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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

[Lord Darkstar]

I've got a problem right now that will cause the death of any miners that try to channel.

I like to build 3x3 staircase for the entrance to my fortress (allows easy pathing for the dwarves and their critters). In my current 31.03 fortress, I went down 5 levels, just got into the rock by a couple of layers, and discovered a cavern underneath my staircase. The cavern floor itself is another 3 z levels down under my entrance stairway, but my dwarves will freak out about using that lower rock layer area if there is ANYTHING crawling around 3 z levels down (like the starting trolls and troglodytes). Anyways, I wanted to removed the up/down stairs, and cap the floor, so the things in the cavern wouldn't scare any dwarf NEAR that area (my hospital is down there, and it is quite irritating seeing everyone cancel doing anything in there because a troll is wandering around in the cavern floor 3 z levels down - although it is funny watching my hunter shoot it with his crossbow for sport. Go figure.). I can deal with routing down to the "second rock layer" of my fortress elsewhere--- but I cannot get rid of the stairs without killing 9 dwarf miners. Here's why: There is no remove down stairs/ramp command. When you us "remove up stairs/ramp" on an up/down stairs, it only removes the up part of the staircase, leaving the down stairs. In 28, I'd just CHANNEL the down stairs away. Now, when dwarves channel, they stand on the area they are removing. In this case, the dwarf will stand on the down ladder, and cut it away, until there is nothing for him to hold onto, and fall to his death. Or at least, big injury. That's crazy! In the old style, he'd have STOOD NEXT TO the square he was working on, and cut away the ladder/tile square itself. So long as I didn't have multiple miners working the 3x3 stairs, they'd be safe. Now? Death (or at least injury) sentence. For what? Nothing that adds to the game or makes it more challenging in a fun way. Nothing that makes it "more realistic" or "more balanced".

When I build moats, I make them a project, because I want to pump them empty, go in and fetch whatever has fallen in them. I like to loot my fallen enemies, and trade away all that isn't useful to burn up in my furnaces. I don't use single tile wide moats for defense so I don't care if it takes more time to do that now. But I do use channel for breaching liquids and in other circumstances. I'd like my old funcationality back, so I can SAFELY dig down without having miners fall to their death. Just like I'd like them to be able to safely breach water and magma. We don't have that functionality now, but we used to.

With the extended caverns now in the game, we are going to want to remove and change "flooring" above the cavern without killing dwarves. We can't do that now, because dwarves stand on the ground they are removing while "channelling" until the very last bit is removed, and then fall to their death. It would seem that dwarves should not do this. They didn't use to, but that is a consequence of this "let's make channelling more obnoxious to slow players down even though time is actually irrelevant (at least 99.99999% of the time if not more) when they use channelling" change.

[Grocer]

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.

My assumption here is that fixing the AI is not a trivial change, and anything that isn't trivial (as far as the channeling stuff goes) will get pushed off into the future which will be, well, nobody knows.  Whereas the old channeling and the new channeling are both existing code, which will presumably make a simpler task.

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.

You don't have to use them, just like you don't have to use traps.  Play the game however you want, let others do the same.  It doesn't bother me if it takes a bit longer, it just causes too many problems as is.  And of course, previous note about how it isn't necessary to have a 'smooth walled' channel for it to be an impediment to attackers and how channels have to be shallow irrigation ditches and defensive moats at the same time, visualization is all in your head, etc. 

Alright, now presume that seigers show up with all kind of neat tricks and have figured out how to climb - would the original channeling be okay then?

[Tokkius]

I prefer the new channeling system in 95% of the situations I find myself in.

[ItchyBeard]

In my current 31.03 fortress, I went down 5 levels, just got into the rock by a couple of layers, and discovered a cavern underneath my staircase. The cavern floor itself is another 3 z levels down under my entrance stairway, but my dwarves will freak out about using that lower rock layer area if there is ANYTHING crawling around 3 z levels down (like the starting trolls and troglodytes).

A suggestion for the future. Construct upwards stairs on the lowest level (on top of the up/down stairs). You might get interrupted a few times, but they'll finish the stairs eventually. Far less complicated than what you're trying to do.

[Pickled Tink]

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.

I'm sorry, I am trying, really trying to see your point here, but I'm failing because of how absolutely stupid it is to claim that making something more of a pain in the arse to do without being any more difficult to do somehow nerfs something.

Also, your assertion that player actions should somehow be considered a "resource" are patently absurd. A resource is something you can expend and run out of. When you have the ability to pause, and therefore the ability to place an unlimited number of designations your idea falls apart. The only possible scenario in which it could be a limiting factor is in irritating players to the point where they stop playing (Far from optimal from a game designers perspective). The only "resources" here are time and in game materials. "Player actions" don't enter into it.

