Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep.17: In Which the Gang Speaks of Military Matters In Luridwhips

Episode Date: October 20, 2019

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Welcome to Dwarf Ortrous Roundtable, the podcast for All Things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roman. I'm Tony. And it is just the three of us today discussing our favorite game, Dwarforkers. What's hot today? So we've got more dev notes who've come out. There's been a lot of work, which is amazing, sounding like things are still.

going, but every time I read those dev notes, I think, oh boy, it's going to be a while, isn't it? He's working really hard. Yes, we have started interviews and interrogation. And that sounds like he's starting a new path.

You know, whenever he gets onto these subject matters that he programs for, it does seem like, usually within a month or two, he's got it wrapped up. So he'll have a dev notes at the beginning of month and then he'll have another one like two weeks later and it does sound like he progresses

pretty quickly on these things for as complicated as they sound yeah i think this next version is going to be pretty cool with adventure mode i mean he spent so much time working on adventure mode it sounds like which i'm kind of getting is sort of the backbone of the entire engine in that when you play fortress mode the game is kind of playing adventure mode in the background while you dittle around with your fort, the game's just happily adventure moating away. So I think all of that that he's put into that could make for some really interesting interactions in the forts, like some of these new conversation options where you can be intimidating or persuade and that sort of thing. So I sort of wonder what that's going to do to the dynamics

and if that's going to impact stress or fix stress or have no effect at all. But whatever it is, it's looking pretty exciting and it certainly makes me want to try to play adventure mode again. Yeah, for example, this all sounds like he is still going and is right in the middle of doing it. It doesn't sound like the new update is going to be very soon, to be honest. It's like he's still working and still figuring out how to do stuff. On the other hand, sometimes when I read it, I get very curious about imagine a dwarf that has like a preposition to handling bad stuff or doing unlawful things. Does he actually get a mood boost from it when he goes and steal stuff? Like, ha ha, I stole stuff.

That would be really fun. and you could go into the mind of the dwarf and see like, oh, yeah, he stole again. And he's like, ah, I stole again. Yes, I feel good. Yeah, so you'd have like career thieves, basically. Like, you're sort of addicted to it. So now I'm kind of pulling it all back to these addiction workshops

where, you know, you could start changing the opium flowers into other tradable substances for the humans or for the elves. Yeah, here we go. Looking back at the history of the dev notes, about a month or two before any particular release, he starts using the word release, it seems. So I think that that's what we're looking for. Whenever he says anything at all about release,

perhaps we will be a couple months from it. Yeah, I'm thinking, let's play the Door Fortress version release football pool here. And my pick is spring of 2020. I think that's when it's going to happen because I don't know where he lives in the US but I bet it's a place that has a winter time and if it does I can imagine that he would be all cozy in his house in the winter

coating all winter along while the snows fell and then by the time it melts and spring happens he's going to be like and here's the release I think he lives in Washington State that doesn't really have a winter neither of those places really have winter like not winter in the winter sense

If he lives on Mountain Hood, maybe. He lives at the top of the National Park or something. 15,000 feet in a volcano. Actually, that would be pretty cool. I think he lives on the ashes of that old dude on Mount St. Helens that was famous and was played by Art Carney in the only mediocre TV movie about the Mount St. Helens eruption. I think you've alienated a lot of our listeners by mentioning Art Carney

and Mount St. what is this it's america's vesuvius it's america's vesuvius because i know we did that bloodline fort thing but i don't think roland had a chance to play it at that or maybe you had a loose track of where all of this was in the grand scheme of things well so far i only managed to get a small overview of what has been happening in the fort, as well as looking into the Legends mode to see what could be done in the future. For example, I was really interested

in what kind of settlement could be raided in the future. And I saw that we don't really have humans in the world. We have, most of the human settlements are, empty and there's just one left that has about I don't know 14 15 humans in it and overall we have just 21 humans left in the world so I guess some are adventurous or just roaming around I don't know I wanted to like get your opinion on well waging war on the last humans remaining in the world aka maybe wiping out a government, which is a big thing. I've never done it before. So I don't know what is going to happen. Probably nothing after it, but hey. That sounds like a reasonable goal to me, especially considering that in the year that I was there, our fortress almost doubled in size. It was at 80 whenever I joined, and I think that it's like something like 130. We got a lot of immigrants during the year that I was there.

