Its turn into plant not "turn into fruit" aswell
It could be good for hiding in a forest.(so good for nature spirits) (im sure you could turn back whenever, And it will most definitely not be a single piece of fruit it will be an entire plant, it isn't called "turn into fruit" it is called "turn into plant"
Virtually any interpretation of "turn into a plant" likely would be silly.
"Turn into any random existing plant" - I chose "turn into a kumquat" as an interpretation largely because I think "kumquat" sounds funny to say, but it's all basically the same whether you turn into a cherry tree (cherries, obviously, grow on them), oak tree (acorns!), or even a plump helmet (not -man... and that's assuming we're still doing what the game does when it categorizes mushrooms, as well as fruits, as "plants"). Arguing fruits somehow aren't plants is rather pointless, since it's not like anything besides a fruit is any better. It's a "superpower" whose use is to turn yourself into an object that is for all gameplay purposes as inert as a rock without the damage resistance and being rather easily capable of being defaced, destroyed, or devoured. That's even if you assume it has a time limit - without one, again, that's basically a suicide spell, because turning yourself into vegetation without a way of reversing the process is a way of, for all intents and purposes, removing that character from the game. (It would make some sense why the elves don't want you to cut down trees if they had that spell, though...) Trying to use it to "hide" would only work in Adventurer Mode, since it would only hide you if you did it outside of the sight of someone you're trying to hide from, and regular dwarves won't think to do it until they come within sight of the enemy. Even for an adventurer, you'd need to be pretty much clairvoyant with your spell timer, if there is one, or else you wind up hiding from a scout only to turn back into a dwarf when the main army is marching by. Again, when you
turn into something in DF, you
actually turn into it, and trees have no eyes or ears with which to sense these things or the capacity to take any actions such as one to turn yourself back.
"Turn into an ent" - Again, presuming there is no AI rewrites to actually make dwarves only do this in sane ways will inevitably lead to it being used insanely. Werecreatures already exist, so let's assume this is basically just an at-will werecritter transformation. Potentially useful, but also likely quite self-destructive when you consider how transformations mean dropping all your armor and changing to a different AI with no sense of self-preservation. ("Dwarves have a sense of self preservation NOW? HAR HAR!" I hear you say.) You're basically trading away steel or candy armor protection for wood armor protection in a transformation you, again, have no means of telling your dwarves NOT to use every time they run into battle. Hypothetically, they could be huge ents, and capable of killing most regular creatures with ease, but then being roasted by anything with fire or webs or is just plain larger and/or made of metal or stone, and this ability nullifies any sort of capacity for training or equipment to give dwarves an edge. Ultimately, this sort of spell would just plain remove the point of the military system entirely, which is a bad idea from a development standpoint because why make code that invalidates a giant chunk of the other code you spent years balancing?
"Barkskin spell by another name" - This is a MASSIVELY charitable interpretation of Toady's original dummy text blurb that has no chance of becoming a real spell, but let's run with it... This is a mildly less suicidal version of the above, at least until you again try to say that you don't need to spend any time rewriting the AI to take into account strategy, and these spells, which still inflict nausea and cost blood, and are basically as likely to be cast again as it is for a dwarf to move towards a target animal or make a basic attack, and you wind up with dwarves that bleed themselves out while vomitting uncontrollably within a few seconds of reaching melee range with the enemy.
Toady has done 2 year long release cycles before, just because it requires work doesnt mean its "unfeasible" If everyone used that as an argument adding alternate planes would never happen since that requires several months of work (and its in the plans), if toady thought this way the game wouldnt be as awesome as it is.Luckily he IS willing to do the work and the community has been shown to be willing to wait for it. Toady was able to add werebeasts (almost fully featured, with transformations, moon cycles etc) in one week, I doubt it would take months per effect, that is a very amusing exaggeration. (see df talks on the subject while he was working on it)
Toady is rather deliberately trying NOT to go back to 2 year release cycles since that sort of thing dries up his donations, and again, just a basic estimate of how much time this takes says "one month of AI building, testing, and bug hunting per unique type of magic introduced". Yes, werebeasts took "just one week", to code the first time... and it took a couple
years of intermittent bug fixing after release to make them not completely self-defeating wastes of time, and even NOW they're still more threats to themselves than others. I'm actually being pretty generous keeping it down to
just a month, because I believe he'll probably pick simpler things than werebeasts, or find ways to reuse code.
If you wanted, say, a hundred new types of utterly random magic, you'd wind up with an eight-year hiatus just to have a feature most players would turn off the instant it came out because it would still be buggy and self-destructive. What a brilliant waste of time! (And surely create a donation exodus as people complain about the lack of progress for anything else. The crowds grew quite vociferously angry as most of those two-year stints went on.)
Now, yes, Toady is perfectly capable of, and willing to, spend time on things that are difficult, but they are also generally things that add a lot to the game for
everyone who plays, not just a few people who want to blow up their forts for no good reason, and are a basis for more complex interactions that the rest of the game's interactions can be based upon. Combat is complex, but much of the game revolves around combat, so a military system and hospital system that makes combat more detailed can potentially add a great deal of depth to the game. A piece of code that will, more often than not, be "turned off" (as any randomly added magic that
isn't in that one world, even if it is a world with "high magic", will be,) cannot be the basis for that much more complex interactions because you can't assume it will even
be in the game, unless you want Toady to start spending
geometrically more time upon any given system to create one system for games with that one flavor of magic, and one system for games without that flavor of magic.
The only rational way to handle this would be to make an AI that can handle one or two more types of actions in a sane way at a time, and then only adding "magic" actions that follow that same AI routine. For example, "healing magic" and "medicine" might follow the same AI, the difference being a spell, a potion, or a bandage, and what it takes to apply it. "Turn yourself into a plant" magic would not follow that AI, so would be put off. Then, with an AI script in place, magic effects whose effects fall within the same general type of use as the script it goes with can be added gradually. We can already generally see this with syndromes, which is basically an outgrowth of the existing magic system. Syndromes are a mechanic that systemize mundane poisons as well as magical curses, thus making work on one system fully applicable to a broad range of uses, almost as if Toady is keeping some sort of cost-benefit analysis in mind or something.
I'm fine with players learning how to abuse the system, thats part of dwarf fortress. aswell.
"Abuse", yes, but abusing a loophole is only worthwhile when there is enough structure of a rule to recognize. You're suggesting the loophole be the regular game. We already had that. It was Armok I, where the magic system could teleport people's hearts outside their bodies, and adventurers would
lose fights against a bush. That sort of "more abuse of the system than system" is exactly why Toady basically does not want to acknowledge the existence of that previous game.
This is, again, the consequence of simple foresight and logic, rather than being swept up in ludicrous quantities of wishful thinking without any time spent considering consequence. I'm fairly sure Toady is not the sort of babbling lunatic to paint himself into the sort of corner you're championing.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1846325 times)