I have a question about FotF itself. If there was an answer on the question from one of the guys from forum and Toady just adds some thoughts about it but not answering from the beginning can the original answer be posted in FotF along with Toady's answer or at least postlinked?
Hmm. Well, I can try this, but I'm finding this takes more of my time than I can manage. If the previous method hasn't been working, I'm not sure what to do.
1. As your fort get more integrated in the world, how do hillocks interact with the surrounding biome right now (and in the future)? Will settling in an evil biome cause the hillocks that grow around your fort to have an undead/syndrome problem? Could they be overrun by the undead and end up with an invasion of your fort? Will you be able to send troops there to guard/fend off undead, beasts and such? Do sending troops there right now do anything?
2. Tying to the previous question, will we be able to "refuse" hillocks settlements? And if that's the case, I imagine the system would work as charts, with migrants (or citizens of your fort) asking for a chart to settle a land nearby. You could deny them because it's too dangerous, for example. How would the current count/barony system tie with the fact that hillock might not pop up because you denied them/place is too remote?
3. Conversely, how do/will hillocks interact with invaders? Could a necromancer rampage through the hillocks to try and raise a larger army to invade you? Would you be able to send patrols to try and intercept the necromancer before it snowballs in a huge army of the undead?
4. You are now moving to the "villain role", though I'm not sure this is "individual" (as in adventurer is a bad guy) or generic (goblins, "large scale bad guys"). Tied into that is slavery in the dev page, though only mentioned 3 times. Slaves right now are a rare occasion and only happen during site destruction in world gen. Since we have more assets now (hillocks) than just the fort itself, will that shift the paradigm of invaders to relate to all that? Let me give a few examples. Right now all invaders want your complete destruction, but it would make more sense for them to want your partial destruction just for their own gain.
4.1 It's pretty easy to lock yourself right now and wait for a siege to pass (ignoring future tunneling units), but wouldn't the invading army raid/plunder the hillocks while you hide (which would also make the invasion last longer, since they have supplies)? Could a siege be done for specifically to gather slaves/undead without losing a lot of lives from the invading force while they force the army (you) to be shut in your fort or occasionally harass you if you try to stray too far away from the fort?
4.2 Tying to 4.1, what kind of problems would this cause for the player? Refugees you can't deny/or deny with consequences? The need to divert resources to reconstruct hillocks? Demotion from duke/barony status (can that even happen?)? Overall anger and sadness in your fort population by the destruction caused in their neighbors or isolation of being locked in the fort?
4.3 Will invaders ever attack you not only aiming for your total destruction? Could it be that they just want to carry off the riches they can and set out? Would some slavers drive by and just take your citizens then go off?
4.4 With the upcoming villain stuff, will invaders use hillocks citizens to try and get to you? Could they occupy a site and hold it for ransom and convince a citizen to come to your fort to, let's say, pull the bridge lever when they come?
5. Will the role of "raider" get in this release? (In the sense of temporary forces, either outlaws or enemies, that come to take people or valuables, causing death and destruction but not enough to end the game)
6. Finally, are there respective plans for the stuff I asked in any arc, if it's not coming in the current cycle of hillock/villains?
1, PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7798682#msg77986822. You can't do that now, and I'm not really sure you should ever be able to refuse hillocks cleanly. If there is a danger, you'd somehow need to convince them, but I'm not sure how that'd work. You don't currently get to be a baron without a demonstrable barony, though certainly there should be various considerations and perhaps baronies without outside sites.
3, 6, FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7798611#msg77986114.1. This does randomly happen on occasion, but they do need to be more aggressive about their siege strategy.
4.2. Those sound like fine ideas; we haven't really set up a lot of the important economic connections involving hillocks, so you won't feel the most important losses for a while. Refugees are hard to do because of population limits.
4.3, 5. Kobold thieves already do this with their archer distraction, but certainly more groups could afford to do that kind of thing in more ways.
4.4. Villains should involve hillocks, yeah, and you'll potential have problem migrants.
1. Will villain level behaviours carry over to more legimate characters? After all Religions are not that much different then cults. Kindoms or Groups of Guards work in a way like gangs on a grander scale too or with different goals.
2. Will Players be an active part of those things. Say a cult officialy wanting to etablish a temple at your fort, Rulers demanding (not just requesting) gear or Warriors. Quests to steal/retrieve certain artefacts where your Adventurer or Fort are approached from a third party (even under false pretenses). Down to a thievesguild using your messhall as meetingplace.
