Bay 12 Games Forum

The simple facts are that a player will often start with a wide variety of goods, and that it's silly to take so long to haul everything to the site where you know you want to build, when you could just start there in the first place. :/

Currently, it's too easy for dwarves to be happy, or for certain thoughts (e.g. death of a loved one) to be canceled out entirely by other thoughts (e.g. the ur-example of a royal dining room).

I don't know if simple numeric balancing could fix this, so I'm thinking:

What if dwarves had slightly more complex mental states, broken up into short-term (i.e. moods) and long-term states. After all, people tend to have long-term psychological trends related to happiness and such as well as having shorter-term trends; a person who's been pretty depressed can still have his good and bad moods, for instance.

I'm not sure how to implement this, but perhaps thoughts could have different values for how much they influence each scale. For instance, eating a great meal probably shouldn't affect their long-term trends much, but might put them in a better mood.

Thoughts?

Seasonal might be more or less of a headache, depending.

I'm totally going to catch flak for this, but I'm going to have to play devil's advocate with regards to the premise here.

I've noticed a lot of democratic suggestion threads, and honestly, I think people put too much faith into the idea.

I mean, I get the point of checking out what kinds of suggestions people want the most. But I don't think it's necessarily going to result in the best possible suggestions, for a few potential reasons (some of which I'm probably wrong about, and some actual reasons I probably haven't considered).

For one, the more cool-sounding/trendy suggestions can snowball votes pretty easily.
Secondly, the people who play a game aren't necessarily people who develop games, and don't necessarily know how to best implement a change or fix a problem. This includes me! So you end up with suggestions that are too specific, or too broad, people tend not to take feasibility into account, or whatever.
Also, there's the basic fact that popularity doesn't necessitate quality or anything like th at.

I don't even think I'm actually trying to argue against suggestion voting. I just think it can only be taken to a certain level of relevance/seriousness. At least it can give an idea of what people want.

A mechanical, vascular response is far-flung from the pain response in animals. It's completely apples and oranges.

A mouse trap reacts noticeably to getting hit with something; it snaps shut. I sure as hell am not about to say that mouse traps feel pain.

Pain is defined as the ability to suffer due to physical trauma, and if you don't like that definition, then come up with another one, but I guarantee you it's going to involve neurology.

In fact, I'm not even sure why I have to argue this. A plant having a mechanical reaction to being cut does not involve any sort of thought or neurological processes. Seriously, this is just getting silly.

Anybody who thinks a plant can "feel pain" needs to seriously read up on neurology and remind himself that plants don't have any.

Perhaps you meant to use the word experience instead of imagination here?  If not then please include an actual quote, because I've never written anything remotely similar.

I already included the part about experience (exposure) and if you want to know where I got "it's okay because it requires imagination" from, here are your own words:

The term, excessive, can obviously be interpreted a thousand different ways, and everyone has their own opinion.  To clarify what I mean when using it, here's my definition:  Anything clearly stated in the game that goes above and beyond simple descriptions, or isn't left up to the imagination.

(emphasis mine)

Natural glass is real.  When lightning strikes sandy ground, it heats it such that it melts, and cools into glass.  I actually collect these RL, and know a guy who makes them artificially by shooting off toy rockets with long wires attached during storms.  The wires are grounded in a barrel of sand.

That makes sense, if the sand cools down fast enough after the lightning strike.

Also, you know awesome people.