Print

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

[Jake]

Part of what causes unnaturally fast mining is the current weirdness with the passage of time in Fortress Mode; 24 hours of in-game time is fewer than a hundred frames, and dwarves only need to eat twice a season.

[assimilateur]

I skimmed over your first post, but when I saw that the gist of your suggestion seemed to stem from complaints about things that are easily modded or even configured on your own I stopped reading. I hope you don't hold that against me.

[Draco18s]

Part of what causes unnaturally fast mining is the current weirdness with the passage of time in Fortress Mode; 24 hours of in-game time is fewer than a hundred frames, and dwarves only need to eat twice a season.

Then if you think about it, it takes a whole day or more to tunnel through all that rock.

[Solace]

I skimmed over your first post, but when I saw that the gist of your suggestion seemed to stem from complaints about things that are easily modded or even configured on your own I stopped reading. I hope you don't hold that against me.

Loweing mining speed is probably trivial, yes. The problem if it takes, say, 5 years and fifteen dwarves instead of 5 months and three dwarves to dig out a decent sized, impregnable fortress, is that your fortress is helpless for way longer than the first winter. Altering the game to be more challenging but also not absolutely definitely kill you takes some deeper changes. My suggestion being pre-cleared caves as a space-resource.

Simply make minerals have a different hardness, and thus require stronger picks to be mined out effectively. You can't dig through granite very well with a -copper pick-... This will automatically slow down players that are past the upper sedimentary layers and soft stone like chalk and marl, while still allowing to get a serviceable hiding place ready before spring ends.

Not a bad idea in theory, but there's no difference, defense-wise, if you're protected by a hundred layers of steel or one layer of loose sand.

[Untelligent]

Actually, I've seen plenty of good suggestions involving making mining no longer a matter of miners holding up their picks and vaporizing the stone in front of them, and participated in several, as well.

They make the game fun in the same way that having tougher enemies to fight come siege time makes the game fun - the game already makes mining, supposedly the core competency of dwarves, so absurdly mindless and easy that you hardly notice it.  The game would be more challenging without the cheat mode speed hollowing of whole mountains that you can perform, and if you were forced to adapt more to what stones you could easily dig through, how much you had to remove debris from mining, and the simple limit to how much stone you could move in a given season.

How you dig should be a big part of the strategy of this game, and it's just not even worth thinking about.

Why would I want it to take even longer to hollow out my mountains?

[Silverionmox]

Simply make minerals have a different hardness, and thus require stronger picks to be mined out effectively. You can't dig through granite very well with a -copper pick-... This will automatically slow down players that are past the upper sedimentary layers and soft stone like chalk and marl, while still allowing to get a serviceable hiding place ready before spring ends.

Not a bad idea in theory, but there's no difference, defense-wise, if you're protected by a hundred layers of steel or one layer of loose sand.

That's something the army arc and improved sieges should take care of. A sand wall would protect your from wolves but not from goblins: so it's a first step, but not a definitive solution.

[assimilateur]

I skimmed over your first post, but when I saw that the gist of your suggestion seemed to stem from complaints about things that are easily modded or even configured on your own I stopped reading. I hope you don't hold that against me.

Lowering mining speed is probably trivial, yes.

I specifically referred to how you complained about starting with a few qualified miners: that is precisely the sort of thing you configure before embarking. Or did you always choose "play now" as opposed to "prepare carefully"?

My suggestion being pre-cleared caves as a space-resource.

Something like that can be done via the world-gen parameters, though I don't know how foolproof that would be.

but there's no difference, defense-wise, if you're protected by a hundred layers of steel or one layer of loose sand.

Now this implied suggestion is something I can get behind, though I hardly consider it much of a priority.

[Solace]

I specifically referred to how you complained about starting with a few qualified miners: that is precisely the sort of thing you configure before embarking. Or did you always choose "play now" as opposed to "prepare carefully"?

Uuh... no, not what I was talking about at all. Which I guess is a peril of not actually reading what I wrote?

I meant, in a broader sense, that this a strategy game where you end up with exponentially more resources than you start with. I might reasonably start with 2-3 level 5 miners, and end up (if I seriously wanted) with 40-60 level 15+ miners. A passable early game challenge is trivial late game; a late game challenge is impossible early game. To give challenges to both the early and late game, they have to be different challenges. My suggestion being, leave "hollow out the entire dang mountain" as a late game challenge, and give the player an easier early game challenge.

