Bay 12 Games Forum

Spoilers ahead (though I feel like this stuff is an open secret at this point).

The ol' sock-full-o'-quarters, eh? Hmm... Hard to say for certain since I don't know exactly what the properties of a pouch are. I'm inclined to say that the coins alone would be better. Their main advantage comes from being a hard metal object with a minuscule area of contact. Like a BB gun on steroids. I'm assuming that a leather pouch would have a much higher surface area. I'm also assuming that attacks would only factor in the material properties of leather, ignoring the material of the pouch's contents. And I might be wrong about this, but I believe 200 coins would still have a weight of <1r, making the added mass negligible relative to the mass of the pouch itself.

Funny you should mention about wrestling with bolts; If you grab an archer by the quiver with your hand, you can press 'r' to immediately remove the bolts/arrows from their quiver, even though you don't technically have possession of the quiver itself. And a stack of bolts only counts as a single object. So you can sneak up to an archer, swipe all their ammo, and stab them in the brain with 20-40r of iron concentrated into a tiny point, all before they have time to react.

Needless to say, I've been doing lots of 'research' on goblins lately. Good times!

What world size are you using? Larger worlds give civilizations more time to expand their territories and grow their populations before they come into contact, leaving them less vulnerable to outside threats, particularly necromancers. And what's the number of desired civilizations set to? I'm guessing you probably set it pretty low to make it easier to get invested in each civ's history. I know I've done that, at least. If so, that may be the reason for your lack of goblins. Every world I've made lately has been overpopulated by goblins, and I haven't even been trying for that.

To get more goblin civilizations, you need more clowns bound to the surface world at the dawn of time. To get that to happen, you need plenty of gods with the appropriate spheres. To make sure that happens, you need at least a few different dwarf and human civilizations. Restricting the number of elf and kobold civilizations may also help by freeing up more civilization 'slots'.

So. Lowering the maximum number of caves to just 1 or 2 will reduce the number of possible kobold civs. Increasing the desired number of mountain regions will give more opportunity for dwarven civs to arise. Reducing the maximum rainfall and drainage to 60 or less will eliminate forests in favor of grasslands and swamps. Without forests, there will be no elves. More grasslands means more opportunities for humans. Although goblins civs aren't associated with a specific biome the way other races are, I have noticed a moderate preference for swamps, tundras, and glaciers. Probably just because other civs are averse to those locations.

Now, if you're willing to reduce the number of forests and elves, but you don't want to eliminate them entirely, then you may need to mess with the drainage and rainfall terrain meshes. Which I do not thoroughly understand proper use of. If you do, just remember to lower the minimum required high-drainage/rainfall squares. Otherwise the worlds will all get rejected.

And of course, to reduce the number of necromancers, you can just reduce the number of secret types.

I've been messing around with the reputation system lately. Mostly I just go around to large crowds of people and start telling the story of the time I killed a giant or, more recently, the time I killed a bronze colossus (did you know stingers can dent bronze, even sever colossus limbs if you rack up enough hits? I didn't. Love this adventurer!), occasionally mixed in with some bandit slaying. This method has gotten me listed in many groups as simultaneously a "legendary hero" and a "feared killer".

At one point, I encountered an elf bard on the road. I decided to test whether bards can spread your reputation, so I brought up the incident with the bronze colossus. Out of curiosity, I asked the bard's opinion of me. But instead of saying "You are brave. You are also a killer" like other people who've listened to me performing the story, he said "You are brave. You are also a legendary hunter."

The next time I checked my reputation, I noticed that a bunch of groups now considered me a "legendary hero" and a "legendary hunter", with many of them not considering me a killer at all.

So, it looks like traveling bards might be an effective way to spread your reputation.

What species are you that a werebeast can't break your grip on it? Or are werefoxes really that weak?

I'm a Fist of Poetleaf, a dwarf-sized necromancer experiment. I've also trained up all my physical stats to superhuman (or rather, superfist of Poetleaf) levels. Now, I can't be sure about this since I have no idea how to check size values on werebeasts, but I'm guessing that a werefox must be relatively small. iirc stature has a bigger impact on wrestling success than strength.

Funnily enough, by the time I got bored and let it go, the thing had trained itself up to an elite wrestler just from trying to wriggle out of my grasp.

Also, I noticed that one of its legs was rotted, so I think I finally know what my stinger venom does!

Edit: It looks like blinded creatures might auto-fail wrestling rolls, or at least take severe penalties, so the fact that I stung out both of its eyes might have been the deciding factor.

Maybe... The thing is, I know for a fact that the temples and taverns in this dark fortress aren't abstracted; I've been in them. My adventurer even learned a couple new songs by watching performances in one of them. So I feel like the other structures should be there. It's just a matter of figuring out how and where they fit in among the other set pieces.

This whole thing might be a moot point now anyway. I found an artifact silver flail while searching the site's main tower, and based on my experiences wielding a normal iron greataxe against the local goblins, I suspect that even an artifact iron axe will be regularly stopped by mere silk and leather clothing. Though I am curious to see how it would fare against large-scale, fleshy targets. Megabeasts and such. And I do still want that artifact breastplate...

Hmm... what to do...

I might hit up some monasteries and do some divination. For once, the cryptic messages might actually come in handy.

I'm currently Rip-And-Tearing my way through a goblin dark fortress in search of an artifact iron greataxe and breastplate I saw in Legends mode. Evidently they are both stored in a structure called The Vile Tombs somewhere in the fortress, but I'm not sure where to even look for that.

Does anybody know whereabouts you might find a Tomb within a goblin dark fortress? It wasn't in the main tower or the prison. All I've found on the surface so far are Taverns/Inns (aside from the ubiquitous watchtowers and trenches, of course). Would it be underground near the troll/beak dog pits? I know some of the work pits have coffins and slabs in them, but I don't think those qualify as "Tombs". I believe there's also a Catacombs structure somewhere, which I also can't find. Would tombs be connected to that? If that's the case, maybe I should look for the local temple...


Anyway, I've been playing as a Fist of Poetleaf, a dwarf-sized necromancer experiment with mandibles and a stinger. The mandibles are kind of disappointing in combat since their bites can't latch on, but the stinger is amazing! It lands deadly or debilitating hits more consistently than most weapons and shreds armor like nobody's business, yet its attacks are flagged as 'kicks', meaning they don't escalate fights beyond "brawl". No idea if the venom does anything, not that anyone survives long enough for that to matter.

This dark fortress, Menacesteals, had a population of about 14,000 when I started (according to Legends Browser). My kill count is around 2,100 so far. So that's like, what, 15% of the population I've killed? I've reached legendary skill as a miner, but the only mineral I've mined is the bones of my enemies.