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Author Topic: "advanced" burrow management  (Read 2884 times)

Vhorthex

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"advanced" burrow management
« on: April 05, 2011, 11:50:05 am »

So hello there fellow dorfs!

After a multiple of deaths, and ill attempts at keeping my dwarfs in the safety of the underground during above ground battles. I've decided to give burrows a try. It wasn't long before I realized that they were an amazing feature to help control your crazy dwarfs! :)

(Like when they decide it's a goo idea to go loot the corpse of their dead friend, 1 second after her fell... in the middle of a huge skirmish...)

I was just curious about 1 thing.

Can a dwarf be part of more than 1 burrow?

I'm just trynig to do the following:

Have 1 burrow with all my dwarfs in it, except maybe miners. Then make a surface burrow, to whom I'd assign trader and my lumberjacks/herbalists.

Can this work? If I overlap Burrow #2 with burrow #1, can a citizen of both burrows freely nagivate in one and move to the next?

Just curious on how well that works.

Thanks :)
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Vhorthex
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wuphonsreach

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Re: "advanced" burrow management
« Reply #1 on: April 06, 2011, 12:44:54 am »

The easy method to using burrows to keep the civs safe during ambushes / sieges / and other fun.

1) Define safe burrows.  You'll want to cover every *safe* area, including expansion area to start with.  I usually have one for the magma forge area, one for the main residence, one for the trade depot, one for the farms, etc.  I suggest going with less then 6-10 total burrows.  Have a bit of overlap where an outer, less safe, burrow crosses some boundary (usually a drawbridge).  The inner, safer, burrow should not extend outward over the bridge, but the outer, less safe, burrow should extend a bit inward to overlap with the inner burrow.

2) When fun happens, go to "m" (military) "a" alerts, and highlight Active/Training in the left column, hit the enter key to move the "CIV" tag down to that one, then arrow over  and turn on the "safe" burrows (with an "A" to the right of the burrow).  Note: This assumes that you have not created non-standard alerts.

3) All your civilians who are not part of activated military squads will now stop what they're doing (if outside those burrows) and immediately head for the nearest active burrow(s).

4) If the siege / ambush is off screwing around at the borders (in 31.18, ambushes had a bad habit of hanging at the map border for a few seasons), define some outer, less safe, burrows that are near the main entrance and activate them.  Now your workers can at least get *some* work done outside the walls, without running all over the map.

The main problems you'll run into:

- Military dwarves like to go and pickup items off the corpses outside the walls.
- Forgetting to extend or add burrows to dig out new areas that you forgot to highlight

I don't bother setting up custom alerts any longer.  Having burrows like "courtyard", "farms", "upper walls" (only if there are no enemy archers), etc. is plenty.
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Sutremaine

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Re: "advanced" burrow management
« Reply #2 on: April 06, 2011, 01:32:54 am »

Can this work? If I overlap Burrow #2 with burrow #1, can a citizen of both burrows freely nagivate in one and move to the next?
They don't need to overlap. Think of burrows as job zones, not movement zones. A single burrow doesn't need to have all its tiles connected either.

Usually I set up three burrows -- one for the entire map less the areas outside the fortress walls, one for the trade depot area or whatever threshold area I've got (this burrow replaces tiles in the first burrow), and one for the food / drink stockpiles. The latter is a 'panic room' burrow, but I rarely get around to doing anything structured.
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Tanelorn

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Re: "advanced" burrow management
« Reply #3 on: April 06, 2011, 03:36:10 am »

Be careful not to assign some dwarves to burrows without food or drink, otherwise I believe they will starve.

I would recommend wuphonsreach's suggestion: use burrows and alerts. Assigning specific citizens to specific burrow should be the exception, rather than the rule (it gets very difficult to manage, too). It's best to keep it simple, and use alerts to keep all civilians in safe burrows.

Typically, I only assign the most valuable citizens (doctors, smiths and crafters) to the "inside" burrow, so that they never, ever, go outside, even on the lowest alert.