If that keeps up, then we need to have something to do with that excess population. Yes, absolutely. We are about at 130, I think, now. So we have a lot of dwarfs, and I had problems like assigning everyone to a job so that it's efficient and not too many dwarves doing the same thing. But yes, we have a lot of people. we can use for war. Even though I actually do like the humans,

they tend to be, you know, not stupid and rather nice, but the amount of elves is just way too high to start anything that's serious right now. I guess we'll see. I did note how many elven civilizations are there? Did you notice that? I think it's just one or, two, but they're really, really full of elves.

Like, a lot of individuals, but maybe one or two governments. So that means that picking a fight with an elven hamlet is probably not the best idea at this point. Yeah, I like the idea of trying to wipe out the human species. That sounds cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wouldn't have any problems with a tipping an elven hamlet yet. I would love to have some kind of war creature, so a bear or something big that does a lot of

damage when it's outside of the map. But my main concern is, in fact, the elves attacking us with some kind of huge creature. That is still not, I don't feel good about that. Hmm. When you say a huge creature, do you mean that they might bring in a colossus or, you know, some Titan? Or do you mean that they'll just come in with jabbers or giant somethings as their warbeasts? Yeah, I'm just war beasts. No, no giants. I mean, I've never seen that. I do have seen some post about a giant leading a fort, but that's something. different. I don't think that elves can have underground creatures, but you can correct me on that. I'm not sure.

But my main concern is that they come with a like two bowmen and 60 giant war bears or something that would be not so nice. One thing that I never could find is the lever

that raises the bridge to the main fortress entrance, not the siege entrance, but the the one into the side of the mountain. I know that Tony built that bridge. I think it was Tony. It may have been you, Roland,

but somebody built that bridge to close off the fortress in case we're ever attacked. And they have the siege entrance that is lined with traps. But I never could find the lever to open that bridge to close off the front door, as it were. How do you find a lever that is attached to a bridge if you don't already know what a lever is? Yeah, so you can click on the bridge and hit, I think it's either Control M or Control N, one of those two, and then it'll take you directly to whatever's attached to it. Oh, that's a pretty cool trick. I can't remember if it's M or N, but it's one of those two.

Is there a similar way to find workshops? For example, there was a, the dwarf that created that awesome artifact, the one that ended up being the tag for the last episode, which the tag was almost a man. minute long, the artifact was that elaborately described. But one of the things that they asked for was tanned heights. And I assumed that we did not have a tanner workshop built. I was wrong. There was one, but I didn't know how to look for a tanner workshop.

So I went ahead and built another one. If you see that there are some duplicate shops that you don't have any idea why they are duplicates, it could be because I couldn't find them. the shops and I built one assuming that we didn't have one already. No, that's a good point. I don't know how to find stuff. I just usually end up rebuilding it because you know what to do. So I'm just like,

oh, we've got five Tanner's workshops because I couldn't find them. Yeah, that's what I do. Exactly. Yeah, I know that we have a Tanner's workshop because I've built it. We have two now. Nice. I also had her,

the butcher, ended up taking out one of the donkeys because I couldn't find, I had to find something to slaughter so that I could get the hide for this dwarf that was screaming at me that she needed stone blocks and tanned hides and that she didn't have any and she was going to go insane. So I just found the nearest animal that I thought probably wasn't a whole lot of use and slaughtered it. It turned out to be a donkey that said that it was a stray donkey, so I don't think it was actually attached to any dwarf. So I don't think that we cause too much consternation in any dwarves' mind for that artifact. No more donkey cheese? Is that an outcome?

I don't think that we had just one. I think we had multiple. Okay, good. Good. Got to keep that cheese coming. Oops. I think somebody noticed that there were lots of workflows for making cheese and stuff. Like, what do you know?

Yeah, I'm the one that does the cheese. I like making cheese. Milk and the animals. It's important. That is fair. That is fair. Keep them milked. Yeah, that is pretty good, actually.

