Bay 12 Games Forum

You're overthinking it, captured dwarves looking after the last goblin tower would gladly re-welcome the hate and spiteful goblins back into ranks or they'd just remember their civ ties, march onto the nearest settlement as a raider/mercenary band and convert it to the new HQ.

I don't actually understand what you are saying.

I think the current situation about gremlins and animal people is a crude placeholder. 

Really they should always have been citizens with a proper entity definition from the start, the reason they are in this weird half-way house between beast and person is because of corner-cutting in the early development of the game. 

They didn't really need to be in the game for any reason, so why are they even in?  Why add shoddy content you cannot be bothered to implement properly rather than leaving it out until you have the time/mechanics to implement them properly?

Or some goblins you killed 3 ages and 10 fortresses ago.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

To kill again 

Think of how many bones there'd be in a post apocalyptic magic cataclysm that has wiped all life off the surface under waves of fire for instance, you wouldn't be able to dig a shallow pit without having enormously dense fossil layers, then after a few hundred years really barren ones.

You would bring goblins back but you would not bring the goblin civilisation back.  Even if you could bring back their memories and ideas, they have not built up any independent infrastructure yet allowing their culture to be functionally independent of yours, in effect what you would end up with is goblin immigrants from the past, not the original civilisation. 

I have finally finished up adding in trolls.  Normally this would not be news-worthy but I have made the trolls properly regenerate.  This was done by adding a syndrome to troll blood so that when it comes into contact with trolls it triggers them to turn into a special troll caste of the same gender in 200 ticks and then turn back again in 200 ticks.  The special troll caste is itself immune to the troll blood syndrome BUT the length of the syndrome is 400 ticks means that the troll will return to it's original caste in 200 more ticks.  Both transforming into and back to another caste causes all wounds to heal, so it works very well to simulate regeneration.

I also made troll body parts poisonous.  This isn't actually canon as far as I know but it makes sense of lore questions like why doesn't everyone just feed the regenerating trolls to your dire bears or what-have-you.  This was harder considerably than making trolls regenerate, the main problem was creating special troll materials that everyone does not think is food. 

It would be even more interesting if an intelligent being was bought back to existence, especially if they were able to bred: they could recreate their civilization!

They would end up recreating basically your civilisation though. 

Not really. If the player is given control over the modifiers alongside the laws, there is no limitation to this method that isn't also a limitation to your own.

You are talking about modding here or not?

So, in your idea, if vandalism is a personal matter, but unsanctioned digging is a capital offence, won't dwarves specifically seek engraved walls to dig since digging those out counts as vandalism rather than unsanctioned digging?

Also, again, you're underestimating AI. If unsanctioned digging is considered a form of vandalism, and is a more severe crime when the wall is engraved, and said severity is modified by the quality of the engraving, then not only will the AI be able to get dwarves to favour digging unengraved walls over engraved walls, but also it can get them to favour digging lower quality engraved walls over higher quality engraved walls.

AI has it's flaws, but if there's one thing that it's really really good at, it's maths, and pathfinding is maths.

They will dig through whichever walls are most convenient for them to dig through.  If vandalism is a crime, then they will avoid digging through engravings even if it is more convenient to do so.  I guess we need to factor in convenience as well as the other factors. 

Underestimating the AI is a good idea from a memory standpoint I think. 

If we can edit the severity of laws, we can probably see the severities that we're editing. I'd rather not give the player the ability to mind-read criminals' pathfinding decisions just so that they can better manipulate said criminals.

Not quite, because we cannot see the severities derived from the personal ethics of our dwarves since we cannot see ethics in general.  We can see the relative severity of the laws, but not the non-legal factors influencing the individuals decision.  That helps us to control the majority but particular individuals will end up not doing what everyone else does, which is a rare thing in present DF. 

If point 3 is specifically how much they fear punishment, it might be an idea to also add in some calculations based on personality facets like anxiety propensity or bravery too.

Yes but those are secondary calculations adjusting the single factor of how much they fear the punishments. 

Pathfinding may be maths, and computers are good at maths, but its also not computationally cheap. Thats why pathfinding always takes shortcuts, and shortcuts reduce fidelity. Pathhfinding is also one of the biggest causes of lag/slowdown in DF already so you wanna be careful when proposing stuff with it

Creatures already pathfind to get food items.  As long as there is a time-lag between when they fail to find food items normally and when they take emergency measures, there shouldn't be any extra lag. 

In the previous subrelease I forgot to fix mountain gnomes.