3. Will you be able to enact your own devious plots? Paying people to do "evil" action like assasinating certain people or sending out some of your adventurergroups to recover certain things for you or set stuff in motion.
4. Will there be interaction between the various villian groups and persons? One cult undermining another, certain banditgroups working together and sharing information etc. ?
1. It is the hope that these systems won't end up being so specialized over time, and they'll be written with that in mind. But we'll be starting with the villains.
2. Your examples sound more like subgroups than the individual villains we'll be starting me; frameworks for entity subgroups (such as guilds, etc.) will be coming in after magic.
3. For the fort, it remains to be seen which actions will be available for your agents. Up on dev, we have assassinations as an option, for instance, so you'll be in the mix. It wouldn't be a huge step to give you access to the agreements, but we'll see which ones feel relevant for the fort when we are sure which ones we'll have.
4. They'll certainly be interacting, as they'll be operating in the same spaces with the same targets and potential agents, but I'm not sure if they'll be able to recognize each other enough at first to collaborate effectively.
The whole concept of 'demon' will float as the sliders move; we've made some semantic charts for 'demon', 'fairy', 'angel', 'titan', 'god', 'force', 'spirit', etc., and we're trying not to be beholden to English entirely when assigning categories to supernatural creatures, as that can be really limiting.
1. If I'm not mistaken, does this mean that we could generally predict the behavior of a creature based on its tag?
2. Additionally, is the category system intended to generate creatures with certain characteristics based on the tag assigned to the entity? As in, "fairies are generally cute flying things" while "angels are divine entities". That sort of thing.
3. Lastly, if the semantic charts do influence the creature's generation, does "trying not to be beholden to English" mean new creature types? Basically, if you were to create a tag for hellenic creatures, would they conform to what we'd expect from Greek mythology? Would a youkai sit in the mountains yelling at people rather than attacking like a normal night creature? Does this create the possibility for a world to generate with sub-classes of specific creature types? For example, dividing the fairies (or anything, really) into two "courts" that don't get along and have certain traits associated with the type.
1. In a very general demons are bad sort of way? Yeah, probably. If that becomes a real problem, we might end up with a partial id/description system, which would be pretty cool for proc animals etc. anyway, when you can start to meet those. Any future language system will also consider where these names come from in the first place, and there might be multiple names.
2. I'm not sure if it's mostly reversed; sometimes we want something with a name that's evocative and has certain traits, and sometimes all of the traits come first and we are just going for a best-fit name. This might depend on the text structures guiding the process, or whether we are at the beginning of the myth or in the middle (where we have more context and guiding info generated.)
3. This is related to the "procedural dragons" issue, which we've been holding off on for a while, but which is now closer; creating mid-level guiding structures is something we're going to be attempting, and when the sliders are cranked over to proc-land, it's going to be trying to create new classes on its own, where any English naming is going to get very vague or broken, we'll see. I'm not sure how much I'll go into the various real-world cultures for names in the low-to-mid level settings; I do a bad enough job with what I have now, and doubt I can set the parameters at all correctly for other named groups farther from my experience, even if a variety of influences suggest the traits of the generated.
With improvements to sieges include some sort of look at balancing the cage trap. Right now it's a very icky thing that pops up when I play, whether or not to use them or not. While of course players can just use restraint, it's nicer to have mechanical reasons. The dev page mentioned somewhere about multi-tile traps, but is there perhaps a few short-term tweaks that could make cage traps a bit less powerful? Right now if you build enough of them to match the invader cap, you really don't have to do much but open the gates and capture everyone.
Granted, I noticed in an older fort after 34.11 that invaders seem more cautious towards traps, and I can't tell if this is noted anywhere, but I noticed that attacking goblins very slowly creeped down my main trap hallway, as if suspiciously, and immediately ran out and refused to enter my fort once one got trapped. I don't know if this is a feature or bug or some other behavior, but it's in the same realm of trap balance improvements.
These address the question -
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7799830#msg7799830PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7799943#msg7799943Regarding invaders becoming shy once they see some traps... I don't believe I did anything with that.
