Bay 12 Games Forum

It seems very strange that there would be atheists in a world such as Dwarf Fortress where there are literal Gods running around and doing stuff. I mean how can one be an atheist in a world where you can strait up go find and speak with one of the demon lords that were summoned from the underworld by the Gods. In a world where there is actual concrete evidence of Gods you can't really have atheists.

Quote from: Melting Sky on January 24, 2017, 09:47:18 pm

I think you have the right idea. Just settle somewhere along the sea where it doesn't freeze solid. Unless you have a very odd world most latitudes should meet this criteria. If you want to sea something extra awesome settle next to an evil ocean. Truly fun things happen along these coastlines.

I already modded in flying versions of most sea creatures for evil biomes... Have you ever seen flying zombie great white sharks? I have

Now that's hilariously awesome.

Although Axes are an all around very solid weapon for dwarves there are several instances where they can end up being quite useless. As mentioned above, reanimating biomes can be a problem for edged weapons since you can end up with severed heads that just won't go down etc. The other place they have a real problem is FB made of strong inorganic materials. If you run into a Steel FB, for instance, steel axes will do absolutely nothing to it.

When DFhack and therapist are up and running on the newer versions of the game where Toady has reworked armor damage mitigation and added mechanics for applying torsion damage to joints I might sit down and try to contribute to this thread with some additional testing. My guess is that blunt weapons will be radically more effective against human sized organic foes compared to before.

How well established is your fort and how long has the tavern been up and running? When a tavern first opens you generally only get a few visitors who come to check it out. These visitors will then spread the word about how awesome or terrible your tavern is when they eventually wander off into the world again. This is when more visitors will start showing up based on the tavern's reputation. This takes time.

Some things to check:
Is the tavern properly designated?
Is the tavern set to accept foreigners, not just locals?
Is your embark particularly dangerous and do you have dead visitors on your lawn that were mauled by husked alligators etc?

I am assuming the world you are embarking in is relatively normal. You didn't do something like embark in year 2 or create a world where there are no suitable biomes for the elves and goblins to live in?

Trippy, this guy isn't undead of any flavor? If not put this up on Mantis. It's a major bug that should help Toady track down some of the seriously broken stuff going on with sentient ethics and behavior at the moment.

I also found whips to not nearly be as OP as one reads - though considering they completely ignored all armour, once your military is fully clad in steel or adamantine, I guess they are the only goblin weapons left that pose any sort of threat at all.

Morning Stars are absolutely devastating weapons against dwarves in armor.

It's nice to see somebody doing actual science and backing it up with statistics. I've been meaning to do some arena testing to see how the new torsion damage to joints has changed things. Back in .34 my testing uncovered a lot of surprising urban myths people had about the efficacy of various weapons.

One of the big myths I was surprised to uncover was whips were not nearly as OP as people constantly raved about. I expected them to be the absolute best melee weapon by far and although it varies greatly dependent on variables such at materials, opponents, skill of the wielder etc. the whips were never even best in class at what they did best which was to serve as a can opener vs medium sized armored organic creatures with bones and the ability to feel pain. The whip was great against dwarf sized opponents in heavy armor which is likely why people wrongly believed they were the most OP weapon, but even in this application they weren't quite as good as Morning Stars. Against stuff like inorganic FB's the whips were miserable. Anyway, the point is simply it's nice to see somebody doing real testing.

There is an excellent combat calculator I believe was created by Urist da Vinci. It's a good tool for gathering combat damage information. I have no idea if it works with current DF, but the tool was amazing and you should check it out if you get a chance.

One thing to take into account is piercing weapons become much more effective against armor the smaller the contact area becomes and a small enough contact area can allow a stabbing weapon of lower quality material such as copper to punch through a higher quality material such as iron. This is why you will get radically different results for testing out copper daggers and copper spears against opponents in full iron armor. The dagger rips them apart where as the spear are all but completely useless.

As a general rule of thumb slashing weapons and stabbing weapon with larger contact areas are absolutely terrible, bordering on completely useless, against opponents that are clad in armor or made of a material stronger than the weapon is. With the new torsion damage system and rewrite of how creatures deal with pain I imagine all the old blunt damage testing is pretty much completely invalidated. When a starter pack comes out for the new version with torsion damage I will put some time aside and do some arena testing to see how things have changed.

Thank you, Patrick, for your detailed answer. It gave me enough insight to see that world generation is based on multiple seeds, of which each is used to generate pseudo-random numbers and sometimes also modifies the random numbers (or the interpretation of them) coming from some other seed. This should make sure, that if you use all the same seeds, the "randomly" generated worlds should end up the same. This is like using the same seed for world generation in Minecraft will result in two identical worlds being generated. Practically, this is just like a procedural generation.

However, after the world generation, things start to differ, because for every session of gameplay some randomness is introduced for the generation of further events. That's why two players (or two instances of) playing an identical world will get different migration waves, caravans, enemy encounters, etc. Similarly, in Minecraft, the enemies, spawned on acertain location are randomized, even if played in identical worlds.

Yeah, you got it. Random seeds are generated and then used as a basis to procedurally generate the world.