Print

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

[Shurhaian]

Yeah. You only have to worry about your soldiers keeling over if you push them too hard, too long. If you otherwise let them tend to their needs(even do so early, as NW_Kohaku says), they'll be plenty rested and fed and boozed for short-term engagements. Once the short-term engagement is resolved, even if there's still a protracted siege, you let them do their things - let them eat, drink, sleep, do whatever they need to be back up to full fighting form. Then, the next time the siegers find a crack in your defences - or, contrariwise, when you choose to sally out - they'll again have ample reserves to fight on.

[sweitx]

I agree with NW_Kohaku that there should be some mechanism for dwarf to try to "sync" their schedule to their task, the difficulty may be how exactly do you program the AI to do so?
A good start is to have the whole squard "tweak" their eat/drink and sleep schedule so they coincide at roughly the same time (maybe have squad leader order "bed-time" and "eat-time" kind of deal).
Then the problem is, how do one schedule it?

Another solution that I believe may be workable is to have a on-call status (instead of just on-duty and off-duty), where the squad will focus on maintaining themselves at near maximum readiness (a low threshold which causes them to eat, drink, and sleep more frequently), such that when they get on-duty, they're less likely to need to go to sleep or eat anytime soon (turn up the threshold).

[Silverionmox]

The inopportune bed & breakfast times are one thing. For that problem there is not really much room to improve that: one could suppress their hunger feelings etc, but that will lead to soldiers dying from starvation at inopportune times instead of going away to eat. That's not an improvement. You could artificially reduce the food needs of active soldiers, but that is something that will lead to exploits (food running out? no problem, draft half your fortress until the caravan comes! they'll eat less).

Or you can schedule them to eat and sleep early when they are being reserved as "On Call", so that they are never more than 40% hungry, like I said earlier...

Military operations simply take too long. IRL, people can go without food for weeks (i.e. skipping 50 meals if need be) In DF, they can last half a year at most: skipping 5 meals, not more. That's a problem stemming from abstracting the number of meals to avoid making them run to the dining hall 500 times each year. Skipping one meal suddenly becomes a huge deal, 1/4 on the way to starvation.

Once the short-term engagement is resolved, even if there's still a protracted siege, you let them do their things - let them eat, drink, sleep, do whatever they need to be back up to full fighting form.

That's babysitting. It should be avoided whenever possible, IMO. Especially since soldier can be expected to do those things. How do they do it IRL? Taking a nap and a nibble in between things. They should have mats to sleep whenever they are stationed and there's no enemy around. Eating out of their backpacks and drinking should be automated. Soldiers expect these things. But the main problem is still that soldiers can not do enough between meals and sleep. Just patrolling around a fortress once would most likely have them abscond for dinner. Siege mode with slower time for the economy would solve that without necessitating any other changes. Not to mention free up FPS for the more spectacular combats.

As I said, the gone-for-lunch problem can be fudged and solved by fiddling with things if need be. But how about the other potential advantages? (day and night cycles and their tactical possibilities, minimal economic worries while fighting, the ability to fight a battle in a single day of the calendar)

[NW_Kohaku]

For the "how to do it" part, then you can make it part of the job priorities arc... or just put it in as part of the Military screen's alerts.  When you want a squad to rest, set it to the "standby" alert, and they'll eat, sleep, and refill their flasks and backpack meals.  If it's as simple as swapping alerts, then maybe it's micromanagement, but it's hardly a terrible chore to be afraid of.

[Silverionmox]

Getting dwarves to eat and sleep on time is literally babysitting.

[NW_Kohaku]

So you honestly think that punching a hole through the standard operations of the fortress and relative time is a more elegant solution than having a "wake up and get to work" button for your soldiers?

Frankly, the Bullet Time Button is just as much micromanagement as an alert level change is.

[Silverionmox]

Not at all, it prevents micromanagement by putting the economy on hold until combat is over. There might be a straggler, but that's the exception and not the rule. Activation would be automatic on the first alarm (at the moment the game pauses now for ambushes).

