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[mendonca]

10 Barnards Star -> sell luxury goods -> Buy Robots -> travel to Sol -> check bulletin board - > sell robots -> buy luxury goods -> travel to Barnards Star
20 GOTO 10

Are we to expect such depth of gameplay early in the Caravan Arc? I reckon I spent weeks all in carrying out the above, just to get myself a bigger and badder ship.

On a related note (re. Elite 2 bulletin boards) a mechanism to offload goods to private individuals might be fun on occasion - perhaps you could sell all your food to a noble at raised prices in a starving community -> he pays a premium to keep his family healthy.

(I'm really excited to see how the game is developing at the moment, the last couple of years are really starting to pay off)

[Lord Shonus]

10 Barnards Star -> sell luxury goods -> Buy Robots -> travel to Sol -> check bulletin board - > sell robots -> buy luxury goods -> travel to Barnards Star
20 GOTO 10

You got more money shipping between Gateway and Soholia.

[Psieye]

10 Barnards Star -> sell luxury goods -> Buy Robots -> travel to Sol -> check bulletin board - > sell robots -> buy luxury goods -> travel to Barnards Star
20 GOTO 10

Are we to expect such depth of gameplay early in the Caravan Arc? I reckon I spent weeks all in carrying out the above, just to get myself a bigger and badder ship.

If I'm reading the dev notes correctly, it may get more complex:

- Get information that X town needs Y goods really badly
- Mass up on Y goods
- Travel to X town
- Realise 12 other caravans got there before you and now Y goods is no longer in high demand
- Worry how you'll ever turn a profit now with your current load


If real caravans are travelling between sites then supply and demand will be changing during gameplay. If worldgen continues during play as well, expect even more drastic changes as say a sudden war in some location will suddenly bring certain goods into demand (military gear, food supplies). After enough development, I'd imagine you could even be a total bastard and massacre some town which causes a change in supply & demand which you then cater to after disguising yourself as someone else. Even better if the local government mobilises their army in response but that's clearly Army Arc and beyond.

Shuttling 2 types of goods between 2 locations where the demand is stable and unchanging is comparatively simple. I wouldn't be surprised if early releases of the caravan arc already catered to that style of gameplay. Of course, you'd have to figure out that stable trade route for each worldgen as it'll be randomised.

[Toady One]

Regarding tools, they are currently not native to Dwarf mode, probably only appearing there with custom reactions. Do you think that the pick and similar things (shovels, felling axes, two-man saws...) will move over to the tool format with a tag to make them applicable for dwarf mode to allow some tool use there without it becoming overwhelming?

Yeah, it's quite possible the picks will move over to the tool format, though I'm also considering the item format in general.  It should respect more dual-use stuff, and the strict item types of weapon and tool and a few others might re-disappear over time with a more versatile format (for instance, expanding the "use" idea to break weapons into several groups that would interface nicely with formations etc., and then give some weapons tool style uses as well).

Did i get that right (since the question came up on the forum) That creature lairs behave as "Player created side" and stuff in there does in fact not scatter around?

They are even stronger than player forts in that respect -- in order to maintain a bit of gore for the time being, items are not moved or rotted inside the lairs, and there's a special flag for it.  In that sense, they are good places to store things and sleep (up to interference by whatever bugs).

Will trading a material to a civ give them limited access to that material in the same manner that it currently does for the player? For example, Vanilla Elves don't use metal. If I traded away large amounts of coke and steel bars to the elves, would they later show up with low quality steel equipment made from those bars? Similarly, will resource deposits become more important in worldgen, for example humans fighting elves to gain a tin deposit (once tin is properly rare again)?

