Bay 12 Games Forum

Hello,

I've got an idea for a fort that would be rather hard to pull off with the normal nature of dwarves making friends with everyone, and then getting depressed when one of those friends dies.

I'm looking to limit that behavior as much as possible. I haven't played Dwarf Fortress in a long time (got burned out a while ago), and there seem to be vastly more tags in the raws these days than I remember. I've started looking through the wiki, but there is a lot of information, and I was hoping that someone here who is already familiar with the changes would be able to point me in the right direction and answer some questions.

So, questions:

Can I change thoughts at all? I want to make "death of a friend" type thoughts give happiness instead of unhappiness. This would solve my problems quite nicely.

If I can't do that, can I emotionally stunt my dwarves so they don't form friendships in the first place, but otherwise function as normal dwarves?

If I can't do that, can I at least drastically slow down the friendship process so that they are formed extremely slowly?

Thanks for any help you may or may not be able to offer

Wooooooo! Awesome! <3

Edit: Quoted somebody, but what I wrote didn't show up/get posted. Can't remember what it was, sorry.

Quote from: Capntastic on October 23, 2009, 12:08:38 am

Quote from: smjjames on October 22, 2009, 12:53:24 pm

Quote from: chmod on October 22, 2009, 10:39:27 am

Quote from: smjjames on October 22, 2009, 01:37:46 am

Ya mispelled armok dude.......

Was a typo. Fixed.

I was talking to Captntastic though.

And I was pointing out the typo he fixed.

So about the site... hehe. Any opinions so far?

Well, it had a type that got fixed pretty fast... seems cool enough.

Apparently we don't have a dedicated topic for house rules yet (at least, nothing apparent on search).

I enjoy playing with various (and sometimes odd) house rules. They make forts fun (and sometimes 'fun'), and provide challenges that neither vanilla nor modded games can bring you.

So! What are YOUR house rules?
The objective of this thread is a central place for people to post their own house rules, so that players looking for new experiences have an easier time of finding new things to try out.

I AM AWARE OF: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Challenge , this isn't quite what I'm after, since it defines a specific fort you need to build, rather than general (house) rules to follow while building any fort.

I'll go ahead and start off with a set I've found to be very satisfying:

In my last fort I used several 'house rules'...I found that they complicate things in an interesting and fun way:
- a maximum of 5 cage and 8 stonefall traps
- there must always be one main access into the fort that is not closed off.
- enemies may only be killed by siege engines or the military. Thus no drowning rooms, invader smashing bridges or other means of mass murder.
- moats must be at least 3 wide and 2 deep before enclosing something
- all moveable bridges need to to be 'powered'. Powered means that you may only raise or lower a bridge if it has an engaged (pulsating) mechanism next to its base (to the side or below). This means you need to construct a lot of complicated power transfer tunnels...it was a lot of fun to rout power all over my fortress while trying to keep access to the 'powersystem' as restricted as possible....
- I used the  goblin mod (neither the thoughest now the weakest goblins...somewhere in between). I was amazed how much this added to the enjoyment (combined with the 'open access')...I had to scramble to train up my military which led to a lot of overall urgency
- workshops: Must be powered (same as bridges) to allow a dorf who is better than 'novice' to use it (=unpowered workshops may only be used by novices or lower)
[...]
here is the link to the map archive if anyone is interested...
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-2928-firegateofmenace

Post away!

He's mentioned his planning process a few times in interviews.  He uses some office software to manage his design notes and plots, which amount to some gigantic files.  He also adds lots of comments in his code, but not what you'd call "good programming practices".  I don't know any more than that though.

You wouldn't happen to remember which interviews and happen to have links to them, would you? 

Quote from: Blakmane on April 02, 2009, 07:44:24 pm

try making the value of a default embark item like iron or steel or plump helmets ludicrously expensive, and then sell the relevant items. Afterwards you can then set the cost back to normal.

I tried this.  I set iron to 10000 value.  Instead of an iron anvil at embark, it gave me a steel anvil.  So I ended up with 3500 or so points instead of 1200.

Change both?!