Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

The new channeling is covered in awesome sauce, the old channeling smelled real bad.

113 (19.3%)

The old channeling was the best, we don't need two ways to make ramps it is just silly.

245 (41.8%)

Old channeling was the best, new channeling is also the best.  Can't we all just get along?

132 (22.5%)

You people need to get on with your lives, it's not a big deal either way.

96 (16.4%)

Total Members Voted: 583

[Sean Mirrsen]

Precisely. It's "carve up ramps from above". You can use it to make downward passageways without mucking around with stairs or flipping back and forth with the "carve upward ramps" command. The old version was only good for making pits. If there's a way to remove the downward ramps from above, your "four pits" design is easily achievable with the new version as well.

And it's "tedious" in the same way smoothing walls before engraving them is tedious. If you can make a second pass over the ramps and turn them into an impassable channel, I'm all for it.

[Shades]

Precisely. It's "carve up ramps from above". You can use it to make downward passageways without mucking around with stairs or flipping back and forth with the "carve upward ramps" command. The old version was only good for making pits. If there's a way to remove the downward ramps from above, your "four pits" design is easily achievable with the new version as well.

And it's "tedious" in the same way smoothing walls before engraving them is tedious. If you can make a second pass over the ramps and turn them into an impassable channel, I'm all for it.

But we can't do this, and we could before, and we could always carve ramps from above so that didn't add anything.

[Lord Darkstar]

Because you can't dig a hole without entering it. The dig downward ought to be there of course for the ease of designation, but a ramp is still a ramp: without magic you can't suspend a liquid until you have completely dug out the adjoining wall.
I agree that dwarves jumping into the magma puddle is bad, but it's a lack of AI that's at fault, not something else.

Really, with lava the safety precautions are not an optional afterthought. Floor off most of the channel. Build a few bars on the other end of the future ramp first, so it's a dead end. Lock the door afterwards.

As has been posted many times before, yes you can. Humans managed it with the most basic technology, so dwarves shouldn't have an issue, between their higher technology and innate magical understanding of earth.

We only got this change in channelling, according to Toady, because the AI can't hand channels. So now you cut ramps instead, so it can handle it. Again, AI failure leads to code change that leads to massive AI failure.

Toady should revert this feature, give us designate down ramp, and just let things ride until he gets to seiging. Which is supposed to be "soon", as it is in the top 10 of the eternal suggestions thread, and that's what he is targetting after spiffing up 31, according to him.

As for covering up the water/magma covered ramps--- if your dwarves decide they'd rather use the ramps to run around to COVER the ramp with a floor, you are screwed. And players are bound to have that happen, as things currently stand. Particularly if that ramp is the "fastest" way to the source rock/wood then crossing a bridge over the moat, for instance.

[Grocer]

If you can make a second pass over the ramps and turn them into an impassable channel, I'm all for it.

Which doesn't fix the AI problems.  As has been pointed out.  Repeatedly.  Which you would presumably have some sympathy for as AI problem resolution was your original justification for why the new ramping was better than the old channeling.

Why are you dead set against having both options?  This isn't a zero sum game, everybody can be happy.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The AI problems existed before, they simply came to attention now that there's a way for them to repeatedly show themselves. A dwarf could always accidentally path into a tile that'd be occupied by a magma flow next tick, it's just now that we have dwarves strategically positioned right next to a path through magma that we see it happening. Same with dwarves getting themselves trapped - this is problem with the way AI selects job priorities, not the tool. Fixing these two bugs (one a straightforward fix, the other more roundabout but still nothing groundbreaking) will eliminate all AI issues with ramped channels. Adding a way to collapse downward ramps - perhaps by the double-channelling method I mention so often - is a way to appease people that want pits and 'proper' channels without 'too' much work.

I would've been fine with both options existing if I didn't share Toady's view on the matter. Moats and smooth-wall channels should be more of a project. The way they are now is a bit too cheap.

[LordDakaris]

I prefer the old system, it makes more sense, and is neater.

Keep the new system as well, call it "Dig trench"? (I can see it being useful sometimes)

If making channels was "too easy" then make it take longer for dwarfs to do, abstract the removal of the ramps.

in a game where time flies by, dwarves take days to drink and sleep for a week, abstracting the construction of channels seems like a better idea.

[Lord Darkstar]

Everything the dwarves do is "too cheap". You can rig a lever to pull a valve 1000 steps away for the cost of just 2 mechanisms-- stone-fi!

Only megaproject building is actually complicated. Everything else is just players having fun making simple things "complex". At this point, a player could just moat a very large square around his desired play are, fairly quickly (before the goblins show up), and then build bridges to allow in caravans if desired. As has been suggested by several posters on these channeling threads.

[Sean Mirrsen]

^^ Above two posters: Similar names much?

I prefer the old system, it makes more sense, and is neater.