If something exists simply to make something much more annoying to do (Which seems to be the gist of your argument here), then it is a really stupid decision to make when you are building a game, as driving off players is counterproductive. I don't mind it happening if there is an actual reason like gathering all the materials needed to make steel being a much more realistic approach than magic steel from iron, but when you have a goal that a change completely fails to achieve while at the same time causing all sorts of other problems like this one, it's time for a revert and a rethink.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The point is to "annoy" players, as you put it. It's actually called disencouraging. When you know you'll have to perform extra actions, you'll think a little before starting your construction.

As to why player actions are a resource... well, put it this way. The time it takes to designate something is irrelevant because of the pause feature. The time it takes to actually dig the thing out is also irrelevant because you normally have quite a lot of time on your hands. The resource cost for a channel is usually negative, because you get rock from channelling (unless on soil, in which case it's zero). Therefore, there's only one way to apply balance to channels - make the player pay more of his attention. Micromanage, essentially. That's also a form of balancing. Now, when your first-pass channel is done, (I'm presuming here the re-channel functionality is added) you will have to look away from anything else you might be doing and designate the ramps for removal. The pause feature lessens the magnitude of the impact this has, but it's still there nonetheless. It doesn't really have to be a limited commodity in order to be a resource.

As for the Grocer's question, yes. Once AI creatures can bypass your defences (via climbing or jumping or swimming or refilling or whatever), I'll be perfectly fine with the old channelling system. Bear in mind though, this will likely also mean that your own dwarves will be able to climb into and out of channels, as well as swim across somewhere if necessary. Once the AI advances to this stage, we won't need to split channelling apart and make it a dual designation, like 'h'/'H' for "different stages of channel".

Oh, and "don't use it if you don't like it" is a bad argument. It's like saying "don't use overpowered units if you don't like them" in any RTS. The problem is that they're there, and while DF isn't a game with real competitive play, it's generally a good idea to make the game difficult on its own rather than have the players devise self-imposed challenges.

[Squirrelloid]

The point is to "annoy" players, as you put it. It's actually called disencouraging. When you know you'll have to perform extra actions, you'll think a little before starting your construction.

As to why player actions are a resource... well, put it this way. The time it takes to designate something is irrelevant because of the pause feature. The time it takes to actually dig the thing out is also irrelevant because you normally have quite a lot of time on your hands. The resource cost for a channel is usually negative, because you get rock from channelling (unless on soil, in which case it's zero). Therefore, there's only one way to apply balance to channels - make the player pay more of his attention. Micromanage, essentially. That's also a form of balancing. Now, when your first-pass channel is done, (I'm presuming here the re-channel functionality is added) you will have to look away from anything else you might be doing and designate the ramps for removal. The pause feature lessens the magnitude of the impact this has, but it's still there nonetheless. It doesn't really have to be a limited commodity in order to be a resource.

You might almost have a point if hundreds of thousands of designations per dwarf year wasn't typical.  The extra inconvenience is unnoticeable.  Lets be honest, there's no way to make building a simple moat a project because its just a small thing next to crazy pumped maga traps and 20000 block castles.

Oh, and "don't use it if you don't like it" is a bad argument. It's like saying "don't use overpowered units if you don't like them" in any RTS. The problem is that they're there, and while DF isn't a game with real competitive play, it's generally a good idea to make the game difficult on its own rather than have the players devise self-imposed challenges.

Well, its the way DF is right now.  There are plenty of things that are 'overpowered' - i've defended a fort for 15 dwarf years on nothing but traps.  Its not a competitive game, so challenging yourself by restricting your options is a valid playstyle.

Certainly the change to channeling does nothing to make the game more difficult.  In fact, making the game more difficult is probably next to impossible.  You have *years* to engineer a defensive system to deal with any invaders - that is a substantial advantage.  All AI is exploitable, and players will figure out how to exploit it to minimalize the risks from attackers if they care to.

[Shades]

The point is to "annoy" players, as you put it. It's actually called disencouraging. When you know you'll have to perform extra actions, you'll think a little before starting your construction.

This is bad game design.

Now making a sheer channel take a lot longer to dig would be a much better way to achieve what your talking about.

[Pickled Tink]

The point is to "annoy" players, as you put it. It's actually called disencouraging. When you know you'll have to perform extra actions, you'll think a little before starting your construction.

The magnitude of the change does not "disencourage" anyone from doing it. It just becomes more annoying to do for no reason.

As to why player actions are a resource... well, put it this way. The time it takes to designate something is irrelevant because of the pause feature. The time it takes to actually dig the thing out is also irrelevant because you normally have quite a lot of time on your hands.

The amount of time you have before an attack is not infinite, unless you have decided to turn off invasions in the init. You still have to decide if it would be a better use of dwarven time and labour to dig the great outdoor moat and seize a section of the underground for your use, or dig a much cheaper in terms of time hole at the front of your fort and sticking a retractable bridge over it (Which, if long enough, can then be upgraded, in complete safety, into a pretty broken siege killing deathtrap that also gets rid of those pesky elves) Your comparison between the two fails.