Everyone else (builders, farmers, haulers...) if free to go outside, unless I raise the alert, in which case they stay inside.
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wuphonsreach

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Re: "advanced" burrow management
« Reply #4 on: April 06, 2011, 07:20:44 am »

Typically, I only assign the most valuable citizens (doctors, smiths and crafters) to the "inside" burrow, so that they never, ever, go outside, even on the lowest alert.

The other reason I don't assign even valuable citizens to burrows is that in 31.18, you would get non-stop message spam of "citizen 35472 cancels job XYZ, item inaccessible".  (Is that fixed in 31.25?)
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Dorf3000

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Re: "advanced" burrow management
« Reply #5 on: April 06, 2011, 08:30:03 am »

I was just curious about 1 thing.

Can a dwarf be part of more than 1 burrow?

I'm just trynig to do the following:

Have 1 burrow with all my dwarfs in it, except maybe miners. Then make a surface burrow, to whom I'd assign trader and my lumberjacks/herbalists.

Can this work? If I overlap Burrow #2 with burrow #1, can a citizen of both burrows freely nagivate in one and move to the next?

Just curious on how well that works.

Thanks :)

That works and they don't even have to be overlapping.  The only real complication with multiple burrows is that once you assign a dwarf to a specialised burrow (for ex. surface work) you need to remember to also assign them to a burrow that contains food and drink - preferably the dining hall - and somewhere to sleep.  Also it's a pain to remember to assign immigrants to a burrow so they don't wander about.  Alerts work well with burrows for keeping your dorfs safe in emergencies, and if you like to plan out large fort areas in advance then having a burrow for the miners works really well.  They won't mine outside the burrow you mark, so you can have them dig out the main rooms first and then expand when it's fully mined out, rather than them randomly going into one corner and taking forever to come back and clear out the entrance hall.
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csebal

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Re: "advanced" burrow management
« Reply #6 on: April 06, 2011, 08:49:11 am »

Typically, I only assign the most valuable citizens (doctors, smiths and crafters) to the "inside" burrow, so that they never, ever, go outside, even on the lowest alert.

The other reason I don't assign even valuable citizens to burrows is that in 31.18, you would get non-stop message spam of "citizen 35472 cancels job XYZ, item inaccessible".  (Is that fixed in 31.25?)

Nope, I still got the cancel spam when i last tried to limit my farmers to their own burrow it in 31.25. The most annoying thing about it is that they do not tell you WHAT they fail to grab, only that they fail to grab something. It turns out, they were looking for some empty barrels that were outside their burrows, took me 15 minutes to figure that out tho.
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Starver

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Re: "advanced" burrow management
« Reply #7 on: April 06, 2011, 08:57:07 am »

The only real complication with multiple burrows is that once you assign a dwarf to a specialised burrow (for ex. surface work) you need to remember to also assign them to a burrow that contains food and drink - preferably the dining hall - and somewhere to sleep. [...]

What I do, if I have a burrow for (say) a mason to only work with a particular stone in a particular workshop, is make the burrow also include (not necessarily contiguously, as already mentioned) a feeding area that'll keep him supplied.  I could also include his bedroom (or all of the bedrooms, if it's a more generic taks area like "I want this volume dug out pronto", or "We desperately need this lot smoothed, A-Sap!"), but in general I don't bother.

It's a little easier to manage than the alternative, which is to make a 'feeding' burrow and a 'sleeping' burrow and assign all dwarves assigned to other burrows also to this, which is what I used to do.  (Why I'd quite like to not just have "assigned" or "not assigned", but an "if assigned to other burrows, also to this"...  Otherwise you end up with dwarfs de-assigned from working burrows mooching around in the others, or solely assigned to the working burrows and you've forgotten to add them to the generic infrastructure ones...)


For emergency digging jobs (usually to divert a miner from their preferred mine-face over in the west to something I need dug out in the east, or one out of the hoard of engravers I have, in a similar fashion) I just define the area alone asa new (often not even renamed) burrow, check that the target dwarf isn't eating or drinking or sleeping and keep them at it for the short time required, then delete the burrow and they go and get back to the main workings, or satisfy any needs that arose.  It really depends on how big the job is, and whether the area involved is going to be 'burrowable' in itself, once complete.
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