What they do with traded materials or whether they trade for them in the first place in world gen will likely depending on the professions given to them in their entity defs.  Resource deposits and redistribution to localized areas are going to be key, and struggles over resources are one of the main reasons the caravan stuff is going in before the next push on army stuff.  So it's quite possible that elves simply won't trade for steel, unless they can think ahead far enough to trade it to the humans or other dwarves, which may or may not be in the cards depending on how well things go -- once they see that they should accept steel in some circumstances, the rest would happen naturally, but the bump to get over is their valuation of steel during the initial trade, since it'll have to account for transport cost/storage/likelihood/value of the future trade.  That's probably easier during dwarf mode rather than world gen, just because there is more time to crunch fewer numbers.  Since humans don't have a restriction on making things from steel if they've got the bars at this point, that is more straightforward -- if you trade steel bars to humans, as things are currently planned, they will return with steel weapons in the event of an attack (provided the armies draw equipment from stockpiles next time, which I addressed around the last post I think).

Will this be possible in future versions?

Quote from: Chatlog

    A Zombie Goast: But really
    A Zombie Goast: If the Dwarf grows attached to a weapon
    A Zombie Goast: Or piece of armor
    A Zombie Goast: And the Dwarf dies
    A Zombie Goast: That thing should become haunted
    A Zombie Goast: Or whatever they call it when an object has a ghost

Given that bodies and souls are now separate, I'd say that this kind of thing is an eventual goal.

Yeah, the idea of the soul separation was to prepare for this sort of thing.  Of course there's no timeline.

Any plans for adventurers being able to contract specific armour/weapons with specific improvements in the next development arc?

Not for the next release.  It's more likely when we add the ability to do it in dwarf mode, which is on the dev page, or when we do adventurer entities and disguise/identity, which are also up there.  Either one might lead to this natural progression.

Is there a Month of Bugfixes planned?

The current idea is caravan release, patch release(s), series of general bug fix releases, army stuff.  The plans are subject to change, but I think that applies more to the last part than the others (looking forward to armies, but you never know).  So, yeah.  If not a month, then a significant chunk of time beyond what happened between 0.31.17 and 0.31.18 or within 0.31.17 in terms of bug fixing.

Is three any chance of restoring compatibility with older Windows versions?

My recollection of the situation back when it arose is that compatibility with versions before XP SP3 was removed by MS with MSVC 2010, through the tweaking of some funtion name or another in a DLL.  I can't find mention of a workaround now, though something might exist.  I vaguely remember a similar situation where a workaround came up but it didn't work out as simply as advertised...  I don't remember if it was this one though.  In any case, I'm currently unaware of how to fix it.  It's not feasible to go back to the old compiler at this point.

When will there be a raws tag for bodyparts that should be able to be levered or popped out, e.g. eyeballs?

I don't have a timeline.  It's a reasonable thing though.  The current popping out methods are too linked to disembowelment and death to be used.

What are your plans for integrating retired adventurers into Fortress mode, e.g. by having them lead founding parties?

This was up on the old dev pages if I remember and might come up during the fortress start scenarios.  It's quite possible you'll be attacked by old adventurers before you can use them to found fortresses.

Will Companion Acquiring be streamlined anytime soon? With the new version, it seems much easier to haul around 20 companions but it's kind of a nuisance to go door to door looking for soldiers and having to repeat the same conversation 20 times whenever you need to stock up again

There are some possibilities for getting large amounts of "companions" all at once when we get to the army stuff (or when you can rabblerouse a bunch of drunks in a tavern or something), but as for real buddy style companions, I'm not sure I ever want to speed it up.  I'd rather increase their survivability in general or stop them from foolishly traveling with you if they die all the time.

also, are the delay's between shot's supposed to simulate reloading, and if so will there be a option to not reload automatically afer each shot, like a combat preference? 

Yeah, that's what the delay is for, and I'd prefer to have it actually track the loading/ready state of the weapon and let you decide where you want to be there, yeah.  The reaction moment/combat-move speed split stuff points in that direction, but I'm not sure when it'll happen.

To better emulate vomiting from a finite stomach, how about if vomiting increased the creature's hunger meter; the creature will retch instead of vomiting if the hunger meter is above some value.

