Bay 12 Games Forum

Hi Jesterdwarf, thank you for the play report. You reminded me that I need to tweak Shadows again... It's not a bad idea to embark far away from them, but they do need more love with all the fort visitors. As far as modded weapons, and the other items you mentioned. -I will need to take a closer look at that.

So I double checked all custom weapons and it seems only executioner's sword has consistent problems, everything else was just the usual military uniform fiesta. If I had to guess it has to something to do with required size for the exec sword? Also kind of funny that you can use non-weapon grade metals for new stuff. Trifle pewter broad axes anyone?
No idea what can be done with Shadows, though.

Thank you for the deep dive. I've examined hundreds of worlds across 6-years of releases. World gen conflicts are not accurate representations of how strong dark races really are. For example, none of the special attacks or physical resistance is taken into account during those battles or wars. No spells are used or breath attacks. Why fair races do so well in world gen seems primarily to do with reproduction which is touchy to tinker with in early releases of vanilla. The dark part is not only the civilizations (which in 40.X are very slow to go to war) but also the curses, mega-beasts, monsters, and wild animals.

There are other factors. Normally, I spend more time tweaking the ratio of races but since this version of DF is not being fixed/updated, doing so results in a lot of wasted time as it often breaks each update. Towers usually dominate the landscape with huge undead populations, that isn't happening in 47.04 for some reason, which is another reason things are less bleak. (Normally, I would not even update this mod without very robust towers appearing but for villains it was worth it.)

There is still a lot of danger to face, but yes this version of Dark Ages is less war-like than intended. I will try to address the situation in v40 if at all possible without sacrificing stability. Once DF is released to Steam and starts getting regular fixes across the board - a much more refined version along with a new tileset can happen.

In retrospect I think my posts look far more accusatory than I intended, sorry. And it wasn't really a deep dive, to be honest.
The lack of sieges despite my fortresses having around 100 dwarves and millions in wealth and lots of exports was confusing so I thought it may have something to do with worldgen. Goblins probably do so damn well because they are immortal, while (I assume) custom races have finite lifespans.
Anyway, it seems that sieges don't really work like you'd expect them to work in this version of DF:
1. Now I've had that bug (?) which I've thought affects only necromancers (siege message pops out, 5 or 6 invaders spawn and then immediately leave and siege is lifted instantly) appear with human, warwolf and legendary dwarf sieges. I checked the world out, because my first thought was maybe they don't have the numbers to actually siege me, so they arrive and instantly rout because they are outnumbered or something, but no, civs are absolutely fine, they have the numbers and clear path to me.
2. On other hand, only three years into the latest fort and first proper necromancer siege arrived! It only consisted of, oh, 56 walking corpses, 5 lost butchers and a necromancer (who was promptly eaten by a giant crocodile). Three weeks of absolute carnage and we won, losing only 95% of the fort population which in my book is a clean victory. Anyway, the weirdest part was that this army had to walk for two weeks to get to me, while frog fiends, goblins and gnolls are in 2 or 3 day walking distance and yet they do nothing apart from some goblin thieves popping out now and then. Which leads me to believe that frequency and intensity of sieges depends on... No idea on what. They aren't at war with each other, they have decent population, they are close, my fort is close, well-populated and exports a metric ton of wealth every year. But no, it's 200 years old dwarven necromancer from the other side of mountain range who decided that enough is enough and came to kill us all (and was eaten by the crocodile).
Speaking of lost butchers, is it normal that I have a lot of lost butcher, fallen slayer and forlorn zombie visitors (inbetween all those paladin poets, who, by the way, also get eaten by giant crocodile)? They behave normally and don't seem any more murderous than any other visitor, but it looks like they are supposed to be tied to necromancers somehow. Or am I wrong?
Oh, and necromancers are visiting too. They are members of other civs and I had in fact a necromancer in my fortress. He was elected mayor, didn't doanything necromancy and was eaten by giant crocodile so I didn't have time to check if he could raise zombies.