The resource cost for a channel is usually negative, because you get rock from channelling (unless on soil, in which case it's zero). Therefore, there's only one way to apply balance to channels - make the player pay more of his attention. Micromanage, essentially. That's also a form of balancing.

Digging tunnels is also an activity that has a "negative cost" as you define it. How do you propose we "balance" that? (In the sake of being fair, of course.)

Now, when your first-pass channel is done, (I'm presuming here the re-channel functionality is added) you will have to look away from anything else you might be doing and designate the ramps for removal. The pause feature lessens the magnitude of the impact this has, but it's still there nonetheless. It doesn't really have to be a limited commodity in order to be a resource.

Simply making something more annoying to do only serves to drive off players. Since the goal was to weaken channels as a defense, and that goal has demonstrably not been met (Since people can simply clean them and go), that is all it does. Except result in dwarven deaths from a dozen other things like channeling the ground out from under their feet and falling into the underground, or channeling into magma and then going for a swim on his way to the food stockpile while other dwarves compliment him on his !!Pig tail trousers!!

Oh, and "don't use it if you don't like it" is a bad argument. It's like saying "don't use overpowered units if you don't like them" in any RTS. The problem is that they're there, and while DF isn't a game with real competitive play, it's generally a good idea to make the game difficult on its own rather than have the players devise self-imposed challenges.

The problem here is that there are varying degrees of skill between players. What would be a challenge to you or I would completely crush anyone trying to pick up the game. Given how steep the learning curve is already, I don't think that's a good idea. If you want a greater challenge, mod your goblins to be size 50 (And give them buildingdestroyer:2) and downgrade dragons from megabeast to wild animal status, and have them hunt in packs of 30 like I do. Or give your carp the ability to breathe fire (That makes fishing very Fun).

The Overpowered units in an RTS game analogy you present is also a false one. You are good at making them it seems. In an RTS game, if you don't use them, you'll likely lose, because the enemy has no such qualms. In this invaders do not use "overpowered" units. If you want overpowered, magma drowning chambers are pretty unsurvivable and unbeatable. Does that mean that, following your own logic, we should no longer be able to build them? What about collapse traps? They are even more dangerous than a magma trap. Does the same hold true for pit traps, where you pull the bridge out from under the siege force and cackle as they fall down a deep hole and splatter? How about weapon traps, or cage traps? Both are very effective means of defenses, especially since you just stick them in a bottleneck and shred the goblins before they can harm you. Loading them with green glass trap components made at a magma glass furnace has no cost at all.

Before you claim that any of these are impossible to get running quickly, I've had an example of each fully operation within the first year of embarkation. I usually do a mix of two of them, and I can have all of them up and running within a few years if I go for it. I can certainly get the pit trap done in almost the same time it takes to dig the large outdoor "invinci-channel" (That said, almost all of my outdoor channeling is done from underground so I can capture regions for safe woodcutting and farming and not have to worry about huge hordes of dragons killing my workers)

"Overpowered" defenses have their place helping newer players deal with sieges and the like. We can afford to be more creative, and we are. I don't use channels for defense. I rely on malevolent architecture.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The point is to "annoy" players, as you put it. It's actually called disencouraging. When you know you'll have to perform extra actions, you'll think a little before starting your construction.

The magnitude of the change does not "disencourage" anyone from doing it. It just becomes more annoying to do for no reason.

Well, if it's annoying you, why don't you stop using it? That's the kinda logic that goes into the thing. It becomes more tedious, therefore more difficult. If you search your memory for the origin of the current "batch build walls" feature, it was because building walls individually WAS too tedious. We didn't get a net decrease in anything but player actions with that feature, and I don't think you'll disagree that it was an improvement.

As to why player actions are a resource... well, put it this way. The time it takes to designate something is irrelevant because of the pause feature. The time it takes to actually dig the thing out is also irrelevant because you normally have quite a lot of time on your hands.

The amount of time you have before an attack is not infinite, unless you have decided to turn off invasions in the init. You still have to decide if it would be a better use of dwarven time and labour to dig the great outdoor moat and seize a section of the underground for your use, or dig a much cheaper in terms of time hole at the front of your fort and sticking a retractable bridge over it (Which, if long enough, can then be upgraded, in complete safety, into a pretty broken siege killing deathtrap that also gets rid of those pesky elves) Your comparison between the two fails.

Not only that, I also failed to see what you tried to counter here. I didn't say "infinite", I said "quite a lot". The practical upshot of "quite a lot" is that to shift the balance in any meaningful way, the time to dig out a "full" channel would have to be disproportionately greater than that of all other mining activities. The fact that you can still seal your fortress in with a small moat and little effort is ever so slightly offset by the fact that if there's ever danger outside the fort, you're stuck with just the stuff you had the time to haul in. Yes, it's perfectly feasible to live completely underground, what with underground forests and all, but this cuts you off from overground plants, watersources and trading, not to mention it makes all of your populace cave-adapted. I don't think much thought went into balancing yet, but as a whole, the system isn't too unbalanced.

