Bay 12 Games Forum

I don't really feel compelled to play this at all, whatever it is, and I was a huge Undertale fan. I'm glad Toby more or less came out and said that he can't make another game like Undertale and that he's not trying to do that. It's not the kind of game that can really have a sequel as such.

But if he really wants it to be something different, I don't know why it would be related at all.

I guess the answer is "wait and see."

Gloom? The old Quake 2 TC that the natural selection games were based off of/copied off of?

Since the thread is up anyhow, I may as well mention that I retired an elf adventurer because he wasn't able to become a necromancer. Retired his ass in the tower, with the books in his hand--read them, no purple n in the status bar. I was pretty annoyed with myself.

Then I came across him later as a different adventurer and sure enough he's a necromancer.

I guess it's possible I was reading a book that talked about a book with the secrets of life and death in it, but I don't think that was the case. I understand from the wiki that books with the secrets in them always have certain words in the title, which makes them pretty unmistakable.

Helmet snake men... until you meet anything that lacks veins. An underrated feature of elves: they don't leave tracks and they have really sensitive noses, so you can sometimes smell things that are going to murderate you on the travel map (in case you wanted to explore that little asterisk on the map and it said "strongest odor: cave dragon" and the year is 1050). Unfortunately axolotl men don't regrow limbs, but tortoise men and armadillo men have natural armor, and most insect people have lots of limbs to hack off wield weapons.

I'm... pretty sure I've seen elf tracks. Maybe it was broken vegetation or something.

It's possibly intended that everyone can't be kept happy. In the old versions, you had nobility. In these versions you have that one guy who just refuses to be satisfied with legendary dining rooms and whatever. Instead of melting him down, you can just exile him. We seem to usually end up with a couple folks who are ecstatic, with most other dwarves somewhere between content and happy.

I guess I understand that it's kind of a tough thing both to get balanced and for us to evaluate the balancing of. It's a combination of many small factors over a lot of game time.

DFHack quicksave apparently works in fortress mode by setting the flag the game uses for seasonal autosaves.

I'd be happy to see official save-and-continue for both adventure mode and fortress mode. But I've lost a lot more adventure progress from forgetting to save than fortress progress, just because adventure mode seems to be more likely to crash after a long session.

I still have dwarves that never figure out how to put parts of the uniform on in the right order. They end up running around without gauntlets and boots until I change their uniforms to exclude clothing, take the bad thought for being naked, and then allow the uniforms to have clothing again.

Do armor stands and weapon racks work for storage yet? I define barracks from items other than those two things because they were never used for storing stuff in older versions, and a barracks defined from a bed works the same way as one defined by a weapon rack. It's actually okay that they never worked: military dwarves can and should just carry their equipment all the time because trying to change it out is buggy and inefficient anyway. The whole "store the swords in the armory and have dwarves grab them for training or emergencies" system makes intuitive sense and feels good from a "roleplaying" perspective, so some new players are certain to try it. If they keep playing, they will eventually realize it's a pain to get to work right and isn't practical in emergencies since there's no penalty for a dwarf who just carries his weapons everywhere.

Then there're training weapons, which are actually harmful to use now that dwarves can get attached to items and sparring is pretty much totally safe.   

Ammo is still buggy and inefficient. Bolts are available in the thousands and the one squad has 500 bolts reserved, with none reserved for hunters. I still have marksdwarves that don't shoot bolts reliably because they're on the ground in the stockpile rather than in their quivers.

The military is actually pretty reliable in these versions. But the UI is still clunky, dwarves still don't always equip properly, and new players aren't going to understand why things don't just work right. Sure, there are workarounds and other ways to do the things that need to be done to have a functional military. But it doesn't help the game's image to have obtuse or broken things running around in a system of such critical importance to a fort. Things like this are why people dismiss the game as buggy or unstable.

I guess my thing is that I don't care so much about all the old timers who are used to the DF way of doing things. I want DF to have a future, and so I want new players to be able to understand the way the game works, too.