Bay 12 Games Forum

I don't know about this. They WILL make the game lag, and don't provide any useful information. Maybe they could be added for megabeasts, etc. But for small creatures? Come on.

There is so much potential though. Granted, I've never worried about how laggy the game gets and am unlikely to start worrying about that any time soon. I think most of the people who were/are against artwork for footprints mainly had an issue with Toady spending time doing them before other big ticket features.

Wow, you look like Tom Ballard. Grow a beard and you'll never worry about MCS (missing chin syndrome) again! And that's a great shirt, I'd wear that.

Show us! Picture of the shirt, please.

This is how I always imagined Trade Depots to look.  A simple loading dock for wagons with a counter.



It's made from rough marble.

"You know...I wouldn't usually consider trading all of my goods for soiled and bloody goblin rags, but this depot...Man, this depot." DG seems pleased with the trading.

Yeah the trees are fat, but they aren't particularly tall. Toady did talk about 30z or 20z tall trees being possible, but that was before he implemented them. 27z would be like the Grant Tree.

Which has a trunk diameter of about 5m, right? What're the dimensions of a tile meant to be again?

With pulping coming to prevent Necromancers and reanimation to be too strong, do you plan to ever add a limit to the number of corpses a necromancer is able to reanimate at a time ? With something like a necromancer skill to increase our corpse cap and/or our range. And making reanimating creature that are far stronger than us possibly go berserk because of its strong will being able to be partially free from our control over them, but not being strong enough to be sane.

From the wiki: "Necromancers who have a sufficient following may use their zombie slaves to build dark towers, a task that requires at least 50 followers" http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Necromancer
DF doesn't seem like the type of game that wants to allow the AI to do things that the player couldn't theoretically do so I assume you would be able to get at least that many followers and probably more. Of course there's a difference between directly controlling that many zombies as a fighting force and simply animating them like puppets. So there's merit in considering limits on how it would work and a sense of the "strength" of different necromancers that is not tied exclusively to how many zombies they curently have. But that's when questions start becoming suggestions. I'd guess that Toady hasn't thought about it much yet.

I wonder if there will be complaints about sneaking no longer being a perfect cloaking device.

I've played fortresses at 1FPS for (in-game)decades, I don't really mind it.

Yeah, when I was playing in the 2d days my computer would hover under 10 fps right on embark and I was content with that. Now I get high FPS with a better computer but it's never really been a game-breaker for me in fortmode because of the type of game it is. I'm content to wait. Adventure mode is a pain in the ass if you have low FPS or hit a lag spike though.

The way I envision "pulping" is just a step beyond all-red damage is currently.  For things that move under their own power, pulping shouldn't really have any effect when it happens, since a fully damaged limb is unusable. 

I'm pretty sure that thralls aren't going to be any easier to deal with, since their whole deal seems to mainly be immunity to pain (which seems to afford an enormous advantage in combat), and if you can get a part fully damaged then it can't be used anyway, regardless of pulping. 

The only place it ought to show up is with zombies, and perhaps material-based creatures, though once again, I would expect that mangling a bronze leg into a pulp wouldn't be easy to do (and I suppose "dusting" or "rubble-ing" might be better descriptors).  The mechanic is (from what I understand) something to handle situations where the damage done to a part is extremely extensive, to the point where it seems strange that it can still be used by the creature. 

What you should probably actually be worried about is how much HARDER the (proper non-thrall) undead are going to be in upcoming versions.  Right now the fact they use hit points makes them very very easy to defeat.  The pulping changes mean they are going to be moved back to the standard combat mechanics, but with some way to damage them beyond repair, but this will probably be very difficult to do.  My expectation is that zombies are going to end up somewhat stronger than their living or husked counterparts, and that unless Toady does some reaction-timer stuff along with the combat mechanics, necromancers are going to be (even more) completely unstoppable. 

Creatures do get an arbitrary buff if they are killed and then raised and I assume it was done to make them more difficult. Find a creature that is skinny, kill it, raise it, and then check its description. You'll notice that it's now giant and packed with muscles. To be scientific you can weigh the corpse before it's raised and then again once you kill the zombie; you'll see that the zombie corpse weighs more. I did some testing on dragons and their zombies for a thread where I was trying to prove if undead worldgen dragons start out fully grown but the changing weight of zombies thwarted me. There was also the zombie bacon thread.