Right now it uses your fullness counter, which is related to when you last ate, as well as an auxiliary counter that is supposed to simulate fluids or something.  Ideally this will take care of itself when we have things like swallowing items and nutritional stuff leading to partially eaten food contents and so on, but I have no idea.

When livestock are incorporated, will we be able to train war and hunting animal's. also will there only be farm animals or will we be able to purchase dog's and cat's?

Currently, horses and mules are more likely than cats and dogs are more likely than random war beasts are more likely than being able to train animals.  Being able to train animals almost certainly won't be in the next release.  The element of uncertainty comes in with simulating all those random war animals the generals constantly train in world gen, etc. -- those are going to be simulated by the numbers now and presumably they'll exist on sites now.  Whether that means they'll be on the market or just part of armies or a lord's personal menagerie is up for grabs.

Toady, do you have plans to give more information in the sites and populations export?

things like location?

Those files are in limbo now that the (partial) XML dump exists.  I don't know if they should be continued at all or what.  The restriction is that they need to have the most important information in a more human-friendly format, where the XML is giant and can be used by utilities.

Will attributes like social awareness, empathy or linguistic sense have any influence on how successful meat shield hiring attemps or quest requests are? Will we see social skills for adventure mode soon?

I think there's a reference to social awareness and the leadership skill when calculating the maximum number of followers, but I wasn't going to mess with the details of the conversation engine until we get to the personality/emotions rewrite, which was a precursor to job priorities and more NPC AI.  So "soon", probably not, but it could end up as part of the army stuff, where I'll need some more decision making.

Toady eventually will the NPCs start to notice that anyone who rides with you essentially meets and untimely end and thus refuse your recruitment on the basis that you are probably more deadly then all the Megabeasts, Demons, and Goblins combined and actually tell you that is the reason? At that point how would you recover your reputation if possible?

He he he, yeah, I guess I alluded to that above.  I think it is reasonable for people to judge you to be certain death based on your track record, and it seems like a difficult place to come back from.  You might have to invest more equipment and money in the matter until you show that you are capable of success at a lesser cost of life, or you might have to move.  There's certainly going to be a more multi-faceted approach to reputation beyond "hero/criminal/member" as we move forward.  It should be that you can still get desperate or foolish people to travel with you even if you have a fairly bad reputation for companion survivability, assuming they have some other reason to come along than dying.

Will it ever be possible for nobles to give your adventurer quests that involve raiding/sieging goblins/warring entities? Would that ever affect the world (ie they appear in Legends as sieges, winning results in the target location to be owned by your parent civilization, etc)? If so, how long do you think this would take to implement.

Yeah, all of that will come up in the first army release.  Probably on the time scale of the 0.31.17 release to get a lot of interesting stuff going on, but we know how good I am with release date estimation.  Whether it ends up satisfying is another matter, since strategy game AI has high standards among discerning players, but I can guarantee adventurer involvement and world changes, if not good decision making, he he he.  Fort mode involvement is going to rely on the surrounding populations getting you up to usable numbers as well as some pains with shifting focus from the fort to the battlefield and back, so that might be a further release down the line or in the first release with a bit more of a release delay, depending on how everything is going then.  We're really looking forward to get everything out there and moving around, first with the caravans and then with the armies, beasts and bandits.

So whats the deal with the military tactics skill...you have plans for that? is it already a working skill that affects things or just something thats there for late?

It has influence on world gen, but that's it.  I'm not sure if the existence of the skill is a permanent state of affairs, and it'll be hard to say until we have the formations and the multi-tile armies moving around on the travel map and so on.  The better the AI gets, the worse I can screw it up due to lack of skill, so there's hope, anyway.

So now that the Dev Log is a more general thing and not a single-contributor thingy, might others (Baughn, for example) also end up with the ability to post there?