The resource cost for a channel is usually negative, because you get rock from channelling (unless on soil, in which case it's zero). Therefore, there's only one way to apply balance to channels - make the player pay more of his attention. Micromanage, essentially. That's also a form of balancing.

Digging tunnels is also an activity that has a "negative cost" as you define it. How do you propose we "balance" that? (In the sake of being fair, of course.)

Why balance it? Digging isn't a negative-cost activity for no reason, that's your sole source of any sort of resources bar wood. Channeling is a subset of digging, of course, but I didn't say its negative cost is a bad thing. Unlike plain channels, plain tunnels cannot be used as a defence though, much less an impenetrable defence, so... yeah.

Now, when your first-pass channel is done, (I'm presuming here the re-channel functionality is added) you will have to look away from anything else you might be doing and designate the ramps for removal. The pause feature lessens the magnitude of the impact this has, but it's still there nonetheless. It doesn't really have to be a limited commodity in order to be a resource.

Simply making something more annoying to do only serves to drive off players. Since the goal was to weaken channels as a defense, and that goal has demonstrably not been met (Since people can simply clean them and go), that is all it does. Except result in dwarven deaths from a dozen other things like channeling the ground out from under their feet and falling into the underground, or channeling into magma and then going for a swim on his way to the food stockpile while other dwarves compliment him on his !!Pig tail trousers!!

What you described are mere bugs. They always happened before. The fixes for a lot of those bugs are rather straightforward, so if you bring the bugs themselves to Toady's attention, they may get fixed. Especially if they are so irritating. Ramped channels aren't a bug, even though they're on the Tracker, however I didn't yet see the "dwarf paths into magma after channelling" or "dwarf falls to his death after channelling" bugs in there, for some reason.

Oh, and "don't use it if you don't like it" is a bad argument. It's like saying "don't use overpowered units if you don't like them" in any RTS. The problem is that they're there, and while DF isn't a game with real competitive play, it's generally a good idea to make the game difficult on its own rather than have the players devise self-imposed challenges.

The problem here is that there are varying degrees of skill between players. What would be a challenge to you or I would completely crush anyone trying to pick up the game. Given how steep the learning curve is already, I don't think that's a good idea. If you want a greater challenge, mod your goblins to be size 50 (And give them buildingdestroyer:2) and downgrade dragons from megabeast to wild animal status, and have them hunt in packs of 30 like I do. Or give your carp the ability to breathe fire (That makes fishing very Fun).

Given the multitude of alternative routes for sealing off your fort that you and other pro-old people here have brought forth, I don't think you can use the "new players will get crushed by sieges" argument here. Making a single channel as a defence is cheap even for new players. And as I said, I don't really like self-imposed challenges. (Though I like modding - go figure)

The Overpowered units in an RTS game analogy you present is also a false one. You are good at making them it seems. In an RTS game, if you don't use them, you'll likely lose, because the enemy has no such qualms. In this invaders do not use "overpowered" units. If you want overpowered, magma drowning chambers are pretty unsurvivable and unbeatable. Does that mean that, following your own logic, we should no longer be able to build them? What about collapse traps? They are even more dangerous than a magma trap. Does the same hold true for pit traps, where you pull the bridge out from under the siege force and cackle as they fall down a deep hole and splatter? How about weapon traps, or cage traps? Both are very effective means of defenses, especially since you just stick them in a bottleneck and shred the goblins before they can harm you. Loading them with green glass trap components made at a magma glass furnace has no cost at all.

Some good points here, but still. What you describe are in many cases rather elaborate constructions that are, well, supposed to, even designed to be impenetrable, by you yourself. Trapped hallways and magma-flooding corridors are a great defence, unbeatable by the average goblin army, but think about how much of your effort will go into them. For the very cheap hallway of glass traps, you still have to make a magma furnace, which implies handling magma and its inherent dangers; you have to set up a glass component production line, churn out quality mechanisms, then designate each and every trap individually and wait until your mechanics brigade hauls the hundreds of components together and installs them (this is imagining a three-wide, six-long hallway filled with 10-component traps). However cheap it may be for your fort, you still have had to make the effort to do it, and there's no need to balance that.

"Overpowered" defenses have their place helping newer players deal with sieges and the like. We can afford to be more creative, and we are. I don't use channels for defense. I rely on malevolent architecture.

Good for you. Personally, I always did. Now I usually make walls with guard posts as the initial line of defence. I don't want to muck around with channel defences as they are now, since walls don't require quite that much effort now that they're batch-built, and also shield from arrows. And channelling has become my most-used tool on par with digging, while my usage of stairs has dropped to miniscule levels. I think the new channels are a great replacement. They'll be even better once all Required Secondary Features and Bugfixes are added.

