Bay 12 Games Forum

Dwarf Fortress => DF Modding => Masterwork DF => Topic started by: Meph on October 09, 2013, 06:10:28 am

Title: Antmen
Post by: Meph on October 09, 2013, 06:10:28 am
Everything ant related goes here. I know that the vanilla races are leading on the "playable race poll" on the other thread, with humans, elves and goblins before anything else.. but I got two messages from players already that want to make Antmen a reality. If more people want to join in on this, help with modding, graphics, manual, ideas... please post here. If there is enough feedback and willing people to have a go, maybe it will end in a new race.
Title: Re: Ants
Post by: eloidin on October 09, 2013, 07:26:07 am
Lets do this. There are so many cool things we can do with ants.
I am very excited to go and try make this thing real!
Title: Re: Ants
Post by: Meph on October 09, 2013, 08:11:57 am
I offer to do all the building designs, and of course all the raws of MasterworkDF as a base. You can steal, copy and alter as you like.

Important:
 - Everything should go in specific files, so please make a inorganic_antman.txt or a reaction_antman.txt and so on for everything.
 - I will add it to MDF and the GUI as soon as its stable/playable.
 - Keep me updated on developement.
 - If you got questions/problems, just post them, people will come and help.

First thing you guys need is a creature file, a entity file and then take it from there. Insect-based pets will be fun, a spawn-reaction for larvae which I can write for you, and lets see what else will be suggested.
Title: Re: Ants
Post by: razorback on October 09, 2013, 10:20:49 am
first thing that comes to my mind:

how about ants can't use picks - instead there is a certain digger caste with harder and sharper front legs/claws to dig (and occasionally defend themselfes)
Title: Re: Ants
Post by: Meph on October 09, 2013, 10:34:20 am
I'm on that already. Its not possible by modding, but I left expwnent a note asking if its possible with dfhack. Make all antmen woodcutters/miners without the need for tools.
Title: Re: Ants
Post by: dukea42 on October 09, 2013, 12:19:42 pm
Can the digger tag be applied to armor? So like they have digging carapace gloves?
Title: Re: Ants
Post by: Meph on October 09, 2013, 12:28:16 pm
Its not a tag, it is its own item. picks are not weapons with a digger tag, picks are digger items. if I make an item called "armor" and make DIGGER:ARMOR, then you get a pick-like something that is called armor.
Title: Re: Ants
Post by: zach123b on October 09, 2013, 02:43:29 pm
what about making only the large ants capable of digging?
then add cave_adapt and size to the miners with lower skill gains in fighting with maybe weaker chitin

can there be castes that require meat and castes that require plants?  fire ants require meat and leaf cutters require fungi kind of thing

could they farm aphids? well we have honeydew beetles already..

could they get mutagens to change castes, maybe in a circle instead of how the dwarves have it
maybe for magic they can 'adapt' into having spider or scorpion traits? poison, leach life, scales, a tail, webs or large pincers.  or maybe use the fallen enemies to become better, dwarves for thick skin, elves for agility, orcs for strength, warlocks for willpower or something, automatons for longer life and no food/water etc

can they have babies like someone else suggested for kobolds?  have the babies referred to eggs? with the children as larvae
might work to have the babies transform into a creature classified as a egg then 'hatch' to transform into a larvae and to 'molt' into a full ant, such as have the transform last for 2 seasons then 2 seasons for larvae which finally leaves the untransformed ant to become an adult ant

could the ants have a workshop that transforms an ant into a creature that's immobile with milking?
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Title: Re: Ants
Post by: eloidin on October 09, 2013, 02:46:58 pm
How about one queen per hive?
And that one queen needs food and in return makes a crazy amount of eggs :P
The should be a difference between warrior castes, big and with poison claws or something and the gatherer/builder ants
How about instead of nobles we make strategists as squad leaders and no other nobles since the queen does all the other stuff.
maybe a manager but the rest seems obsolete to me.
Also make you at war with all the other ant hives in the area?

so many ideas. Also i like the picture of the ant kindren Adrian Tchaikovsky paints in his "Shadows of the Apt" series.
Those books are full of awesome ideas imho!
Title: Re: Ants
Post by: vonsch on October 09, 2013, 03:09:05 pm
Will ants wear six shoes? Or four shoes and four gloves? :)

