management system, either

* Improvements to stockpiling/hauling through setting priorities
* Stones needing to be designated for removal before being hauled
* auto-dumping of non-economical stone

(b) stone generation, either

* more stones created (few in favour)
* less stones created (many in favour)
* setting

(c) hide/show stones toggle

However, I don't think other important gameplay aspects have received enough attentions. For instance, the siege/combat problems and solutions should be summed up:

First, civilians in combat. The same suggestions still hold, virtually undebated, either

* Designated "military" zones that all civilians will avoid when under state of emergency
* Designated "safe" zones that all civilians will aggregate in when under state of emergency
* And the addition, special "safe rooms" that civilians will gather in when under state of emergency. However, imo, this can more elegantly and flexible be handled with "safe zones".

[Othob Rithol]

quote:Originally posted by gimli:
<STRONG>Well I would like to see a minor fix what hasnt been mentioned so far. Balance ranged weaponry & traps, since both of those are ridicolously overpowered.</STRONG>

If you really want to, it's a quick fix, just go into your DF/raws/objects folder, and edit item_ammo and item_trapcomp files...pretty self-explanatory.

knocking them down, say by 25%, might just do the trick for you.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Regarding the stone issue, I would personally like to see more stone produced. Yes, it is annoying to see it clutter the area, but at the same time, I often kind of run out of it because I tend to expand slowly. (^_^;;

In addition, it is one of the more dwarvish resources and at the same time of limited supply: Plants will regrow unlimitedly, but once you have dug out the entire mountain, it is gone...

However, there was something else I was considering concerning stone:

How about requiring stone blocks to be used for most or even all things created by the mason and craftsdwarf? Think about it, if you hear that someone is making a statue, don't you envision them having a fairly regular block of stone from which they create their masterpiece?

This would greatly increase the usefulness of stone blocks, which themselves are much easier to store than raw stone, thus helping with the cluttering issue (at the cost of having a mason heavily occupied, of course).

Deathworks

[Kaelem Gaen]

The one I see missing on the list.

Freshwater collection tanks.  

You got rainfall, which as far as I know is always freshwater,  all it does is give your dwarf an unhappy thought.  Now I already know that somewhere down the line rain will refill ponds, But if you're in a coastal settlement, that water will always be salty.

Of course you can do the salt->pump->freshwater thing, but it would be nice if you could designate barrels, or maybe even make rain collectors.  Now it wouldn't be like you set it up and boom you got a constant source of water, it collects which could take a couple rainy days or maybe one big storm.

So in conclusion, more ways to get water.  (Hey you'd still be SoL in a desert or a tundra)

[Khosan]

One that really gets me: Dwarves in danger.

In particular, dwarves running.  I think everyone has seen that one dwarf who is standing right in the entrance to your fortress when an ambush or something appears, and then decides to run off into the hills.

I hate that, and I can't tell you the number of times it has happened (especially considering that after moron #1 runs off and gets killed, all his moron friends run out to steal his pants from his still warm corpse, who proceed to follow in moron #1's footsteps).

Probably could be solved by having the pathing algorithm (or whatever it is) make paths that lead away from the closest underground tile act like a restricted traffic area.  Probably need to add in some sort of further weighting for if the dwarf gets within X squares of whatever's aggravating them.

So the dwarf would think, "Well, there's a lot of goblins between me and the door.  That's not a good route.  Maybe if I run south a bit and then curve around them..."

[unobtaniumman]

Go dig an underground tunnel network in your back yard and tell me how all the dirt you removed just turned transparent and insubstantial so you could move through it and keep digging. I would also like to hear about how you carried the stuff out and it suddenly became a giant carveable block.

I can't dig in my backyard.

I live next to the ocean. There's an aqufier. A freshwater aquifier, oddly enough.

[Othob Rithol]

Damn, I thought I kept a link tot hat witty "bump target thread" magic card.

[JujuBubu]

If there is voting going on .. I would like to vote for MOAR STONE ..
more rubble, more trash .. with the premise of better Stone and transportation,
or the medical arc will include a lot of back problems

Another thing that keeps getting on my nerve is animal handling.
I want to breed animals for food and labor but the handling is just annoying.

I moved from pits to cages. from there to cages and pits to enable breeding.
from there to cages without pits for breeding to cages and restraints for breeding.

my new goal is to build a large stable for my animals to breed in, with long rows of restraints and cages for the offspring. I think this could work out nice.

Now my problem is the following :
Not seeing the gender of animals in cages.
Not beeing able to cage pets.

A suggestion would be to build cages or restraints in the room of the pet-owner, who then cages his pets in his room to admire them there ..

and to give a positive aspect to the economy : enable me to buy stuff off dwarfs.