I also find it curious nobody commented on the fact that I'm not, in principle, against the old channel system.

And, Squirrelloid. I can't help but notice:

You might almost have a point if hundreds of thousands of designations per dwarf year wasn't typical.  The extra inconvenience is unnoticeable.  Lets be honest, there's no way to make building a simple moat a project because its just a small thing next to crazy pumped maga traps and 20000 block castles.

If it's unnoticable, why do people keep noticing it so much?

[Pickled Tink]

The point is to "annoy" players, as you put it. It's actually called disencouraging. When you know you'll have to perform extra actions, you'll think a little before starting your construction.

The magnitude of the change does not "disencourage" anyone from doing it. It just becomes more annoying to do for no reason.

Well, if it's annoying you, why don't you stop using it? That's the kinda logic that goes into the thing. It becomes more tedious, therefore more difficult. If you search your memory for the origin of the current "batch build walls" feature, it was because building walls individually WAS too tedious. We didn't get a net decrease in anything but player actions with that feature, and I don't think you'll disagree that it was an improvement.

...

You are really, really fond of the false analogy. I guess it would be pointless saying "x2 < x10". And I am in favour of anything that decreases annoyance. Conversely, I am opposed to things that increase it for no good reason, especially when they are insufficient measures that fall far short of achieving their goal and introduce a whole host of other problems.

If something is mildly more annoying to do, but still doable, then all it does is make something slightly more annoying to do. It doesn't turn people off it.

As to why player actions are a resource... well, put it this way. The time it takes to designate something is irrelevant because of the pause feature. The time it takes to actually dig the thing out is also irrelevant because you normally have quite a lot of time on your hands.

The amount of time you have before an attack is not infinite, unless you have decided to turn off invasions in the init. You still have to decide if it would be a better use of dwarven time and labour to dig the great outdoor moat and seize a section of the underground for your use, or dig a much cheaper in terms of time hole at the front of your fort and sticking a retractable bridge over it (Which, if long enough, can then be upgraded, in complete safety, into a pretty broken siege killing deathtrap that also gets rid of those pesky elves) Your comparison between the two fails.

Not only that, I also failed to see what you tried to counter here. I didn't say "infinite", I said "quite a lot". The practical upshot of "quite a lot" is that to shift the balance in any meaningful way, the time to dig out a "full" channel would have to be disproportionately greater than that of all other mining activities. The fact that you can still seal your fortress in with a small moat and little effort is ever so slightly offset by the fact that if there's ever danger outside the fort, you're stuck with just the stuff you had the time to haul in. Yes, it's perfectly feasible to live completely underground, what with underground forests and all, but this cuts you off from overground plants, watersources and trading, not to mention it makes all of your populace cave-adapted. I don't think much thought went into balancing yet, but as a whole, the system isn't too unbalanced.

1: I never said you said that time was infinite. I said that time is limited with regards to in game events. I did this to differentiate between time and user actions that you had incorrectly claimed were similar. Nice try to deflect the issue though.
2: You can never be sealed off from the surface. If you want a chunk of surface for farming, wood, or anything, just go one z level below it, dig a nice outline of up stairs around the part you want, and channel the surface tiles away from underground. Mmm... fresh surface.

The resource cost for a channel is usually negative, because you get rock from channelling (unless on soil, in which case it's zero). Therefore, there's only one way to apply balance to channels - make the player pay more of his attention. Micromanage, essentially. That's also a form of balancing.

Digging tunnels is also an activity that has a "negative cost" as you define it. How do you propose we "balance" that? (In the sake of being fair, of course.)

Why balance it? Digging isn't a negative-cost activity for no reason, that's your sole source of any sort of resources bar wood. Channeling is a subset of digging, of course, but I didn't say its negative cost is a bad thing. Unlike plain channels, plain tunnels cannot be used as a defence though, much less an impenetrable defense, so... yeah.

You obviously haven't tried. A long winding tunnel with a pressure plate at either end connected to a floodgate will keep a horde of goblins occupied for ages. A simple sufficiently long and winding tunnel can delay a goblin invasion for a very long time. Certainly long enough to get your military off break and into position.

Now, when your first-pass channel is done, (I'm presuming here the re-channel functionality is added) you will have to look away from anything else you might be doing and designate the ramps for removal. The pause feature lessens the magnitude of the impact this has, but it's still there nonetheless. It doesn't really have to be a limited commodity in order to be a resource.

Simply making something more annoying to do only serves to drive off players. Since the goal was to weaken channels as a defense, and that goal has demonstrably not been met (Since people can simply clean them and go), that is all it does. Except result in dwarven deaths from a dozen other things like channeling the ground out from under their feet and falling into the underground, or channeling into magma and then going for a swim on his way to the food stockpile while other dwarves compliment him on his !!Pig tail trousers!!

