Bay 12 Games Forum

The downside of a draw-and-place tile system like Zombies! is that it cant easily provide the layering effect that ramps-up difficulty.  By pre-placing the tiles we can ensure that they are in progressively harder/dangerous bands (though this dose require a bit more setup time).  A placement system typically radiates outward from a starting node which means the players have few options initially.  I'd at least start with a surface area of face up tiles (containing forests, ponds, grass, rivers etc) to give players some room to move around in right away.  It might be possible to use difficulty layers with placement if their are some rules that trigger a transition, the simplest would be having 3 stacks of tiles which get drawn from, players start with the shallow stack and when its exhausted they move the the next and so on.  Because the player needs to move to the location the tile is being placed their would not any functional difference between the two for play but their would be issues with confining the tiles to the playing area (Zombies! has this issue), it's a trade off between setup time (laying out tiles) and time spent during the game (picking a tile and placing it vs flipping a tile).  Also with regard to the resource cards I proposed would be under the tiles, it would work equally well to have 3 shuffled decks of them with the player drawing from the one matching the type of tile which would indeed be simpler then laying them out before hand.

Also I'm going to revise workshops from my earlier post, rather then replacing the underlying tile workshops would be a smaller tile that is placed on top of a face-up tile.  In addition they are no longer dead-ends only, rather some tiles have a 'room' space in their center, all such room tiles have the normal connection possibilities of a non-room tile and for movement purposes the room is ignored.  Workshops can also be placed anywhere on the surface level.

Various monsters and 'AI' controlled creatures should lurk the game and they need to be controlled, in a normal Player-vs-Player game an opposing player is usually allowed to direct the monsters movement, that's not really a possibility in a cooperative game.  So would simply give each monster a set speed and role a special directional die (Up, down, east, west, stationary x2) and move it along the chosen direction until it reaches an obstacle, trap or tunnel intersection.  Most monsters would be limited to one instance but their would be a 'lair' tile for each monster which would re-spawn the monster on a particular role (think Pac-man).  The players will thus be dealing with monsters continually once they the lair is found and the nastiest monster lairs are in the deeper layers with HFS being a slightly different one-time burst of monsters.  Some event cards could generate a monster instance at the edge of the tunnel network with out a lair present, it would behave as normal but not re-spawn if killed.  Different monsters have different strengths and weakness, such as trap avoidance, door opening or smashing, ranged attacks, movement stopping webs etc etc.

Yes 10x10 would be a good upper bound, my though is the board is divided into 4 zones, surface, shallow, mid, deep.  All the zones are the same width and height and comprise 1/4 of the board.  The width of all the zones would be Number of players + 3 so game size and set-up time is dynamic.  Each layer would be 2 to 4 rows deep depending on how fast/slow the players want to make the game.  So you could be looking at a very small quick game of 3 players being 6x8 or a very large long game of 7 players being 10x16.  Keep in mind though the players need little room for individual items and tokens as they would in monopoly, virtually everything is kept on the board or in the players hand so the whole play area can be used for the board, a normal coffee table should suffice for even a large game.

buman & Djohall:  You guys are totally on the right track here, I was going to suggest just the same system of flipping face-down tiles as excavating as soon as I read the initial post (I too was flabbergasted at use of Monopolies round-about mechanism, it is quite uninspired).

I would like to add some more points to what you two have.  Rather then the typical player-vs-player boardgames use a players-vs-board design.  The players are working as a team to meet the challenges the game is throwing at them, which in a DF inspired game would consist of invasions, plagues, earthquakes, starvation and ultimately the HFS as the ultimate challenge.  Pandemic uses this technique and it makes for a very enjoyable and interesting game.  It's also simple to ratchet up difficulty by using more or less of the nasty of the event cards/tokens at setup.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30549/pandemic

I'd also completely 'shrink' the game and have each player represent a single dwarf, their token would move around the board (by a set speed not dice roles) through the flipped over tiles and they would interact with the board only in their immediate vicinity.  Limited numbers of resource cards (Settlers of Catan like) are kept in the players hand to literally represent their carried inventory and can be picked up or placed on the map only at the players location.  Hostile creatures would also be tokens (moved semi-randomly each round) and could combat the players token and even kill it (of course the dead player need not quit as they can still advise the remaining players and might even be able to rejoin as an immigrant).  This would make for a much more personal game rather then a 'high up' management game, combined with the cooperative nature and danger elements you present the players with a very a stick-together or split-up dilemma.

