Bay 12 Games Forum

This is a forum for suggestions on how to improve the game by changing how the game works or by adding new stuff.

I get the impression that 1x1 embarks are possible and that you are suggesting that other people should do it because it is fun. That would be better to post in the gameplay discussion forum rather then here.

They are not possible without dfhack. Thus, asking for them is indeed a game design change request.

I have heard rumors of 1x1 being slightly more unstable than other things, so there might be some associated bugs, not just changing one line in the code. However they are very rare bugs, I've done tons of 1x1s and never crashed. Including in mountains, oceans, the middle of villages, etc.

The two major ones a year ago were voxelmodpack and yogscast modpack. Voxel server went down awhile back "temporarily" so they may or may not be maintaining theirs, I'd probably go with yogscast for now.

Nah, if you pretend that the depth of the DF diggable world = the earth's crust, then 2032 is perfectly reasonable for a normal magma for the average depth of the map which would correspond to about 20 miles underground. Stuff is hotter there.

My complaint is not that the cap is too low. My complaint is that it is too "flat"

Okay... but I'm struggling to see what this has to do with xenosynthesis. If you want to make a suggestion forum thread for populations of animals being dynamic, then great, go for it.

But flat or not, the point as is relevant to this thread is that the populations are very very low. Yes a GCS is a large predator, but I only even catch a glimpse of one once every 5 years or something in my forts, even though I'm covering acres and acres of cavern land.

You also have to consider that underground animals may just be flocking to your fort in higher concentrations than in the world in general. Drawn by rumors of wealth, or just hearing the scratching noises you make when you dig with their keen ears, or whatever. Just like FBs and megabeasts. You can't even take the (already very low) population density you observe to be the world population. It's probably lower still.

DF world is also vastly closer to the magma than Earth is that near the surface. There would probably be a huge amount of extra sulfur gases and things than there are here. Dwarves don't choke to death on them because... the cavern ecosystem is soaking them up! And growing much faster than on Earth in the process.




At the most, this argument seems to call for making cave grass not regrow in game, and that being pretty much sufficient for explaining most of the ecosystem. Which would be fine with me.

Yes but you can much more simply make tallow roasts for the same creature modifier and a tiny fraction of the work.

I think you guys are suffering from the old "forgot to check neighborhood before embarking" problem

There are like half a dozen people in the thread including myself who said they embarked in the same tile or right next to gigantic civilizations full of goblins and still don't get attacked for years and years...

defining "griefing"

I define griefing as blowing shit up just for fun, even though you aren't actually in need of the resources or have any reasonable beef with the person. If you have some good reason to seek retribution, or if it's legitimately profitable for you to do it (not spending a week to blow up a day's worth of work for some stranger just to annoy them), then I don't think it's within the realm of game rules to outlaw it (as in banning players). Although in-game law may still come after you.

phantom guards

That phantom mechanism sounds a bit clunky, but yes I was thinking there could maybe be additional non-player-associated automatons send by the empire to help keep peace. Like an extra 1 of them per 4 players or thereabouts. They don't take directions from anybody for personal work like the other ones do, and hang around nearish spawns, responding to reinforcement requests from other automatons.

* Significantly increases site security
* Doesn't do anything to make abandoned sites any more secure, because somebody has to call in the reinforcements
* Creates a nice scaffolding system for players, who can hang near spawn with quick response times until they're ready for more risk/reward further out.

The "security by obscurity" thing you mention is also a great point. The game should only give clients the data they need to display what they can see currently (plus a few extra meters buffer so you don't get glitches when you dig anything). If you want to find well hidden bases, you have to actually go stalk people and stuff, and they can guard themselves against that if they are so inclined. This shouldn't be the only viable strategy, but is another route you can take if you want to save resources on defenses by just trying to hide instead. Sort of like taking on some extra risk for a higher profit margin.

And yes the turret defenses and things in your base are also key. Your automaton is mildly intelligent. It can do things like help direct the aiming of cannons and coordinate defenses. And somebody with an established industrial facility can majorly out-build these things compared to nomadic griefers. So in an attended facility, you can build maybe 5 "turrets" (or whatever) for every 1 a nomad might manage. And your might be twice as effective if coordinated by an automaton, so you can match 10 attackers pound for pound long term without getting worn down. Whereas an unattended facility the attackers actually have an advantage, or it's more 1:1

Are you trying to engineer failure?

People play all sorts of games with their real life names attached and full accountability. Casinos aren't exactly unpopular... Nothing's stopping you there from falsely accusing the guy at the poker table of some crime if you get pissed off. Somehow society (nor casinos) crumble under "media shitstorms" from this sort of event. Keep in mind, the accusor would also not be anonymous, and could be sued for slander, etc. if need be. There are alsready also many competitive facebook games, etc. with people's real names. And as mentioned, this is popular in internet commenting systems for news articles too -- it significantly reduces people being dicks in comments, and it does not in practice stop many people from signing up. I think you significantly overestimate people's indignity and/or the novelty of this approach.

However, that said, your actual legal name is definitely an extreme version of that idea anyway. I think it would still be quite effective even for just your account name to have history publicly posted for the game. Especially if you make the history nice and machine-readable, and let server owners set up custom auto background checks by default to screen people based on their previous in game history.

e.g. statistics like
"estimated ratios of resources mined vs. traded vs. donated vs. broken vs. stolen"
"number of different servers explicitly banned from"
"number of players killed per 24 hours of play time"
and so on.
Possibly only for the last 2 months of paid account time or whatever equivalent.