I dunno.  It's a new change.  I expect anyone might be possible, but I haven't spoken with anybody.

10 Barnards Star -> sell luxury goods -> Buy Robots -> travel to Sol -> check bulletin board - > sell robots -> buy luxury goods -> travel to Barnards Star
20 GOTO 10

Are we to expect such depth of gameplay early in the Caravan Arc?

I don't know what the bulletin board does.  There's that dev page thing about inquiring regarding supply/demand situations, which is probably going to have some partial implementation in this release.  Other than that, you'll be able to move stuff around and make ends meet, first release, though there still aren't a lot of ends.  And yeah, the situation might end up complicated and a bit untidy for you.

[shadow_archmagi]

Yeah, I can't wait to send a 100-man-strong caravan to an elf civilization on the brink of starvation, pull up in the depot, and say "Behold! CLOTH!"

This is why I shouldn't read forums during class. I just burst out laughing and everyone glared at me.

At least I didn't do a spit-take.

[LoSboccacc]

if caravans are going to show up in fortress mode, and then the armies, and then the !!wars!!, can we expect some enhancement in the number of dwarves a fortress could maintain before fps death?

a couple of 15 dwarves caravan active, a 75 dwarves army for defence, a 100 dwarves for attacking and you'll need a lot of other dwarves to produce weapons, food, booze and generally maintain all of that stuff.

[Karlito]

if caravans are going to show up in fortress mode, and then the armies, and then the !!wars!!, can we expect some enhancement in the number of dwarves a fortress could maintain before fps death?

a couple of 15 dwarves caravan active, a 75 dwarves army for defence, a 100 dwarves for attacking and you'll need a lot of other dwarves to produce weapons, food, booze and generally maintain all of that stuff.

Toady's said in the past that when your fortress becomes a barony, it should start to have some control over dwarves outside your fortress, like drafting them for an invasion force or having them pay you taxes.

[Psieye]

if caravans are going to show up in fortress mode, and then the armies, and then the !!wars!!, can we expect some enhancement in the number of dwarves a fortress could maintain before fps death?

a couple of 15 dwarves caravan active, a 75 dwarves army for defence, a 100 dwarves for attacking and you'll need a lot of other dwarves to produce weapons, food, booze and generally maintain all of that stuff.

Toady's said in the past that when your fortress becomes a barony, it should start to have some control over dwarves outside your fortress, like drafting them for an invasion force or having them pay you taxes.

To expand on that point, the lands surrounding your embark point will build dwarf settlements. So your fortress will end up surrounded by villages and outposts that you cannot directly interact with, but you can order them to send some dwarves for some project beyond the borders of your embark site. After you return from that trade/invasion/whatever, they'll go back to their homes so you cannot bring them back with you to your fortress directly. Think of the many civilians and soldiers in adventure mode now who have no name until you speak with them - you'd have these 'faceless mooks' to fill in the roles you require. Afterall in a battle, do you realllllly care what kind of personality Urist McGoon#213 has and whether Urist McGoon#148 slept in a good bed recently?

I guess this implies you'd be fighting goblins out on the field while they're travelling to you and only if you fail to win do they siege you (with the opportunity to use weapon traps and all on them). If they're sieging you, they've already done damage to your surrounding settlements.

[LoSboccacc]

if caravans are going to show up in fortress mode, and then the armies, and then the !!wars!!, can we expect some enhancement in the number of dwarves a fortress could maintain before fps death?

a couple of 15 dwarves caravan active, a 75 dwarves army for defence, a 100 dwarves for attacking and you'll need a lot of other dwarves to produce weapons, food, booze and generally maintain all of that stuff.

Toady's said in the past that when your fortress becomes a barony, it should start to have some control over dwarves outside your fortress, like drafting them for an invasion force or having them pay you taxes.