What you described are mere bugs. They always happened before. The fixes for a lot of those bugs are rather straightforward, so if you bring the bugs themselves to Toady's attention, they may get fixed. Especially if they are so irritating. Ramped channels aren't a bug, even though they're on the Tracker, however I didn't yet see the "dwarf paths into magma after channelling" or "dwarf falls to his death after channelling" bugs in there, for some reason.

A dwarf will still path through magma when he breaches it, if that is the quickest way to his destination, and he pathfinds through an empty channel, and it floods as he enters it. Fixing this would require adding a predictive element to pathfinding. I shudder to think how much that would slow down the game.

Oh, and "don't use it if you don't like it" is a bad argument. It's like saying "don't use overpowered units if you don't like them" in any RTS. The problem is that they're there, and while DF isn't a game with real competitive play, it's generally a good idea to make the game difficult on its own rather than have the players devise self-imposed challenges.

The problem here is that there are varying degrees of skill between players. What would be a challenge to you or I would completely crush anyone trying to pick up the game. Given how steep the learning curve is already, I don't think that's a good idea. If you want a greater challenge, mod your goblins to be size 50 (And give them buildingdestroyer:2) and downgrade dragons from megabeast to wild animal status, and have them hunt in packs of 30 like I do. Or give your carp the ability to breathe fire (That makes fishing very Fun).

Given the multitude of alternative routes for sealing off your fort that you and other pro-old people here have brought forth, I don't think you can use the "new players will get crushed by sieges" argument here. Making a single channel as a defence is cheap even for new players. And as I said, I don't really like self-imposed challenges. (Though I like modding - go figure)

The multitude of other methods for sealing your fort are not immediately apparent. A goodly number of ones I have mentioned myself are quite complicated and require a good deal of forward planning. Also, your personal dislike self imposed challenges does not justify arguing that everyone else should suffer for your own personal benefit.

The Overpowered units in an RTS game analogy you present is also a false one. You are good at making them it seems. In an RTS game, if you don't use them, you'll likely lose, because the enemy has no such qualms. In this invaders do not use "overpowered" units. If you want overpowered, magma drowning chambers are pretty unsurvivable and unbeatable. Does that mean that, following your own logic, we should no longer be able to build them? What about collapse traps? They are even more dangerous than a magma trap. Does the same hold true for pit traps, where you pull the bridge out from under the siege force and cackle as they fall down a deep hole and splatter? How about weapon traps, or cage traps? Both are very effective means of defenses, especially since you just stick them in a bottleneck and shred the goblins before they can harm you. Loading them with green glass trap components made at a magma glass furnace has no cost at all.

Some good points here, but still. What you describe are in many cases rather elaborate constructions that are, well, supposed to, even designed to be impenetrable, by you yourself.

Is that any less the case with a moat? You design the moat to be an unbroken trench that nothing can cross, and it works.

Trapped hallways and magma-flooding corridors are a great defence, unbeatable by the average goblin army, but think about how much of your effort will go into them. For the very cheap hallway of glass traps, you still have to make a magma furnace, which implies handling magma and its inherent dangers; you have to set up a glass component production line, churn out quality mechanisms, then designate each and every trap individually and wait until your mechanics brigade hauls the hundreds of components together and installs them (this is imagining a three-wide, six-long hallway filled with 10-component traps). However cheap it may be for your fort, you still have had to make the effort to do it, and there's no need to balance that.

Who needs quality. Quantity all the way. Magma is pretty safe to handle if you know how. Breaching it these days is not so much. I've only ever had one magma accident, and that was my first attempt at breaching it. There was some flooding. Many dwarves died. You also did not address the point of cage traps, All that requires is two dwarves and two workshops. Embark with a hundred wood and you can get a very large impenetrable defense corridor very quickly for little effort.

Also: You are still operating under the bogus assumption that player actions actually means something in terms of game balance (It doesn't, because the only things that really make a difference are fort resources and the time you have to utilise them). Your entire position seems to be that something is only acceptable as a defense if it is annoying to do, and the more annoying, the more acceptable.

"Overpowered" defenses have their place helping newer players deal with sieges and the like. We can afford to be more creative, and we are. I don't use channels for defense. I rely on malevolent architecture.

Good for you. Personally, I always did. Now I usually make walls with guard posts as the initial line of defence. I don't want to muck around with channel defences as they are now, since walls don't require quite that much effort now that they're batch-built, and also shield from arrows. And channelling has become my most-used tool on par with digging, while my usage of stairs has dropped to miniscule levels. I think the new channels are a great replacement. They'll be even better once all Required Secondary Features and Bugfixes are added.

You didn't address my point.

