Bay 12 Games Forum

Reputations work the same with player adventurers that they do for AI, so the AI could become "familiar" with the magic aswell. SO they will be able to use it, just not be able to "exploit" it like players, which is fine.

That's not what I mean. 

Yes, it may be possible for the AI to have some sort of experience bar for magic for understanding like crafting skills go from dabbling to legendary. (That said, having experience bars on AI that make the AI even stupider without training would be a massive hazard with DF's already terrible "hey, let's climb this tree, it seems like a shortcut across this valley, what's the worst that could happen, OH ARMOK HOW DO I GET DOWN, oh well, let's just sit here without calling for help until we starve to death" AI...)

My point is that Toady is talking about players learning familiarity with the bounds of the system.  That is, like the candy spires, players can learn the probable areas that are safe and the probable areas that are dangerous.  The AI, by definition, will never be able to carry over out-of-game knowledge like that.  In other words, it is a gamey, anti-simulationist system. 

You say that "you're fine with it" if the AI doesn't know how to handle the system, but have you actually really put thought into what that means?  A system this wild can almost invariably wind up having easily "cheesed" magic users.  (Just look at how you can turn into a vampire to make yourself invisible to the otherwise virtually-impossible-to-beat zombies so you can casually walk up and nonchalantly snap necromancer necks at your leisure. That's just a taste of what expanded magic that the AI doesn't understand will produce.)

If the system means that the spirit's "relationship bar" means that misfires become possible and more likely as the spirit gets angrier, and the spirit gets angrier with more use, then it means that understanding how to throttle use is important.  But again, where's that throttle on the AI?  What if the AI just turns into a strawberry plant any time it sees an enemy, constantly spamming the spell because it's a "defense" until they wind up having a "misfire" that sets them on fire or makes their brain turn into a plant's and makes the spell permanent, effectively making it a suicide spell when they overuse the spell?  (Or if they turn themselves into edible plants in the face of a locust swarm because, hey, those things look scary, and that spell is listed as a "defense"...) Even if you don't do it yourself in adventure mode, you're fine if every enemy you come across in adventure mode just suicide plants themselves?  You're fine if all your companions suicide plant yourself? You're fine if it makes Fortress Mode completely unplayable?

AI is always at a disadvantage to players but the fact that they will be able to use it at least partially sanely at all is awesome.

The AI needs to be completely sane, or the game as a whole breaks down. You're not appreciating how vital it is for the AI to be able to have at least some rough parity with the player in understanding how game mechanics work to make the game world have some sense of verisimilitude rather than dropping you out of it from the suicidally stupid dwarves finding more and more ways to kill themselves through things a toddler would understand not to do.

Beyond that, I can't help but notice how vague that "companion" system really is.  Either it's going to be like, say, Fallout 4's system of companions that approve or disapprove of specific actions (taboos or rituals), and/or something where you have to sacrifice "presents" for the spirit to gain more affection points. (Honestly, it kind of sounds like Toady might have just made that whole "companion" thing up on the spot, so I wouldn't get to attached to that concept...)

Again, it raises questions of how you could reasonably implement a system for AI learning this stuff.  Either they always know how to use their powers (which would be put the player at a disadvantage until they learn the system, but be generally reasonable for gameplay balance,) or they have to learn by gaining "experience" with a system that will kill them because they don't learn that eating meat angers the spirit enough to make their spells backfire until they hit level 10 magic lore.

Again, it raises problems of players knowing that a certain race will always turn into a defenseless strawberry plant if they are threatened, and let players exploit this to the point where all challenge is removed from combat, since there will never again BE combat.  You just need to get a little tracking skill, follow to where the footprints end in the strawberry patch, cordon off a sufficient area to ensure they haven't escaped, and set the fires to ensure there is zero chance of escape. 

(And for that matter, even if magic is just relegated to "magic missiles" and "fireballs", then it still accomplishes the wonderful role of destroying the combat system that has been painstakingly crafted, and that so many people love and find unique by replacing it with fire magic spam that bypasses armor defenses...  The list of unintended consequences is a long one, indeed.)

