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Topics - Orange-of-Cthulhu

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DF Suggestions / A suggestion for an oath system

« on: November 06, 2020, 09:19:57 am »

I think the game has a lot of the stuff in place already to make this fun.

Basic idea:

An oath is a trade with a god. You promise the good to do X, the god rewards you with Y to help you achieve X, but if you fail the got punished you with Z.

X can be stuff like "kill 10 goblins in a week", "kill 3 rocs in a year", "build 100 statues", "get fort value to [value] within a year".

If you want a stat boost before you fight a roc, you should not be able to swear just to fight this roc, so it would be a free lunch. You'd have to swear some more things, that should be designed to be more than what the player wants to do. Maybe like "kill 3 rocs within a year" is the "minimum oath".

It could potentially create some interesting race-against-the clock situations, with the player trying to fulfill his roc kill quote before the clock runs out and his legs burst into flame.

Also possible to create minor fun stuff. Like you take an oath never to eat fish for some small bonus (maybe a drowning protection) but then forget about it and eat a fish and then kaboom! (That oath would work great for fortress mode as well.)

Y can be stat bonuses, special items, special powers (i.e. an adventurer can turn invisible or can't drown, in fortress mode sleep need is halved, dwarves cannot drown, stuff like that). I think it can be taken from effects already in the game, example immunity to pain.

Z should be taken from stuff already in the game, like effects of poison. So it could be the effect from some snake poison inflicted on you every morning, it can be some of the undead stuff like you get inflicted with rot, or your ears become magma.

In fortress mode the Zs can be the effects from evil biomes (but underground) or that a bunch of dwarves get an individual effect like they get poisoned out of nowhere once a month or it could be that a bunch of bad creatures spawned in random locations of the map or your buried dead become hostile zombies.

An oath is sworn by one of the gods that exist in the world.

So the Y Z should if possible be related to the god's sphere.

If it makes no sense with Y Z in the sphere (i. e. you swear by the god of lust to kill orcs), they could be generic effects instead. I.e you swear by the god of lust to kill goblins, Y is a dodge bonus and Z is snake poison every morning for the rest of your sorry life. It would be way cooler if the Y and Z were sphere bases. So you swear by the god of rot and both the Y and Z will be effects that are rot-related.

Fortress mode - several uses.

Honestly not sure if oaths would be a fun addition to fortress mode. But throwing up some ideas anyway.

Anyway, I think in fortress mode there should be fort wide oaths, where the fort as a community takes an oath binding for all citizens.

(This is similar to the oathbreakers in Lord of the rings who become the army of the dead because they break their common oath.)

Fort wide oaths should give a fort-bonus and the penalty should be fort wide.

The player should decide to generate and take oaths. This would accomplish the same as in adventure mode; to force some extra goals upon you. Maybe you'd like a stat bonus to digging, and the only oath avalable is 100 z-levels. Then you'd be given some extra goal.

You could add game generated oaths, such as the monarch out of nowhere pledges that the fort will dig down 100 z levels or build a glass tower or whatever.

I'm not sure this would be fun though, as it would be disruptive to the game if mega projects were suddenly trust on you. It's something to ponder about if a game would be enjoyable if the player's goals were sometime randomly reset. It might be fun, I don't know other games that does this, so it would be rather unique and give a chaotic feel to it that in the middle of your project of building a moat or whatever you have to scramble to construct a glass tower. On the other hand, the goals of the oath would be set by the game, and probably the game can't check if a glass tower exists in the fort by a given date - so it would be more boring stuff like put 100 statues below 20 z levels and such.

You could also have dwarfs spontaneously making individual oaths. This is akin to moods.

It could range from stuff like "I swear I will never go outside again" to "I swear to protect my spouse to the death" to "I swear I will face an elf in combat." The dwarf would then get a bonus related to the oath, and would get severely penalized for screwing up.

So you might get stuff with a dwarf randomly bursting into flames or getting turned into a random creature.

Example: The game makes the doctor swears by a god of fire, "I will not let any patients unattended". The doctor would get a stat bonus, and burst into flames if he failed.

Example: A dwarf swears he will never be rained upon again. This gives him a bonus regarding focus so he's always focused, but if you forget about it and he gets rained upon anyway, one of his arms fall off.

DF Suggestions / [UI] Dwarf lists are a mess, resulting in tedious scrolling. Ideas for solution.