Another Pandemic feature that's interesting is giving each player a unique roll they get to choose which gives them a special 'power' or advantage.  Several such roles exist and only one instance of each can be used in each game with 1 role for each player.  If fewer then maximum players are available then some roles will be absent but this is ok as none are essential to winning the game.

I think the some of the professions of DF would work well here, each profession allows that player to do/make something very easily/quickly but which all players can do slowly or less efficiently, for example a miner can flip over 3 underground tiles on their turn while others can flip only one.  Crafters/Builders could use half the normal resources to make things or make unlimited 'batches' in a turn.  Warriors are of-course superior in battle, Traders can exchange items at superior ratios, a Hauler could even incresse your hand size to let you literally haul more!

The game area should indeed be a grid of face down 'rock' tiles but we will need to have z-levels which will be the primary 'ramping up' of difficulty as the different events/riches are shuffled into progressively more dangerous and rewarding stacks to draw the players down and towards the HFS.  If the board was like DF in the XY plane then it be far too complex and tedious to have multiple layers active at the same time (even if we had some kind of vulcan-chess setup).  Rather the z-depth should be one axis of the grid, essentially a side-on cut away like an ant-farm.  All the players would start on a special 'surface' row or rows (which might be though of as top-down) at one end of the board and progress downward by crossing the board area.  Players can move their tokens freely in all the areas they have excavated/discovered and don't suffer any movement differences between moving in rows or columns.  Their would need to be some 'cave-in' restrictions to keep the board from just being systematically hollowed out.  I'm thinking a rule that states no 4 excavated tiles meeting at a corner.  Combined with random underground features you should see some interesting shapes.  Lastly it should be a simple matter to widen the board in either the vertical z-axis for length & difficulty or in the horizontal for player count.


Ultimately the players need to be compelled to dig deeper for greater wealth which which they need to surmount the ever growing challenges thrown at them (thus preventing a strategy of not digging down until massively prepared).  I'm thinking that making an artifact should be the 'win' condition, with deep metals being a key ingredient.  Perhaps a random recipe is drawn each game and revealed bit by bit to the players.  The required materials would entail a large amount of time/exploration and time for dangerous encounters and challenges.  Their might be a victory condition for each role and the players as a group only need to achieve one.

Purring maggots have no (known) life cycle beyond the larval stage. That in itself would establish that they're not normal bugs. The milk secretion has to serve a purpose. Personally I picture it's their means of breeding, acting as a trap for hapless batmen and the like. The secretion sustains tiny larvae that start growing in the intestine of their hapless victim, feeding on the inner tissues. Eventually, long after their victim has eventually died, they finish eating what remains of the rotting carcass and their weaker fellow brood and the last couple remaining maggots abandon the remaining scraps of fur and bones and move on, searching for rotting remains and the like to feed on and continue their life cycle. The milk needs to be prepared into a hard cheese or otherwise heated for consumption to render it harmless and safe to eat, otherwise it inflicts you with deadly parasites. Also gives you a handy way of breeding the things as well, making them more available. Feeding uncooked milk to a creature would eventually create it's size/2 maggots, rounded down. That's just my idea though, no idea if Toady thought about it or whether he just figured disgusting cheese would be funny. Hopefully cheese will become a canonical dwarven trait either way.

Thanks, the current implementation no longer seems very disgusting at all. 

As for bats, I doubt their milk production would be sufficient. Arguing for breeding would also be difficult seeing they're a flying creature, making herding exceedingly difficult and large milk production would likely hamper movement. Someone brought up rabies too. They'd make for a better cat replacement if anything. I doubt they could eat a sufficient variety of plants to make them useful cattle either.

Your not taking into account the effects of domestication.  Some bats are quite large such as fruit bats and if breed for milk production could conceivably be used though it would never be a lot, the flying thing could be a barrier to implementation but if so its a barrier to all fly domesticated animals which would be a real disappointment.  Alternatively bats being used for other purposes such as leather (lots of skin on those wings) would also make sense.

