Realism be damned, this is a game. A game that should at least try to make sense. Right now the dwarves can twist the hardest substance in the universe into a sock with their bare hands, yet they need a pick to remove some soil? Some of us would indeed like to have shovels and rubble you'd have to remove, and hoes too. Not so much the diapers maybe. 
Have you paid attention to any of the "Give us pooh!" threads?
And if you have any more questions, look at the list I posted - the "balance" is a sub-option. It's not "required" in any shape or form. But it's something that could be nice to have.
More importantly balance should _never_ be achieved by making the user interface more complicated. The correct way to balance would be to have some in game effect such as making sheer channels just take longer to mine per square.
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That's good game design.
Which is why I also pointed out in the list that we couldn't yet devise an appropriate ingame "cost" for this balancing. Play time seems to be a non-issue (not to mention potentially hard to achieve), some kind of designation limit won't work, merging into a double-designation won't work for breaching flows, making it a construction is too intrusive, material cost is right out. The only meaningful balance change seems to be requiring an additional reusable item, like a rope, but that might not fit into the short term as there's no precedent so far for a task that would require two tools at once.
(edit: late idea, though also not short-term. Make an architect "prepare" tiles to be channeled, so that a miner can just cut them out. Handled game-side, of course, without extra designations.)
The up/down stair designations serve a different purpose. Unlike ramps, they do not require horizontal movement to cross, and you can have a single "access shaft" by digging a vertical series of up/down stairs. They are entirely different from normal digging routines, and could justifiably be changed to require an architect skill to carve, but that's superfluous for the immediate future. As they are, the only change they really need is prohibiting them from being made in soil. I know it can be compacted to form a usable stair, but stairs carved into sand...
Final balance will come in the last arc before 1.0. So there's no point to "balancing" digging a channel. Just revert it, so the players can have the same functionality as before.
However, having an architect prepare the channel is fine by me. Right now, architects do very, very little. At some point in the future that should change, but will it be before MP dueling of fortresses?
Actually, right now, STAIRS do not serve a different purpose from ramps. Ramps let your dwarves change z levels. Stairs let your dwarves change z level. It's the same functionality. We can do very much more with stairs than ramps. That is an unfair thing, at least to ramps. Just don't have ramps auto-collaspe when their is a ramp underneath, and now you can have a simple ramp "chute", allowing z level passage. No stairs ever needed, game interface becomes cleaner. Indeed, right now, you should construct a RAMP, then cut it into STAIRS, according to the logic of "Channel creates a ramp, then players use 'remove up ramps' on the z level below". Remember--- we don't care about balance at this stage, because everything is going to change before 1.0 comes up, so there isn't a reason to care at this time, regardless of how overpowerful a particular feature might currently be.
Be careful about not letting dwarves dig down. How would they get down to rock if it is covered in several levels of sand and squishy clays? With no local wood for use in "constructions", this could make the task of making proper fortress impossible, instead of merely dwarvenly.
Remember Sean: the most important time in the game is how long a player has and how much fun he has in the game in that timespan. Making a player spend tedious time rather than rewarding time is what kills the fun of a game. At a certain point, a developer has to set aside realism and tedious, repeative commands that the player must put in, or no one will find the game fun, just tedious, and that is the end of any commercial potentional for the game. Remember, right now, Toady is a professional game developer--- he makes his living on supporting and further enhancing and developing DF. He has to keep an eye out on his player base and their satisfaction, as well as keeping an eye out for his own satisfaction for the success of his chosen employment and project.
Because a ramp that doesn't connect to a higher z-level isn't a ramp. It's a bump. Ramps are a feature of walls, not floor. They can't exist on open floor, since they have no effect there. So they are removed.
As to the other, it matters because time isn't the only factor (There I go again. *sigh*. Really, go read the entire thread again. It's all explained there.). There are other things you do that make one task more difficult than another. Designations, the keys you press, the stuff you have to design. To get engraved floors, you first smooth them, then engrave them. To get a smooth tunnel, you first hew a rough tunnel, and then smooth it. We don't need a designation to mine a smooth tunnel, even if it takes more time to do, because we have a whole separate profession to smooth and engrave things. We don't need the engrave designation to work on rough stone because engraved floors are always better, and there'd no longer be a use for the "smooth" designation. See my point? If we went the "SimStuff" way and simplified things, we'd get a useless designation and everyone going straight for mining already-smooth tunnels everywhere, unless it was an emergency. It works for the sheer construction effort, but this here is a roguelike as much as it's a life sim, and it needs the diversity and detail. That it has to be simple and easy to use is important of course, but that's no call for making things too simple to do. I'm not saying we should make the game harder everywhere. But if we have an opportunity to introduce diversity and detail, why not?