Title: Re: Ants
Post by: Meph on October 09, 2013, 04:19:01 pm
Maybe I should have taken another title: ANTMEN. Not ants. ^^ We are speaking about Antmen here, otherwise it will be hard to bring in the vanilla buildings, grasp-bodytokens, intelligence, trading, diplomats, nobles, all that kind of stuff. We are speaking about a race of intelligent Half-Ant/Half-Human thing. ;)
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Undeadlord on October 09, 2013, 07:31:42 pm
Is it wrong that I would love to have them not be able to use weapons. Just claws and pinchers. I think I have heard before that you can't limit trainings, but it would cool to only let the antmen training attacking with claws and pinchers to a level 5. Makes it more likely people would make multiple squads to swarm over an attack to the hive. Just like ants do! :)
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Meph on October 10, 2013, 02:54:42 am
But... if you got no weapons... and no ranged weapons.. and no ammo... and probably no shields either... that seriously might cripple your defenses. Also your industry, because metals become rather uninteresting things.

On the other hand, "We are the swarm" is not bad, although more zerg then anything else ;)
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: reded88 on October 10, 2013, 05:41:09 am
It'd be cool if the antmen were more adapted to attrition style with mass numbers and strategic placement, maybe have them have some kind of carapace, military castes specifically and genetically modified bred for war, slightly faster then your average human, faster healing, access to noticeably weaker weaponry then the other races especially dwarves, and maybe a giant wasp pet to help bring world domination for the insects and insectoids.

Also, I wouldn't like to see the whole more then 2 arms and legs thing, it would make things.. "complicated" and probably awkward when it comes to combat
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: eloidin on October 10, 2013, 08:12:42 am
I agree, it is hard enough as it is right now (for me) to properly equip my militia.

Is it even possible to create a unit with claws/poison stuff on their attacks? or should we do that with weapons etc.

How about female workers male soldiers.
would make it possible to have different casts, also the male ants as soldiers makes sense to me
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Tierre on October 10, 2013, 08:14:42 am
Well i think it will go to starcraft/zerg area soon enough:) Maybe they can't use weapons BUT can have a lot of different creatures as pets for war? Use giant beetles/scorpions, wasps/hornets for defence and attacking and use ant swarm only as last stand choice?
Also make caste transformation cost a lot of metal (what the heck - it should be useful for something) and make all castes sexless except for winged noble males and ant queen female with a lot of children. Also.................. why not make ant queen almost immobile (speed 10000 comes to mind) pet like the previous (much missed by many players) concubine? And all the other ants won't have any other means of making children. Forgot/lost queen - have FUN surviving:)
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: dukea42 on October 10, 2013, 09:13:49 am
I kinda saw them as have 4 arms and using weapons and armor completely foreign in nature. Like they could use giant "iron mandibles" that are really like big scissor claws. Weildable for them because of their extra arms. Maybe that's also the digger tool for them as an expansion to their primarive tunneling cousins. Stat-wise is it truly different than a great axe or maul? No, but thematically it's very different.  Other important weapon would be extreme pikes and polearms. They face many deadly beasts in the caverns so range would important.

For armor and clothing it's all chitin based. What's it to them to increase their Exoskeleton so they all learn armor using and armor making very fast. The master chitin crafters can weld various metals onto the chitin plates.

It'll be important for then to maintain beetle farms for dew and chitin.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: eloidin on October 10, 2013, 10:25:07 am
i like the chitin idea, however i think you should be able to make a squad of deadslow heave hitters to draw the attention away from the less armored crossbow and shield squads.
So maybe make heavy steel squads only viable when supported by other squads..
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: CuriousCreativity on October 16, 2013, 03:43:06 am
Meph suggested I stop in an say "Hi" in the thread here.

I've started work and you can expect a release of my 'concept' of the Antmen race in the next month or so.

A fair warning, however: although I am going the somewhat naturalistic/rudimentary "Ant" route, it is shaping up to be quite complex.  At last brainstorm, I think the entire reproductive path from lowly ant to Antman was ~20 individual steps.  The entire project is based off of real life ant research - i.e. castes, etc.