« on: October 17, 2020, 07:29:32 am »

This is a problem that happens a lot to me - in situations where I want a particular dwarf in a particular squad or when I want a dwarf in a paricular bedroom r when I want to find a dwarf that just created a masterpiece.

Squads: I have atm 164 dwarves. So I create for instance a new lasher squad when I have gotten 10 whips together. I know I want Urist McUrist, weaver in the squad because he arrived a five migrant waves back with adequate armor, and I just didn't need him in the military before now. I know roughly where he is in the U screen because he is with the blue dwarves.

But when I want to put him in the squad, the dwarves in the list are sorted by how long since they arrived in the fort and not by job title - so I have to scroll up and down the dwarf list to find him, looking at all the names.

It is tedious - I think the UI should allow to find any given dwarf very fast, no matter which thing I want to do.

Bedrooms: Same thing. I want to move Urist McUrist, recruit to a specific bedroom because I want the military to have beedrooms as close to where fighting happens as possible. I find the bedroom I want him in, and again I need to search for him by scrolling up and down a list of 164 dwarves in order to assign him to the bedroom.

Solution: AT the very least all the lists should have the dwarves in the same order - so me it matters not which one, as long at is is always the same.

ALSO, I think the lists should be searchable. You might want to find a dwarf called Be-something that was just in a fight. Just being able to type "be", and then getting a reduced list with all the dwarves with "be" in their name would help a lot to find the dwarf fast.

I think for some lists you need more options as well.

For the military list, I want to be able to get lists like "dwarfs who are not in a squad, ranked by their "total sum of levels in combat skills" or "level of armor user" or "level of fighter". And I'd like to be able to remove dwarf types from that list, for instance "remove all metalcrafters and rank the remainig dwarves by their total levels in combat skills" - it would enable me to just quickly realize my idea of making a new lasher squad, and I would not have to spend time on meticuosly making sure I didn't put an important blacksmits in the squad.

I think this needs to be in the UI. Can be debated endlessly how many search options you need. I think any seach/sorting options would cut the playing time spend on scrolling on dwarf lists a lot.

It happens a lot that I want to do something with a dwarf, and then abandons it because it takes time to find the dwarf. It can be I see a dwarf cooked a masterpiece, and I am like "whoa this guy should get an electrum statue in his bedroom!" But I don't bother because it takes too long time to find his bedroom on the bedroom assignment list.

It can also be for instance to take a sad dwarf and assign him to train an animal, because they might get good thought from training an animal they like.

Or you don't care about trade, so you want a very useless dwarf to be the broker. Then you could seach for "dwarf with the lowest amount of skills in the fort", and he gets the broker job.

So there's some potential gameplay that goes missing because the search is too tedious. At least for me. I guess other people have different stuff you want to do that they also don't because of the lists. Like if you wanted a military squad where everybody has high dancing skills. Something you feel like doing for some reason.

I don't know the exact best way to fix this, but the goal should be that no matter which list you have - the military one, or the one where you add people to be performers in temples and scholars, or the bedroom list or the one where you assign animal trainers and so on- it should be possible on ALL the lists to very easily find any particular kind of dwarf, and have some options to customize the lists according to the players desires.

It would make it possible to just do more things with the game. You'd have easier control of which individual dwarf does what. I think that would be a good thing.

DF Suggestions / Woodcutting should be done by zones and not by designation.

« on: October 04, 2020, 04:11:34 pm »

I personally find it tedious to have to designate trees to be cut down in a repetitive fashion, whenever the log stock is depleted, over and over and over again.

And then I look how wonderfully automatic my herbalists work. I create the zone when I embark, and fruits are picked by the dwarves for the rest of the game, with no need for me to bother about it.

I would LOVE if you could make a woodcutting zone, so the woodcutters simply go and cut trees in this zone forever after the zone is created.

The woodcutting zone should have options - it should be a list of the tree species in the zone, and you should be able to specify which trees you want cut and which you don't want cut. This is because, if the trees you want to log are mixed up with fruit trees you don't want cut as your booze comes from them, it would be tedious to create a bunch of small zones around the trees you want to cut - much easier to create a big one and then remove the fruit trees. (Or whatever else trees the player is not into cutting. Some people are maybe very picky about what types of wood they make beds from?)

I'd love this, as it would remove one of these boring repetitive things from the game. You'd still have to manage your logging, the same way you have to manage the herbalist zones by throwing more or fewer dwarves into and and by sometimes changing the zones if your need changes.