Actually, being able to designate a rough wall or floor with engrave is useful to the player, and should be supported in-game. As it is the same labor task that performs both smoothing and engraving, engraving a rough surface should smooth it, then engrave it (allowing the engraver to be called away at the completed "smooth" step). But there would still be a use for the "smooth" designation, as you might not want to engrave everything (I don't--- I don't like engraved floors, so I only engrave the walls, and then only in important places, not everywhere in my fortress. And "fortification" should work on rough stone as well (although there is more logic for "fortification" to be done by
miners, with all the material cut out of a smooth wall), as that is also performed by the same labor task. It too should automatically cause the wall to first be smoothed, then to be fortified. DF already supports these sorts of auto-chaining of functionality natively, so expanding it would be another good feature and improve player experience.
People wouldn't always use "Dig Smooth Tunnel" command. Just like people wouldn't use "Engrave all dug tiles". It doesn't make sense in all conditions.
Ramps aren't any more auto-vanishing than rock matter is auto-vanishing and somehow getting compacted into a single chunk. You dig away the tile, leaving a bump where a ramp connected to it. Since the game doesn't work with within-level terrain variations, the bump is not displayed. It's still there, but since it's not going to affect anything anymore, even if something is built next to it, the game can hide it to keep the screen clear (or better yet, remove it completely to save RAM).
Again, read the thread. The channels are currently impassable and insurmountable. That you can climb out of a hole you've dug yourself without a rope - congratulations, you're fit for service in the Army. I can't. Imagine that you're me - you've dug a hole and can't get out of it.* The dwarves and all non-flying creatures in DF are currently the same way. Implying "Cutscene Power To The Max", that miners may use their picks to climb out, also implies they should be able to climb when not mining, which they can't. To them, digging such a pit or channel should be an engineering task, not a matter of personal physique.
Digging a down stair, as well, requires engineering prowess, but that doesn't change the fact that the stairs provide the means of traversing them. Even without engineering knowledge, you can take a pickaxe and make a small stairway in rock, with some physical effort (okay, a lot of physical effort), since there's nothing stopping you from standing on the stairs you make until you emerge on top of wherever you're digging to.
WHY WOULD THEIR BE A BUMP IN A CHANNEL? THAT IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT A CHANNEL IS! You need a
concave floor, not a
convex floor in a channel.
Jumping carp! You've really lost the ore vien in this discussion, Sean.
Also, since DWARVES do not enter the tile when digging in any other circumstances, it is obvious that they have post diggers, drills, and augers, and they are using those. They pop out of magic dwarve space, where the dwarves currently keep their chisels, hammers, jeweler's loop, cheese presses, hoes, planes, squares, plumb lines, gaskets, sealants, matches, flint, steel, oil, tinder, sharpening stones, pliers, and everything else that isn't an axe, pick, bucket, bin or barrel!
THEY ARE NOT ENTERING THE OLD STYLE CHANNEL! The game shows you where they are. They don't enter the square. They have dwarven magic tools that pop in and out, so they can do whatever they need to.
REMEMBER! Dwarves don't enter the tile they dig. Until Toady changes
WHERE THE DWARVES END THEIR DIG (ie, the move into the flashing dig tile target), they aren't slowly stepping into it, or down into it, or climbing up into it. They are using their abstracted tools (baskets, chisels, augers, drills, sledge hammers, etc) to get the job done. Heck, for all we know, their pick is enchanted, floats on it its own, and dwarven miners merely concentrate on what they want done and the pick flies around, doing it. We just don't know this because magic isn't in the game yet.
Until it is time for another wall of text, have fun in DF!
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Topic: POLL: New Channeling: Super Awesome or Super Dumb? (Read 51808 times)