But I might have started to thin out animals. I'm not sure if that's actually our fort or just my personal one, but somewhere I started out really rapidly thinning out animals. No, I just, I don't want to say get rid of dogs, but that's pretty much what I did we had way too many oh yeah dogs are all about the leather and the casseroles in the fort

I mean there's too many you gotta eat them sorry yeah dog lovers now with meth and the different dogs it really hurts my heart like if you don't see it's just a dog it is like something cute and you know oh no I know how this looks oh god yeah the poodle leather

when you can have like a poodle leather quiver and like oh that just makes it really personal like dog leather I guess you could sort of deal with a poodle leather just really brought it all in but well it's a it's a cruel game what could you say sorry any huge pet fans

another thing that I did was created a new squad and I set that new squad a practice in a couple of training rooms that I created but I didn't see any actual training areas. So I set up an armor stand and a weapons rack in a couple of relatively small rooms. Basing that on, gee, I don't recall which guest it was that we were talking with, but one

of our guests said that it is probably best to have them training and sparring in a very small room so that they will interact with each other better. But in any case, I set up a couple of those. I did notice that one of those rooms was used almost to capacity by one of the squads. And then the other room was barely being used. I would see one or two dwarves in there at any given time. But those training areas are in the same level as my Dwarfortress Roundtable logo. Did you catch that, Roland?

Did you see my logo? Yes, I saw it. It's amazing. I just spent a bit time in the fort so that they could finish it, so I could lay my eyes upon this beauty. and it's quite good and our dwarf has like headphones on and you made the headphones with statues? Yes, the balls on the headphones, yeah, were statues.

The reason for that is actually kind of interesting. There were two different kinds of wood that I had set up to be placed for the different colors of floor tile. However, it turned out that the color of the headphone ears was the same color and it looked identical to the different kind of wood that I had laid around it.

So apparently the almost infinite different types of wood do not have infinite different types of tiles in the MF tile set. So you couldn't see the headphone things. But whenever I tried to

delete just that one and deconstruct just that one floor tile, it would inevitably deconstruct that one and one of the ones beside it, which was screwing up the overall picture. So I wasn't able to actually remove just that one, and it seemed to not let me put a new tile on top of it

because there was already one there. So I kind of cheated. I had statues sitting in the stockpile, so I grabbed a couple statues and put them on it. I like how it looks. I really do. Yeah, and about the military stuff, right? I wanted to add something.

Please. The first thing I did with the military was to make its security squad, which is just a squad of the first dwarfs we had. And they trained in the entrance somewhere. Let me ask, when you say the first thing, do you mean the first thing during the first year that you had it? Okay. The first thing I did, the very first thing I did, in fact. So they may be still, a few of them may be still training in the entrance instead of your training rooms. Could be.

Yeah, well, I will fix that. The training rooms actually are very good and they're a bit smaller than my usual rooms, but they seem to work really good. You have two different kinds of military training. Yeah, I set up one to be wrestlers. And the other one to be, I think, like with melee weapons, like, I think sword dwarfs. Mm-hmm. Okay.

You certainly should go back over the squads because I tried to fix my screw-ups. Whenever I was building my own squad, I started accidentally stealing squad members from other squads. Now, I tried to replace them as best that I can remember, but I'm pretty sure that I didn't get it all correct. So one of the things that you might want to do, Roland, is take a look at, the squads and see the changes that I made, or at least just make sure that they are viable, because I may have screwed them up so that they're not exactly in the same situation as you last left them. Yeah, I still have to look into that.

I will do so. But for, right, the different kinds of military training, you have like sparing and personalized training. and I'm not sure what personalized military training or whatever actually means, but it's not as efficient as sparing. And all of our dwarfs are either sparing or watching the sparing session. So that is the fastest way, actually, to get good military dwarfs. And all of them are doing it.

So that's perfect. If it was anything that I did, it was purely by luck. I think we just lack a bit of metal. We do have a bit of copper, but I'm not entirely... I don't like copper armor. We do. We do have a shortage of metal in our fortress, and I did dig around,

and I'm not 100% sure of which minerals can be smelted into metals. and I think that we found silver and I know that we found plenty of gold but I'm not sure that gold is actually useful for weapons You can do war hammers I guess out of gold because it's heavy and smashing but I don't know that yeah I don't know that it's the best for really anything

other than making coins or trinkets or statues or whatever You can only get gold weapons due to a mood oh okay then scratch that yeah gold is pretty pretty useless actually unless somebody wants especially gold items

like a noble I want a gold door or something unless you have that gold is just and I usually stalled two items so that the item gets a higher quality I would love to see and I know it's

