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Topics - Orange-of-Cthulhu

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DF Adventure Mode Discussion / Does the demon ruling a goblin civ leave his throne room for long periods?

« on: December 04, 2022, 04:58:19 pm »

I found the demon in the dark fortress-tower - then I left to "recruit" for a zombie army. And now I returned with some zombies, the demon isn't there any more?

There's a slade throne in a big room, so I am pretty sure I am in the right room. It's a big square room with a row of statues of monsters in the middle and a row of display cases ai one end. An it has a slade throne.

It seems like the demon left while I was gone?

Wondering if I should stick around and wait or maybe it will never come back?

It's kinda funny. I've cleared out the entire tower, there's nobody in it anymore but my zombies. I feel like I went everyywhere, also was way down below, found all the trapped kids that sadly got ripped apart by my zombies, sorryyyy! I try my best to be a hero, but I can't please everybody!

I'm just standing in his empty throne room dancing on his throne for my zombies to make the time pass. It's a tad underwhelming.

DF Suggestions / Adv mode: L-screen tells you how big creatures are compared to yourself

« on: December 02, 2022, 07:41:58 am »

Size matters a lot for combat in adv mode.

But sometimes I am not sure how big my character is, and I also sometimes am not sure how big the opponent is.

Like I wanted to train wrestling on a monitor lizard for instance. I don't know what a monitor lizard it, and I figured they were probably mini-lizards, but turns out they're twice as big as a dwarf

There's a lot of animals in the game, and you can't be expected to know how big they all are. And with experiments I don't even know HOW you can know the size of them?

IMO you should be able to see at a glance if an creature is bigger than yourself or not, and not have to carry the encyclopedia "Animal sizes: Facts and Fiction." in your pocket to look up the sizes of animals that are standing right in front of you.

I suggest that the look-menu where you get the description "he has blue eyes, he has a jagged scar " etc, you add a sentence at the end describing it's size relative to you: "He is about twice your size" or "He is way smaller than you", and so on.

Maybe in brackets: 0%-25% difference, 26%-50% difference, 51%-100% difference, +100% difference.

It would remove some breaks in the gameplay to look up the sizes of creatures in the wiki.

I'm sure newer players die a lot on this as well and get wrecked after attacking stuff 5 times bigger than them without even knowing that size matter.

DF Adventure Mode Discussion / Does the game crash when you become ruler of a site?

« on: December 01, 2022, 09:42:55 am »

So I enter a human town, seemingly abandoned and taken over by a group of bandits. There's a few people in the citadel, the ruler might a chieftess and they are "right in all matters."

I'm in the castle. There's just 3 people there. To a random monk I announce I am the new ruler, I get a message "You are now on control of Meshvise, ruling the Fellowship of Amazement from the Castle of bothering" - press enter for more, but the game does not respond to any keys on the keyboard.

What the hell happened?

DF Suggestions / Minor settlements

« on: November 30, 2022, 10:13:13 am »

When examining the world, I find it to be a tad to empty in between larger settlements.

Especially mountains seem just totally empty of people.

To me it makes the world feel sort of "too empty", like people just arrived five years ago. You also get a weird feeling like all the sites are like under permanent siage and live in gated communities surrounded by nothing but wilderness. The world doesn't feel "lived in".

So I sugggest scattering a number or mini-settlements holding like max 10 people normally around the map.

It should work like a "major" settlement like a city or a forest retreat each generate 1 minor settlement in ther surroundings pr 250 inhabitants.

The minor settlements should be linked to larger settlements, so you find them around where there's people living. Like sites generate them x clicks away from the site. So you get more populated "lived in" areas, but also some wilderness with less stuff in it.

HUMANS GENERATE (towns and cities):

Hunter cabin: A hunter, maybe his wife and kids. It has hunter stuff in it like hides, bones and meat. 1 pr year a trader arrives and buys all the stuff.

Watchpost: A 8*8 wooden 3 story tower with a lookout on the top and a guy with a horse at the ground floor. They watch out for invasions and megabeasts, and the horse guy rides off to the nearest town to warn them if they spot one.

Hermit house: Same house as the hunter cabin. In it lives a wise man that left socity to seek wisdom in nature. They're located in inhospitable areas like deserts and mountains.

Mining station: 1 shoddy house for miners to live in, 1 storage room for ores, 1 furnace house to smelt them, a small mining system below them. In mountains near roads. Population like max 5 miners.

MONASTERIES GENERATE:

Road side altar. It's just an altar they build in a place people pass buy, to advertise their faith. Maybe you can pray there?

