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Dwarf Fortress => DF Modding => Topic started by: squamous on August 08, 2021, 05:55:24 pm

Title: Necromancers sitting in their towers doing nothing [SOLVED]
Post by: squamous on August 08, 2021, 05:55:24 pm
As you are aware, in vanilla worldgen necromancer apocalypses are basically guaranteed. However, in the modded world I'm working on, necromancers tend to just sit there and do nothing for reasons I don't understand. I've generated worlds with 2000+ years of history and more necromancer towers then there are civilizations, each one containing hundreds if not thousands of zombies, but they never actually use them. Anyone have a reason for this? I've tested my custom necromancers compared to vanilla ones and vanilla ones will often completely depopulate smaller worlds, but my custom ones never seem to do so.

Pic is an example, I set there to be 1 type of custom necromancer, and 1 type of "mummy" that's really just the custom necromancer but it comes from disturbances instead of slabs but is otherwise identical. 900+ years of nothing.


(https://puu.sh/I2vXc/53f522a45e.png)
Title: Re: Necromancers sitting in their towers doing nothing
Post by: Mobbstar on August 09, 2021, 05:34:06 am
Wild guesses: Do the necromancers have the goal to "rule the world"? Does the embark selection list them with a red line or "war"? Do their ethics or beliefs forbid warfare?

Aside, I haven't ever experienced a full necromacopalyse, but that may be because I've rarely generated +500 year worlds, and those were always large or with raised settlement cap. In my experience, the necromancer guilds either remain puny, or grow and snowball until they hit another guild, at which point infighting hampers both their war against the living.
Title: Re: Necromancers sitting in their towers doing nothing
Post by: squamous on August 09, 2021, 02:47:34 pm
Quote from: Mobbstar on August 09, 2021, 05:34:06 am
Wild guesses: Do the necromancers have the goal to "rule the world"? Does the embark selection list them with a red line or "war"? Do their ethics or beliefs forbid warfare?

Aside, I haven't ever experienced a full necromacopalyse, but that may be because I've rarely generated +500 year worlds, and those were always large or with raised settlement cap. In my experience, the necromancer guilds either remain puny, or grow and snowball until they hit another guild, at which point infighting hampers both their war against the living.

My goal is to make snowballing guaranteed essentially, the idea for this project is the creation of a world that is doomed to an apocalypse. Anyways, the embark selection does list them as at war, and the ethics of their civs are pretty war-like. All the ones I checked also desire to rule the world.

My necromancers:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Title: Re: Necromancers sitting in their towers doing nothing
Post by: EternalCaveDragon on August 09, 2021, 09:33:14 pm
Absolute stab in the dark here, but maybe they're not being used because the game somehow doesn't count them as regular undead? I remember reading about a similar issue that someone else brought up and their custom necros had minions but never built towers because they didn't count as regular undead. I don't know why this would be the case when it seems yours are building their towers correctly, but not using their huge armies of minions to actually attack anyone. Maybe it's the multiple undead types screwing with the game logic somehow?

Like I said, stab in the dark, haven't messed with this stuff yet so I have no first-hand experience.
Title: Re: Necromancers sitting in their towers doing nothing
Post by: squamous on August 09, 2021, 10:50:25 pm
Quote from: EternalCaveDragon on August 09, 2021, 09:33:14 pm
Absolute stab in the dark here, but maybe they're not being used because the game somehow doesn't count them as regular undead? I remember reading about a similar issue that someone else brought up and their custom necros had minions but never built towers because they didn't count as regular undead. I don't know why this would be the case when it seems yours are building their towers correctly, but not using their huge armies of minions to actually attack anyone. Maybe it's the multiple undead types screwing with the game logic somehow?

Like I said, stab in the dark, haven't messed with this stuff yet so I have no first-hand experience.

Fair enough, I'll do some testing and see what happens

EDIT: it doesn't seem to have changed much. Currently I made it so they only make size 10000000 lieutenants but that doesn't do it either. On the other hand, I have found that if you allow vanilla necromancers into my custom world and turn on all their features (experiments, ghouls, lieutenants, summons), they destroy the world pretty quickly, so I feel that's the direction to poke at. For comparision, I can generate a 1000 year large-sized world with my necromancers that gets filled with towers but no necromancer wars, while testing that same world after enabling all facets of vanilla necromancy gets me undead-conquered nations 90 years in.

EDIT2: I have also found that if I generate a small world and leave it running for multiple thousands of years they sometimes eventually take over things, so clearly they CAN, but something is making them not want to do so.
Title: Re: Necromancers sitting in their towers doing nothing
Post by: FantasticDorf on August 10, 2021, 03:13:37 am
Do you think use of [GENERATED] might help you more naturally accomodate the w.g secret cap? If there's any particular hardcoded game mechanics attached it might be worthwhile to look into. And yeah, zombies aren't as strong as necromancers make them out to be nowadays anyway compared to instantly duplicating a couple of experiments to pad out the numbers.
Title: Re: Necromancers sitting in their towers doing nothing
Post by: squamous on August 10, 2021, 03:57:48 am
Quote from: FantasticDorf on August 10, 2021, 03:13:37 am
Do you think use of [GENERATED] might help you more naturally accomodate the w.g secret cap? If there's any particular hardcoded game mechanics attached it might be worthwhile to look into. And yeah, zombies aren't as strong as necromancers make them out to be nowadays anyway compared to instantly duplicating a couple of experiments to pad out the numbers.
  • Though Necromancers aren't [OPPOSED_TO_LIFE] in vanilla or your tokens, it be a better anti-living fix if you can't conjure up a genuine reason to let them go to war.

I have tried giving them opposition to life, it doesn't do anything. [GENERATED] can't be specified in user raws according to the wiki.
Title: Re: Necromancers sitting in their towers doing nothing
Post by: squamous on August 11, 2021, 01:30:40 am
Some more testing revealed something interesting. When I replace everything my necromancers can do with this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I get the zombie apocalypse I want. I have eliminated all other possibilities. Something about this interaction and how it changes a creature produces the zombie war effect. For context, my lieutenant equivalent turns the corpse into a "living" creature, a different creature than it was originally, with the following tags:


Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So, none of these can be the determining factor.
Title: Re: Necromancers sitting in their towers doing nothing
Post by: squamous on August 11, 2021, 06:24:02 am
As far as I can tell, I've solved the problem after some more testing. For those who may be interested, it seems that if you make a necromancer whose only lieutenant spell is a custom necromancer lieutenant interaction in which the targeted corpse is transformed into a new creature, the transformed creature must have a MAXAGE tag, and the interaction must add the NO_AGING tag to said creature. This will make it so that necromancers are aggressive in worldgen. This likely also applies to transforming the necromancer himself ie, if you were to transform the necromancer into, say, a dragon of some sort, the dragon itself must have a lifespan, and the necromancer must get the NO_AGING tag in order to be properly persecuted. This is more obvious but I didn't know that lieutenants abiding by the same rules was required.