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[Mikademus]

Many threads deal with pet peeves or small, even trivial issues, or with expansion requests. I am personally of the opinion that DF atm is a potentially fantastic game, but that some major issues render it sometimes more painful than fun. These large, critical things is what I hope we can collect in this thread.

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Stones
I'll start with Stones, which was recently brought up again, and discussed in length earlier (and many times before that), I go as far as to say stones is perhaps THE gameplay problem atm. It causes logistical problems (area clearing, order of lugging, merchandise priority), which frustrates gameplay and distrupts the intended game flow. I have in fact dropped the game in waiting for an elegant solution to stone handling.

The most common suggestions arm seems to be explicitly zoning stones for lugging, designating stones for destruction, or, wnen digging, making a distinction between excavation and mining.

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Army coordination
Face it: managing your military dwarf isn't fun. They are stupider than a necked chicken after eaten.

* Military, especially leaders, sleeping when besieged or attacked
* Uncoordinated squads, units acting (getting slaughtered) individually

The most common (partial?) solution to this is a "state of emergency" (auto-set during sieges?) putting the military on alert.

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Civilians during sieges
Well, perhaps even more stupid than military dwarves are civilians when ordered to stay indoors. This of course leads them to either stand in the door so it can't be closed, or stand between your military and the attackers. Thank you, Mr Longshanks Smartdwarf.

The best solution I have found to this in the threads is to designate "military only" (forbidden to civilians) and/or "safe" (mandatory retreats for civilians) zones that take effect when in a state of emergency.

[ March 17, 2008: Message edited by: Mikademus ]

[Align]

Technically, stones can be ignored whenever they aren't on a stockpile or blocking a door, so they're not really that big of a problem - we all just have OCD.

[Wiles]

Construction designation is the biggest hurdle for me. Building a large aboveground castle is going to give me carpal tunnel syndrome.  

[Gambler]

Yeah, military controls and siege management are very annoying. The fixes for these have been discussed many times, and I think everyone kind of agrees on the general way the issues should be dealt with.

Building designations are too, especially for things like walls and roads.

[Crafty Barnardo]

The healthcare system seems to be largely broken.

The way dwarves handle burning items seems like a major problem that should have a simple fix.

[Othob Rithol]

Container/Storage issues:
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Dwarves (particularly military dwarves) scatter their worn and excess clothing and items across the fortress, and rarely make effort to store it. The items cannot be dumped since they belong to someone. KNOWN ISSUE

Best Guess : When a dwarf equips an item replacing another, keep the second item equipped (DO NOT DROP ITEM) and task : store owned item. Store owned item is raised to the priority just below eat/drink/sleep. Yes, wait for your mason to store his old shirt before he makes the floodgate. If no storage available, dwarf places item in stockpile and relinquishes ownership, or dumps item,

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Some dwarves clutter up their rooms with a gazillion crowns etc, making an eyesore, despite containers being available. I believe, from observation, that said containers have maximum capacities.

Best Guess: Remove maximum capacities. Logic for dwarf to place object in container suitable, in room that contains container type. If not already, racks and stands become containers.

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Worn and/or foreign items can be placed in stockpiles that they are not wanted in. KNOWN COMPLAINT.

Best Guess: Allow foreign/domestic and New/Worn/Badly Worn/Falling Apart options on stockpile controls. Same for large/narrow. In orders screen, option to auto-dump worn/badly worn/falling apart items, and narrow/large clothing.

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A stockpile for items in bins/barrels (ie stonecrafts, plants) set to take from  another stockpile (ie, a main storage warehouse drawing from stockpiles located near the workshops)  will draw each and every new item individually. This spams the hauling queue.

Best Guess: Stockpile option to take : singles/half full/only full containers.

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Seeds, Sand and some food items compete for bags. Coin/seed consolidation expected, but not on the current agenda. KNOWN ISSUE.