To expand on that point, the lands surrounding your embark point will build dwarf settlements. So your fortress will end up surrounded by villages and outposts that you cannot directly interact with, but you can order them to send some dwarves for some project beyond the borders of your embark site. After you return from that trade/invasion/whatever, they'll go back to their homes so you cannot bring them back with you to your fortress directly. Think of the many civilians and soldiers in adventure mode now who have no name until you speak with them - you'd have these 'faceless mooks' to fill in the roles you require. Afterall in a battle, do you realllllly care what kind of personality Urist McGoon#213 has and whether Urist McGoon#148 slept in a good bed recently?

I guess this implies you'd be fighting goblins out on the field while they're travelling to you and only if you fail to win do they siege you (with the opportunity to use weapon traps and all on them). If they're sieging you, they've already done damage to your surrounding settlements.

you still need to churn out equipment for them, but that may work.

however, what would happen then when the siege comes? even if the defender are abstracted away, if the goblin attackers win and come to your fortress they will make an huge impact on frame rate.

[Knight Otu]

Yeah, it's quite possible the picks will move over to the tool format, though I'm also considering the item format in general.  It should respect more dual-use stuff, and the strict item types of weapon and tool and a few others might re-disappear over time with a more versatile format (for instance, expanding the "use" idea to break weapons into several groups that would interface nicely with formations etc., and then give some weapons tool style uses as well).

That's definitely something I'd love to see, along with other raw types getting similar treatmeant (materials especially).

Toady, do you have plans to give more information in the sites and populations export?

things like location?

Those files are in limbo now that the (partial) XML dump exists.  I don't know if they should be continued at all or what.  The restriction is that they need to have the most important information in a more human-friendly format, where the XML is giant and can be used by utilities.

I'd rather have both the quick export that gives an overview of the world and the slow but detailed xml export. Sometimes you just want to know whether your modded creatures actually roam the world or how successful your entities are.

[Footkerchief]

That's definitely something I'd love to see, along with other raw types getting similar treatmeant (materials especially).

What do you mean about materials?  Less strict material types, e.g. more robust alloying or something?

if caravans are going to show up in fortress mode, and then the armies, and then the !!wars!!, can we expect some enhancement in the number of dwarves a fortress could maintain before fps death?

a couple of 15 dwarves caravan active, a 75 dwarves army for defence, a 100 dwarves for attacking and you'll need a lot of other dwarves to produce weapons, food, booze and generally maintain all of that stuff.

Other people already mentioned a lot of the concepts here, but here are some quotes:

Spoiler: wall o' text (click to show/hide)

http://bay12games.com/media/df_talk_2_transcript.html

So ostensibly you should be able to send out thousands of people and arrange them in lines and then siege a goblin tower with different approaches and so on. The main problem would be that you'd be restricted; if you ever zoom in you'd be restricted to having just a smaller number of people, while at the same time a fight could be raging on off-screen with further people. The main problem area this ties back to is fortress mode; what happens if twenty thousand goblins are knocking at your door, what exactly is going to happen there? And we've thought about that quite a bit in terms of ... we're talking about a fortress that's very old, that's had large numbers of things popping up around it, and you've got control of thousands of people outside the fortress and so on, and of course there's a million things that need to be considered that we don't really have time to talk about, just in terms of your industries and so on. But, say that these larger numbers came up; you'd first be able to contest them outside your fortress with larger numbers, with larger army battles; but if they did make it to your fortress and sieged the actual fortress where you've only got your hundred, hundred and fifty guys running around, then they'd have to keep their numbers lower too to keep things fair, or just to keep things running with the CPU. But they could send in two hundred guys or something and you could have your standard sieges, and now if they had twenty thousand people they could do that a hundred times, but we just have to artificially set things up so that that's not how it works, or if it does maybe supporting their supply lines would be what causes them to leave if you keep winning, or just being depressed would cause them to leave if you keep winning and so on.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=30026.msg601337;topicseen#msg601337

Maybe the idea of shifting your "focus" from the fortress proper to outlying settlements, roaming armies etc. could be generalized to other aspects of fortress mode, so that very large fortresses could be controlled piecemeal?  To the extent that you could have one large burrow at a time being directly simulated, with other burrows running in semi-abstracted mode, and haulers occasionally moving between burrows with off-map arrivals etc.  I guess it's mostly a question of how well the Caravan Arc stuff (production of items, transfer of resources between sites) scales down.

