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[Dastard]

Been playing for about 2-ish months now, love the game. Felt like signing up to toss out some ideas and possibly troll/join succession games. Here goes.

Ideas:

• Prefabrications:
  A UI for generating/sharing/using prefabricating building/designation orders. I know there are a few third party applications for this, but I think it'd go a long way towards end user friendliness if there was a main interface for this, as the game could come packaged with a few basic versions of buildings such as bedrooms, powered mills/pumps, workstation/storeroom combos, etc., and it individual tiles in the prefab interface can be given a construct order so as to prevent (or promote in the case of nobles) getting trapped in.
  
  The prefab menu could list all of the workshops necessary to complete the prefab, and list how much base materials are necessary, and automatically assign jobs to workstations to finish it with options for preferring stone or wood and preferring high or low cost materials; a screw pump prefab would require 1 stone, 2 wood (I think, can't remember), and would generate work orders for a massive corkscrew, a stone block, and a wooden pipe. One of the hurdles I think a lot of new players come across is not knowing what builds parts for various objects and/or getting aggravated when they forget a part and have to go back and build a workshop/turn on labors.
  
• Tutorial Level:
  Make a series of 1x1 tile (like nanofortress) games that run players through the basics up to the more esoteric. Start off with basic features like designation and interface navigation, go to the more intermediate like trade and military, and work towards the more esoteric features such as pumping, traps and levers. Even a prepackaged map that contains a basic fort and notes explaining how the different features of the fortress work would go a long way. When I started playing it took me 2 hours of playing to realize that mining wasn't ordered via work orders and was designated, and that the manager didn't just make your dwarves automatically do stuff and you had to build all the workshops involved and assign a manager, and to be honest the help menu wasn't as helpful as it could be.
  
• Megaflora and unit sizes in general:
  Living in northern California, I think it'd be cool to have giant trees and the like. They could be treated like mining is and be filled tiles that are mined out by woodcutters in a manner similar to mining rock, so with large enough ones one could theoretically carve into it and build rooms into it (modded ewok civ!), and the roots could be generated out into the ground. They could be quick access to large amounts of lumber as the tree tiles above would collapse when below is mined out, and tiles could generate additional wood tiles if left undisturbed for 20-50 years or so. The concept could be expanded past just giant trees and giant mushrooms could be found underground, or giant underground roots that could grow through aquifers (potentially a way through aquifers on maps without magma), and could be tied to certain biomes (mega trees only occur in temperate zones with high rainfall, giant towercap only occurs in caves of a certain size, etc).
  
  On a similar but related note (and I'm sure this has been requested before), certain creatures should be larger than 1x1, specifically megafauna. I find it counterintuitive that 9 dragons can fit inside a wagon and that titans are only one z level high. I suppose this leads to pathfinding issues, but it also means that the truly badass creatures of the world can be given larger, more detailed sprites in tilesets.
  
• Acrobatics:
  Add in a stat that corresponds to the ability of creatures to climb, jump, and tumble, could simply be tied to the agility stat. Make it so that dwarves with enough skill can jump over walls and into/out of/over pits that are only 1 z level high/deep; would add gameplay incentive to make walls higher that one z level, especially if creatures eventually have varying sizes and can easily step over low walls.

If I think of anything else, I'll post it. Just tossing ideas out for the sake of it.

[Capntastic]

Giant trees have been suggested literally a zillion times and are in the dev notes and thoroughly planned.

Same with multitile beasts.


Tutorials (also planned) would be anti-productive until the game is feature complete and the UI is more set.

[lucusLoC]

"prefabs" or building templates have also been discussed at length before.

i have along rambling topic (that needs help) on the subject here:

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=39304.0

please contribute.