Because of the way in which DF deals with spawning civ members, and my insistence on having a real life based ant life-cycle, military seems to be heading in a very unique direction.  Think autonomous civilian ants, with reasonably powerful natural attacks, that have a tendency toward rage when enemies are close to the hive, supported by elite AntMEN squads with many of the trappings of humanoid combat.

I'm up for suggestions, but I tend to see coding projects I work on as my "baby" so to speak.  However, support the idea with research about real ants and I can't say no :)  Honeypot, trap-jaw, stinging, etc. are already on the roadmap, for those who have mentioned ideas in that direction.  So is a unique fungus cultivating system.

Cheers!
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Tierre on October 16, 2013, 05:34:21 am
Might be a good idea (but hard to do) to change tileset a bit. Ants are going to be growing a lot of things and maybe even grow their own waorkshops, which may require tiles which are not present now.
I think they totally should grow their workshops like they do their pets, maybe from special pet/larvae.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: dukea42 on October 16, 2013, 06:50:33 am
Don't think that's modable but to borrow another Zerg idea, "drones" could be created as an item that is used to contruct the buildings. Essentially the same as Orc labor camps.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Tierre on October 16, 2013, 07:33:48 am
Yeah you can make a reaction which turns an ant of some specific caste into a TOOL:WORKSHOP_LARVA which is required for most workshops.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Pascale on October 16, 2013, 10:21:22 am
According to some random article I googled, carpenter ants are capable of squirting poison/glue all over the place when they're doing poorly in combat. Since the magmamancer-turned-firemage does that in Dwarf mode (though with fire) would it be possible to do something like that here?
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: CuriousCreativity on October 16, 2013, 11:24:13 am
Tierre,

In the end, Antmen will indeed have custom sprites.  In other mods, this normally involves only the 'entities', i.e. the Ants themselves.  Sprites are a very time consuming process - we will have to see :)  As far as growing workshops: I will have to speak to Meph, but I don't see how they could be directly 'grown'.  That said, requiring a grown product as a build material to create the workshop is definitely do-able.


Tierre/dukea42,

My initial concept something similar... Trying to work out the life-cycle there was some toying with the idea of having the Queen be an item required to build the workshop responsible for producing eggs.  That was kind of scrapped because that would essentially make the Queen un-kill-able.  In the current incarnation of the life-cycle, eggs are indeed items, and must mature before being hatched.

I have been trying to come up with a use for drones in general...  In real life they are usually hatched in waves along with queens before the nuptial flight.  They leave the colony almost immediately to fertilize the queens on the nuptial flight and the queens store that sperm for pretty much their entire lives.  There is usually very little if any fertilization ongoing in the colony as the queen simply stores the sperm from the nuptial flight to fertilize the eggs.  This creates the problem that drones are quite useless.  So, it is not out of the question that they could be implemented in the ways you guys have discussed, honestly, I haven't what the heck to do with them :P  I can't really simulate the nuptial flight....  A thought that crossed my mind was to create a workshop somewhat similar to the Thieves tunnel, and have a reaction that represented the nuptial flight and the founding of new colonies.  No idea as of now however.

Pascale,

Indeed.  I intend to implement spitting ants, and yes, they are definitely do-able :) If glue is implemented, think creatures that shoot webs, poison is simply a re-purpose of existing special attacks/interactions.

Notes:

The current caste system involves the queen(pet/civ-member) laying eggs(seeds) which are planted to mature then harvested.  The Mature eggs are then hatched to create larva that are combined with food/fed to transform into pupa that are fed/hardened to transform into workers that go through the real life process of advancing through minima worker, median worker, maxima worker phases.  This is over-layered with a very fantastical process of evolution from Ant through Giant Ant through Antman, etc.  Essentially, you embark with lowly ants and through a process advance your colony from lowly ants through intermediaries such as giant ants and on to the humanoid form Antmen.  This is counter-balanced by the fact that ants are, well, numerous.  I am toying with the idea of removing the lesser more mundane versions of ants, however, for some reason even if it is fantastical I like the idea and satisfaction of advancing the colony through these stages.  Once you get your hands on an Antman queen, you can produce antmen directly, but on account of the complexity and size they reproduce much more slowly.  In contrast, lowly ants are Extremely easy to hatch and reproduce and thus very numerous.  Think a ready made army of workers to do your menial tasks such as farming, etc.

