Bay 12 Games Forum

The thread title is fairly self-explanatory, but:

Choosing to settle in an Evil Biome is effectively the closest thing the game has to a difficulty setting. Yes, you can set the difficulty higher on Embark, but in my view this doesn't affect the level of difficulty itself, just the speed at which you hit the level of difficulty - sieges are equally tough regardless of this setting, they just come sooner. The only way to actively increase difficulty beyond the normal is to try finding something like: a reanimating biome, a biome which rains dangerous syndromes, a biome with husking/thralling weather, a biome with dangerous undead creatures skulking around.

Unfortunately, most Evil biomes do not do this. Despite genning a very considerable number of worlds looking for an appropriately scary starting biome, I found... basically nothing. The vast majority are not reanimating. They do not have undead wildlife. They usually do have some kind of evil weather, but it is usually just raining blood or something dwarves find disgusting without actually being dangerous.

Nor are Evil biomes visually that interesting. They have specific grasses - Wormy Tendrils and Staring Eyeballs; Glumprongs - but from my experience these are also quite rare. Normally you just get dead vegetation, which isn't particularly interesting and looks basically the same as ordinary vegetation (dead grass is somehow still green, which I can assure you is not how dead grass looks).

Once in a million, you find an actually Evil biome with appropriate eyeballs, death zombies, creeping mist, and so on - but it's really just too rare. Most Evil biomes are not Evil, they are, as the title puts it, mildly vexatious.

I would go so far as to say that, because of the new Agitation mechanic, Savage biomes are actually presently much more difficult than Evil ones on average.

I feel that Evil biomes ought to be nearly guaranteed to be reanimating or have some really horrible syndrome weather, and glumprongs, wormy tendrils, and staring eyeballs ought to be more of a staple. If I choose an Evil biome to settle, I'd like an Evil biome and not a mildly vexatious one!

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=180533.0

Same basic complaint, I think. The issue isn't that megabeasts need plot armour - they just need their actual fighting skills. As it is, my understanding is that worldgen combat is determined by size and skills. It doesn't take into account the fact dragons breathe fire hotter than magma, or that bronze colossi are made of nearly impermeable metal, or that rocs can fly. Consequently, megabeasts go out like chumps in worldgen combat when they can destroy an entire fortress in Fortress Mode.

But yes, completely agreed with the central complaint - megabeasts are simply not surviving worldgen. With default settings, the half-life of a dragon is 30 years - half of all dragons from when generation started die every 30 years, approximately. No Smaugs here.

I'd like to add some serious support to this one. It's just impossible to keep megabeasts alive in smaller worlds in the latest version. The half-life of a dragon is about 30 years, and they get tiny piddling kill counts then get felled by a camel or something equivalent. Something like Ancalagon the Black is just impossible right now because dragons are not favoured enough in combat during worldgen.

Quote from: Crab on February 03, 2017, 02:06:45 pm

57 (!!!) Terrifying Glaciers later, I have a fantastic candidate - all three caverns are linked by a Deep Pit for extra fun, I'm in range of two towers, at war with the Elves, and there's (finally, praise Armok!) a thralling dust cloud. The only problem... the biome isn't reanimating, so the caverns are pretty damn safe if you expand carefully and seal things off with constructed walls and the like. I don't want to have to go through another 60 odds world to make this the perfect candidate, so I'm really hoping that there's some way of modding the raws in the save file to just turn on local re-animation. Is this possible?

I'm sorry! That's truly excessive effort. Yes, it's possible to assign any evil weather/reanimation to any evil biome prior to embark using dfhack. If you want, it can be a cloud of Toxic Crabspores that turn everyone into Crabthralls.

I haven't written up a how-to, but if you post the save to dfdd, I can give you the commands to fix the weather. (And if you want, move any other towers in the world close by so you have a better necromancer supply.) Sounds like you've got the rest of the bases covered for a fun embark. (I look for about the same things as you in an embark, apparently.)

Would you mind posting the how to? I'd like to know how to do this in a more general sense so if ever the mood takes me some months down the road, I can do it myself. Plus I imagine there might be a few spectators to this thread over time who'd fancy knowing too. If I knew how to set regional interactions and move towers prior to embark, I'd be a happy man!

57 (!!!) Terrifying Glaciers later, I have a fantastic candidate - all three caverns are linked by a Deep Pit for extra fun, I'm in range of two towers, at war with the Elves, and there's (finally, praise Armok!) a thralling dust cloud. The only problem... the biome isn't reanimating, so the caverns are pretty damn safe if you expand carefully and seal things off with constructed walls and the like. I don't want to have to go through another 60 odds world to make this the perfect candidate, so I'm really hoping that there's some way of modding the raws in the save file to just turn on local re-animation. Is this possible?

Is there any good tutorial for learning how lua scripting works in DF context for someone with no prior experience?

Quote from: Crab on February 22, 2016, 03:44:40 pm

Does this not seem a little crazy to everyone else? Is there nothing that can be done about it?

There seems to be a fundamental problem with conflicting goals.  Toady is aiming to create a world simulator, and that includes simulating goblins that are somehow balanced against the other races.  But in order to make fortress mode interesting, players (and Toady) want huge waves of goblin invaders.

So, on the one hand, you have player-created fortresses which are essentially impenetrable deathtraps for invading goblins (unless the player is inexperienced, or is intentionally letting the goblins have a prayer of winning).  This means goblins need to be numerous and aggressive -- aggressive, because why would you throw yourself on the gigantic obsidian + steel + magma dwarf fortress when you could stay home raising your children and writing songs?  Numerous, because once the first hundred goblins have done this, who's going to follow them?

Then on the other hand, you have these aggressive, numerous goblins running amok in world generation, before the player steps in.  How do you keep these goblins from destroying the other races?

I don't have any answers.

Surely just make AI sites likely to resist goblin wins? I don't really object to there being 25,000 goblins so that they can regularly send 200-strong sieges at me, I just object when that 25,000 means that the number of elves, humans and dwarves is rather low indeed. I like to embark with all three available neighbours and a healthy dwarven civ so getting the monarch is a good challenge; but the propensity of goblins to make other civs go extinct really makes that rather more difficult.