Best Guess: Option to disallow seed bags on orders screen. Change hauling of seeds to seek stockpile, not bag. Or implement consolidation. Option to reserve bags (like bins and barrels) for non-seed purposes.

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Coffers/chests and bags are considered the same for furniture placement. When placing a coffer, sometimes one must cycle through pages of used bags if they are closer than the furniture stockpiles. PET PEEVE.

Best Guess: Separate the two object types on the build menu. Place coffer/chest and place bag.

[edited for formating and legibility]

[ March 17, 2008: Message edited by: Othob Rithol ]

[Luckymoose]

The main problem I have currently is construction designations. Very time consuming and inefficient. Something else I hate is how you have to build a floor or something out to get that corner wall piece on if not on the ground. This is silly. Also we should be able to better handle wild animals in cages instead of just freaking out when we try to move them. Also when designating a cage to be built that already has an animal, make it say what is in the cage. My last fort I had like 30 empty cages made of the same thing as the couple goblin cages I waned to move. You know how annoying that is? Not to mention the forbidden area spam you get when telling dwarves to stay indoors.

[Derakon]

When placing cages, hit 'x' to expand the list and you'll be able to see which ones have creatures in them.

[numerobis]

quote:Originally posted by Luckymoose:
<STRONG>Something else I hate is how you have to build a floor or something out to get that corner wall piece on if not on the ground. This is silly.</STRONG>

I would call that a feature, though it is pretty micromanagey -- the need to plan scaffolding is something I like.  Wouldn't be so bad if I could then just place a wall on top of the floor.

[Keiseth]

There's really *nothing* at all wrong with stone. Granted, yes, it's a mess to have so much laying around, but that's what happens when you make a tunnel. The stone goes elsewhere. If anything Dwarf Fortress is remarkably lenient in this respect. You could add in a feature that makes the stone less likely to pop up but then you'll anger the same people who get annoyed at things like undead fish and birds.

[Derakon]

Actually, one possibility would be to simply have a "toggle stone" designation like we currently have "toggle engravings". Most of the time you don't really care where stone outside of your stockpiles is, so why bother showing it? It should still default to "display" so you can tell if you're managing to successfully extract <foo> from the wall as you mine, but you'd be able to turn it off for the parts of your fortress that you want to look nice.

[Draco18s]

quote:Originally posted by benoit.hudson:
<STRONG>I would call that a feature, though it is pretty micromanagey -- the need to plan scaffolding is something I like.  Wouldn't be so bad if I could then just place a wall on top of the floor.</STRONG>

If it weren't for the issue of it taking bloody forever to get rid of the floor...

[Nukeitall]

There is no efficient way to cull the entire fortress of pets.

Massive pathfinding and performance issues.

Invasions currently lack ANY sort of siege equipment, unless the goblins "get lucky" and get cave trolls. Even then they're relegated to sitting outside roasting marshmellows.

There is no "mass designate" for contstruction. I want 50 tiles of solid obsidian, not lignite! RAGE!

GET INSIDE MEANS GET INSIDE, NOT STAND THERE!

NO, DON'T RUN OUTSIDE TO GET CLOTHING AND GET KILLED! STOP! STOP! NOOOOOOOO!

All I can think of. Still love the game, though.

[Lyrax]

The stone management is a problem, though it's not a big one.  The problem is that whenever someone gets a job that requires stone, they always seem to pick the one that is FARTHEST away from them.  It would be nice if I could specifically zone mining to have the stones be automatically forbidden.  Or to not leave stones, but that might be asking too much.

[Footkerchief]

quote:Originally posted by Derakon:
<STRONG>Actually, one possibility would be to simply have a "toggle stone" designation like we currently have "toggle engravings". Most of the time you don't really care where stone outside of your stockpiles is, so why bother showing it? It should still default to "display" so you can tell if you're managing to successfully extract <foo> from the wall as you mine, but you'd be able to turn it off for the parts of your fortress that you want to look nice.</STRONG>

Holy shit this is a really good idea.