I know there are mods that do this, but I would love to see some utility for gold coins put into the game because it would be really cool to, you know, be allowed to spend them like currency. As I say, I know that there are mods that do this, but it would be really cool to have it part of the, you know, not modded experience. So it fit really, really well into the game. But meth had a thing where you can use gold coins to hire animal people to come. live in your fort. So there's like an animal people liaison workshop and you pay somebody there and then they go off and find an animal person and pay them to come migrate to the fort, which is a pretty cool idea. And you can do that with goblins or elves. It's like the elven

emissary or the goblin emissary or over. So that's kind of a cool idea, I thought. Can you actually say what kind of animal person you want to have? Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. So you can have like, yeah, multiple war bears kind of It's pretty neat for, you know, grizzly bear people. I did that. Oh, my God, I love it. Yeah, and I mean, there are some bugs with it, so it's not perfect, you know, kind of what he was alluding to last week when we talked to him.

You know, he's kind of trying to squeeze water from a stone, sort of, but getting really creative with how he does it. But it works, and it's pretty neat. You can have multiple animal people. Comes here for it, but one of the problems I had with it was they arrive completely naked and with no gear. So my grizzly bear woman was really upset that she didn't have any clothes. And for whatever reason, she wouldn't go get clothes out of the stockpile.

So maybe they didn't fit. Maybe they were like dwarf-sized clothes and not grizzly bear clothes or something. So that was one problem. And then the other one was people would have the same names. So there was like, you know, C-I-X-N-L-I-U or whatever. But there would be like two different creatures called that. So it's kind of confusing. but I figured that was probably a limitation in the game

than anything else. But it's neat, it's worth playing with for sure. I know that we had talked off and on about different ways of building squads and training them, and I had said, my way is I'm like of the Kim Jong-un school of military where it's like everybody, you just go to the military and you don't ever get any breaks. work really hard until you go crazy and if you go crazy you get put in a special squad and then sent out as a colonizer which I guess is kind of where the Kim Jong-un analogy breaks

down because they're not really colonizers in that way but anyway the point I'm making is I'm very much not interested in their moods and just make them train until they go nuts and then I send them off but it sounds like maybe there's better ways to do it than that so I don't know do you what do you guys think of setting up squads and how when and that well while I think

the idea of sending off the people that have a bad mood to colonize something is a great idea I don't really have that many problems with mood I would say

in my personal thoughts everybody is quite happy actually how do I achieve that. I have no idea. Like people tend to say, oh no, my dwarfs are unhappy and I'm like, I maybe have like one or two

that tend to be unhappy and then I call them Mr. and Mrs. Grumpy or something along the lines so I can watch them better and also if you train somebody long enough in the military, they do get

happy thoughts from training in the military. So that's pretty neat. A spree to core. Maybe it's not a problem. I do want to get better at understanding the military. Yeah, it's complicated. That whole military screen totally throws me for a curve

because for the longest time I didn't realize when you built a squad, you have to set them to active treating instead of just leaving them alone. So I could never figure out why my squads weren't actually doing what they were supposed to do and why they just keep getting steamrolled any time. or they wouldn't wear a gear or whatever. So I hadn't realized that. And then that whole thing of scheduling just totally throws me for a curve every time. But there's lots of things that I still don't really understand, I guess.

And that's a really good reason to just set them training all the time and until you set them to fight something. You don't have to mess with it. Like, well, they're going to die anyway. So they don't have a pretty, they don't have an optimistic outlook on life, I would imagine. know that they're going to be sent in to die sending out their pick from the embark or whatever

until a wear beast comes and kills them all. Imperial Sardicar. Above the equip I get how one can equip dwarfs and stuff like that. But the schedule

is still weird. I tend to set the schedule so that you know the Canada schedule, right? You see the different month and what they're supposed to do. There is something that says like 10 dwarfs training. And I always set it to two minimum dwarfs training,

which means that even though the entire slot doesn't have time, maybe two of those dwarves have time, and then they go train. You can set it to one, but then, that guy is just standing around and looking at armor and if it's two dwarfs they may actually go and spare each other and that seems to work fairly good so that my dwarfs spend more time training because they have sometimes they do have conflicting schedules like work schedules and this helps if you give what I'm saying. Yes. And so how big do your forts get before you guys start putting a military in? Because as I mentioned, my strategy of leaving them to train all the time,

definitely then removes creatures from the workforce, which may not be a wise move. So I always wait until much later. I always go, my workflow is very consistent in the fact that I usually will build walls in a door. And then let the fort get big enough, and then I'll start training the military. So I wait pretty late in the game to put a military together. And maybe that's not a good idea in retrospect. I'm not sure.

