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Author Topic: Missing Metals  (Read 90565 times)

xaldin

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #150 on: February 17, 2011, 10:43:09 am »

I could be wrong, but it seems that most people agree this could be a good thing, but it needs more information easily found before embark and trade needs to be stepped up to fill the gap.

Can't say I think it's a good thing myself but agree that embark and trade need to provide lot more information. Perhaps also modifications to worldgen to allow for more options as well.
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UristMcDwarf

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #151 on: February 17, 2011, 10:43:23 am »

I really liked this lack of metals, my first embark back on .16 was in a gabbro area totally devoid of metal but full of diamonds above ground. My first steel mail shirt was given to the militia commander and he never felt so powerful. After some embarks with metal the game became too easy and my fortress grew boring cause sieges and ambushes didnt really provided any challenge. Im in favor of having to adapt your fortress to suit the embark rather then adapt the embark to your fortress.

Edit: this post was full of spelling errors, Im ashamed. It might still have somes since im not a native speaker...

He felt powerful until the first ambush getting slaughtered by 12 goblins all in iron.

This metal scarcity wouldn't be an issue if goblins didn't jump out 4 month after embarking wearing iron, bronze, armed with steel daggers.... :/

I played 3 fortresses last night and all terminated in death (I refuse to use traps otherwise game is ZZZzzzz...) from simply the fact I can't get metal weapons in any quantity. I simply couldn't burn wood, smelt ore fast enough without having some coal to fuel the process to get iron armor up and running. The other scenario was no iron at all and meager amounts of copper. None of the forts made it past year 3 so far. I'm sure that depending on circumstances there is ample ore, however we as players are also racing the clock to get access to ores be it fending off invaders or preventing tantrum spirals. It really comes down to TTA (Time To Acquire) for an ore.

Let us assume for the sake of discussion that it takes 1 month, with overhead to tap a layer.
We'll use 2 months for cave layers.

Given iron ore lets say on layer 8 we are looking a 8 months to tap that (counting the fact we are farming, building, etc in the background). Hit the caves and layer 5-8 and you are looking at 10 months. Now feel free to adjust the time-per-layer to what you see fit. The question is how quickly can you get, at a minimum Iron weapons and armor flowing before 1 goblin ambush shows up 1 shotting your dwarves with steel weapons? Hell My last fort was wiped out by 1 goblin kidnapper with a steel dagger.

1: Mod Dwarf Corpse to be iron ore
2: Mod it to be flux, too
3: And a builing material
4:  :-\
5: Profit!
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Khym Chanur

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #152 on: February 17, 2011, 10:55:48 am »

It'd be fine for me if the mineral abundance was toned down to somewhat less than it was in 40d, since there's more layers than in 40d and caverns cut down on the amount of exploratory mining you need to do, but this is way too much.
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tps12

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #153 on: February 17, 2011, 10:56:23 am »

I played 3 fortresses last night and all terminated in death (I refuse to use traps otherwise game is ZZZzzzz...) from simply the fact I can't get metal weapons in any quantity.

Maybe try it with the traps, or just hole up, until you can get some weapons? It's sort of inevitable that less metal means fewer metal weapons, and therefore that making a bunch of metal weapons as your primary defensive strategy is not going to work out as well.
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UristMcDwarf

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #154 on: February 17, 2011, 10:57:50 am »

Still not getting why people don't mod avalible stone into iron and flux.
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agatharchides

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #155 on: February 17, 2011, 11:02:04 am »

I could be wrong, but it seems that most people agree this could be a good thing, but it needs more information easily found before embark and trade needs to be stepped up to fill the gap.

Can't say I think it's a good thing myself but agree that embark and trade need to provide lot more information. Perhaps also modifications to worldgen to allow for more options as well.
I said could be with better with better trade and information. Obviously there is a lot of controversy about it now.  :P And it is mostly a matter of either finding a site with flux and iron by trial and error or defending the fort with wood, stone and glass traps, which actually doesn't sound Zzzz to me at all, particularly if you discount cage traps.
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Deon

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #156 on: February 17, 2011, 11:04:18 am »

Still not getting why people don't mod avalible stone into iron and flux.
Because I believe that the whole thread is dedicated to this vanilla change.

Mods can work around it in hundred ways.
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kilakan

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #157 on: February 17, 2011, 11:07:51 am »

well I did some testing with the sitr finder, and if you set it to both shallow and deep metals, it seems to always direct you to the one with the most metals first, and then just list the rest.  I let it run through an entire world and what it gave me for a site had
Flux
Coal
Magnetite
Cassirite
Copper
Gold
lots of Gems
Clay
Sand
and a few other types in the bordering biomes.
so i say the the finder is way more useful now.
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squeakyReaper

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #158 on: February 17, 2011, 11:19:09 am »

My only complaint is that my last five world gens have created worlds where the mountainhomes had no metal, meaning...  no picks.  Couldn't start up.
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ohgoditburns

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #159 on: February 17, 2011, 11:23:49 am »

I would suggest:
A) Suck it up.
B) Embark on a multi-biome site with metals listed in each biome. I strongly suspect that each biome will have different metals.

What I would like to see is different material values for the bones and leather of different creatures. Sea serpents should have steel-like bones that really reward capturing/killing/farming them. I mean... that's more of an effort than a steel industry.
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Shades

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #160 on: February 17, 2011, 11:29:56 am »

To be honest it looks okay to me, sure there is less materials than we've had in the recent builds but the total count isn't far off what it used to be before that and it just means I can't have every dwarf in full steel armour now.

I wouldn't mind a bit more variety though.
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The_Fool76

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #161 on: February 17, 2011, 12:00:22 pm »

The biggest problem I'm having with this is that you simply cannot get enough metal through trade to set up a proper industry if your site happens to lack any really usable metals.
It would be like trying to found Detroit but instead of thousand foot ore freighters full of iron, you get one rowboat with a stack of rebar each year.
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G-Flex

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #162 on: February 17, 2011, 12:04:07 pm »

Yep. Like I've said, the major problem is that we have the realistic scarcity of resources without the trade infrastructure to account for it. It's lopsided.
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Psieye

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #163 on: February 17, 2011, 12:16:04 pm »

Question: is ore scarcity affected by world gen year? In the older versions, the resources available to a starting civ are pooled from all its sites so the more sites a civ has, the more resources it has access to. Personally I'd be happy to just have the resource information available in legends mode so I know what I can and can't expect from trade in advance.
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Mantonio

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Re: Missing Metals
« Reply #164 on: February 17, 2011, 12:21:52 pm »

I'm actually not enjoying this now. Nine times out of ten my civilisation has no access to iron, copper or any useful metals at all, and 90% of the world map is either barren or full of something useless like Bismuth.

It's just... it's not fun anymore. There's having a challenge, and there's being kicked in the balls over and over because fuck you player. And that's what this is. And why are we suddenly not allowed to know what sort of stone will be on the map? Why did we need that taken away? Now it's even harder to get the materials you want. Now what if I want a Microcline fortress, or Sandstone pyramids in a desert? Nope, sorry, you're not allowed to see until you get there now for some utterly arbitrary reason! And good luck trying to survive long enough!

tl;dr Metal now being incredibly scarce has made the game unfun for me. Now it's a choice between 'Go to that biome you want, that MIGHT have the stone you want, oh but you won't have any metals' or 'Fuck you player, go here if you want to actually get anywhere, you have no choice in this matter anymore'. This isn't fun, this isn't even Fun. It's just frustrating, and I see no way metal being so scarce can be good.

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