Burrows would work. You could also treat certain rooms (like workshops!) as separate, and abstract them out when looking at the larger fortress. Not the most eloquent solution, and it'd only really be helpful in assembly-line like workshops (smelters and forges in one room, for example) or rooms with a lot of people (like barracks!). It'd also fail if everyone's outside the rooms that are being abstracted.

For a real vast city for example why not create a own Build-mode without dwarfs on the screen? Pause the time entirly even, then let the player plan entire buildings, streets, places and zones from premade or selfmade templates/blueprints.
(snip)
(edit: Going down to the lowest detail level should still be possible.)

This is all the central problem with fort mode really.  It's similar to the difficulty with retiring a fort and expecting it to be going on as you want it to continue on.  Jumping back and forth between levels of abstraction is a hard problem when there are things like the state of fluids and so on to consider, and so without a solution present I've been leaning toward having one main active area, at least for any reasonable period of time, with sub-areas available for relatively simple acts like army fights.

There's a bloat somewhere about "deep sites" which relates to the question of fortress sprawl.  I think at least having a main section that you are looking at in detail and other sections that you aren't looking at in detail (at worst, ever) is a tractable problem, where you could think of your fortress as the keep in the center of a giant capital, and you could have your dwarves off doing all sorts of projects all over while still maintaining a "realistic" sense of scope, without your dwarves being important enough in the workings of things so as not to become drowned in mediocrity.  You'd still have complete access top to bottom in one map column, so bad things could still happen locally, which is good, and it could give you all sorts of reports and various control over non-visible sections, and they could be realized for you in either (a) adventure mode, (b) in a non-controllable fortress mode based on the adventure mode representation.  This is easier since fluids don't come into play (since they can be controlled in general when you don't go all nuts with them).  I don't mean to harp on fluids though -- there are all sorts of problems.

[Quatch]

Yeah, I can't wait to send a 100-man-strong caravan to an elf civilization on the brink of starvation, pull up in the depot, and say "Behold! CLOTH!"

Any plans for food of desperation to be available? Boiled shoes for dinner tonight, but it beats starving.

Also, I know it is a crazy question, but when you calculate distance for things like caravan travel, will you use spherical-world distance, or straight line distance? Will dragons prefer raiding along great-circle routes?

footnote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great-circle_distance Illustration http://www.distancefromto.net/.

[Knight Otu]

That's definitely something I'd love to see, along with other raw types getting similar treatmeant (materials especially).

What do you mean about materials?  Less strict material types, e.g. more robust alloying or something?

Well, not quite - several material tokens are restricted to certain types of material, such as MILL, DRINK and the like being restricted to plant materials, similar to how several "item" tokens are restricted to weapons, armor, and so on. The latter might see a revision according to Toady's post to allow for more dual purpose items, something I'd like to see in other raw files as well if at all possible.

[Psieye]

if caravans are going to show up in fortress mode, and then the armies, and then the !!wars!!, can we expect some enhancement in the number of dwarves a fortress could maintain before fps death?

a couple of 15 dwarves caravan active, a 75 dwarves army for defence, a 100 dwarves for attacking and you'll need a lot of other dwarves to produce weapons, food, booze and generally maintain all of that stuff.

Toady's said in the past that when your fortress becomes a barony, it should start to have some control over dwarves outside your fortress, like drafting them for an invasion force or having them pay you taxes.