FOREST RETREATS GENERATE:
Sacred tree. A random tree is deemed sacred by the elves. Max 3 religious type Elves like in the tree in order to listen to the thoughts of the sacred tree and then share the wisdom of the tree to their community. (You should SO much be able to cause mayhem and consternation by cutting it down.)

Giant animal training station. Essentially just a small field with a couple of elven animal trainers and some giant animals. The Elves deem it better to train animals more "in the wild" sometimes. So it's a place you can get in bad trouble as a new player.

DARK FORTRESSES GENERATE:
Children-snatcher hideout. A small house with disgusting crap in it. A couple of child-snatching goblins use it as a base for when they go out and steal kids. Sometimes you can find stole kids temporarily held here, before they're transfered to the Dark fortress.

Watchtower: Same as the human watchtowers. Except the goblins use them more to scout out good places to invade. It also has a torture room in the basement.

Altars. Goblins will sometimes build small altars full of bone jewelry and twisted statues to honor their demon load in places they deem to be good for this purpose. A couple of dead bodies of sacrificed sentient prisoners is all you find there.

ALL SITES EXCEPT ELVES
Logging stations where the sites get their wood. A shack with beds, plies of logs and 1-5 woodcutters heaving at trees.

Goblins should somehow be extra more destructive than the others.

DF Suggestions / Beavers

« on: November 30, 2022, 09:46:36 am »

They live around water in temperate forests, wetlands, low mountains and rivers.

The busily transform the landscape by cutting down trees, transforming them into wooden blocks and constructing dams and underwater dwellings with them. 10 beavers make one dam, so if their number goes beyong that, surplus beaver(s) will move some squares away and commence building a dam of it's own.

The wooden blocks of a beaver dam regularly vanished into thin air, thus causing flooding plus the beavers will repair the dam.

Should they run out of wood they will sit depressed on the waterside and slowly die away.

Their furs are great for tanning and they can be tamed. It's possible to steal their logs and wooden blocks, hence you can now oursource your woodcutting to flocks of beavers.

Dwarves like beavers for their industriousness.

DF Suggestions / Procedurally created weapons

« on: August 18, 2022, 10:08:10 am »

So fantasy games usually have the same "collection" or say swords, like short, "normal", two-handed, scimitar, broad.

Instead of pre-defining sword types, you could instead definte the parameters that make up a sword (and a hammer, an ax, etc.), and then allow the game to randomly create any kind of sword within these parameters.

That means swords would be unique from place to place and from game to game. Names could also be unigue % procedurally generated, like elf-sword or [civ name]-sword or [name of inventor]-sword.

Now probably it would take a lot of research in weaponry to do this,

I imagine for swords it would be like

- how broad is the sword
- how long is the blade
- where is the balance point (AFAIK this decides if a sword is good for stabbing or slashing or both)
- how thick is the blade

The parameters would then define stuff like how likely is a sword to break during combat, how good does it slash/stab (balance point placement), how fast are attacks by using the sword (the shorter the faster), how much damage does it do (heavy means more damage and less speed), do you need two hands to use it or will one do, what body size is needed to use it, how strong do you need to be to be able to use it good. (I imagine a weak dwarf with a super heavy sword should struggle to fight well with it, so maybe you'd want to make light swords for the non-combat trained dwarves that are weaker.)

So you'd have like a huge variety of swords, some of them being fast but break easily others being slow and sturdy,

Then you'd do the same for all weapon types, and you'd get like hammers with a long handle and a medium head and hammers with a very short handle but a humoungous head and so on - and the weapons would all work somewhat differently.

Could be a thing that the player designed parameters for swords etc. and got the dwarves to make them. Some designs probably failing horrobly, (like a sword with max length and min broadness probably being super fragile).

DF Suggestions / Suggestions to NPC-behaviour, mostly adv mode

« on: August 18, 2022, 08:16:28 am »

So NPCs in the current version are very sort of meek and passive.

You can for instance enter a bandit camp and murder people, but most of the bandits won't react to it - with a good rep you can even recruit bandits to your party, then they help you to kill the other bandits. Like right after you decapitated their friend that they miss

You can also engage a wandering group of 50 goblins and then pick them off one by one from one end of it - since most of them will just stand around and moan about the fighting and killing and being sad, but they won't attack you to defend their buddies.

Because of the passivity You can even enter a goblin lair with an experiment character and murder goblins, get their beak dogs to be your own pet companies, and then have the beak dogs massacre like hundreds of goblins, without the goblins being aware that they're ujnder attack.