A question that i thought of today: are there any plans to expand gender within the game?
currently, all characters seem to be cisgender and dyadic, with some inherently genderless beings like sponge men mixed in, so expanding on this would add in more representation and variety to the game. i could also see it slotting in with the laws and customs expansion mentioned in the Fortress Starting Scenarios framework, since some of the customs and laws (not necessarily ones added in the initial update, but maybe sometime later) could revolve around the roles and definitions of genders within a society, stuff like what it means in this society to "be a man/woman/whatever other genders this society has"
Yeah, that's along the lines of where we were thinking of trying to address gender as robustly as we can manage. I'm not sure we'll go so far as different gender roles as far as restricting rights and so forth, as I didn't want to particularly dwell on certain systemic miseries and crappy systems would inevitably be generated. We can probably have certain constructs and distinctions generated and also allow various individuals to escape easy categorization within a given system as well, or for two systems to not cross-categorize easily, though it's difficult to say how that'll turn out from here.
With the map rewrite, can we expect floating islands and castles in the sky? If so, will they move over the map? That would suggest the possibility of a segue into mobile forts and ships.
If you were going to start making DF from scratch again, what would you do differently?
These address most everything of the first part -
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7800036#msg7800036PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7800062#msg7800062There are the lessons of the map certainly, and that'll be ongoing I'm sure. Having multiple cameras/loaded areas is another big one. The centaur issue is also something that we're not supporting well now, and I'd much prefer to have a system where I can cut-and-paste critter sections easily while still respecting all the materials, though I can't say that fits in the question exactly since I'm not sure on the best way to do it; there are many competing concerns.
1. What can we expect for medical options with the upcoming Adventure mode medical improvements? Will there be doctors like in fortress mode, and/or will it be up to the player character to diagnose and heal their injuries?
2. Will the Semi/Megabeasts become more unique with the myth/magic update? Will they be procedurally generated similarly to forgotten beasts, just with more limitations so that they can still be recognized as hydras, dragons, cyclops, etc?
3. Is there any future plans for a manual way to progress time in a world, without going into/out of a fortress/adventure mode save?
Death Dragon:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7800414#msg7800414Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7800629#msg7800629PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7800635#msg78006352. I'm not sure it'll be exactly the same system as forgotten beasts, and there might be some that aren't proceduralized at all (and it's important to keep that ability for editor reasons if nothing else), but we have had long-standing plans to have, yeah, as above, like a "procedural dragon generator" that lands in the dragon ballpark each time.
3. As far as non-wg stuff, I'm not opposed to changing that over from the two week version, or having the calendar advance available from legends.
How do you protect the DF code from getting lost?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7800668#msg7800668Will this villian arc centre on whichever 'villian' has the most interesting solution/improvement, or do you have a specific heirarchy/plan of which goals you want to follow up and improve upon from the proposed candidates?
Will you continue to improve the messengers you introduced in this version onwards for this Arc? Or are they going to be temporarily postponed until villians get a little bit more attention?
Are we going to see some kind of expansion of diplomacy now that we have messengers? Or will that wait until things like status, law, etc. are adressed? In the latter case, what would be the reasons?
I think a lot of the initial plans will be villain-type-agnostic, and the particular plots that might only involve necromancers and vampires would be a bonus, some of which we are hoping to attain. It's important to get everybody involved, or some worlds won't have a lot of action.
Messengers are just like everything else. There's a lot more to do with them, and we can see ways they relate to the current work. But maybe nothing will happen in the near-term. There is a lot to do everywhere.
1. Can we expect some improvements regarding hostilities in adventure mode to be part of the villain arc? Banditry, in particular. I've read various comments on this forum about how in a time before time, bandits were actually aggressive and attacked you when walking straight into their encampment. Currently, they tend to ignore you, unless they are on a specific mission to rob someone, in which case they might try to rob the player, but only after nonchalantly chatting about the weather and inquiring about why one is travelling. Any chance things will get a bit more dynamic in this regard before the long wait?
2. I noticed that if bandits actually try to rob you, they start a non-lethal conflict should you refuse to submit, which is a very nice touch! Is there any chance non-lethal victories over bandits or entities in general will be kept track of by the game and tied into the reputation system, eventually? I imagine something like being able to accuse someone of banditry, then beating them up to the point where they yield, and then being able to "summarize the conflict in which you subdued Stealy McBandit", resulting in a reputation gain without being considered a killer.
3. As you probably noticed by now, I am especially fond of the adventure mode part of the game. I am aware that this would probably fall into the economy arc and is not a priority, but is there any chance coins will become stackable before the long wait, and paying tavern keepers with currency will become an option? This is admittedly a minor issue, but I just have to ask, for I seemingly have a coin fetish going and tend to carry ridiculously large quantities of them with me.