And, Squirrelloid. I can't help but notice:

You might almost have a point if hundreds of thousands of designations per dwarf year wasn't typical.  The extra inconvenience is unnoticeable.  Lets be honest, there's no way to make building a simple moat a project because its just a small thing next to crazy pumped maga traps and 20000 block castles.

If it's unnoticable, why do people keep noticing it so much?

The point being made is that given how many we already make, another extra one is not going to deter us from doing something. That said, it is an extra step that shouldn't be needed, which is annoying.

So you have thus far shown that you are all but incapable of making a solid analogy, in favour of making the game more difficult to use as opposed to more difficult (You appear to delight in it, in fact), and you seem to believe that your personal dislike of people setting their own challenges is more important than lost functionality.

Wow... I find myself pitying you. That was unexpected.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I haven't encountered the functionality loss though, that's the problem, I guess. For me, the new channelling is nothing but an invaluable tool. The old channelling was also an invaluable tool, but for different reasons, and those reasons still hold with the new channelling. I guess I'm just more wary of magma and don't make five-wide shafts into hell knows where without an exploratory shaft or two. And above all, don't consider visible ramps to be any sort of hindrance to visual splendour.

And just a small point about the moat - you don't design the moat, it's impassable as it is. There's no ingenuity in designating a square around your entrance which automatically makes your entrance unreachable. Compare that with a hallway of traps, a magma trap, or even the long corridor with closing floodgates. That's ingenuity right there. The impassable channel is just an exploit. An Insurmountable Waist Height Fence, if you will.

[Grocer]

Argh!  Ninja'd in the morning!  Pickled Tink is like my own personal Kato.  I'm posting it anyway, cause I think it's snarky and typing it out made me happy.

EDIT: and looking at the time, I got ninja'd cause I am super freaking slow.  Another point against player time being a resource!

Well, if it's annoying you, why don't you stop using it? That's the kinda logic that goes into the thing. It becomes more tedious, therefore more difficult.

Yeah, I don't know if you've actually been paying attention or not, but what people have been trying to explain to you is that this 'more difficult' version of digging out a defense isn't actually any more difficult.  The annoyance comes from all the other negative things that have occurred as a result.  Let me outline it for you:

1: A change is implemented to make moats more difficult so as to make sieges more challenging.
2: Said change does not make moats more difficult to construct in any meaningful way.
3: Said change breaks a lot of other things while leaving annoying little ramps scattered over your meticulously structured fortress.
4: Some players (Group A) get 'annoyed' because of item 3.
5: Some players (Group B) like the change because it fixes 'annoying' things that used to happen to them.
6: Group B convinces Group A that the change is good for some people, thus Group A (mostly) agree that it should stay, but the old way should be nerfed and the functionality re-implemented.
7: Some subset of Group B (that's you) says that is stupid, using continually shifting arguments which culminate in 'the change was designed to annoy you so that you wouldn't dig out defenses the way you used to.'

At this point I would like you to glance back up the page and note items number 2 and 3.  They will come in handy in your future readings.

to shift the balance in any meaningful way, the time to dig out a "full" channel would have to be disproportionately greater than that of all other mining activities.

The current change to channeling has not changed the siege balance in any meaningful way.  The only value it has is in item 5 and, if you'd care to check your notes, that has no impact on time to erect defenses.

there's only one way to apply balance to channels - make the player pay more of his attention.

There's only one way to balance strip mining - make the player pay more attention.  But most of us don't mind that carve downward ramp has made that easier for you because we don't care how you play the game.  Why do you care how other people play the game?  Besides which, it isn't actually true.

Now, when your first-pass channel is done, (I'm presuming here the re-channel functionality is added) you will have to look away from anything else you might be doing and designate the ramps for removal.

Yes, so tedious.  It's not like you wouldn't have been paying attention to when they finished anyway because you wanted your defenses constructed before you started other mining work.  See item 2 above.

What you described are mere bugs. They always happened before. The fixes for a lot of those bugs are rather straightforward, so if you bring the bugs themselves to Toady's attention, they may get fixed.

Stranded miners is a bug too.  People have been bitching about it since 3D AFAIK.  Same for masons walling themselves up, etc.  If fixing the little problem details of the AI was so straightforward I would imagine it would have been done long ago.  I'm positive I've seen Toady writing about this before, but I lack Footkerchief's search-fu. 

I don't really like self-imposed challenges.

Finally, some motivation for item 7.  It's taken a while brothers and sisters, but we've finally reached the mountain top. 

Sieges are broken.  They're gonna be worked on 'soon.'  But in the context of current channeling, see item 2.  I'll add a caveat:  apparently it is annoying enough to you personally to cause you to stop using them.  That still doesn't make it a success.  Might I suggest that you could tweak your key-bindings to remove your ability to channel in game?  If it helps, you could view it as modding instead of a self-imposed challenge.

I also find it curious nobody commented on the fact that I'm not, in principle, against the old channel system.

