Yay if you didn't notice yet, you can FINALLY edit what pauses the game via announcements.txt

No more game pausing every damn time the stupid dwarves have stupid kids or whatever :DL

Yes it's nice it doesn't pause for every small event.

"Miners have struck microcline." Yes, thank you for letting me know we've struck useless rock. :O:

Construction material nonetheless.

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I dug a too big room for farming so bucket brigading would take too much time. I have to make smaller rooms to make things easier. The farm plots were on soil.

And while I was building the aqueduct the mason said "No Job".. :-? There was plenty to do since the aqueduct was about 50% finished.

Loving it so far, biggest problem for me right now is the Military interface, which is very powerful and thus highly complicated. The burrows/alert level systems will be good to have, though. I like the squad schedule thing, too. You can set squad-wide orders for every month, so that squads take it in turns to train, rest, patrol burrows, guard set points, etc. Thus, if you have three squads, you can make it so that every month one of them is practising, one is patrolling, and one is off-duty. You can also decide if they're to wear their uniforms while inactive.

No, just digging out dry soil isn't enough, you have to actually flood the area. I get an "invalid building" error when I try to designate the would-be crops as a Pond to irrigate it this way, don't know if it's a bug or not. What I ended up doing was digging into a nearby pond on the same level so that it flooded the room (and a small reservoir I built to collect the water). I then closed the gap with a floodgate, which I hooked up to a lever so that I can re-flood the room again if I need water for the crops or reservoir.

Don't know if you need to irrigate the tiles more than once. You apparently don't, though, since it's now more than a year since I irrigated my crops. Either way, I'm in a swamp area, so you'd think the soil would be wet enough from the get-go:03:.

A plus point is that water no longer ruin constructed floors:up:. I accidentally spilled water into a hallway, and the floor stayed "Rough shale block floor". No more do you have to remove and build new floors if water gets onto it and discolours it forever.

Overall, I like that farming takes more skill. It was such an overpowered way to get food in the earlier versions. Think I had something like 1500+ plants in the play-along tutorial fortress that made it to over 100 dwarves.

Okay, I'm sorry, but... :rotfl2:. That is all.

Have played for a year now, and no moods yet. It's more than possible that they've been made for more uncommon, as they apparently were in Dig Deeper/Dwarfier.

You probably have to gen a new world, yes. On the plus side, you seem to be able to dig down as deep as you want to now -- no longer are you limited to 20 z-levels or so. Of course, digging deep runs the risk of running into Hidden Fun Stuff, which is apparently far more prevalent now than in the last version.

Is that how you do it. Wonderful. Apparently, you can also set how many embark points you start with (in the worldgen setup).

Oh, and has anyone tried to dig a channel yet? The miner automatically leaves ramps along the side of whatever you dig out. Enlarge the pit and the downward ramps that no longer touch the sides go away. BIG thumbs-up!

Hmm so you don't have to do the ramps thing any more? As that was about the only safe and quick way of digging down with out the dorfs either trapping themselves. I wonder how cave-in happy they still are..

As for the old ****ing tower-caps under the floodgates problem, my solution was to stop using them and use 1 tile long raising bridges instead. It works very well and they can't grow under bridges as they are always there (plants start growing when the door/gate is "up" as the structure disappears and allows growth. It would be nice if smoothed tiles did not generate mud.

Anyhow the bad thing about 1 tile long bridges is you can't tell if they are up or down visualy, unless there is water running over them. and they are built in the down position, which means you are more likely to have an accident and flood if you are not very careful and forget to link a bridge to a lever. But this is better then having a tree grow in a critical spot and block off water flow (even though the stupid tree is blocking off a 16x16x10 cistern which has enough pressure to blast the tree to kingdom come). Good thing though about being built down is no more stupid dwarves trapping themselves and starving to death before I realize they did this yet again (and ya I know the solution, not always possible though).

If you have to irrigate for all crops now though (maybe surface crops still work without irrigation), what on earth do you do if you want a desert fort now. I have read though that it may be a bug and not intended.

As for ponds, don't forget that you need to designate the pond over a hole 1 z level above. Temp farms I make are usually 4x4 or 8x8 and have an opening at the top 1x1 or 2x2 with separate ponds designated on each pit square (this way they bucket faster, each pond can only have 1 bucket task at a time, so 4 ponds with 1 opening and 1 strip of land is best for a 2x2 pit).


Anyhow I have to say for the moment that I will be sticking to 40d, game is not very stable for me, it crashes when trying to do a search for a start point, runs very slowly, and for some reason my worlds are being generated with a ton of aquifers (my maps are coming out with about a 95% aquifer rate on any land that has soil).

When you channeled out a tile in the old version, it left an empty tile on the z-level below the dwarf. Now it produces a tile with an up ramp in it, so all you have to do to dig into the ground is to channel. No need for building and tearing down staircases or whatnot any more.

Surface ones seem to be as they were.

Oh, and has anyone else tried out the military yet? I'm finding the new UI hard as heck to understand. Thank goodness for the DF wiki.

I thought about this more and I don't like it leaving a ramp.

The whole purpose of channeling was to make a pit (ie a channel), if i wanted to leave ramps and dig into the earth that way i would dig using ramps (if you don't know this, this is the quickest way to dig in 40d as you don't need to line out channels one at a time in an enclosed space).

Now If i can get rid of the ramps with out having to go down into the channel then it is not a big deal, otherwise it just totally kills a main defense which is pit moats.