To expand on that point, the lands surrounding your embark point will build dwarf settlements. So your fortress will end up surrounded by villages and outposts that you cannot directly interact with, but you can order them to send some dwarves for some project beyond the borders of your embark site. After you return from that trade/invasion/whatever, they'll go back to their homes so you cannot bring them back with you to your fortress directly. Think of the many civilians and soldiers in adventure mode now who have no name until you speak with them - you'd have these 'faceless mooks' to fill in the roles you require. Afterall in a battle, do you realllllly care what kind of personality Urist McGoon#213 has and whether Urist McGoon#148 slept in a good bed recently?

I guess this implies you'd be fighting goblins out on the field while they're travelling to you and only if you fail to win do they siege you (with the opportunity to use weapon traps and all on them). If they're sieging you, they've already done damage to your surrounding settlements.

you still need to churn out equipment for them, but that may work.

however, what would happen then when the siege comes? even if the defender are abstracted away, if the goblin attackers win and come to your fortress they will make an huge impact on frame rate.

Well yes, you'd have to solve the logistics problem of "how do I equip all my soldiers" as well as "how do I get all the food they'll need to eat while travelling and fighting". But it's very easy to produce a ridiculous overabundance of items in fortress mode anyway. Maybe if we have some kind of "the Abstractor Chest" thing where you put items in and they get abstracted into generic items - these abstracted items then no longer eat away at your FPS/memory and only items put in here are then available to your army when you go waging war out there. Like, here's my vision of it (which means it's speculation and I've no idea what Toady's actual vision is):

--- Start Speculation ---

Spoiler: "Uh, this became a wall of text" (click to show/hide)

Suppose you want to fight goblins while their armies travel to you or maybe even siege their dark fortresses. You bring up some new screen tied to some new bureaucrat dwarf position. There, the bureaucrat tells you that your total standing army including all the 'faceless mooks' outside your embark area has X dwarves in it at Y skill level and require Z maintenance to upkeep (which you pay with coins you have minted). You feel this is inadequate so you order the bureaucrat to do whatever administrative tasks he needs to do to recruit some additional dwarves over the next M months so that you have an army of 300 soldiers to play with plus more in the reserves (somebody needs to defend the fort in case another army hits you while you're out).

While the bureaucrat goes and sees to raw army size, you make your fortress dwarves (who you have direct control over like now) to make 300 steel axes and whatever armour you deem fit to equip mooks with. You realise you need some extra flux to do this so you contact your bureaucrat again and ask him to arrange for a delivery of 200 dolomite stones. Since dolomite is a natural resource in your biome, the sites can mine this out and have it delivered to you - for a fee of course, so you give permission to take out 500 gold coins (which you minted over the last 2 years) from the Treasury zone.

Ok so your legendary weaponsmith is cranking the axes out but you don't have a legendary armoursmith - in fact your best one is only Talented. You ask your bureaucrat if there happens to be a more experienced armoursmith living in your barony outside the fort. Turns out there is one, so you invite this armoursmith to bring his family over to live at the fort proper while you make him crank out 300 steel chainmails and let your current Talented armoursmith make 300 bronze high boots (you had to compromise somewhere as you just don't have enough to deck out every soldier in a full set of steel plate mail). Oh and some dwarf displeases you for whatever reason so you punish him by exiling him to live in the sprawl outside the fort. His friends get a bad thought from this but hey they were ecstatic anyway so they don't tantrum. The exiled dwarf is still remembered in Legends mode but doesn't get loaded up in Fortress mode so it's less FPS again.

While the equipment is being manufactured, you start thinking about the food required to feed 300 soldiers for the 5 days they'll be operating for. You've been farming a lot but not nearly enough. While getting a bunch of dwarves to do some plant gathering and fishing you tell your bureaucrat to order the sprawl mooks to gather extra food and send it to you. They need to be paid for that but you want to save up your hard currency as contingency for whatever emergency may strike in the future. Therefore you negotiate a barter instead - your fort will ship out a few tens of clothes you made (gotta do SOMETHING with all that cloth the elves brought you) to the sprawl in return for them bringing in your quota of hunted, foraged and fished food.

