Bay 12 Games Forum

Version Bump!

Snoman, I was looking into sand for you, but the new version got in my way. I will look later.

Hey I'd rather a new version!

I guess I could start a new fortess with a copy of DF, somewhere with sand, and try to get the settings required from that, but to be honest I've got no idea where to start. There are a lot of attributes per tile!

Can I make a sand tile with this? I'd like to cheat and add in some resources I don't have, but don't have any example tiles to copy the settings from.
 I could backup my fortress and start a new one in a new area, reveal and start writing down tile values, but has anyone already got some written down?

Have you packed your -woollen mittens-? 

Just pick a biome that freezes in the winter (but not all year round!) and mine a hole in a lake! You can even carve a staircase into the lake beside your island in order to get to the bottom, it will all melt in the spring anyway...

Don’t forget you'll have to build it out of walls so you can construct buildings on them... I would also recommend building it right to the floor of the lake as I'm not sure how a floating island of walls would react to the rest of the lake melting, probably catastrophically 

Has anyone done this? What would happen?? I'm going to build on some ice this winter to find out!

The terrain is 100% procedural.  You can read about how it works on the wiki, or at this interview.

On the other hand, the towns and fortresses and towers and such are all pre-made and plopped down on the map.  The location of these places are procedurally generated, and are dynamically taken over by different races, dynamically populated, and dynamically ruined.  Towns will have a temple sometimes, and there are a couple different temple models, but these are also put down wholesale.

So the landscape is far, far, FAR more procedural than Diablo II EVER was.  But yes, there are SOME premade aspects... those exclusively being towns.

Thanks for the references. So you mean the layout of the buildings etc for the towns etc right?

Procedural and randomised are not mutually exclusive.

In world gen, a pseudorandom seed is used to kick of the world generation procedure.

Procedural generation of stuff just means that Toady doesn't hand craft every world that is generated, he writes procedures that do it for him.
 He also happened to make the parameters adjustable, and able to take random inputs, giving different "randomised" worlds every time.

EDIT:
Reading the original post again, you're both right. Its just that during play after world gen, the 'basic what if' stuff by all the NPCs, that your friend refers to, are (as far as I can tell) much the same factors that shaped the world in world gen. Its just that in world gen everything ran way faster, and that after world gen, there is player interaction as well.

It would be nice to hear from Toady on this, (if he hasn't already commented on the issue somewhere). As the world generation part of DF is a masterful idea in my opinion, and it would be cool to have a better understanding of the forces that shape a DF world.

Quote from: Aqizzar on August 06, 2008, 02:57:50 am

I'll add that there's no reason to crank out ballista bolts in industrial quantities.  Catapults an Ballistae both use Siege Operator skill, and firing a catapult at a wall one tile away gives the same experience as anything else.  I always use catapults in some out of the way room, firing at a wall over a channel (to cut down on stone hauling) to train up operators.

He was talking about Engineers, not operators.

And low quality ballistae suck oh so much. Havent got even one good quality to check. Catapults ALL suck at hitting an enemy btw...

Yeah I was talking about producing industrial quantities of arrows to level up your seige engineer. Masterful ballistae and catapults reload much faster. Your seige operators get 30 exp for loading a seige engine and 30 exp for firing.
 So if you have masterful ballistae for the defence, thats great for (hopefully) obvious reasons. But, if you wait to level up your seige engineer and make masterful catapults in your training range, then when you get to the point where you can spare the dwarves to sit and train on the catapults, they level up much faster due to the higher quality catapults.
 Thats just the way I do it. The alternative would be to start training seige ops straight away on low quality catapults. It depends on your preference I quess.

Use the range of ballistas to your advantage. They have the range to hit things half way across the map. Don't think "a dozen tiles should do", think "50 tiles should do". If you funnel the goblins into an extremely long, straight tunnel or channel with a ballista set up on one end, you'll be able to take out a whole slew of them before the even get within sight.

Yeah distance is key. Don't use a switchbacked path, use one really long path. I built a raised road 100 tiles long. I t runs off the end of a hill now and meets up with a big ramp I built at the end.
 Also, if you have a three wide road, build 3 ballistas overlapping, so that the the ballistas fire into the 3 tiles of the width of the path:

1 = ballista number 1
2 = ballista number 2
3 = ballista number 3
# = undug ground
F = Fortifications
. = open tile

......111#
...222111F
333222111F
333222FFFF
333#######

You need those fortifications alung the side of ballista #2, other wise things walk there and get shot. Make sure this is dug out the side of a hill so that it classifies as dark/subterrainian, that way you can ban dwarves from going outside and still man(dwarf?) the ballistas.

But yeah, best piece of advice is to build a really long straight path.

Also fill a very large stockpile with arrows before building your ballistas, enough to make a legendary seige engineer. Then you get better, faster firing ballistas.