And yes, this might be the "pessimistic view" in your book, but the fact of computer programming is that the "pessimistic view" will come true unless someone pre-emptively codes safeguards to prevent that from coming to pass.  At best, Toady actually takes some of this to heart and tries to actively avoid the worst case scenarios, "proving me wrong", in which case this sort of listing of everything that could go wrong becomes actively constructive.  At worst, well, at least I'm hosing down the fires of hype before it completely oversells something Toady has absolutely no capacity or even intention to deliver. Toady has just said, after all, that he has no intention of releasing more than a few hard-coded spell types a year because the AI will need to go with it, while people were saying we should get ready for every spell in the GDC examples to totally be a spell in the next release. After all, you have a thread dedicated to hyping up magical artifacts with full conversation skills that Toady doesn't seem about to release.

Honestly, my first thought is that you might want to link that one screenshot where there were several pages of thoughts in a description literally listing off seeing hundreds of dead goblins just so Toady realizes that isn't hyperbole...

I think there could also be a "shortened" list for many traits.  Yeah, it's nice that traits can be given specific language, but it hits "eyeglaze levels" when you see a dozen traits listed that way in a row, and players just can't deal with it.

In fact, this is one of the major reasons I prefer using Dwarf Therapist - instead of some insidiously bland longform text readout, it just represents personality traits as large or small squares in a spreadsheet, which is instantly, visibly recognizable.  (Anger propensity- big square, love prop- little square, violence- little square. OK, so, cranky but not violent, got it!)

If Toady is absolutely dead-set against iconographic information readouts (which he shouldn't be, as it is scientifically proven to be a better mode of communicating basic ideas) then at least use something like shortened and preferably color-coded personality traits.  I.E. Urist mcCranky has an explosive temper, is not romantic, is rarely violent.

A better use would be to use symbols to express this sort of information rapidly without having to worry about the bland long-form prose that causes eyeglaze. Maybe there could be an "expand" button that reads it all out for you, but what players really need when managing a hundred dwarves is the ability to search for dwarves that have courage or have anger issues.  (Again, this is why I play with Dwarf Therapist, since it lets me understand all my dwarves at once, rather than having to manually go through every goddamn dwarf one-by-one and having to write it all out on paper what their personalities mean.)

For an example, you might then have -
*Anger Propensity*
xLove Propensityx
XXViolenceXX

(Obviously, this is reusing existing symbols, but there would be reason to do so, since it means less to learn, which is the point of using symbols in the first place.)

This would at least give you a list of notable traits and their general values, which is what you actually need to know, especially going forward with dwarf personalities mattering more and more. 

Thanks as always for taking the time to respond, Toady!

Quote from: NW_Kohaku

With the coming mythic changes, will there be ways in which myths can "decay"?  That is, portals to different dimensions shut down forever, schools of magic forever lost, or once mythic and legendary things turning mundane when their "magic energy source" is cut off.  (Such as a city on a floating island turning into a mere plateau, or the edge of a discworld turning into merely a chain of really stormy areas of sea on a globe with undiscovered continents.)

For that matter, you mentioned concepts like myths from different creatures/cultures that oppose, and some of which may or may not be true. If there are conflicting myths, will it be possible for us as players to affect whether they are true or not? (To dip into the more Elder Scrolls style mythic, where reality is partly subjective, belief or disbelief can grant or strip away divinity.) If I lead a crusade to wipe out believers of a contradictory myth, can I make that myth untrue, and take away its magical power? Can we, in play, make new myths, or shape existing ones in other ways?

Yeah, some of it happens naturally, just because in a game where things die and are tracked numerically, that tends to be how the world goes if you don't put in some effort at restoration.  We have put some thought into this though -- even in the original Armok, we were hoping to have different courses available for the universe, whether it's fading out, or cyclic, or apocalyptic, or stuck in some perpetual gothic nightmare.

