What purpose does this serve in gameplay?
At what point in the game will a player go, "Oh, in order to solve this problem, I will need to construct a library?"
Honestly I was in support for libraries until I read this. I will have to reorganize how I would like libraries to be brought in keeping this in mind.
Glad to hear it.
Giving someone reason to pause and re-evaluate their assumptions and outlook is perhaps the greatest goal I have in making these comments on the Suggestions Forum.
Out of curiosity NW_Kohaku, do you support a sort of 'Annual Report' kind of option? The bookkeeper would do it automatically while he was bookkeeping. Basically when you hit the z key a new tab appears called 'Annual Report' this report keeps track of stocks that happened on the selected year. This could come in handy so that a player could see how he has been doing throughout the history of his fort and plan for the future.
I support some form of an "annual report". It was part of the
dwarven kingdoms suggestion, although that had to do with the baron or other noble calling an annual meeting.
Toady, however, may take some convincing.
[The conversation was on taverns and how to build them]
There's obviously going to have to be a new kind of screen or options menu for the new stuff but it should all come right off of that screen. When you get into this economic stuff there's also this desire to jump into, 'I want my guest list with their winnings tab and how many drinks they've bought' and if for some reason you set up two inns you could have charts saying how well they're doing. I don't know how much we want to jump into Theme Park type of stuff, but it's reasonable ... Like, if you decide to start your fortress and you just set up this giant gambling hall and you attach some stockpiles filled with all kinds of stuff that's brought in and it becomes a big part of your fortress and basically booze is your main export straight to people into their stomachs and then they export it out of their bodies when they walk off the map or whatever, and that's your main source of income, then it would be reasonable to have tracking information for that kind of thing. But if it's just a small little place you use to make your diplomats and merchants more happy and more likely to have good trade agreements and that kind of thing then it doesn't need to be something that's in your face all the time. We're certainly not planning to have it at the end of the year pop up your earnings; that's not what we're going for, I don't want to scare people into thinking we're doing something completely off base and stupid with the game.
To properly describe the impact that an annual report would have, I think the best way to describe it is to talk about interface.
DF right now is currently most like a Real Time Strategy game.
In a RTS, you have only a few important resources (like gold, wood and oil in Warcraft 2), and you have those prominently displayed at all times, because those were your most critical tools, aside from the units actually on the map. Aside from having a menu to tell your buildings or units to do things, you pretty much otherwise had a big open view of the map, and the physical layout of the gameworld, and could push your units around and mash your big stack of units into the enemy's big stack of units, and watch the units in the stack fall down until only one stack was left, and that player wins.
Right now, DF is all about physical layouts of your embark, physical locations of your dwarves, and the resources they are extracting and shoving around on the map.
Adding an annual report changes that dynamic - it pushes the game more in the direction of being a sort of SimCity-type game or Rollercoaster Tycoon game. It changes the information you give the player from an immediate-need-and-resources-to-manage-those-needs type of information layout to a long-term-careful-management information layout.
I believe this is a great direction for the game to go in (there is only so much depth and complexity in an RTS, after all, and we don't even have a serious enemy in fortress mode to pit our fortress against), and I've been arguing for this specific form of change in the game in many different ways in virtually all of my major suggestion threads.
There is, however, a bit of a problem explaining how, exactly, libraries actually fit into all this.
Do we need to only produce one book as a tool for bookkeepers to use in an accounting workshop, rather than simply giving them a table and a chair? If so, that's not really a "library", now is it? If we are going to be producing a library, it probably should involve books that more than just one dwarf will ever want to look up.
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Topic: Books (Read 3724 times)