(No reason not to keep the d method of cutting trees as well, maybe some players like it for some reason.)

DF Suggestions / Kobold garbage collector caravan.

« on: September 23, 2020, 10:12:25 am »

The inspiration of this is various garbage-centered characters in sci-fi comics (there's one in the movie Labyrinth as well), plus the desire to make one game tactiv more role-playish.

Problem I:

I usually use caravans as garbage dumps - it's the easiest way to get rid of the rubbish like xsockx that pile up, and because of FPS I want rid of items I don't need.

It feels weird to me that a trader caravan come, and they will always accept a "gift" of a lot of worn down clothes, invader junk you don't want and so on. I feel like, they should be inclined to say no to worthless things. And also that destroyed socks and thongs should have a trade value of 0. So, IT DETRACTS FROM ROLEPLAYING and feeling like you're in a coherent world that you hand over your garbage to traders.

Problem II:

Garbage disposal is, to me, a tedious problem. I like that the game has some of it, but I think that for the offered entertainment of it, it takes too much space in the game to get rid of random animal corpses outside and such.

Problem III:

Atom smashers are used in the game, because it simply is the best solution. It also detracts from roleplaying though.

I think therefore, it would be better to simply introduce a garbage collector function in the game that also worked as an element of a fantasy world.

So I'd say the kobolds have a strange cult centered around the collection and worship or garbage, which they collect from the entire world and then dump in a large pile that they dance around and worship, and the bigger their pile is, the happier their god is. So they send out caravans that don't sell anything, but just offers to the player to donate junk to it. And then you give them the stuff, and everybody's happy!

As they can't talk, the screens should just be like "A kobold caravan arrive. Their diplomat ask "UMUNUMUNUNU! NUGUMUNU!". Do you accept yes/no."

So there'd be a challenge there to figure out what they are asking, plus it would be fun to sometimes get incomprehensible messages.

They should get angry and leave if you offered them valuable items. "Like, are you trying to make us commit blasphemy or what???"

It would be very cool if they helped themselves with collecting the items, to relieve the workload and get it done faster.

I'd like if there was a downside to it - like the more you donated to them, the more likely it would be they'd send thieves or invadors, because they consider you rich. Other civs might also respond negatively in you helping the kobold garbage god cult.

I don't care that much if the garbage collecters are kobolds or another race, I just think kobolds seem to fit the role well.

I think most players would enjoy a lot some help with the garbage situation, and solve it in a more funny way than have to select d on a lot of individual items and them pull the atom smasher lever.

I think also down the road, when trade and economy gets "realistic", it probably can't work to make caravans take a large number of junk items. If you simulated the traders more realistically, they'd not want to devote their time to hauling broken socks around the continent.

It could be expanded to necromancers sending caravans to ask if you would donate the content of all your refuse piles and if they can collect the corpses lying around. Seems like a lot of opportunities for having that backfire, but many players would love somebody else cleaning up the battlefield and just truck the corpses away.

DF Suggestions / Move the standing orders to the mayor's screen.

« on: September 17, 2020, 07:26:15 am »

I would love the mayor and other nobles to have more of a function, and make the mayor more like the bookkeeper or the broker, which are nobles you really like because they are important.

I think it would be more organic if the standing orders, the o screen, were integrated with the mayor.

For starters, I'd like them to move to the mayor screen, and they should not all be available in the game all the time. They should be locked or unlocked according to the player's actions, the same as the bookkeeper unlocks you knowing what you have in the stocks.

Some of the options should not be accessible to the expedition leader, and only show up when you get a mayor.

This would reflect that as the fort grows bigger, also the administration changes. You start with 7 dwarfs doing more what they want, it's more of an egalitarian situation, and then it goes in the direction of becoming more centralized and more refined.

I imagine the mayor has to regularly hold meetings with dwarves, in order to keep all the options available. Say the option "gather refuse outside yes no", is locked, the mayor would unlock it by holding a meeting and then figure out how to organize the change. The options is then unlocked for say 2 years, after which it loks and the mayor needs to organize a new meeting to unlock it again.

It would make sense of the meeting was with say 2 other nobles or administrators.

EXTRA WISH: I think there should be more types of standing orders, in order to give the player more control and to personalize the behaviour of the dwarves.

For instance, you should be able to control the priority of praying jobs or going to the tavern jobs. Or you could increase the weight of leisure jobs, or decrease them if you want them to work till they bleed.