I think fall under the 'rule of cool' things, dwarves should have domesticated some underground creatures and bats are an obvious candidate, they also help address the conservation of energy issues that are a bit of a logical gap in the underground ecosystems of DF as bats bring nutrients/energy into the cave/underground from the surface. 

Isn't this already covered by material and item likes?

Dwarves should be happy if they can work on their favorite material or produce items they like.

I would imagine dwarves that likes wood and bolts would be very unhappy as miner or smith, fairly happy as carpenter/woodcutter/marskdwarf/bonecarver and happy as woodcrafter that makes tons of wooden bolts.

No, material/item likes are clearly ment to be the appreciation of the decorative/ascetic nature of a material or the taste of a food-stuff and a dwarf gets happiness from owning or consuming them.

Everyone has a favorite food but everyone dose not like to cook, trying to apply the existing favorites as professions would lead to very absurd and distorted set of professions being liked, many professions like architect would never be desired or have absurdities like only enjoying architecture if the bridge is made from emeralds.  It's also just plain confusing for the player, they would have little if any hope of ever matching a dwarf with what they like and the effects would be for all practical matters random 'noise' in a dwarfs happiness.

Currently dwarves have a whole list of 'favorite' things, foods, gems, rocks, pets as part of their personality quirks.  And we also have a huge variety of professions that we can assign them to with no regard whatsoever for their personal preferences because they simply have none in the realm of jobs.  Adding a 'favorite' profession that a dwarf will get a bonus happy though from doing "Relished the opportunity to work at his life's calling".  The players still retains full control over setting professions and new migrants existing skills are only slightly more likely then random chance to be their favorites.  Also favorite professions should not be evenly distributed across all professions, just as many people dream of being janitors or burger flippers I imagine few dwarves dream of being lye makers or wood burners, their should be a clear tilt towards crafting and more 'elite' stuff particularly metal and gem crafting.  Favorite professions could serve as yet another way to distinguish dwarven culture from that of other races.

Generate zones (areas of limited size which are contiguous for the most limited movement type possible in them - i.e. a normal floor area would be part of a zone where the entire area is contiguous for a creature which can walk but not open doors, an area of water for one which can swim but not open doors, a tile with a door on it for creatures which can walk and open doors, etc) with connectivity links (not specific paths, just info that they zones are connected) to adjacent zones. Generate an initial path on this (comparatively very simple) zone network, and then just generate a path to reach the next adjacent zone as you need it.

The flaw with pathing only from zone to zone is that some arbitrary goal needs to be put in each zone which results in a "choppy" path in which the agent unnecessarily moves to that goal point.  My plan is to use a zone tree to both confirm connectivity and to progressively whittle-down a to a series of connected zones which will form a 'corridor' through witch an A* search will be confined.  That prevents most wasted node expansions but still gives the optimum path.

If you are asking about the implementation that Impaler[WrG] and shadow_slicer put together, read this paper, this power point, this paper, and pages 23 through 26 of this thread.

Unfortunately we never progressed to the point of zone implementation, currently were at a decent tile-level A* implementation, a test-suite that runs large batches of randomly generated searches and reports time efficiency and a path-following class that serves as the interface between the Path engine and the agent and will navigate for an agent.

I've shoot down multi-threading so many times in this thread but certain people just will not drop it, it's starting to get very very old.  I'd also like to point out on a more basic level that "doing stuff when DF is paused" should never be something to build/plan around, not only for the anticipation problem that Hand points out, but for the simple fact that its a terrible idea to force that much pausing in the UI and I consider it a flaw that should be fixed.

tylor:  I already have something like that I call it 'interrupt-able' A*.  Each search and all of its nodes remain in memory until some kind of completion is reached (a full path or failure) only then are resources freed.  The actual node expansion loop is controllable, I can tell it to run for some number of expansions or until completion.  At any time I can query the search to get back the best partial-path found so far.

But I still need work out having an agent that started moving on that partial path smoothly transition to the final one if it turns out that the initial path was flawed and the agent was sent in the wrong direction, most likely I'd just request another path from scratch.

For those of you not in the know, the overall effect is simply to 'smooth' that 'hang' that occurs when a larger number of agents all start pathing simultaneously.  Though their are some potential side benifits, like terminating searches when they grow past a certain length but that get a bit more complex.