What do you guys think about that? I don't know. It seems that a good time to do it would be when you get your first immigration wave and you see that there are people in there who like to, you know, press daisies. Oh, really? So you take the, you look for the pacifists, and then you decide to squeeze out any bit of, empathy they have by force in the military? Is that what you're saying?

Well, maybe not press daisies, maybe press seeds. I was more getting at was someone who is not immediately useful to your fortress needs, someone who's, you know, either, you know, and you can also get people who are coming in that are already legendary, you know, hammer dwarfs. Dang, who's the Kim Jong-un now. Then, yeah, put them in the military and they're the captain, right? But I would think that a good time would be whenever you start getting immigration waves and part of those immigration waves

are people who aren't immediately useful to your fortress. It seems like that would make sense. Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we all know I like evil biomes and stuff. I started a few of them and when you do that you actually have to start

with a military dwarf of some kind. So one of your seven is just dedicated to warfare and that guy gets immediately drafted into a squad so you can point him there, there, please cut this, kill this, and then I slowly fill up the squad he's in at the next immigration wave and so on, so on. But usually the first squad I do is fairly early even if I just have my starting seven. so at least one dude has some kind of skill yeah i suppose that's a good call and i also now i started trying to make sure that i conscript the dwarves that have some sort of military experience

already so that they're not starting from zero because i noticed they learn a lot faster if they have friends that are like good at swords or whatever like they they get better because one time i had a legendary axe person join my fort and i was really excited so i made them the head of the guard and then all of a sudden everybody got really good and suddenly I just had a whole squad of legendary people this really short over the span of a year suddenly everybody was legendary which was really cool and I don't know if maybe there was an attribute

like this person was also a really good teacher or how that worked because I've never been able to replicate it I think it works like this you need these skills teacher for somebody that teaches to be effective at it And the other, like pupil, not exactly pupil, what's it called? Recruit? No.

Training? Yeah. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, yeah. Padawan? Yeah, the Padawan, right. Then you have dependent on the trainer skill, a specific amount of experience gets copied to the trainee. Obviously, if you have a massive skill, like legendary, there is just more experience that could be transferred.

Even though if the person is a really, really bad teacher, it might still be more effective to get him to teach than somebody that is a really good teacher, but not as good with the weapon. I think it works like this. And also, they do level up in teaching so that is not the biggest problem. If you have somebody legendary, that is not exactly your squad leader, you might want to put them as your squad leader so he teaches the other people in your squad. And it also works great if you have a dedicated weapon squad. So just not a mixed squad of several weapons, but rather a squad of just spares, one squad of just hammers. Even though you have it, you don't have a full squad of them, it might work better for the teaching techniques.

And I do want to mention that I plan to plan to. post to the Dwarfortress Roundtable website, df roundtable.com. I plan to post some pictures of slices of the fortress as it was whenever I finished it and passed it on to Roland

so that, you know, we've spent two episodes now pretty much focusing on lurid whips. I think it would probably be nice for our listeners to have a chance to kind of take a look at what the fortress looks like so that they have some idea what the heck we're talking about. Sounds dandy. I love it.

Anybody else got anything that they'd like to cover for today or mention? I think we're good. Should we put the wraps on it? I think that the reps are being placed upon this episode of Dual Fortress Roundtable. Be sure to stop by Bay 12 games and click on one of their support options. And one thing I didn't do last time, and I really meant to, and I feel awful about it. On our last episode, we had Meph on. Meph, if you're listening, thank you so much for putting in the hours.

weeks and months that you put into that tile set and all of the things that you've added to the Dwarf fortress community because it's great. Rock on, man. That's too true. Keep on working. All right. So I guess until next time, this is Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, your favorite dwarf podcast.

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a laser-sharp targeted podcast. Totally. Yes. Totally. Swedish Dwar Fortress fans. Yes. All right.

Okay, everybody, have a great week, and we will talk to you next time. See you guys. Bye. Bye. This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Please stop by and leave a comment or suggestion in the comment section of this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice.

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