I think personally you should have the option so that with one click it sends a command "after dwarf has finished current job, the next job will be socilize in the tavern/ going to pray / haul an item" or whatever.

I'd like that mayor or king could issue an order that would function like big cleaning day or a new years celebration in the tavern.

Optional: Some of the orders could be moved to barons or kings. To me, it makes sense that the king makes the decision if people gather vermin or not. I'm not sure which orders should stay with the mayor and which ones should move to the king. The manager might also get some of them.

Optional: It also makes sense to me that the mayor or a noble would sometimes change the standing orders, bases on their preferences. "The king has ordered the dwarves to gather vermin". It would take some getting used to, but I think it would be fun. And you'd have the option of getting rid of the mayor/noble that issued standing orders you did not like.

Optional: The administrator level of the mayor should determine which standing orders he can even do. He should gain levens in administration, the same way the bookkeepet and broker gains levels. This creates the interesting possibility that your super administrator dies and some noob becomes mayor - meaning you will have to wait to be able to change the standing orders.

DF Suggestions / (Mood and Mayor) Give the player hints at how to increase fort happiness

« on: September 03, 2020, 10:25:14 am »

In the mood debate, I in fact thing the system works fine.

BUT that it is simply so complex that many players have problems with figuring it out. And that makes people think it doesn't work, and pherhaps decreases their enjoyment of the game. I that the happyness boosters are too hidden for players. And when it is so hard to see fortwide effects in the game of the things you do regarding mental health, well probably many players do not do much about it.

I think what works is more the cumulative effect of many things - the easy ones as legendary dining room, blissfull bedsooms, interesting expensive statues in the hallways etc. The harder ones - giving dwarves enough free time to pray/read books. And then more tedious stuff like making (and managing!) 10 squads set to train wrestiling 1 or 2 months a year, as a sort of fitness club to generate happy thoughts of "relieved a sparring session."

I also think that the way it is set up dwarf happyness is an integral part of the game, as important as the booze supply and such. It's something you need to devote a lot of playing time to - But it is mostly overlooked by players.

My solutions to this is to intruduce in the games hints to the player as regarding to what can be done to make the dwarves happier.

Off course, indications exist already in the negative/positive thoughs in the dwarf info screen.

But it is information overload to most players to look through 150 dwarves and gauge whether it would work best to work hard on getting masterwork clothes and meals, or if you oppositely need to give the dwarves more time to chill so they can pray.

I think these hints need to be supplied with an "executive summary" for the player.

So - once in a while a system will read through all the happy/unhally thoughts in the fort should, check for "most common unhappy thought", "least common happy thought" and such and you'd get a message about it.

Messages

"lack of military training is a heavy burden on the hearts of the dwarves in the fort" (if martial happy thoughs were the most rare)

"no dwarves expressed happiness with the food"

"satisfaction with bedrooms is at an all-time low."

"The dwarves are restless because the have no time to pray."

Maybe also progress reports

"The satisfaction of bedrooms has greatly increased since the last report!"

This IMO would make it easier for players to fix the biggest "holes" in the defense against collective insanity. It would make it possible to ignore the hints as well, if you don't feel like making the dwarves happy. And at the very least, if you have been disregarding messages of unhappiness because of crappy bedrooms for years, you's feel ownership of the problem if suddenly they all went nuts.

I'd say the best place for these hints would be the mayors screen in the nobles screen - this would also make the mayor usefull. You'd like the mayor better, because you needed to go to his screen in order to check what it important to do to increase happiness. So he'd feel like he was usefull like the bookkeeper and the broker.

The messages should off course be extremely humorous and funny! And I prefer to have them inside the mayor's screen to you can choose to not look at them, if you don't care. They should not pop up in the screen so you needed to click return to get rid of it and keep the game moving on.

DF Suggestions / More options for caged prisoners: Execution or set them free.

« on: August 21, 2020, 06:40:12 am »

When you cage invaders, they just become an item like any other. And you get rid of them by either letting them out and killing them or destroying the cage.

To me, it gets tedious to "process" a lot of cages manually, plus it feels historically incorrect. It feels weird to have to destroy the entire cage in order to get rid of a prisoner inside it.

So I'd like more options:

1: Execute.

The cage should have an option to execute prisoner, so with just one click he gets stabbed through the cage and stripped of his stuff. I guess the chief of the guard does the executing.

2: Free.

