Bay 12 Games Forum

Then what about severing sensory nerves to make them immune to pain? Removing bodyfat to make them faster?

Further Suggestion: Limiting this to arena mode might be sensible.

At present, it looks like biochemistry/physiology is in its early stages, in that food and drink are currently, at their core, timers, or can at least be generalized that way; the "guts" are needed to turn a eat/drink event into a replenishment of those timers. Dwarves don't need a pancreas or spleen because there's no representation of insulin/glucagon/bile, nor a lymphatic system, so they're placeholders right now. 

I'm not criticizing this, merely noting that if/when we get a working dwarven biochemical model, the ability to remove organs becomes much more of a meaningful choice. At present players would simply rip out everything from their dwarves but heart, lungs, guts, skin, motor nerves, bones, and muscles, and get fast-moving extremely resilient fighters who work a lot like undead with blood.

Of course, the ability to voluntarily remove things perhaps gets too steampunk? If we're going off of a low-magic fantasy setting, having the evil warlord remove semi-vital organs from his minions to limit their lifespan and vastly increase their utility doesn't quite fit.

In my experience, a dwarf's death is a set piece in terms of unhappiness. Death of a friend, death of a lover, death of a parent, etc; it doesn't matter HOW that dwarf died, only that he's now dead.

That said, it's usually much easier to prepare for deaths by old age, since you can keep the related bad thoughts like decay from happening.

*cough*
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=2813
*cough*

Quote from: CognitiveDissonance on August 25, 2010, 07:41:20 pm

You guys mentioned infinite weapon traps with glass serrated discs.

I was reflecting on that... wouldn't the first 3-4 traps, hitting about 120 times, level up an iron-armored gobbo to legendary EVERYTHING if it survives? Then, it WILL dodge all the rest of the traps, as well as anything else you can throw at it.

I had this happen with an invasion - a single goblin survived my multiple traps, and as a result became immune to them. Then, the fortress died.

This makes so much sense. I have a few hundred long corridor of traps, and I have been noticing a number of highly skilled goblins every time they run through. It's been too long since I last played to reliably say anything, but I'll see if I can test that and see what happens.

Humorously enough, if that's true then the glass serrated disk traps actually hurt you more than they help.

This is why you build an option to flood the trap corridor with something hazardous. Let's see if these supergoblins can outsmart boolit magma.

I'm trying to make a bone-heavy breed of some animal to supply my marksdwarves with training material, but I'm a little fuzzy on what specific traits influence the butchering returns and how the multipliers actually work. How much does a given trait affect a given return, and which attributes modify which return?

I vote yes on SPEED:0 , if only because the sheer volume of space you're going to need warrants its use to keep low FPS from dragging the project out.

Also, perhaps make the reflecting pool run red with blood? Smears travel so fast in this version, and it'd go well with the Tholtig Memorial.

I build my forts with as many planes of symmetry as possible, down to the placement of the stairs, and have been working on making the core of the fort as small as possible. Beyond that, I build as many trap-filled corridors with as much automation as possible. It's not out of the question for me to have fivefold redundancy on my entry corridor sections, each of which will seal itself off, flood itself with magma, drain itself, then open itself to be cleaned should a goblin reach the pressure plate at the end. Five of these corridor quintets in sequence form the first rung of my defenses. At the end of the gauntlet of goblin blenders and fluid traps following those, my entire fort core is suspended over magma from supports that will collapse should a non-citizen manage to reach any of the staircases leading down into the fort corners.

Naturally, this fort core has eight redundant backups arrayed in a 3x3 box. Each is also surrounded by magma until the previous fort core is terminated (which automatically drains the magma from the entryways into the next core), and stocked with a married pair of dwarves and a cache of supplies (and farmland) so they can live out the automated obsidian farm recasting the destroyed fort core(s) and go dig them out.

I'm paranoid-anal.

Try dropping them into upright spike traps loaded with as many spears as you can make. It reduces the drop needed for a particular level of lethality, and thus the likelihood of violent dissociation, and bleeding out doesn't affect their butchering.