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[Hyndis]

If you make your fort a burrow and restrict your civilians to it in the Alerts screen, you can prevent your suicidally greedy dwarfs from making a trip to loot the corpses of their fallen comrades. Nothing worse than having one dwarf struck down and then losing 10 more who run off to grab his socks.

You can also create a small burrow in a room that is protected by traps or other last ditch defenses. Put some beds, a plump helmet stockpile (should be very easy to keep it stocked), and a well. You can use the alerts in the military screen to order all civilians to be confined to that burrow, and they will all head there until you clear the alert.

They will stay in the bunker, hopefully with enough food and water to last, and also traps to keep them safe, while your military deals with the threats.

The bunker doesn't actually need to be small, but smaller is easier to defend.

[darkrider2]

Dig the perimeter of a huge circle that spans 20 odd z levels
1 hour later, dig out the bottom level, link support, pull lever
Everything remains intact with only the first z level crushed

did you mine out the top of the circle too?

[Rollory]

While I sympathize with your loss of your dwarves, I have to agree with Nekoexmachina: That entire event does not contain any aspect of the game engine failing, but rather mistakes you made in managing your dwarves and the situation.

Bullcrap.

In such a situation, you are the one who should deactivate all labors on the trapped dwarves,

Utter, stupid, moronic bullcrap.

It should not be the player's responsibility to obsessively micromanage each and every dwarf.  If a dwarf is in a place from which they can not do a particular task, they should not be trying to do it.  Period.  It is not "gameplay" to page through every single dwarf who went wandering off to get something the player didn't expect them to get and turn off sections of their brain just to allow other dwarves to realize that a particular task needs to be done.  It is a failure of the game system.  Suggesting otherwise is idiotic.

This was a major failure of the game engine in 2D, it seems to have been mostly resolved in the 3D builds.  It is very regrettable that this problem has returned.

[Blackburn]

It should not be the player's responsibility to obsessively micromanage each and every dwarf.

That's what the entire game is about.

[Genoraven]

It should not be the player's responsibility to obsessively micromanage each and every dwarf.

That's what the entire game is about.

Quoted for truth.

[Ieb]

It should not be the player's responsibility to obsessively micromanage each and every dwarf. 

Micromanagement is what DF is all about.
Since you have to decide yourself what rooms goes where and how big rooms those nobles should have dug out, you're going to be pressing a lot of buttons just for those little things. "Only the best of Gold furniture for my mayor!" and so on.

Sure, you can opt to keep micromanagement low and only have a few dwarves who actually do work and everyone else acts as a hauler, but that has the small risk of Idlers. Who hang out at the meeting zones and statue gardens. Throwing parties. Making friends. Getting married and making kids.

Then some goblin gibs some punk somewhere and all hell breaks loose just because you had dwarves who had the time to relax and enjoy their life some other way than continuous labour.

It's hard to decide what to do, at least for me. On one hand, it's sort of cool to have a fort where the dwarves actually seem to live in and socialize, on the other hand, if a goblin does get through the defenses somehow and stabs my legendary mayor in the gut, at least if I micromanaged everyone into doing something there won't be any tantrums about it.

[melomel]

I dealt with my FB by drafting everyone into the military except a carper, and walled off the entire entire caverns by building a floor over the access pipe.  Worked pretty well, except poor armorer is trapped down there...  I turned on plant-gathering for her, but she keeps getting interrupted by the FB.  I'm wondering what would happen if I put her out of her misery and drafted her into battle--it's a regular meat critter and she has a dwarven-issue shield, if you know what I mean.

[ETA:  Starving and dehydrated, she ripped off all four of its horns without sustaining any injuries to herself or her *ahem* shield.  Beast ran across the caverns and finally ripped her chest.  Opened up the stairs down, drafted likely dwarves (woodcutters, ones with fighting skills), and the beast promptly killed a couple of them, but is not long for this world considering its injuries.  I've got my armorer set up in a smoothed obsidian 1x3; kinda rooting for her to survive now.  Or at least not go insane.  I don't think she's terribly happy about being locked in the cavern and then being forced to fight a four-horned blind cobra beast sober and on an empty stomach.]

The other good way, besides turning off all sorts of collecting via refuse/forbid/workshop orders, is to forbid every single item in the caverns, layer by layer.  Then cancel every single pending job down there, again layer by layer.

I think I found one reason for crazy pathing errors:  AFAIK, when I abandoned my fort for the first time and reclaimed, a lot of junk wound up in caverns that aren't actually accessable.  Opening up the lower level seems to reveal everything, even caves with no path to your access tunnel.