As I understand it, it's because motivations are now individual, so bandits and goblins will attack or not depending on how aggressive the particular goblin/bandit is, and before that they were set to just attack by default.

However, I think the game should aim for complex behaviour. Something that makes it feel like there's both an organized resistance plus that the individuals have individuality.

a) I think there should be some sort of group-motivation thing. So that if a group member gets attacked, all the members get a high motivation to attack. This can then be rolled against their individuality, meaning only the most fearfull/violence-opposed members will refuse to fight.

Characters now see it as like a bar fight if I attack a guy in their group. Like "Somebody is fighting over there, but I need not really to bother." IMO they need to respond as a group.

It should be sort of like when you attack an individual, and then they're aware that you're attacking them. They need that on a group level - so that if I kill a bandit and then ask the next guy to join my party, the guy should be aware that I'm hostile to the sort of person he is, to the group he belongs to, and he shouldn't be like, he thinks is has nothing to do with him that I murdered 10 people in his bandit camp.

I think it could be improved by adding group-level fights, so if I kill a bandit, then all the bandits consider me to be an agressor of their group.

Individual values/personality might make them now want to fight despite them knowing I just murdered people from their group. I think the choice of the non-fighters maybe should be marked either by a diaogue line (like "We're in a fight, but no good come from answering violence with violence!"/"I should fight to protect my fellows, but my stomach is churning!" 7"I choose to betray my group of bandits ha ha!")

b) I think for people joining in a "group fight" they need to see or hear or be told about the fight, and it shouldn't just happen by telepathy that all 50 goblins knows there is a fight if the guy in the back gets killed. So they need to either see it or have somebody tell them X is attacking us.

c) I think there should be ROLES in a group fight.

- Some will choose to run and warn everybody else we need to fight, yelling "Come to aid, X is being attacked!" Then those that get alarmed will run in to fight.*
- Some will join the fray immediately.
- Those armed wilth long range weapons will stay on the distance and fire away.
- Some will tend to wounded. (Like if they have high empathy, they'll go and comfort a wounded before they attack.)
- On top of that you have the individual values that can make some of them refuse to fight or run away by fear.
- Some might declare they don't give a shit about their group when it comes down to it and run away.

- The group of individuals who just stand around and do nothing in particular (Like comment a guy on their clothes) should be eliminated or be made rare - if it's rare the player can probably rationalize that they're paralyzed with fear or weirdos or whatever.

*This creates a cool thing where you need to try to sneak up on people and assasinate them without them having the time to run away and get help.

DF Suggestions / Beyind animal men - animal animals! Enter the hippo-ostrich.

« on: May 18, 2022, 11:15:36 am »

I was just thinking how the concept of animal men (btw better named animal people) could be extended to creating combinations of all possible cross combinations of animals and not limit it to cobining human and animal.

The suffix determines the head type and the prefix determines body type which also determines behavior and psychology.

A penguin-elephant is then a creature with the head of a penguin and the body and behavior of an elephant.

An elephant-penguin is a creature with the head of an elephant and the body and behavior of a penguin.

And so on with crab-pythons, hippo-ostrich and so on. I'd like to have all combinations being possibilities.

Am thinking like experiments if should change from world to world which ones get created and probably there should just be like max 10 of species of these kinds of creatures. So IDK if a god or somebody else decides to make some penguin-elephants, and then they escape and live in the area an elephant would normally live.

In fort mode it should be possible to tame them, breed them and butcher them like any other animal.

The benefits are: They's make each world more unique. You'd increase the number of existing creatures, and many of these creatures would allow for a good laugh.

DF Suggestions / Less random names for geography, civlizations, sites and governments.

« on: April 10, 2022, 02:56:39 pm »

It has off course charm with names like "The Steppe of Venegation" and so on.

To me at least, it makes the game harder to play that ALL the name are random like that, because I can't remember what is what.

In adventure mode it can slow things down that it's hard to remember which forest was The Forest of Beards and which one was The Forest of Tomes.

I propose to use "managed" procedurally generated names like the names for intelligent undead that always kinda sound like something an undead would be called. Like they're called "sunless stalker" but not something random like "bewildering stalker" or "buttonstalker."

Managed procedurally generated names will be like

Example 1 Sites. Example: Dwarf fortress.

There's 3 name models and then the 4th one, the old random name generator. 25% of names are picked from each model at random.

Prefixes, [most common metal], [most common precious stone], [most common ore] [name of king's favorite metal], and so on.