Poets: I picked an embark that is relatively close to both Paladin and Druidwarven civs, yes. Didn't expect there to be like 4 to 1 ratio of Paladin/Druid civilians to everyone else visiting.
Necromancers: Sometimes there is an occurence where necrosiege arrives (i.e. "The dead walk, hide while you still can!") but there's only 5 zombies which immediately leave the map and lift the siege. But I don't know if it's because of the mod or just general Dwarf Fortress things.
Shadows: Well they have Opposed to Life tag, which makes them forget everything and want to kill absolutely everyone the moment they step on the map. Shadow visitors have civilian jobs so it leads to some Shadow Poet arriving to (supposedly) have a good time in the tavern and instead they go on a rampage. Sometimes it's just Shadow Representative, which is I assume some kind of administrative or diplomatic position. So far I've seen them to 1v1 a cyclops on two occasions, although now that I think of it cyclops is probably a semimegabeast so I apologize for misinformation. In general, Shadows arrive, then either make a beeline to your tavern or hang around the edges of the map indefinitely until someone comes too close.
Last fort I played was located in the middle Orc, Dark Elves, Lizardmen and Warwolves' territory, all of them have sizable population with Lizardmen having almost 10k lizardmen doing lizardmen things in one of the towns. Shadows also were considered 'neighbours' on the embark screen despite being half a continent away. Fifth year in so far and no sieges save for two necromancer sieges I talked about earlier.
Other fort had similiar problems, with 20k Goblins and 12k Frog Fiends just twiddling their thumbs despite the newly created fort being like two days of marching away from their towns.
Also had a dark elf come to visit only to turn into two-headed jumping spider man and cause something that looked like loyalty cascade because dwarven druid caravan attacked the werespider, and then wizard caravan attacked the dwarven druids, and then everyone had a jolly good time attacking my dwarves.
I didn't dug deep enough to check on the demons, but other locals were fun enough. Great cave crocodiles and great frogs certainly caused a lot of death and misery, especially for the visiting monster hunters who ventured into the caverns and died immediately like it's Dark Souls.

Hi Jesterdwarf, I am not getting the error using the default Phoebus or Spacefox. Can you tell me exactly what screen you see it? Starting Dwarf or Adventure mode?

The error occurs every time the game (I assume) is trying to load the tileset, i.e. when I try to start any game mode or enter the advanced world generation. It crashes at 'Preparing text objects'.
This problem is fixed by copying the crittermen.png from, for example, Spacefox folder and putting it into raw\graphics\doren in the other tileset's folder - which wouldn't be that surprising if not for the fact that every tileset save for Gemset already has this file.
As far as I can tell, problem only happens if (after unpacking the zip archive) you launch LNP, switch to Gemset, launch DF, try to load the world or enter worldgen and get the error message. Then you have 40% chance that the game will crash with this same error regardless of the installed tileset until you copypaste crittermen.png in your 'Dwarf Fortress 0.47.04\raw\graphics\doren' folder. I was able to replicate this error 4 times out of 10, hence the 40%. It doesn't happen at all if you don't touch Gemset, all other tilesets will work fine. Worldgen is still prone to crashing after 200 or so years, though, but such is the life in Dark Ages I suppose.

Quote from: Jesterdwarf on March 31, 2019, 12:46:04 am

Well, people are already willing to kill everyone and everything in the game in very painful ways for no other reason that 'seemed fun', and this somehow isn't problematic. But killing transdwarves? No, we can't have that, no-no. That would be bigotry.

You misunderstand. I'm saying if dysphoria would be added, it would be convenient, gameplay-wise, to discriminate against trans people, which, yes, causes problems.

Nobody can stop players from doing what they want, but it's absolutely best that the game itself doesn't make it not just convenient but beneficial to discriminate this way. It leads to less trouble in general, for everyone, forever.

When gay dwarves were added, no one started creating gay concentration camps in their forts, or making threads about creating gay concentration camps. Same thing will happen with transdwarves. Go be worried about 'discriminaion' somewhere else. You can always try 4chan if you so desperately want to be told how much of a failure in life you are and how much everyone hates you.

Well, it's kind of that if you're born with the soul of a dragon, you get superpowers, and if you're born with 'wrong gendered' soul you want to kill yourself. One is somewhat less cool than the other. Also if you can get soul with wrong gender, it means that you probably can get a schizophrenic soul, mentally deficient soul, Alzheimer-afflicted soul...
I don't think mixing mental health and souls is a good idea.

Y'all just prejudiced against prejudice. Please stop with this prejudicism, it's my trigger.
Also I think prejudice should not be in the game because of course having some imaginary people being prejudiced against other imaginary creatures will instanly make all players racist, nazi, jewish, homophobic and KKK members simultaneously. Toady will basically be second Hitler if not worse for including, however partially, prejudice in a simulation game.