Something like that can be done via the world-gen parameters, though I don't know how foolproof that would be.

Pretty sure it can't. Not yet, at least.

[assimilateur]

I specifically referred to how you complained about starting with a few qualified miners: that is precisely the sort of thing you configure before embarking. Or did you always choose "play now" as opposed to "prepare carefully"?

Uuh... no, not what I was talking about at all. Which I guess is a peril of not actually reading what I wrote?

I can also think of why the dwarves dig so fast in the game, and that's because you start out with two-or-three moderately skilled miners and no weapons to speak of.

That sounded like a complaint about digging being too fast for qualified miners, at least on the face of it. That can be slowed down by not giving them any mining experience before embarking, though I can see how that may not satisfy you.

My suggestion being, leave "hollow out the entire dang mountain" as a late game challenge, and give the player an easier early game challenge.

I'd figure that perhaps digging was never meant to be a challenge for dwarves. Coupled with the time scale of this game, I don't see the wisdom in making it slower or otherwise more difficult. There's a slight exception to the above: as far as I know (I haven't played anything earlier than .28), in the 2D versions there used to be the risk of cave-ins unless you placed supports in your larger rooms or corridors. I'd like to see this feature make a comeback some day, but hopefully only after this game has been somewhat optimized. The last thing DF needs right now is to become even more resource-intensive.

Pretty sure it can't. Not yet, at least.

Have you experimented with the parameters, at least? There are some options that, on the face of it, look like they could sort of do what you want.

[Solace]

That sounded like a complaint about digging being too fast for qualified miners, at least on the face of it. That can be slowed down by not giving them any mining experience before embarking, though I can see how that may not satisfy you.

Digging being too fast in general, because only semi-qualified miners (and not many) have to make an entire underground fortress before you're eaten by wolves. By the time they get qualified, they can just fly through stone. And just lowering the speed would only serve to get you eaten by the aforementioned wolves.

I'd figure that perhaps digging was never meant to be a challenge for dwarves. Coupled with the time scale of this game, I don't see the wisdom in making it slower or otherwise more difficult. There's a slight exception to the above: as far as I know (I haven't played anything earlier than .28), in the 2D versions there used to be the risk of cave-ins unless you placed supports in your larger rooms or corridors. I'd like to see this feature make a comeback some day, but hopefully only after this game has been somewhat optimized. The last thing DF needs right now is to become even more resource-intensive.

Maxed-out miners can clear a space (which I think is a thousand cubic feet) of any stone in under a second of real time, which can't be more than a few minutes of game time. Being able to make these sorts of things at all is well beyond superhuman, but moving that mass of stone (let alone breaking it in the first place)... that requires actual, you know, superman level strength.

I guess an alternate solution would be (and I may have heard this mentioned before), that digging would be a two-part process. First break the stone, then get someone to haul the... apparently, almost ten tons of stone somewhere else. Might take a few trips. There could also be a step where it's sifted for gems or ore.

Have you experimented with the parameters, at least? There are some options that, on the face of it, look like they could sort of do what you want.

I have, and there's not.

[assimilateur]

I guess I can see how making mining more difficult, labor-intensive and/or complicated makes sense, but I don't quite share your enthusiasm for it.

[Draco18s]

Maxed-out miners can clear a space (which I think is a thousand cubic feet) of any stone in under a second of real time, which can't be more than a few minutes of game time. Being able to make these sorts of things at all is well beyond superhuman, but moving that mass of stone (let alone breaking it in the first place)... that requires actual, you know, superman level strength.

At 100 FPS, that "1 second" of real time is a full in-game dwarf-day.

[NW_Kohaku]

100 frames is 2 dwarf hours.

It only takes one turn on their part to clear a tile, however, which is based upon their own speed, but would generally be something like 10 frames, plus another 10 frames just to take the next step forward.  10 frames is 12 game minutes.  Of course, with better agility, it can be basically half that much, so 6 minutes at max speed.

[Draco18s]

100 frames is 2 dwarf hours.

I thought I saw somewhere that 100 frames was 24.

[NW_Kohaku]

Nope, 100 frames is 2 hours, because that's the same amount of time that delays between anything controlled by pressure plates or levers, and that was the basis of the water clock.

(Six cycles on the first loop = 1 day; 28 cycles on the second loop = 1 month; 12 cycles on the third loop = 1 year.)