Yeah, I didn't know you could dig down by going down a z-level and designating up-ramps (haven't tried it yet, but was told on the DF forums that you could do this).

In which case, maybe channels should be as before, and a "Build downward ramps" option added.

Hate to say this, but I've gone back to Dig Dwarfier. From reading the forums, there's a ton of new cool features, most of it underground:O:, but the broken combat and medical system makes it unplayable for me:-?, and I don't feel like being a beta tester for DF (already do that for FS and SH5), so I'll wait for patches.

Ya you can dig down using ramps. Way safer, less caveins, accidents, and other dorf stupidness, and it saves a heck of a lot of time and effort, no more designating sections one trench at a time (like when digging out a 16+z level 16x16 cistern for example). My master fort has its main entrance dug out the side of a large mountain. would have been a designating nightmare if i had tried to do it by hand.

No need for a downward ramp though really since it works fine the way it is.

I am back to the old version for a while now, just too buggy and many of my favorite tools don't work.


Btw anyone think that the creator of this game is seriously obsessive compulsive. The amount of imho stupid things the game keeps track of is beyond crazy (and is a waste of processing power). I really wish he would work more on the core game play and less on this fiddly stuff like tracking how many toes a dwarf has, and which ones are caked in blood, vomit, and mud.

Aaaw, I was enjoying my crisps. They just don't taste the same when thinking about vomit covered toes. :O:

Seriously though, wish more developers had such care for detail, though there has to be a line drawn somewhere, of course. :hmmm:

Oh don't get me wrong, i like attention to detail, but DF takes it to an extreme.

Speaking of blood, etc, I need to invent me a dorf washer, as my waterfalls don't seem to be cleaning them. Maybe a room connected to pressurized water source, instant flood and drain thing so they don't drown. 2 z levels with a grated floor so the 2nd level which they stand on drains near instantly (also dorfs don't get sucked through floor grates, unlike wall grates).

hmmm :hmmm:

Agree -- I miss burrows, though. They're the #1 best feature of DF 2010. I just save-scummed my way out of a failed siege because my stupid dwarves insisted on staying on the wrong side of the moat with a horde of Orcs attacking. You pretty much have to activate the entire civilian population and force-move them below-ground, and the instant you deactivate them (to man siege engines, say), they charge back out to get slaughtered. Siege preparation pre-DF 2010 is a lengthy exercise of frustration involving mass forbidding, hair-tearing, curse words and a general incredulous state of "how the **** can they be that dumb?!".

I never save-scum, by the way. Dead-is-dead, that's how the game is to be played. Only two times I've done it is this one and that time I forgot to lock the door to a corridor flooded floor to ceiling with magma, and some genius dwarf decided to open it and venture inside. Yeah:-?.

That's actually a very plausible and actually rather frightening possibility. Lots of people who have hobbies they work hard on for years without stop do not enjoy them at all.

Edit: as a side-note, I really wish there was an init option to bypass the new hospital system. Seriously, call me squeamish, but it's just too graphic for me, not to mention that I don't know how good it is for gameplay (you have to spend a lot of embark points on some dwarf's medical skills, and if he or she dies, you're without competent medical aid until you by some stroke of luck have people with medical skills stroll into your fortress). Prefer to have the current system where wounds just heal magically.

Burrows would be nice, but they are not necessary. Just design your forts so that the defensive systems are mainly outside. For example my fort uses an large castle structure outside as its entrance, it is backed up against a mountain hill with a high vertical slope behind it (which I cut out of the mountainside), and a 3 sided moat to the front. It uses 3 drawbridges, one for the exterior moat, and 2 for the interior (one is used to divert enemies onto a winding path. The fort has 4 towers, one on each corner with fortifications all around and a roof (so that no one can snipe from above on the hill). the wall only has fortifications on the inside to shoot at enemies on the winding path. I also made the inside of the fort floodable with pumps (and drains) to drown small armies in. I didn't bother trapping the inside of the fort though, just the outside around the first drawbridge. The ramparts can also be sealed off with a lever deep inside the fort. Oh and the moats can also only be accessed when the bridges are down (3 tile wide moat with stairs in the middle beside the bridge)

So if a siege comes i just order all the dwarves inside, and let soldiers go outside into the ramparts and towers. Even if the enemy could bypass the castle, the entrance is a long tunnel with a ramp going down towards the end, this ramp gets covered by 2 bridges on each side, and a portcullis in front of it, beyond the bridges is 4 masterwork ballistae behind heavy fortifications that overlap and cover the 4 tile wide passageway.

Nothing is getting in the front door unless I let them :) Anything else will get drowned, shot to bits by crossbows, or splattered by ballista bolts.
The secret entrance is also pretty secure though not as fancy, but the passage way in is flooded to be a small "lake" when not in use (that is what makes it secret, as the lake is drained and refilled as needed).

Beyond that I keep careful tabs on exterior jobs and tend to do them in large batches for safety. Technically though there is no reason to ever open the gate other then to trade. Water comes from an underground river (which is also fully secured), wood comes from underground tower cap farms (the only wood real dorfs use), and orders are set up to keep stupid dorf wandering into ambushes to a minimum.

But then I am very security minded.

I have now commissioned the construction of a couple siege revolvers, which should even the playing field somewhat.

http://barbecueandbeer.com/images/te...r-grill_1_.jpg

I apologize for the double post, but this just had to be shared. An awesome little combat report coupled with equally awesome graphics. A must-read:yeah:.