Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: (name here) on October 04, 2008, 10:10:52 pm

Dwarves would tend to still be able to deal with both of them, especially once dwarves have any kind of magic power to deal with the treants. human cav can't run foverever and marksdwarves can get in shootouts if they try to pull partian shots. they've got the advantage if dwarves split up, though. other than the elven magical allies and domestic animals, the dwarves have massive weapon superiority to the elves, plus if they really, really feel like it they've got the stuff to incinerate the forests. relese a few caged fire imps and the forest vanishes in flame

Of course they will.. but it will be hard when they're out of their element. There has to be some reason why different war-prone sentient species still exist in the same world..

Magic power, that's a big if. Cavalry just needs to cut off the supply lines to starve an advancing dwarven army of beer. Minor weather magic can deal with burning forests, and the same can cause landslides over fortress entrances, or flooding if they're built on flat land.

The problem with a race that has all the good stuff is that the game becomes predictable, and ultimately, boring. All the other races are just steam cannon fodder then. Why even bother to trade or conquer them if dwarves are just as good or superior in everything? Homeground advantage stops the game world from becoming one big empire in a few decades. Not that world-spanning empires should be impossible, but they should require commensurate effort and a policy intentionally focused on annexation. And after a few centuries at most it should fall because of internal weakness, because empires rise and fall like tides...

VERY few games have even tried to model the continuous rise and fall of countries/nations/empires. Crusader Kings is closest one I've ever seen, and a Kingdom could very easily fall apart if the new King had a bunch of personality traits that ticked off his vassals.

If DF were to want to have some sort of Rise and Fall of entities, then the immediate success of any country should be dependent on its leader, thus if the next leader is great, they expand rapidly. If the one after that is terrible, the country contracts.

My vision is a Submerge-able Fortress like the Figaro Castle from Final Fantasy 3/6. Goblin's try to siege? You just pull a lever and disappear beneath the surface (probably with sliding doors too)

And by Submerging I Don't MEAN FLOODING.

Do falling items (not floors) cause injures? If so, then you could build a platform above the area where the Elves are trapped and have dwarves dump stone on them.

Please tell me this works. (I shall not be testing it myself anytime soon)

All that will also affect what resources your civilization has available. For example, a conquest might give your civilization access to a new source of iron or to a trade route with a distant civilization, affecting the prices of the goods you buy from (or sell to) the caravans. If an enemy civilization razes one of your civilization's settlements and kills a bunch of skilled weaponsmiths, the quality of any further weapons you import might be noticeably reduced - and the refugees fleeing from the destruction will look for a new home and might end up at your own fortress.

So the entire World economy could be computed by what Resources a Civ has access to, and the professions of the Population of that Civ. That would be much easier to keep track of than actually creating and tracking items at the world level.

Thus if you start a new fortress, and determine your parent civilization is lacking in good steel armors, then you can focus on training up high-quality Armorsmiths and producing steel plate armor. For the initial several years you'd receive extremely high prices for your exported steel armor. As your civilization 'absorbs' these goods though, the price would go down as the game computes the contribution that your Dwarves are having to your civilization.

Conversely, maybe you somehow find out where that goblin civ you're at war with keeps the majority of their smiths. So you go attack the site and kill them all, severely hampering their arms production. In subsequent battles, you notice the quality and quantity of their equipment has been greatly reduced.

It would also mean that you would no longer receive 'requests' from the liason and Human merchants, and instead would just receive and update on that Civilization's current prices.

Toady, every time you come up with another tool or feature that supports your player base, it makes me feel that much more guilty for not having donated yet.

On the other end of things, I think normal Plants and Drinks have too low of a value. A Dozen stone mugs or so are enough to buy food and drinks to supply half a dozen dwarves for a year. (This is an estimate, btw). While that seems like a steal when you're buying, it also means that no player is ever going to rationally make a fortress which exports plants and booze. I am of the opinion that anything you can import via trade should be profitable enough that you'd perhaps want to design a fortress of your own to export it(For a few years at least). Right now, with normal plants and booze, it'd be a total waste.

As for the talk about prepared food, yeah, it does need to be changed. The stacking issue also needs to be fixed, because if you're not careful with your ingredient selection, you can easily end up with a bunch of large meal stacks that won't fit into barrels and rot sooner or later.

I've never done it, but I thought I saw somewhere that you could turn Cave-ins off (not the announcement, but the actual gravitational event). Would that help at all?