Keep the new system as well, call it "Dig trench"? (I can see it being useful sometimes)

If making channels was "too easy" then make it take longer for dwarfs to do, abstract the removal of the ramps.

in a game where time flies by, dwarves take days to drink and sleep for a week, abstracting the construction of channels seems like a better idea.

Time is irrelevant. It's the player actions that matter. If you only need a channel, ramps will do. If you need access to lower levels, ramps will do. But if you want them impassable or smooth, you can afford to invest that extra effort. Just having them impassable from the get-go is a bit too cheap for the benefits such form provides.

It makes sense from the in-game perspective, not the real-life perspective. In RL, you could, of course, tell your subordinates to dig impassable trenches as one order. But for this to have a gameplay impact, the time to dig out an impassable pit would have to be disproportionately larger compared to the digging of ramps. Like, quintuple.

Oh, and I wouldn't mind unabstraction of mechanics, either.
Levers may require wire (rope or cable) in addition to mechanisms, proportional to the distance being linked. The laying of the cable can be abstracted, if only for gameplay reasons, but I'm really hoping that someday the forts will make internal sense as well. For example, burrowing enemies could happen upon the control lines of your defence network...

[Lord Darkstar]

I don't mind the abstraction. If the dig channels takes longer than ramping, that's fine with me. I don't care if it takes x2, x3, or x5 longer than just ramping. But I do want clean breaching, and would like to be able to big a multi-z pit or shaft without risking the loss of miners, at least early in the game when the loss of your miner(s) and their picks can be critical to your plans.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Alright, now presume that the pathing and AI bugs that make you lose dwarves are handled, and a method is added to remove unwanted submerged ramps.

[Lord Darkstar]

I've been willing to accept that, IF there was some way to remove submerged ramps in magma from above. But that is a tremedous amount of work for Toady, compared to just giving us back channeling, and letting the AI improvements await the seige arc. Again, walls are faster, and no goblin can get through a wall until seige arc is released to the public. Just build a receiving wall/tower and build a bridge between the two. You can do all that in the first 2 years easy. If you want to get fancy, you can even engineer your trade depot up a level or two. So long as you got rock or wood.

DF is our lego set. Right now, we've had a basic tool that was very useful removed for what is a truly capracious reason that doesn't acheive anything logical, even for "balance" sake. We'd like that tool back. Failing that, we'd like something that returns the functionality, even it it is more tedious compared to the original, it will hopefully be as safe for dwarves as we've lost. Early game loses of important dwarves can be serious fun killers.

[Squirrelloid]

Time is irrelevant. It's the player actions that matter. If you only need a channel, ramps will do. If you need access to lower levels, ramps will do. But if you want them impassable or smooth, you can afford to invest that extra effort. Just having them impassable from the get-go is a bit too cheap for the benefits such form provides.

Um, what?  Time is the only possibly relevant commodity if its a balancing change.  That there's far too much time before a fort is in any danger means there is no change on the player-side which can balance moat-making.  Only changes in siege-behavior can do that.

Seriously, I make several thousand designations in the first dwarf year.  What's another designation or two?  The relative magnitude of adding an additional designation step is so small relative to the number of designations made per dwarf-year as to be meaningless.

[JohnLukeG]

Well, I decided to see if what people have been saying about how efficient this can be is true, so I had my dwarves dig a nice deep pit with the channeling designation.

All five of them died.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Time is irrelevant. It's the player actions that matter. If you only need a channel, ramps will do. If you need access to lower levels, ramps will do. But if you want them impassable or smooth, you can afford to invest that extra effort. Just having them impassable from the get-go is a bit too cheap for the benefits such form provides.

Um, what?  Time is the only possibly relevant commodity if its a balancing change.  That there's far too much time before a fort is in any danger means there is no change on the player-side which can balance moat-making.  Only changes in siege-behavior can do that.

Seriously, I make several thousand designations in the first dwarf year.  What's another designation or two?  The relative magnitude of adding an additional designation step is so small relative to the number of designations made per dwarf-year as to be meaningless.

No, not the only one. There are resources, time, and player actions. Walls require significant player effort and resources, not to mention time - they are the most expensive defences. Moats are marginally less effective - they don't stop bolts, but done the old way they require only time - and not too much of it, at that. The new way would at least make the player do more designating.

Seriously, all level transitions in my forts now are ramps. Because it's easier to make a three-tile designation than two three-tile designations needed for stairs. Stairs have the benefit of being omnidirectional and requiring minimum space, so the extra effort to make them is justified, even if the requirement to make them this way is purely an engine limitation.

Well, I decided to see if what people have been saying about how efficient this can be is true, so I had my dwarves dig a nice deep pit with the channeling designation.

All five of them died.

Cause of death?

(reminds me of a joke about smoking - where some guy smoked ten packs of cigarettes a day and died at 20... because he got hit by a car...)

[JohnLukeG]

They kept digging under each other, and near the end, one of them caused a tile to collapse, which killed everyone in the pit. 

Also left floating ramps everywhere.