Bay 12 Games Forum

Turns out zombies won't attack you if you're a vampire.

As it turns out, neither will necromancers if you aren't an enemy of their group.  I ran in to a tower ready to have a big necromancer versus vampire faceoff, but ended up having a chat with a necromancer about his old job as a ranger.  You can recruit them as well...  Though the zombies they raise don't follow you when you travel.  In a way, this works better, because you can go into a town without causing a zombie apocalypse, and your necromancer pal can still swing the tides of battles by raising dead enemies.

Here's some release date pseudo-science for you all:

(based on the 10.5 pages of issues estimate Toady gave us and the devlog updates)

09/13 - 09/21 werewolves 8  days
09/21 - 10/06 necro/zombies 15 days
10/06 - 10/21 mummies 15 days
10/21 - 11/06 vampires 16 days

average 49/4 = 12.25 days

cities pages = 6.5

6.5 * 12.25 = 79.625 days at average rate
6.5 * 8     = 52 days at fastest (werewolf) rate
6.5 * 16    = 104 days at slowest (vampire) rate
Giving us a possible release date somewhere between 6th jan and the 27th feb, with the likeliest date being 2nd feb.

Of course this all assumes that Toady doesn't take any days off or have any kitchen floods again, and that the issues he has to work on for cities are of roughly the same difficulty as the ones he had for night creatures.  Which are not assumptions I'd make bets on.  But it is at least a nice concrete set of dates for us all to fetishise!  (All of which are more optimistic than Footkerchief's date, which worries me.  He isn't often wrong...)

I really hope Toady will fix bug with vanishing zombies, while he is at it. Maybe add at last pulping? Feature creep is in full effect anyway, so why not. I am still sad there was no separate release (with additional bugfix release, of course) because of said creep.

I hope this does happen, because zombies as they are now are very broken, seemingly due to the hitpoints system.  The zombie elk and reindeer on my current evil glacier fort seemed far too weak, so I ran some tests with an unskilled, unarmed, unarmoured dwarf in the arena, and he demolished a zombie ettin, a zombie giant, a zombie minotaur and a zombie roc one after another with his worst wound being a bruise on his arm (which healed up during the minotaur fight).  not exactly a rigorous scientific test, but a roc or a minotaur are normally serious threats, and just being zombified shouldn't make them easily killable by the most peasanty peasant imaginable (even after all the fights he had no skills above novice and no attributes listed in his status screen)

Even if pulping isn't introduced, DF's combat simulation has moved on a bit since the introduction of the hitpoint system for undead (I think, can't think of any changes off the top of my head), so maybe its time to see if they function at the right difficulty level without it.

And to the next responder, how does a veil make you look deranged?

Imagine a well-known mass murderer with a nice pink flowery scarf wrapped round his face.
I know we can't have scarves, or pink clothing, or flowery clothing, but dammit my imagination likes to pretend we can.

Or maybe I just get excited about interesting-sounding adjectives without thinking about what they mean and you call me out on it   

I think the manager assigns jobs to workshops either from east to west or west to east if there's only enough tasks to fill one workshop queue (can't remember the actual direction, just do a quick experiment), so you can always set up your workshops so that the one you want to recieve manager orders is east/westmost.

If i'm obsessing over my current fort i can play for entire days but once i get bored with it it'll be a few weeks before i play again.  It's an all or nothing game for me, but i always return eventually.  This must be the only game i've actually returned to more than once or twice, but i guess the quick dev cycle helps that.

Breaks only occurr when i am literally too uncomfortable to concentrate.  So kinda like 31.01 dwarves who would starve themselves to death trying to mine massive rooms out.

Have you thought about making Santa's Elves the controllable race? You could have custom workshops that churn out binfulls of low-quality toys, and spew toxic chemicals into the air, slowly poisoning your elves. And Santa could send his terrifying megabeast helpers to check up on your progress, and punish you for not going faster.

Quote from: Jordrake on December 04, 2010, 08:08:11 am

DF Turkey (BTW, can anyone think of a more Christmassy flavour than turkey?)

Reindeer.

Slaves to Santa: God of Toys
Chapter II: Christmas Elf SLave Labour Camp?