Desktop Tuesday: The Engineer

Development
81

git gud
play dwarf fortress lol

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[quote=“Dwalus, post:76, topic:23517”]
You’re saying anything that doesn’t require you to work the equivalent to a full-time job for two solid weeks is too easy? As I said before, many of us simply don’t have the time (or can’t justify the waste of time) required to build something so large.[/quote]

For my kingdoms, yes. I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anything great if I haven’t done anything ambitious.

For your kingdoms? The nice thing about games like this is your goals are your own.

There are many ways to define “better” and “well designed”. I mostly define it in terms of efficiency/productivity - e.g. how many goods I can produce for sale per day (at end game), or how quickly I can get a hearthling to level 6 in any role (before end game

Aesthetics is a secondary concern. It matters too, and I do do things like have a nice park/garden at the top, and have nice decorations, etc (and I did start a new world from scratch just because I decided a large indoor swimming pool would look cool), but efficiency is far more important (to me) than appearance.

Due to game mechanics; for efficiency/productivity you end up with several clusters of interdependent areas (to minimise time spent travelling by hearthlings):

Cluster 1:

  • Wood storage needs to be close to tree farm
  • Carpenter’s workstation needs to be near wood storage
  • Carpenter’s bedroom needs to be near carpenter’s workstation
  • Furniture storage #1 needs to be near carpenter’s workstation
  • Blacksmith’s forges needs to be near wood storage
  • Ore storage needs to be near wood storage blacksmith’s forges
  • The “blue town flag” (where items you buy arrive) needs to be near ore storage (as ore is the only thing I buy)
  • Blacksmith’s bedrooms needs to be near blacksmith’s forges
  • Metal bar storage needs to be near blacksmith’s forges
  • Blacksmith’s anvil needs to be near metal bar storage
  • Storage for weapons and armour need to be near blacksmith’s anvil
  • Engineer’s workstation needs to be near metal bar storage
  • Engineer’s bedroom needs to be near engineer’s workstation
  • Iron/bronze gear storage needs to be near engineer’s workstation
  • Storage for turrets and traps need to be near engineer’s workstation
  • Storage for repair kits needs to be near engineer’s workstation, and not too far from fort entrance turrets

Cluster 2:

  • Vegetable farms need to be near raw food storage
  • Wheat and corn farms need to be near raw food storage
  • Kitchen needs to be near raw food storage
  • Cook bedrooms needs to be near kitchen
  • Processed food storage needs to be near kitchen
  • Dining room needs to be near processed food storage, and needs to be in a central location

Cluster 3:

  • Sheep and chicken pastures needs to be “not too far” from kitchen
  • Animal feed storage needs to be near pastures, and not too far from kitchen
  • Shepherd bedrooms need to be near pastures
  • Wool and feather storage needs to be near pastures
  • Weaver’s spinning wheel and loom need to be near pastures
  • Fiber storage needs to be near spinning wheel and loom
  • Silkweed farm needs to be near fiber storage
  • Hide storage needs be near weaver’s spinning wheel and loom
  • Thread, cloth and leather storage needs near weaver’s spinning wheel, loom and bench
  • Weaver’s bedroom needs to be near weaver’s spinning wheel, loom and bench
  • Trapper area needs to be near hide storage
  • Trapper bedrooms need to be near trapper area

Cluster 4:

  • Flower storage needs to be near flower farms
  • Herbalist workbench needs to be near flower storage, and not too far from cloth storage
  • Bandages and potions need to be near herbalist workbench, and not too far from military dormitory
  • Herbalist bedroom needs to be near herbalist workbench

Cluster 5:

  • Mason’s workbench needs to be near stone storage
  • Mason’s bedroom needs to be near mason’s workbench
  • Furniture storage #2 needs to be near mason’s workbench

Cluster 6:

  • Potter’s workbench needs to be near clay storage
  • Potter’s bedroom needs to be near Potter’s workbench
  • Furniture storage #3 needs to be near Potter’s workbench

Note: This isn’t the only way to break things up; and there’s probably a few tricks to improve efficiency and make it better; like have multiple storage areas for prepared food (with whichever is closest to kitchen small so it overflows and the more distant prepared food storage area doesn’t remain empty); so that you can have 2 dining rooms and reduce distance travelled at meal time.