So!  That is just a few notes on what I'm currently working on, thought you might find it interesting :P   

Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Pascale on October 16, 2013, 12:00:15 pm
With all the emphasis on numbers FPS sounds like it'll go down the tubes pretty darn quick, I must say. And I meant the ants burst when they flee, like fire mages may explode when the flee while playing dwarfs, though spitting ants is cool as well.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: thistleknot on October 16, 2013, 01:44:02 pm
man... I hate my f'n phone not letting me post this... had to wait til I got to a pc.

So yeah, I'd love to see antmen as a playable race, since there the closest thing to xelics.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: CuriousCreativity on October 16, 2013, 05:02:21 pm
@thistleknot,

I don't know a lot about "Xelics", however on search I found this: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Modification:Civilization_Forge might want to check it out.

@pascale,

To be honest, I have never fooled around with the Mages much in MW-DF.  I will have to take a look at the raws and see how exactly they work, as far as exploding when they flee.

As far as FPS:  I think that is a very apt and accurate statement.  Unfortunately, FPS will probably be an issue for those with lower end PC's.  Of coarse, turning on the various "simple" UI choices and other FPS beneficial settings in masterwork will hopefully help.  Who knows, this is still on the drawing board in many ways - I just can't imagine an Ant Colony/Hive with only a handful of ants.  For some reason in my mind's eye I see copious amounts of rigidly casted, expendable ants.  Could be just me, lol.

To the person who mentioned Starship Troopers earlier: I absolutely love the idea and presentation of the franchise - the spirit is definitely there :)
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Meph on October 17, 2013, 07:48:19 am
You cant have ant and antmen civ members, because of the way how profession sprites work. Pet ants and antmen civ units is doabe.

You might have misunderstood Tierre, he meant a tileset for the buildings, not creature sprites. please do not do a tileset ^^
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Tierre on October 17, 2013, 08:54:18 am
Pity, but i see that it is nothing but excessive work for you. Well i guess using a lot of mushrooms in workshops will help make them more antmen like:) It is too bad you can't add a sprite to a tile used in workshop for example or inorganic material like you do to creatures. Hope Toady makes something like that.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Shadow9657 on October 17, 2013, 09:46:42 am
Speaking of fungi there is a fungus that will inhabit and influence an ants behavior. Since there is a theme of using real life ant biology I was wondering if this could be implemented as some secret !FUN!
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Tierre on October 18, 2013, 08:45:01 am
Not sure if this is possible. But i guess you can make a mushroom which is made of evaporative material with syndrome. It will melt on being harvested. I really doubt you can make plant secrete syndrome without being harvested.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: CuriousCreativity on October 18, 2013, 07:07:00 pm
Even if that was possible, what syndrome token would simulate the parasitic fungal infection that affects ants?
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Meph on October 19, 2013, 10:18:06 am
opposed to life, low chance of happening from injesting that fungus. :)
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Shadow9657 on October 19, 2013, 12:27:52 pm
Well if harvesting an evaporative material is impossible couldn't it be implemented in a similar way as the cult of the carp god  is in dwarf mode? An infected ant would migrate to the fortress and begin infecting other ants similar to the way the cult leader functions.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Meph on October 24, 2013, 10:32:27 am
Yeah, that would work. :)
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Tierre on October 25, 2013, 08:13:56 am
Also there is a bug (don't remember it's name) which sometimes infest ant hives making them drug-addicts. They secrete some drug which makes ants think that those bugs are part of the hive and feed them. Even if you destroy all those bugs, aaddicted ants will never be able to function effecientaly again (sad fact). It is called Lomechusa strumosa If you wonder. Could b a great secret FUN for ants:)
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Pascale on December 17, 2013, 08:11:16 pm
So this isn't happening, then?
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Meph on December 18, 2013, 03:13:51 am
CuriousCreativity, who wanted to write his logged in the last time on the November 03, 2013. 6 Weeks ago. So I'd say that the chances are rather slim.
Title: Re: Antmen
Post by: Pascale on December 18, 2013, 01:12:02 pm
Drat.