Death Dragon:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7802604#msg7802604In particular, the nonchalant chatting of the robbers is part of the 'interview' process, where the other bandits are getting into position around you, at which point they drop the topic and switch over to demands. I suppose this should have better exposition, where they explain what they just did or something, along the lines of "ha ha you're surrounded" or whatever, with the demand.
We do have some dev plans about better id checks and alarms and so forth, when we improve 'hideouts' for the villains (which includes the bandit camps.)
It would be reasonable if it could properly credit the end of a non-lethal conflict, yeah.
Stackability is non-trivial and will very likely not be handled for a good long while. I'm not sure why tavern keepers can't be paid, on the other hand; that seems more like a bug, though I'm likely forgetting something about the process.
Is the Golden Salve intended to be given some use during the magic stuff?
I'm really not sure about vanilla in general; there's this idea of having editors and building up a pack-in vanilla universe alongside DF as a kind of tutorial, or something, but the part of that where Zach and I are coming up with a fixed universe is also a very non-DF way of doing things (editors for modders are awesome, of course.) It seems like ultimately I shouldn't be focusing on that sort of thing, but will probably still be doing something with it.
As you implement magical mechanics, how do you think you will do with mundane engineered equivalents? Will they come along later with the functional reworks to their overarching systems, done before, or as we go along?
For a couple of examples, based on what I've heard is going to come when mythgen has come to pass (That is to say: mythgen is something I've heard that is likely already planned to do what I'm listing, I'm just listing the mundane counterparts we don't have yet):
-Magic that immobilizes and moves the targets vs mundane restraints and dragging units, which would likely come with the justice rework.
-Magic that treats and cures ailments vs functional mundane apothecaries and knowledge-system implemented medicine.
-Magic that bends the mind vs functional coercion, interrogation and mechanical feedback on social situations from the character's social skills.
And so forth. I'm not suggesting these particular mechanics get implemented, just asking where they sit in relation to release priority their likely-magical-counterparts that'll come during the mythgen releases.
That aside though, thanks for the new update, Toady! It's been a world of fun keeping up with the dramatic new changes you're doing! That makes me think of one more question.
How does it feel now that the sphere of influence of the player's fortresses are now really starting to stick their fingers to the local world? I understand that the "bringing the world alive" updates were both more ambitious, and basically necessary before these new changes came to exist, but seeing those foundations come together in really cool player-usable mechanics must be pretty exciting, yeah?
For magic vs. mundane counterparts, it's really a case-by-case situation, since some of the mundane counterparts are complicated and some of them are already in the game.
Player influence on the world. Oh, yeah, certainly. It's nice to finally get to some of the player-facing sides of the mostly invisible work we've been doing, and the 'c' screen keeps calling us back for more.
So, given it seems you can encounter non-questors taking the identity of criminal, and it seems they might not always actually have a criminal record, what even is the justification for them being labelled criminals?
I'm immediately thinking up the mental image of them calling themselves that a being basically some sort of fantasy-realm punk subculture thing.
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7805208#msg7805208golemgunk:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7806894#msg7806894Civilizations have an effective distance before they're not considered contacts for you in dwarf fortress mode. Does sending raiding parties extend their sights a bit when considering retaliation, or are you effectively immune to their influence at such distances?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7807241#msg7807241Is formation-specific AI something that will be included in this pass with the party-scale adventure mode situation, or is that fiddling for another arc? That is to say, in the general sense of players and NPC commanders issuing orders to have their squads stand with them in combat in some particular manner.
Party based systems would be glorious to have formation-style combat with, but I can see reasons why it might not be presently considered.
I suspect I won't get to that, but this is another pressure point for it as we continue to not do combat changes more generally.
Will characters in a party created by the player have the same needs as a single character has currently, like food and water needs?
They don't at this very moment, but that's just because I haven't decide what to do yet and that's the default behavior. I'd rather have them use food and water, probably, and use it automatically when you aren't controlling them, but I'm a bit worried that if they can't obtain food and water on their own, it'll be a little too annoying and lead to micromanagement until we get them, say, operating in the market independently when you wander through it.
With the ability to make multiple starting characters in adventure mode, will we still get a game over when our designated party leader dies, or can we continue playing with others in the party?
Right now you can TAB into one of your other party members or follow the quit prompt (leaving your party in the same limbo your companions normally end up in when you die.)