I'm tearing my hair out over the leadership bug (no leader on first embark, second went insane and no replacement elections), but considering this is a freeware, donation-supported labor-of-love game with a design team of two, it's awe-inducing.

Bullcrap.

In such a situation, you are the one who should deactivate all labors on the trapped dwarves,

Utter, stupid, moronic bullcrap.

It should not be the player's responsibility to obsessively micromanage each and every dwarf.  If a dwarf is in a place from which they can not do a particular task, they should not be trying to do it.  Period.  It is not "gameplay" to page through every single dwarf who went wandering off to get something the player didn't expect them to get and turn off sections of their brain just to allow other dwarves to realize that a particular task needs to be done.  It is a failure of the game system.  Suggesting otherwise is idiotic.

This was a major failure of the game engine in 2D, it seems to have been mostly resolved in the 3D builds.  It is very regrettable that this problem has returned.

That's pretty harsh.  If you've donated a lot of money, I can see how you'd be angry, but this is a niche-market, free-to-play game.

It's like comparing the (shudder, gakk, gag) new WotC D&D to a homebrew systems where you roll percentile dice with every hit to see if you get hit in your left kidney or spleen.  (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15803.  No 'fense, Mr. Toady, but I thought of that rant when I realized a throat could have a water covering.  ;])  One's mass-market.  The other's a labor of love.

[Hyndis]

DF is a game made by a person with OCD for people with OCD.

Its all about the absurd levels of micromanagement! 

[Ilmoran]

While I sympathize with your loss of your dwarves, I have to agree with Nekoexmachina: That entire event does not contain any aspect of the game engine failing, but rather mistakes you made in managing your dwarves and the situation.

Bullcrap.

In such a situation, you are the one who should deactivate all labors on the trapped dwarves,

Utter, stupid, moronic bullcrap.

It should not be the player's responsibility to obsessively micromanage each and every dwarf.  If a dwarf is in a place from which they can not do a particular task, they should not be trying to do it.  Period.  It is not "gameplay" to page through every single dwarf who went wandering off to get something the player didn't expect them to get and turn off sections of their brain just to allow other dwarves to realize that a particular task needs to be done.  It is a failure of the game system.  Suggesting otherwise is idiotic.

This was a major failure of the game engine in 2D, it seems to have been mostly resolved in the 3D builds.  It is very regrettable that this problem has returned.

While it is a flaw in the game system, it's not a critical failure when there are easy workarounds.  Yes, it should eventually be fixed.  No, it shouldn't be considered high priority.  Turning off labors or drafting and activating the stranded dwarves should have freed up their tasks.  There's also the job list, or the unit list, where the option "Remv Cre" removes a dwarf from being assigned to a specific task, and, in my experience, seems to put them at the bottom of the list for re-acquiring the same task.

[ohgoditburns]

It should not be the player's responsibility to obsessively micromanage each and every dwarf.  If a dwarf is in a place from which they can not do a particular task, they should not be trying to do it.  Period.  It is not "gameplay" to page through every single dwarf who went wandering off to get something the player didn't expect them to get and turn off sections of their brain just to allow other dwarves to realize that a particular task needs to be done.  It is a failure of the game system.  Suggesting otherwise is idiotic.

Dwarf Therapist.

[melomel]

While it is a flaw in the game system, it's not a critical failure when there are easy workarounds.  Yes, it should eventually be fixed.  No, it shouldn't be considered high priority.  Turning off labors or drafting and activating the stranded dwarves should have freed up their tasks.  There's also the job list, or the unit list, where the option "Remv Cre" removes a dwarf from being assigned to a specific task, and, in my experience, seems to put them at the bottom of the list for re-acquiring the same task.

There are several significant flaws, or areas that could be improved on, in DF.  But DF is goddarm-ned-ed freakin' free to download.  Complaining about about the gameplay in the new version is kind of like accusing your former favorite webcomic artist of violating your first amendment rights because they didn't go with the storyline you wanted them to.  If you donated a hundred dollars or so USD, and Toady's blocked your email account, then you can bitch.  If you've never given a significant amount of money and you just don't like the new version...  suck it up.  I've had enough problems with games I've paid massive amounts of money for.  (And Windows Vista.  Fuck Vista.  Nothing like being paying forty bucks for a spanking new game only to find out Vista doesn't like XP programs.)

DF is a game made by a person with OCD for people with OCD.