In an effort to improve army morale, you have your Master Cook work on all the raw food you have. She churns out mostly Superior, several Exceptional and a few Masterwork dishes. Satisfied you shove them into the Abstractor Logistics Chest (uh yeah, with a better name obviously). They are now stored as "300 Superior Prepared Meals" with no recollection of what the ingredients were and the lowest quality level was taken as the level the abstracted items are at. This latter feature is to prevent abuse of putting items into and out of abstraction to improve quality. Now your soldiers will gain a morale bonus and won't run away so easily in battle.

Your equipment is complete, you shove all your military items into the Abstractor Logistics Chest where they get remembered as "300 Exceptional Steel Axes", "300 Superior Steel Chainmails", "300 Finely-crafted Bronze High Boots" and so on. Again, decorations are forgotten or maybe they'll be kept in some abstracted way like 'they are all decorated with goblin bone' and the game will decide whether that means spikes, hanging rings or an image when the player asks to look closely at the item again.

Time to move out. You order your mook soldiers to gather and get equipped. You note their generic skill level is "Competent" which defines all their combat skills. You supplement these mooks with officers that you hand-picked from your fortress dwarves, personally equipped with better gear as you chose in the current military screen. Maybe you also want to throw in low-level military dwarves from your fortress into the army too as further supplements to grunts - they'll be named grunts on the battlefield with distinct equipment and skills remembered but otherwise treated the same in the battle. Oh and you need to send out a commander of course. You deck him out in a very heavily decorated uniform which bolsters morale again by how impressive and fearsome he looks. His commander skills will then dictate how well he actually performs in battle.

Now say you lost that battle and the incoming goblin army sieges you. Your sprawl sites in that general direction have been ransacked so you lose a percentage of sprawl assets (dwarves, items, whatever). Your embark site now has to face the goblin army like a conventional siege right now. Since you battled them, their numbers have thinned down, but you lost some of your best military dwarves in that battle (either as casualties or prisoners). Well you got your Corridor Of Doom filled with weapon traps to help you. Oops, but you had used that in a previous ambush years ago before you became a barony and you let some of the ambushers escape. The goblin siegers already know about your Corridor of Doom. They decide to make their own path into your fort with troll miners - because you wanted more exciting sieges you set the init option to "yes let invaders dig, I don't care about aesthetics of my fort".

Crap, so you don't have a good military and the goblins won't fall for your Corridor of Doom. You pull the big lever you made out of gold with cinnabar floor tiles surrounding it. Your magma plumbing megaproject kicks in and floods the front section of your fort with magma. That deals with the sieg... oh wait, they had RESERVES. Because it'd overload your FPS if all the goblins spawned on your embark site simultaneously, they're sending them in waves. Now that the vanguard died, they send the rest of their troops in. Except they can't really do anything about the magma other than wait for it to slowly seep out. After milling around a bit (at a safe distance from the magma as it's lethal), they decide there's nothing left to do and instead decide to ransack the rest of your sprawl sites for supplies and loot.

While they were milling around however, you had your 3 legendary miners dig out all the tiles under the ground the invaders were standing on. Just as the goblins decide to leave, you finish digging and they all fall into a giant cave-in hole. Now you get your dwarves to build screw pumps and manually pump the magma seeping out of your fort into the hole to finish them off. Because this huge goblin army required every able-bodied goblin from 5 dark fortresses to be gathered together, this goblin civ won't be sieging you again for a few years (while they replenish numbers and kidnap more children). It was a costly battle, but your fort is saved - provided you survive the inevitable tantrumming because your soldiers happened to be friends with several dwarves~

[MrWiggles]

Will we be able to get roads made on the world map, in both dwarf and adventure mode?

Will you be able to finance various things in adventure mode?