Regarding the creation of adventurer parties, will the other created adventurers have the same restrictions in terms of available race?
What I mean is, if a civ only has dwarves available as adventurers, will we only be able to start dwarves from there, or will the "main" adventurer have the dwarf-only restriction, but other party members will be able to be humans, elves, etc. as mercs or friends of the main adventurer?
It's the same separate process for each character, then you choose which town they start in from the collection of starting towns available between all the characters you make. It doesn't really try to explain why they are there -- presumably if you make a bunch of hearth people from different sites, the two weeks which passed on the calendar was them all deciding to get together some place. We'll flesh out the nature of the party's start situation over time.
1. In the monthly report you said you would be adding more to what villains do in the game such as vampire cults. In this villain fleshing out update will player adventurers be able to join vampire cults and do missions for them with the possible reward of getting to drink a vampire in the cult's blood?
2. Will player vampires be able to start their own vampire cults and recruit NPCs to serve them? Will they be able to promote their cultists to full vampires by offering them their blood in this villain fleshing out update?
3. Will bandit groups give player lieutenants quest types different than what a hearth person would get in this villain fleshing out update?
4. Finally will criminal groups finally do more than just hang out underground in this villain fleshing out update? Maybe steal some stuff at night?
1,2. That would be reasonable, but it remains to be seen which exact aspects of the special-case villains are highlighted. I'm not going to commit to anything on this score until I can see what can be pulled off.
3. We're hoping so, yeah.
4. There's not much to steal, but the leaders of those groups are in the villain lists now, and they generally have several underlings available in the towns where they live. Hopefully they can be differentiated from bandits somewhat.
Will your adventurer be able to talk about how much they love their pets? How much can you interact with a pet? Can I show off my cool pet to someone I think will like it, and will vermin haters be like "ack, gross! get that outta my face?" Can I give my vermin pet stuff to chew on, put it in barrels, or put it down? Will we be able to put animals in wooden cages on our property now? If you made an animal whose younger forms were shoulder pet sized but as an adult is bigger than you, which of those sizes is it going to think about in terms of its mechanics? Can you tag a pet for both vermin and mounts?
Unrelated, what about pits and dark fortresses make them unsleepable?
I've modded my goblins to be more sociable but their new taverns still don't sound very inviting since you have to stumble through the trenches drunk to sleep. Although that is a very Dwarf Fortress experience.
On small/large animals, Rockphed:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7808465#msg7808465He he he, they can't yet talk about their pets or do... much of anything social with them. However, if you drop a hateable pet, and it wanders over near somebody, that likely will trigger the vermin thought, which is a negative thought people can mention. They can't be fed, but again, once they are on the ground, they will likely be able to eat items (using the dwarf mode vermin code.) I haven't done anything with cages or chains, as they aren't common in adv mode.
The sleep/travel restriction is some older vanilla-linked hard coding on site type. We'll root all of that out over time.
Will you add fireworks, cannons, hand cannons, rocket arrows or other gun powder based inventions at any point?
I'm not particularly opposed to it, though I think that stuff holds a special place when it comes to what people would want to be able to turn on and off.
In the upcoming adventure mode update can you throw vermin pets as weapons like you can with the normal vermin you find with 'L'ook?
KittyTac:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7808678#msg7808678These ended up being questions with random braindumps attached. Don't mind that, I enjoy rambling.
1. After magic, etc, are there plans for technological advancement over time?
I'm not really thinking of the time period the typical fortress / adventure starts or ends in, but after many ages of the world pass. Maybe the age of the dwarves comes, and with the forgotten beasts and mythical style creatures dead we end up with more complex machinery, digging machinery, composite materials, etc. You can spend more time on research when you're not dealing with insane fire breathing winged snails, I've been told.
Humans have the shortest life spans and might advance medicine due to that, tactics in war, weapons like everyone else, energy generation because the dwarves are no longer around to teach their now-mythical free-energy machines nor would they have anyway...
The elves might dominate and refine their love of trees into a potentially dangerous genetic engineering type scenario... grow trees harder than slade and nobody can cut them down easily, but the plant life itself starts becoming a threat to normally treeless biomes, water supply, etc in exchange for practically indestructible grown items.
Maybe one race doesn't end up dominating, but partners with another.