While on the other hand, you'd have to remember to send your soldiers off to lunch whenever you activate them if there's a "stay alert" button. For a quick workaround I'd prefer that dwarven soldiers don't need to eat and sleep as long as their enemies don't

It's not confusing if announced well: other games like Exile/Avernum, Master of Magic en Heroes of Might and Magic all work with separate moments in the game where the player's attention is focused on combat.

[Shurhaian]

Exile and Avernum are not familiar to me, but MoM and HMM are turn-based games to begin with. When your attention is on any one particular unit, time is frozen for everyone else, whether you're in combat or on the overworld. Comparing that to Dwarf Fortress, where all orders are executed concurrently, is useless.

The whole point about setting the threshold at which off-duty soldiers will handle their needs is that you don't need to do it automatically, they will do it themselves. All you need to do to ensure that they won't suddenly wander off is raise the alert level, instantly setting them to go much longer without food or drink.

If such an alarm forces them to cancel their current bio-break as well(possibly with a larger-than-normal unhappy thought) so long as they wouldn't still be pursuing that break at the new alert level, then that's getting more soldiers active than were before, which is something an altered timescale doesn't do at all.

[ilsadir]

I think the Eat More Often solution should just be implemented for all dwarves.

It's rather silly that a Mason will work himself nearly to starvation, just to complete a few more doors.  So let everything grab food more often, but eat faster.

[Shurhaian]

Have it be tied to alert levels and you can set it however you like. But it is beneficial that dwarves will push themselves a bit harder before taking a break to grab a snack.

Introduce a separate level for idle dwarves, and that will make them more likely to grab food, booze, and rest when they don't have anything more important to do. There could be three levels for the civilian populace: grab food(or whatever) while idle(but if you've just finished a job, look for another eligible job first); grab food after current task; abandon task to grab food. These could all be tuned such that the dwarves never suffer an unhappy thought from being hungry(unless the work site is far away), or you could order them to tighten their -carp leather belts- a little when you really, really need to get some critical work done.

[Silverionmox]

They already eat very little, in comparison with the time they can go without food. IRL people can go without food for months - or in other words, they can skip 30 meals and they're still up (not running, but not quite dead yet). How many meals does a dwarf have per year? I bet it's less than thirty. So skipping one meal suddenly becomes a big deal.

Eating frequency, time until starvation etc. should be open for revision and ideally should be in the raws somewhere.

[NW_Kohaku]

In real life, those thirty meals are 10-15 days.  In DF, it takes you HALF A YEAR to starve already.  So just to make it an arbitrary "30 meals" (and not all meals are equal, by the way), we have to make dwarves take almost four years to starve?

[Silverionmox]

In real life, those thirty meals are 10-15 days.  In DF, it takes you HALF A YEAR to starve already.  So just to make it an arbitrary "30 meals" (and not all meals are equal, by the way), we have to make dwarves take almost four years to starve?

That's what is implied by the current eating frequency. And the eating frequency is chosen arbitrarily after all, just like the starvation limit. And the link to the calendar depends on the arbitrary choice of how many frames there are in a dwarf year or day.

[NW_Kohaku]

So then, are you now proposing arbitrary changes to eating cycles and how much is consumed in a year?  Do dwarves have to eat more frequently just to meet an arbitrary ability to skip those meals?

Again, I'm really not seeing the problem that requires a "dwarf bullet time" solution.  It seems like you're discarding the perfectly good solution of having dwarves eat more on their downtime simply by labeling it "micromanagement" and discarding it before even considering it.

[Silverionmox]

So then, are you now proposing arbitrary changes to eating cycles and how much is consumed in a year?  Do dwarves have to eat more frequently just to meet an arbitrary ability to skip those meals?

The number of meals required is already arbitrary.

Again, I'm really not seeing the problem that requires a "dwarf bullet time" solution.  It seems like you're discarding the perfectly good solution of having dwarves eat more on their downtime simply by labeling it "micromanagement" and discarding it before even considering it.

Now you are dragging it back up. I didn't say anything about that.