Historically, prisoners were sometimes led free on a oath they would cease hostilities, or simply sold off. On this option, you ask the prisioner to swear to cease histilities in return for his freedom. If he accepts, the prisoner would get stripped naked, set free from the cage, and then walk straight of the map and home.

IDK if it an be implemented that they keep their oath, but you could for instance make it so that if freed prisoners reach their home site, there is a % chance that they stop attacking you for five years. It's fine by me if they show up again, it would motivate you even more to kill them.

There is a lot of possibilities here, ransoms were a big deal. You could go overboard and have a messenger go and ask for some stuff in return for you freeing the prisioners. Or some emissary could show up and give you stuff in return for freeing the prisoners.

But I would be happy with a very simply solution that just rids you of them.

All the old solutions would off course still be possible.

3: Slavery. I personally think it is too dark for the game, but if the developers feel like it, it would make sense to keep them as slaves or servants of nobles or something. IDK how it could work, but it would be neat to have some slaves from a former invasion.

DF Suggestions / Libary suggestions: More info on books plus a Library noble

« on: August 21, 2020, 06:14:15 am »

(In order of personal priority)

1: Increase the info on the library screen. ATM you can only see what books you have with the artefact screen, but copied books are hidden. We need a list of all the books in the libary, including the copies.

2: Expand the book list to a list that does look like it belongs to a real library. The list should include author, title, general topic.

There should be statistics, such as "number of times read" and "days belonging to fort." plus a list of readers (The old game SimCity2000 had random statistics on buildings, and there is nothing more enjoyable than that. I would love to know what the most popular book in my library is!) As well, I would want a list of readers, so I can see who read the most books. It would personalize the dwarves say if I could know that my fisherdwarf had read all the books about pulleys.

Books should be sorted by general topic (medicine, history, philosophy etc.). So you could really nerd around and go "whoa I only have 2 books on climate, I really have to raid some place with a lot of climate books!".

3: Add a noble, the Master Librarian.

The library lacks this guy in charge of it. The function should be modelled on Malachia in "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco.

He'd decide which books got copied, as in he would order the scribes to copy this or that book, so his preferences would matter. (Pherhaps the forementioned book list would be acessible on his nobles screen.)

He'd issue demands like "new zinc bookshelf", for all the relevant library objects (3 chairs, chests, bags, writing materials, books, shelves, scrolls, codexes, quires). He'd sometimes forbid the export of parchment, quires, scrolls. He'd conduct meetings with scholars, scribes, other nobles, visiting scholars, resulting in happy or unhappy thoughts, depending on his personality.

He'd be in charge of the museum as well, and issue mandates for that as well. ("Bones should be displayed", "an object of brass should be displayed". etc.)

He'd double as doing a bit of work as a scribe and scholar. He should keep a few books closed to the public, because the information in them is just way too explosive for the general dwarf! (Urist has hidden "Can the Fortress Save the World" from the general public, as he deems it dangerous to read for unstudied people.")

He should have a tendency to get involved in the dark villanous plots that I do not know as I don't play that version yet, but is anything better than a Master Librarian found murdered in the library with a bloody page torn out of a mysterious book? I think not!

DF Suggestions / UI: Make the animal info from k'ing the animal available on the z-screen.

« on: July 22, 2020, 07:27:40 am »

Reason: I had a werebeast attack that left a male -trained- giraffe badly injured.

I figured it would die anyway, so I wanted to butcher it. The problem was I had TWO male -trained- giraffes, and on the z-screen where you can butcher them I had no idea to tell which one of them was the injured one. The only option was to butcher both of them.

It feels counter-immersive, that you are not able to order "butcher the injured giraffe." It's like my butcher is blind, and cannot tell a werebeast-mangled giraffe from a healthy one

This could be fixed by added a v (view) option on the z-screen, so you had knowledge of which giraffe you ordered to be butchered. The k-screen gives you the info "he's right leg is mangled, his left leg is mangled etc.". You can also see it on the u-screen. It should be accessible from the z-screen as well.

Another info that should be accessible here is the relations of the animal.

I have some animal trainers that bonded with some giraffes they trained. I don't want to butcher the giraffes that bonded with my former animal trainer that now is the legendary armorer, in order to not damage his already fragile mental health. I want to butcher the giraffe that bonded with the unimportant or dead dork. But the bonding info is only accessible on the dorks relationships screen, but the animals just don't have one. So again, I have no way to tell which giraffe is who on the z-screen, where you can order them to be butchered.

And again, it is counter immersive that you don't know which specific giraffe you're butchering.