Clowns (if they're still around) might "civilize" and invent an intentionally obfuscated legal system and fast food. Or they might have sat around watching for long enough to realize that if the dwarves all need alcohol to get through the working day, they might eventually need far worse things to get through the day.
Maybe it isn't new technology at all... ever wonder where everything from the dwarven atom smasher ends up? Well, it's approaching critical mass in 3 other dimensions long forgotten about. The inhabitants are very angry about this lump of neutron-degenerate matter about a year away from collapsing into a singularity and are doing something about it... Welcome to the age of myth 2, electric boogaloo.
Those are just random examples. Half the technology invented might be useless in a given world, or developed in response to a problem that stopped existing by the time it was complete. Maybe it's still magic fueled, and magic is scientifically proven.
2. A much simpler one... Gunpowder brings a lot of other kinds of fun, but just reading about history, what about these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow, not necessarily with the poison?
They're not a massive technological leap from the complex mechanisms + crossbows the dwarves already have, and don't really do much except make citizens either more or less of a liability during a siege. Hand them out and hope they help and don't start shooting other dwarves for fun, or just let the military use them as a shorter distance but faster-firing crossbow...
The 1400 cut-off keeps it all reasonably simple for me. Not worrying about genetic engineering or neutrons, stuff within the timeframe is on the very large table.
Toady, will this upcoming version have much more inclusion of pets for other NPC's to be using? ((like soldiers & groups dispatched from sites riding upon horses, or people's personal pets becoming involved in fights with their masters))
<Followup post> about histfigures already being mounted upon animals or surrounded by war animals like bandits in the world already with a clear relation of ownership more than a question about mounted raiding, which toady has replied to answers to in the past in respects for being mounted upon animals having certain advantages over difficult terrain etc.
We'll have more supporting variables in place but I haven't committed to more broad use of pets and mounts yet. There are a few book-keeping complications in sites that aren't experienced by your party. It might all get sorted out when I handle adventurer-with-pet retirement or villain pets, not sure. If we do take the villain pet route, there'll be that. Mounted raiders/etc. is an additional matter.
In fort mode, I've noticed that the legendary blue of a peasant and legendary magenta of a noble aren't used as non-legendary "base" colors for any other civilian profession (though they are used for high level sword- and hammerdwarves). Do you have plans for these colors for new or improved civilian classes in the future?
Witty:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7810360#msg7810360So yeah, these are old reserved colors that have become less and less useful for those purposes as those uses predate everybody important flashing. It would make a lot of sense now to use the civilian (light) magenta and the (light) cyan for new purposes.
You mention that only members of your starting party will be directly controllable in the upcoming adventurer additions (besides in turn based combat, presumably). What's stopping you from allowing direct control of histfigs who join your party later? Is it just the interactions you'd have to add ('Hi Dad!'), or is there something complex you need to do before we can take control of the destinies of 'real people'?
Oh, just noticed "equipment pages". That's gorlak sized helmets without the need to make them in a fortress first, right? Woot!
After creating the party and adventuring out, will we be able to switch between newly recruited members?
I could be missing something obvious, but no, there's nothing stopping us except the existing relationships and positions, as you suggest. The position part is pretty big; taking over a civ-ruler would just be silly now, like they were possessed and became a wanderer. I mean, not that that's a bad thing for game-game fun-time, but it cuts against what we are trying to do enough that it hasn't been a priority. That will continue to change as we go. Certainly doing something like taking over an existing bandit gang is well within reach now, and might be pretty fun.
In particular, control over your later-added companions is more of a roleplaying thing; they aren't meant to be as loyal and we wanted to leave some room there. Once we quantify loyalty a bit (part of this release!), we might have them cross a threshold where you can induct them into party status, and then you'd be able to TAB over to them freely. You might not want to do this if you are trying to roleplay a villain and don't care to have your loyal subordinates as part of a party, or otherwise want to maintain the integrity of your original group.
With the introduction of better adventure mode party mechanics, has the idea of the possibility to spar with a party member to help gain levels in combat skills come around, and will this be possible even if you recruit someone after making the party?
It's a reasonable idea.
Would you consider releasing a version of your standalone myth generator prototype, like you showed off at GDC? I imagine that people would appreciate something to check out during the Big Wait.
I'd prefer not to do this. I think it both has the bar too high in some places (effect lists, at least for release one, probably) and too low in others (most everything else.) It's not reflective enough of what I want to do, and I don't want expectations to coalesce around it overmuch.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 2913714 times)