Name-prefixes: [name of founder], [name of most worshipped god], [name of founder civ's leader]

Suffixes: [keep], [forge], [hold], [fort]

Model 1: Prefix + suffix

Model 2: [name-prefix]'s + sufix

Model 3: The [Suffix] of [Prefix]

Model 4: The old random generator.

So you get many names like Uristforge, Bismuthkeep, Magnetitefort, Etur's Keep, Dastot's Hold, The Keep of Galena, The Fort of sapphire.

They'd sound like dwarf fortress'ish, I think it will make them easier to remember. You can recognize on the name that it's a dwarven fort.

IDK how many names the game can generate like that, I guess Toady can calculate if they're enough - I think it's enough names so the fort's don't get similar names in different games. There's a lot of minerals, metals and dwarf names.

Civilizations and governments,

Civlizations could be named after the founding holding, governments after the site they're at.

So it'd be like

Civilization: "The dwarves of Etur's Keep"
Govt. "The dwarves of The Keep of Galena."

Does the site get conquered by say, Armok forbid, Elves, the new govt. is called "The elves of the Keep of Galena."

Example 3: Mountain ranges.

The game checks the mountain range for characteristics. Each time it finds one, it has a chance to name the mountain range of that characteristis or to move on. If everthing is "rejected" it gets one of the old random names.

Tallest peak. Sky, Heaven, Endless.

Most northernly/westernly/etc - square of a mountan biome: Northern, Western, Southern, Eastern.

A megabeast lives there: The mountains of the roc/hill titan/colossus/etc.

Coldest mountains: Frosty, Frozen, Icy, Snowy.

Color of most normal mineral: Grey, Red, Orange.

Most common ore: Galena, etc.

A random god.

That would end up with mountain ranges being called like The Southern Mountains, The Icy Mountains, Dragon Mountains, Mountains of Etur, The Sky Mountains, The Mountains of Galena.

I think it would also make them easier to remember, and it should be done for everything - hamlets, dark pits, necromancer towers , prairies and so on.

DF Suggestions / Adventure mode: Ability to pick up unconscious beings.

« on: April 09, 2022, 06:36:34 pm »

I would love to be able to pick up unconscious foes, because you could then throw them say into a river or off a cliff.

Another use could be to pick up your unconscious fellow adventurer so you could flee from a flight without having to leave him/her behind.

DF Adventure Mode Discussion / Couldn't the find the boss of a fort?

« on: February 08, 2022, 05:50:42 am »

I went on a quest to find a vampire in a fort as I want to become one.

Turns out like 50 goblins live in the fort, and they're all hanging out in the central hall. Like 20 of them attack me and I manage to kill them all. The rest are chill and I can talk to them despite me killing a lot of people.

Some say they're afraid of the boos that leads the place, I figure, "hey maybe he is the vampire." But he's nowhere to be seen. I concuct a plan to start an insurrection to flush the boss out.

I ask a bunch of goblins to be my adventurer pals, some to join me in an insurrection, some to be my heartsperson and get some to do each.

Then I shout to them all I am taking over the site, but nothing much happens.

I figure if I start killing people I can lower the amount of goblins and in the end find the boss. So I start fights and my adventurer buddies join in and kill their former fort-buddies.

It just ends up with everybody dead. The boss is nowhere to be seen,

IDK if he died or if he is somewhere else? Or is sitting in some weird room somewhere in the castle walls? My insurrection went nowhere and I also didn't find the vampire, it just became a bloodbath of meaningless slaughter.

I wonder how insurrections work? How do I do to quench the oppotision and take over? And how come the boss is nowhere to be seen?

DF Gameplay Questions / Some questions about becoming a vampire and/or a necromancer

« on: January 10, 2022, 09:54:11 am »

I have an experiment adventurer, a night creature. Doesn't eat or drink and undead are friendly to her. Can walk into necromancer towers and chill there and ditto for human/elven/dwarven sites.

If I become a vampire and/or a necromancer does this "freeze" my stats so I can't improve them anymore? Like can I train mace from competend to legendary plus even as a vampire and/or necromancer? Can I improve the basic stats like endurance and all the others?

Is there any point in becoming a vampire if I already don't need to eat or drink? As far as I can see what it will do is double my physical stats? That's nice, but not sure if all the stats are then frozen forever and can't change.

Does being any of these change how people react to me? Like will some people attack me more or less?

Does it matter the order you do it in?

DF Gameplay Questions / Mysterious books lying outside forts

« on: January 09, 2022, 07:01:22 pm »

I had it happen twice now that I apporach a fort and then find a random book lying on the ground outside. I just wondered what was up with that?

