Bay 12 Games Forum

Not sure if this is really a succession fort pitch per se. See, something that always bothers me when I play is I like to name all my people. While I have some friends on an IRC, sometimes they're too wrapped up in... non-DF stuff to offer to be named. And sometimes I run out of video game character names - or when I keep getting 20-30 migrants each season.

So as I was working on Voile Fortress, I thought, "Hey, maybe a community fort type thingymabob?", it could at least provide me a pool of names to use and all that. While I'm not against a succession fortress, I'm unsure how many people are up to writing one about something NOT dorfs, as the mod uses Koakuma instead.

I'm at work now, so I can't really say what kind of embark it'll be at the moment. But probably something not too friendly, maybe not evil but maybe. Possibly a volcano, if I can find a nice one that doesn't completely make the place a mess. My playstyle tends to aboveground fortresses/castles/towns, whatever you wanna call it, but if we do succession you're welcome to start carving out more underground of course.

The mod will be my own, Voile Fortress, which aside from adding in the Koakuma civ and some stuff for them, is largely vanilla content.

Oh right, as an aside, I can't promise in a succession fort that I'll hand it off in a "good" state. I have a bad habit of getting so wrapped up in making the fortress, I forget to make those little, unimportant things... like bedrooms and dining halls...

Please wait warmly.

So what is this mod, you ask? Well, really it's pretty small as it all it does is change the playable civ to Koakuma. Dwarves remain in-game, and should get along with the Koakuma civ just fine. I at least, have not seen them start out warring with one another. Dwarven RAWs aren't changed, so their caravan should arrive in the Autumn in the second year and beyond. Should.

This started out as little more then a pet project of mine, and I shared it amongst some friends, and I figured: Why not just share it with the DF community at large? What's the worst that could happen! They're kind, upstanding, and only slightly mentally insane people after all. While I eventually plan to add more features that'll help make the Koakuma civ be more standout, as it stands now this is what they have as pros and cons:

Pros
- Koakuma have higher regeneration, agility, and disease resistance on average then other races.
- Atelier building will eventually allow them to access a wide variety of materials via alchemy.
- Mana industry!
- Credits to who made the Sawmill mod, as the Koakuma use it.

Cons
- They cannot use adamantine, at a later point they can use it in alchemy to produce other things, but it won't be as good as adamantine.
- The steel they make isn't dwarven, which is to say it's weaker and the original steel RAW has been re-named to dwarven steel and is only produced by the dwarves.
- Their wings, headwings, and tail may or may not be protected by armor. I'm not too sure on this one, but in my experience, they tend to lose wings really easy.
- They are human-sized, so they can't actually wear any armor salvaged off smaller creatures.
- A high female to male ratio means you may want to be careful how you use the males. (3 to 1, to be exact)

What is a Koakuma?
Koakuma is a character from Touhou Project, and my inspiration for this project is the Suika Fortress mod. While Suika is more aesthetically correct, Koakuma is one of my favorite characters so I decided to do this anyway. Koakuma literally means "little devil".

Credits
By default the mod is packaged with Phoebus tileset, so all credits go to him for those tiles.
Original Koa base icon is credit to a friend of mine, although all the professions are done by me.

I'll probably prettify this at some point or another. And make it look more organized.

Download is here:
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=6745

Changelog:
v1.3
- Added in Winged Spears, Half-Pikes, and Long Bows for Koakuma civ
- Trolls and Ogres given a petvalue
- Tea Mushrooms. Because why not?!
- Mana reactions now use Strand Extraction instead of Concentration
- Sawmill uses Woodcutting instead of Carpentry, and only yields 10 planks instead of 20.
- Koakuma stats have been tweaked
- All female humanoids have breasts (may be removed)

v1.3.1
- Minor bug fixes caused by me reading the wrong tokens (Labor tokens =/= Skill tokens)
- Koakuma given custom language

v1.4
- Orichalcum and Mithril added to the Mana Furnace. Orichalcum is made from copper and gold with a mana gem, and Mithril is made from aluminum also using a mana gem. Orichalcum is stronger then Koakumian Steel and Mithril is about half as strong as Adamantine.

