Bay 12 Games Forum

I just published my third book, and it's available for free at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/469025.

It's available in a wide variety of formats (mobi, epub, PDF, plain text, etc).

Sadly, it's not about dwarves, but players of Liberal Crime Squad will probably want to give it human rights and marry it.

The obligatory blurb:

An unlikely couple finds love in the vortex of violent social upheaval. Can their relationship survive their differing political stances? A terse political thriller, infused with an uncompromising romance.

If you can tolerate an elf singing a dorfy song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME5urFBf0kk

I think it's the best version of Misty Mountains Cold.

If Race is included, it should be handled (as Mr. Fox noted) Liberally - that is, Diversity is Celebrated. If you do not have Diversity (a cross-section of many cultures), and your racial choices during recruitment are too homogenous, there should be a penalty -  to your Juice score, perhaps.

So I have run into two weird things while running 40.05 lately I wanted to ask about. 

1.) The first is that I started my fortress while showing humans, elves, and goblins all near my embark point yet two years in I have not seen a soul beyond the dwarven traders who came once.  Any known bugs or issues out there about this?  I know of the issues with sieges but I thought elves not visiting the fort was a fixed bug.

I think this is a known bug - I'm not sure what other thread I was reading about it in, but I've seen others discuss it. The civilizations around you disappear.

2.) So my weaver went down into the caverns because hes an idiot to go get spider webs and when he saw a spider he ran in terror as I would expect.  What I didn't expect was that he ran 2 tiles away slammed into a wall broke his hand and passed out from the pain.  He eventually awoke but I have never seen a dwarf hurt themselves but slamming into something before and I was wondering if this was normal?  If so I must say Kudos to Toady because it was both hilarious and awesome.  I hope that weaver learned his lesson 

That is indeed hilarious. If it's not a bug, it's a feature.

Perfect. In regards to your suggestions, I think the idea of electronic security systems that can be hacked is a good one, but I wouldn't want to make it obligatory -- I like the game supporting and encouraging a range of playstyles, to ensure that there's always more strategies to explore in repeat plays. Robbing the bank vault, for example, can be done through either a high-tech heist or a heavily-armed "everyone get down" raid, each with their own set of challenges.

Hacking is currently fairly tiered already -- low Computers skill results in hacking failing to produce results (juice or otherwise), while the "harass websites" action is easier for medium tier computer users to pull off. Low skilled computer users picking that will just troll forums and stuff though, which doesn't actually accomplish anything. Will consider additional choices and depth on the top end.

It doesn't have to be obligatory - give the security-droppers a bonus, or disable the alarm triggers on the 'big doors' or something - it can still be taken without dropping internal security, but it should be a harder thing to accomplish.

As it stands, though, hacking is either giving out too much computer skill, or too much juice. A good test would be to take someone who has zero hacking skill, and see how many days it takes to get them to 200 Juice.

Oh man I would love for there to be a low end, less illegal way to train computer skills

Agreed. I was surprised that you couldn't take Computer classes at college. An alternative would be to have 'Teach Liberals Practical Life Skills' as an option for an activity (trains computer, finance, business, etc - not as effective as a college ed, but it should be relatively inexpensive).

I just started playing LCS a week or so ago while waiting for DF to stabilize - and it's tons of fun as it stands, but there are a couple of 'weak spots' that I've seen, from an outsider's perspective.

Hacking is far too OP. It's too easy to get someone up to Juice 200.

Here's an alternative proposal:

At Computer levels 0-4, say, you can Troll. Trolling would get you only minimal amount of juice.

Level 5-9 you can Skript. Skripting is a little more potent, gets you a little more juice, but it has a tendency to pull in small amounts of Heat, and it isn't the juicy stuff, which should be done at skill level 10-15:

The Hack. I'd like to see the actual 'hacking' portion spread out over three phases, such as Discovery, Penetrate, Exploit. The first round gets you past the first firewalls, the second round past the second layer, and finally the goodies, which can be a variety of actions (like a date menu): get map, deactivate security, pilfer secrets, steal funds.

I'd like to see each major location (Power plant, Intel HQ, Prison, etc) have its own computer security system that needs knocking down before operatives can infiltrate. For instance, after 'deactivate security' on Courthouse would cause their alarm system to be inoperable for the next day. Attacking a place without deactivating their computerized security should be akin to suicide.

That's the big one I had, the others were small and mostly about standardizing some interface. Otherwise, this is a pretty epic game.

I'd contribute, myself, if I knew the C's.

I was able to bring a lot of them back home by re-opening the staircase down to the cavern, thankfully, but we're losing 1 or 2 each month to 'well-wandering'.

They could also be trying to fish - every other tile with water on the map thus far is ice.

It also seems these are Jesus Dorfs. They're walking on the 'Open Space' directly above the water tiles. To the bug tracker!