Basically; for my definitions of “better” and “well designed”, multiple small buildings (and excessive travelling time between them) is inferior to a single large building (with minimised travelling time between areas).

In other words, (for my definitions) bigger does mean better.

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83

Most of the things you are talking about can be solved with alternative methods of storing items and transferring items in bulk from one place to another. We need shelves and cabinets and granaries/silos and wheel-barrels and carts and tamed animals etc to help with these problems.

Also don’t forget you can build your towns tall and wide. Using basements and 2 story buildings can cut down on movement inefficiencies quite a lot if that is how you like to play the game. So main floor for the main point of the building, upstairs for living quarters and basement for storage of the produced material, ground in / around the building used for growing crops as well.

More than anything we need more function oriented decorative items, that give storage and also look nice and can hold plants / medicine / food / tools / clothing etc

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84

For the current game; I’ve been experimenting with the gold/metal vaults lately. For “temporary remote outposts” it’d be better for me to fill a vault with food and move the vault to the outpost, and to do the reverse to get items (clay, stone, ore) back. For “normal kingdom operation” (e.g. getting items from farm to raw food storage to kitchen to prepared food storage to dining room) I wouldn’t want micro-management like this.

For the future game; lots of things are technically possible, in theory, all the way up to automated railway (or “mine cart”) delivery systems and item sorters controlled by player created mechanical or “pseudo-electrical” logic systems.

Note: This is one of the things that keep me coming back to Minecraft - the redstone, piston, hopper, mine cart and water flow mechanics, and the ability to build complex machines. Sadly, the “only one controllable citizen” is what pushes me away from Minecraft (it takes an extremely long time to build anything - “many hands make light work”) and attracts me to games like Dwarf Fortress, Gnomoria and Stonehearth. If I could find a game that offered both complex machines and populations of multiple citizens, then… Not sure what to say here - I’d be willing to pay $200 for something like that. :cry:

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85

I think I get where you are coming from. I personally could not stand mine carts in minecraft because they get in the way of everything. a Horse pulling a cart would be the best thing ever - no constraints no repairs just feed it and don’t give to too much work.

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Well, you mentioned Dwarf Fortress but it does have both of those - not to mention it’s entirely free. Sure, it’s not intuitive as Minecraft but the complexity of the systems people make are just as impressive (if not moreso) than those in Minecraft.

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87

Yes - I should’ve been more specific and qualified my original statement with the word “modern”. Computers have come a long way in the last 20 years (since games were single-threaded and used text or 2D graphics). :wink:

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I’m not sure what you mean. Dwarf Fortress is, by all means, a modern game. Sure, it’s not contemporary in art style, but only a minority of DF’s features would have even been possible on a computer twenty years ago. It’s a highly complex game with equally complex machines. You can have a much greater degree of control over your citizens without actually micromanaging. As far as a management simulation, you can make things much more efficient than in Stonehearth - not to mention create much larger structures. You said it yourself:

I assumed you would have liked it based on our previous discussions.

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Seriously?

Computers have been 64-bit, with multi-core and often with more than 4 GiB of RAM for about 10 years now but Dwarf Fortress supports none of it. There’s no client/server (as if it was designed before the Internet existed). The user interface is like something designed for mainframes 50 years ago, full of archaic keyboard shortcuts without even basic mouse support.

There isn’t one single thing about Dwarf Fortress than can be considered “modern” by any stretch of the imagination.

Note: Dwarf Fortress has the best/riches game mechanics of any game in this genre, unsurpassed by any of the clones it’s inspired, and is a game I’ve spent a lot of time playing (but modern it is most definitely not).

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Dwarf Fortress does support 64-bit systems. Sure, RAM is capped at 4 GB but that’s not even remotely an issue because RAM isn’t the important part, but the processor speed.