Its all about the absurd levels of micromanagement!  ;D

No...  DF is made by a person with sadistic OCD for people with masochistic OCD.

The new skill trees and burrows and military menus are better than a hardy spanking.  :P  (THANK YOU SIR; MAY WE HAVE ANOTHER?!)

[Man In Zero G]

It should not be the player's responsibility to obsessively micromanage each and every dwarf.

It is the player's responsibility to assign which labors each individual dwarf is supposed to be attempting to do, and which ones to ignore. That's how the engine works.

If a dwarf is in a place from which they can not do a particular task, they should not be trying to do it.  Period.

If you've trapped a dwarf somewhere that he can't reach the jobs for the labors assigned to him, and don't go turn them off, that's a failure of the player, not the system. By leaving the labors turned on, you're telling the engine "assign this type of job to this dwarf". The engine can't know the dwarf is unable to do the job until it tries and fails the pathfinding. At which point it alerts you. So you can decide what to do about it - "Do I try and rescue the dwarf, or do I turn off his labors and abandon him to his fate?" You know, to play the game. That's what you're complaining about, the game alerting you to a problem that you need to deal with. If you're actually suggesting that the engine should make that choice for you, frankly, that's idiotic. Yes it's annoying when it keeps happening over and over, but the only reason it would, is if you don't fix the affected dwarf the first time.

It is not "gameplay" to page through every single dwarf who went wandering off to get something the player didn't expect them to get and turn off sections of their brain just to allow other dwarves to realize that a particular task needs to be done.  It is a failure of the game system.  Suggesting otherwise is idiotic.

There are more than enough ways to keep your dwarves from ever wandering off into those situations in the first place, like the new burrows and alert states for example. And if you screw up and miss a few, turn off labors they can't do anymore. It's pretty simple. Frankly, if you're not using those features, it is not a failure of the (unfinished) system, it's a failure of the player's understanding of it. Suggesting otherwise is somewhat insulting to everyone's intelligence.

[QuakeIV]

I think you guys (other then the OP) seem to think that its a GOOD thing that you cant actually do anything with a game because of trapped dwarfs trying to do tasks that they will never be able to reach.

Really, it can be a bug even IF theres some absurdly micromanage-y method to repair the problem.

Theres all sorts of fun micromanagement like making rooms for your little dwarfs, setting up farms, and building complicated infrastructure to complete various complicated tasks.

However, disabling every. last. labor.  on a large pool of intentionally trapped dwarfs, just to get the remaining group of dwarfs to get any work done, is inescapably boring. It feels unnecessary to any logical entity that they should have to disable a dwarfs wall making ability if he is stuffed into a small stone box so that wall-making isn't constantly and intermittently interrupted.

It shouldn't be the players responsibility to baby every singe dwarf through every little situation, such as being trapped in a cave full of monsters, and in the process completely incapacitating the entire fortress.

[Blackburn]

I think you guys (other then the OP) seem to think that its a GOOD thing that you cant actually do anything with a game because of trapped dwarfs trying to do tasks that they will never be able to reach.

Oh, we don't consider it a good thing. But we do consider it an easily fixed problem, and bitching about it on the Internet instead of fixing it is a stupid and juvenile thing to do.

Yes, turning off everyone's labors would be boring. Sorry this game isn't non-stop fun-time action all the time. But that's how it is, so suck it up and wait for Toady to fix it when he feels like it.

It shouldn't be the players responsibility to baby every singe dwarf through every little situation, such as being trapped in a cave full of monsters, and in the process completely incapacitating the entire fortress.

This is DWARF FORTRESS. Obsessive micro-management is the ENTIRE POINT OF THE GAME.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

...
However, disabling every. last. labor.  on a large pool of intentionally trapped dwarfs, just to get the remaining group of dwarfs to get any work done, is inescapably boring. ...

I find this part of your argument rather odd (besides the OP mentioning that only some of the dwarves remained trapped, so I assume less than a dozen): So, the player causes purposely a certain situation and then expects the game to clean up the mess quietly and quickly after him without any trouble? If I intentionally trap my dwarves somewhere, as you describe it, should I not then be prepared to deal with the consequences of my decision?

And people also gave several suggestions on solving the problem easily, actually leaving another very obvious one out:

Create a squad and put all the dwarves who are stuck into it and order them to kill something.
They will be drafted, not do any civilian labor, and happily stand around the corpse of the creature they killed until they have starved to death.

Since there was no way to rescue them, this rather cynical method would have been a very easy and elegant way to handle this.

Deathworks