v1.5
- Suika civilization added. For now they use mostly Dwarven set-ups. Although they are far, far stronger and have a very limited selection of weapons. They aren't intended to be playable, but if you do try them out well... they may be a bit too strong. Suikas use all Japanese-named weapons, armor, and clothing.
- Koakumian Steel is renamed to "Crude Steel" and every Civ (except Elves) has access to it now. Including Goblins! Crude Steel is still about half as good as Dwarven Steel.
- New folder 'optional' has the 'silly' Koakumian language. If you use it, remember to back up your original!
- Tweaks to Koakumian civilization should allow them to actually expand and should prevent them from being small, tiny one-city civs now.

Thinking about it, I want to try making a kind of harbour/port... anyway, how can I go about trying to butcher anything that lives in the ocean? Particularly given how... untrustworthy swimming is. I can't think of a way you could kill something in the ocean and be able to retrieve the corpse for butchering.

Except for a great, great many pump stacks to drain a section of the ocean faster then it fills in? Is this the only way to do that?

Also I forget, how quickly can a fisher actually depopulate something the size of an ocean? A long time, or just a few Legendary-level ones will do it?

But I'm kind of stumped on how I want to start working it. So I shall turn to you bay12, in your infinite wisdom and power, to give me an idea. Huge image is huge by the way.

I am thinking of either making a castle (keep, motte, whatever you want to call it at an early stage), in the lower left right by the volcano as I recall magma evaporates in about 20 tiles, so I could try to use it to make a magma moat or something. However as thats right by the edge, it is a bit cramp...

On the other hand, I could just build somewhere in the "middle", but I'm unsure how I'd get to transporting the magma that far without it drying up. As I'm going for an aboveground settlement, positioning is a bit important as well.

Any suggestions or anything? I usually end up scrapping embarks over something I see as a poor design choice, and this embark is actually pretty mineral rich (tons of gold as I recall and has tin/copper) so I'd really like to keep using it... I think I found a second embark I liked, but it was in a Badlands, so it would have absolutely no trees and I dislike breaching the caverns early on, because I tend to forget to wall it off and I'm trying to not use too many traps.

How effective do you think that is? Rolling up an embark and I notice this civ has access to unicorns (modded game to make it so you don't need a DM to tame exotics).
Now from prior experience, I know I can't actually request them from the caravans for some reason, and it WILL mean an extremely low supply start but... unicorns! I'm just unsure if they'll breed well at all, or if it's going to be one of those things where I lock them away for decades and maybe have three, instead of two.

I swear I don't have OCD for real but, in DF? All the time. I've been trying to find a nice embark that is flat, but has a volcano. A source of water, such as a brook or river, would be nice but I'd be fine with just the volcano.

I've found a few that are flat and have a volcano but then when I start making them... I just get annoyed at little things. I start making my starting little fort, and start to tunnel to where I want to put my magma forges but then they just feel too far from the fortress itself! And then I'm mining in it too, so then it doesn't look all... planned.

Anyone else experience OCD tendencies, but only when it comes to DF? Time to gen up a new world and hope I can find a flat area with a volcano again...

Due to some modding in my custom race, I have a much larger variety of animals to pick from embark. My favorite is when I get a civ with access to rhinos and/or elephants however.

I just got one actually - rhinos only - but in my previous embark I did try cave crocodiles. While I did forget to actually unforbidden the eggs, I did notice in my stocks they do crank out an insane number of eggs. Which would you think is actually better to have at embark? I know from experience you can't request them from the caravan.

EDIT:
I forgot an important detail. I modded elephants and rhinos to no longer have problems feeding themselves. They will not starve to death.