Yes, because it’s a complicated game. Any more advanced graphics wouldn’t work on most computers, regardless of multicolor support or additional RAM support. You’re underestimating how complex the game actually is.

Well, the fact that is was created in the last decade, for starters. It also has a degree of complexity unsupported by non-modern systems, and even now it won’t run on most of the computers that existed when it was first released.

Modern didn’t mean next-gen console quality, or state of the art graphics. It simply means the game is recent or advanced enough be considered something recent rather than the computer/console games of old. The minimal graphics don’t mean it’s old, just that it appears to be old.

Edit: I just realized how far we’ve strayed from the topic. When you inevitably respond, please respond to my post in the Dwarf Fortress topic on this discourse.

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91

Some weird interactions I noticed with Engineer weapons:

  • Only allowed 2 Turnip Shooters (a.k.a pea shooters) on the field.
  • Insignificant damage to monsters (imagine 2 pea shooters quickly destroyed consecutively because they can’t deter)
  • Takes too long to rank Engineer to get Turret (a.k.a pea shooter v2).
  • Turrets are doing doing enough damage

Some ideas for improvements:

  • Remove limits or increase deployable Turnip Shooters and Turret amount. It makes no sense if you can make a ton of them but only allowed 2 on the field ???
  • Turrets and shooters mounted behind walls should be given some sort of chances (~30 to 40%) of evading incoming missiles from enemies for the fact that it is hidden behind a wall.

Here’s my turret platform I built:

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92

Thanks for the feedback on the turrets! More tuning will be done on the turret range and damage. You should be able to place 4 turrets at level 3 and 8 at level 6 engineering.

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93

can we get an attack damage tooltip ? (either in the engineer UI, and/or on the items’ flavour text)

:slight_smile:

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94

I also noticed that my turnip shooters I have placed on a short tower (the picture above) does not fire even when a golem or a tall monster (same height as the small tower) walks pass.

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Is the enemy too far away from the turnip shooter (they don’t have much range)?

To be honest; it’d be nice if someone did a “turret science” topic and tested a bunch of things like turret range, elevation, etc (for both turret types, and maybe archers too). One thing I’ve found is that placing a fence (the type masons and carpenters create) in front of the turret blocks the turret and prevents it from firing (even though the larger turrets look tall enough to fire over the top of the fence).

Note: My plan was to put a trench in front of the turret (instead of a fence) so mallee enemies can’t hit it; but I got lazy and didn’t try this. Instead I’ve been deliberately trying to get the enemy to damage the turrets so that my engineer can get some XP for repairing them.

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It’s worth noting as per the Kickstarter stretch goals, the traps are only one aspect of the engineer’s role.

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did they fix the mobs spawning near own camp/base?
(no home net for updates, using office net, too lazy to search, too curios to ask)

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the new engineer UI makes it kinda hard to see which recipes are unlocked at first glance. you have to actually click on the recipe to see the red text at the bottom whereas with other crafters it is greyed out

when’s the last time you played and experienced this, @Hunyo18?

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My stonehearth is still A17 3023, can’t update stonehearth, home connection problems…

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when ever the goblins asked for my shinies i never gave them anything but these turrets feel like i am just giving them food for the damage they deal. If there are different types of ammo as well as turrets that would make the engineer a bit better
my thoughts:

  • different ammo types rocks,wood,metal,goblin skulls(to make the enemies flee in fear)

  • make a long range and short range turret. The long range deals lots of damage,uses double ammo each shot and can hit enemies miles away. Short range turrets deals medium amount of damage,short range, larger storage for ammo and fire really fast.

  • make ammo boxes which can be connected to the turrets so you don’t have to reload and if there are spare turrets in the boxes when the turret disapears have the box replace the turret and supply the ammo making the turret less hands on.

  • Last but not least when the town goes into defense mode be able to assign workers and such to different turrets to supply with ammo and more turrets instead of either attacking the enemy fist to sword or hiding in there homes.

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