The one fort I didn't enter, the other one I went in and killed the inhabitants - nothing remarkable, just some humans armed with normal stuff. They didn't have any other books.

DF Suggestions / Dwarf weapon/arrmor shop for adventure and fortress mode

« on: January 02, 2022, 08:05:08 am »

I had a recent thread about getting armor sized for animal men in adv mode, and now I ran into basically the same problem for steel weapons in adv mode. You have to sort of hustle around looking for a steel weapon. The methods I found was just looking at the inv of random dwarves in human sites to see if they have steel weapons and then buy them - go into abandoned dwarven forts and scrounge around looking for a pile of steel weapons. (I can't enter populated forts because they kill my FPS.)

For RP it makes little sense - all dwarves are about is making stuff and being greedy, so they should want to sell their rare weapons and armor for a hefty price. And it also doesn't make sense that a well-respected monster-kiling adventurer have no other way than to hustle to get gear. Another RP thing is that your adventureer is always dressed like a hobo, with completely random pieces of scavenged armor and clothes. I'd be cool to get a full set of matching ruby-encrusted steel armor and maybe your logo on the shield.

I propose to introduce a weapon/armor-trading dwarf position that works the same in adv and fort. Order options include selecting encristation by any gem and quality.

The shop guy stands around and visitors can place orders with him for any metal weapon/armor item the game can make and any size of armor. The item(s) should be ready 1 month after the order is placed. The price should be HEFTY as it's a custom order, like 20 times more dwarfbucks than the items would be worth on normal trade screens.

Fort mode:

Place the shop anywhere you want.
There's a chance visitors place an order. Mercenaries and monster hunters should be normal clients.
You should be able to refuse the order, like if you think the guy looks likely to use the weapon to carve your own dwarves,
If you miss the 1 month deadline, you get some penalty. Like it's shamefull for the fort and caravans bring less stuff because you're unreliable. Or the shop guy gets hammered for screwing up his job.
You only get orders for items in the stockpile. So you can only get orders for diamond-encrusted bismuth bronze stuff if you both have bismuth bronze bars plus diamonds stocked up.
IDK what they'd pay with in fortress mode. If they paid in random valuable adventure-person kind of items it could be a cool way in fort mode to get access to some extra ressources. Maybe they even can pay in shells!

Benefits: Effectively creating mandates that make sense, much more then nobles out of nowhere asking for 5 armor stands or whatever. Creates a small source of hard-to-get items.

Adv mode:

The shop must imperatively be located at the top of the fort next to the trade depot, because it's so hard to enter the fort due to FPS.
You should just be able to order anything and the game would produce a diamond-encrusted shield without bothering to check if the fort has diamonds.
The price should be HEFTY.
There should be a one month delay, just to make you wait for it!
It should be depending on rep if they want to sell to you at all - like they need to consider you protector of the weak or brave. And if you kill people from the dwarven civ, they blacklist you from the shop. (They don't want to sell steel weapons to any random lunatic!)

Benefits: It would create a little mini-quest --- doing good deeds to make the dwarves like you, gives you a reason to visit a fort, gives you the task of getting valuable stuff together to pay, gives you an extra option to get gear, makes it easier to play oddly sized animal men.

DF Suggestions / Quippy taunts for the combat log

« on: December 15, 2021, 01:37:03 pm »

Quips have specific various conditions, for instance "quipper cuts the leg of opponent" or "quipper stabs opponent in the arm."

Furthermore the uttering of a quip should depend on the personality of the speaker, with quips being uttered more frequently if a person has high values for merriment and eloquence and has low stress.

If the conditions are met, the quip enters the combat log right after the event that trigghered it as something said by the quipper.

They should be rare enough so it feels like sort of special to see on, but not like ultra rare. I'm thinking 1 quip every 100 successfull attacks?

Ideas:

Quip: "Now you can learn how to clap with one hand!" Trigger: Cuts hand off.

"This might hurt your dance moves!" Cuts leg off.

"I guess you can cancel your dentist appointment." Bashes teeth out.

"Be happy I just washed my socks." Kicks person in head.

"Do you mind if I keep this?" Rips body part off and holds it.

"You didn't know hammer time just started?." After scoring hit with war hammer.

"I heard you wanted an [item], so here you go." After scoring archery/throwing attack with [item].

"I can show it to you in slow motion some day." After dodging attack.

"Oh, did that hurt?" After gelding blow.

I think it would be fun to spice the combat log up with some quips, and probably it would create strange effects in some cases.