  That must be why you've made a dozen* different arguments about why, in principle, the old channeling system was the pits.  I'm glad you've changed your mind.  Arguing on the internet can work!

And, Squirrelloid. I can't help but notice:

You might almost have a point if hundreds of thousands of designations per dwarf year wasn't typical.  The extra inconvenience is unnoticeable. 

If it's unnoticable, why do people keep noticing it so much?

Please refer to item number three, above.   

*Number may be inaccurate as I didn't bother to count.

[Pickled Tink]

I haven't encountered the functionality loss though, that's the problem, I guess. For me, the new channelling is nothing but an invaluable tool. The old channelling was also an invaluable tool, but for different reasons, and those reasons still hold with the new channelling. I guess I'm just more wary of magma and don't make five-wide shafts into hell knows where without an exploratory shaft or two. And above all, don't consider visible ramps to be any sort of hindrance to visual splendour.

That's your choice. Others, such as myself, do care. And the ramps we can't get rid of are annoying. They sit there, taunting us... whispering "You cannot get rid of me... I offend your sense of aesthetics..." I have no problem with a dig down ramp designation. I just want my old channels back so I can safely breach liquids without worrying if Urist McFireLover is going to go burn down my fort if not massively micromanaged with split second timing.

And just a small point about the moat - you don't design the moat, it's impassable as it is. There's no ingenuity in designating a square around your entrance which automatically makes your entrance unreachable. Compare that with a hallway of traps, a magma trap, or even the long corridor with closing floodgates. That's ingenuity right there. The impassable channel is just an exploit. An Insurmountable Waist Height Fence, if you will.

There's no ingenuity in it even if you have to remove the ramps. Either way there's no ingenuity, both ways you get an impassable defense. The current one is more annoying than the old one, however. Things don't need to be ingenious to be worth it or valuable.

Also, you seem to have fallen into the trap of assuming that something is an exploit because it is easy. Been there, done that, got pounded to paste by people who called me on it. An awful lot of the mechanisms used by people to kill or trap things could be considered exploits. Pumping water onto goblins that insta-freezes and kills them as an example, or washing enemies into a pit full of burning lignite blocks in steel bins (or using one to boil away the sea), or building a pressure plate operated shifting labyrinth that traps any goblin who enters it for all eternity, or stringing up kittens outside to serve as irresistible bait to goblin ambush parties to give yourself warning of their approach. Those actually exploit quirky behavior and in the game engine. And in case of the burning lignite bins a bug. I'm fairly sure the retractable bridge wasn't intended to be used to drop those no good elves down a deep hole, and the atom smasher... well, enough said.

You are calling it an exploit because it is easy. I have yet to see you decry any of the above, and doubt you will. Think of it this way: One day Toady will release a version where all those no good people who just use trenches as their insta-defense will suddenly be shocked as the goblins put a wooden log across it and march right on over, and then march on inside to have Fun with the dwarves. On that day, people like us will laugh at them and use our mighty death machines/soldiers to bring pain and terror to the goblins in ever more creative ways, and the poor people looking sadly at the smoking ruins of their fort will have to run to catch up. That said, people quickly learn there are far more amusing ways to deal with goblins than digging a ditch. I'm trying to design a goblin pinball machine. Not sure if it'll work, but I won't know until I try

Edit for annoying typos and wandering brains

[Sean Mirrsen]

I haven't encountered the functionality loss though, that's the problem, I guess. For me, the new channelling is nothing but an invaluable tool. The old channelling was also an invaluable tool, but for different reasons, and those reasons still hold with the new channelling. I guess I'm just more wary of magma and don't make five-wide shafts into hell knows where without an exploratory shaft or two. And above all, don't consider visible ramps to be any sort of hindrance to visual splendour.

That's your choice. Others, such as myself, do care. And the ramps we can't get rid of are annoying. They sit there, taunting us... whispering "You cannot get rid of me... I offend your sense of aesthetics..." I have no problem with a dig down ramp designation. I just want my old channels back so I can safely breach liquids without worrying if Urist McFireLover is going to go burn down my fort if not massively micromanaged with split second timing.

You and the person above you can both have your old channelling back when the AI can deal with it. Fixing the AI bugs mentioned doesn't actually seem like much work, at least relative to the effort that went into changing the system to the way it works now. For one the dwarves just have to remember to channel from a neighboring tile like they did before, for the other the flow updater must flag tiles as impassable not only on the flow tile, but on every tile next to it on the same level. Like I said, these bugs mostly existed before, they only came to attention now. They'll have to be fixed eventually, so better now than later.

In principle, I'm only against the old channels as a means of easy defence. But if your dwarves know how to walk around magma and don't fall into the holes they make, would it really inconvenience you that much if you need to dig a smooth channel as a two-step process instead of one designation? I mean, that already happens with engravings, and I think they're used at least as frequently as channels. I'm just looking at a possibility for more detailed gameplay here.