For elements where the default state is "permanent part of the world", it'll take some directed work.  The notes we've drawn up from our various inspirations include some rules for change and some power-sourcing, so I'm hopeful we'll have some of this before the end of time.  At the same time, it would be cool to have, say, a way that the world could become awakened to magic or connected to another reality as well.  I'd like change to be possible, since it is good for stories, but what we'll actually accomplish is unknown.

I'm not personally inclined toward the "belief creates reality" model, but as a fantasy world simulator, DF should probably keep it in mind since it comes up often enough, and it would be funny to watch the ebb and flow of that in a computer simulation that doesn't have any escape hatch when things go horrible wrong.  It has some overhead calculations, but those can probably be folded into whatever schism and other demographic calculations we end up needed when we get further with religions in general.  But like most things, there's aren't particular plans.  In terms of myth creation, we just have those megabeast superstitions in world gen right now.  In the 0% fantasy setting, the myths will have to come from somewhere, though when we'll have new ones in play vs. ones that cultures start with is also hard to say.  There's a lot to do.

Odd, seems like the inverse of what I noticed Toady's worlds existed as before.  I ask about Götterdämmerung, and he talks about "awakening" magic ex nihilo.  Maybe Toady really is trying to reverse the Lord of the Rings notion of dying magic.

Actually, serial killers aren't a modern concept, it's just the name for them is modern.  They used to just call them "depraved villains" or something.

I'd suspect with further personality advancements, there will be serial killers on the loose, as well as more mundane criminals, it's just that vampires allow for more clear transitions between a normal dwarf that mindlessly obeys the hivemind and a supernatural subversive dwarf that murders the other ants in their rest cycles.

That said, this suggestion is a bit nonsense.  If you don't like night creatures, just use the worldgen options to turn them off, problem solved.

No need to get too dismissive on technical grounds for someone trying to learn.

Actually, I thought this thread was going to be about learning coding from playing DF. And frankly, I don't think it's all that bad a place to learn, in the sense that you are required to perform highly structured, logical problem solving.  With the standing orders stuff coming in, dwarf management even in the vanilla game will basically be a form of scripting language. 

Understanding the mode of thought required for coding is more important to teach than the strict set of rules for any one given language, as you can pick up the shibboleths of any given specific language fairly quickly if you have a firm understanding of the underlying principles.

But other species could be.

Furthermore, slings would have to be leather. The Almighty Toad has decided that only metal can make weapons. So it'd be hard to get him to do it, unless you like yourself some copper "slings".

Tell that to wooden crossbows, bows, blowpipes, swords, axes, and such.

...And all this will be moot if Toady decides to have us select the starting seven from existing populations. As Indigo says, this system could still be possible in adventure mode, because if you think about it, Fort mode is just the dwarves sending seven adventurers out on an expedition.

I don't see this becoming a problem because DF has "population pools". Or rather, non-historical characters. 

It's a Shrodinger's Gun situation; So long as there are any non-historicals from which you can hypothetically draw dwarves, you can just say this one character you just rolled up happened to be one of the dozens or hundreds of dwarves in the mountainhome that just happened not to be notable/historical until the point where they started adventuring.

After all, that's basically what adventurer mode does now: Your adventurer isn't supposed to be spawning in ex nihilo, they're supposed to be someone who was a population member of wherever they start the adventure who one day decided to leave it for an early grave along with maybe a side of fame and glory.

I always assumed that the paying for skills was the cost associated with finding and hiring a dwarf with the appropriate skills. I guess it really depends on how you view the process of founding a fortress. If it's a group of seven friends in a tavern who decide they want to do thier own thing, then limited and semi-predefined dwarfs makes sense. They are just who is available. Personally, I always assumed it was more along the lines of receiving a charter/commision to found a settlement from the ruling parties of your civ, in which case finding and hiring the specific dwarves you want skill wise (maybe even personality wise?) makes more sense, because you have the whole civ to pick from. Though, if that were the case it should probably re-roll personality every time you change the skill set of said dwarf.

I like the idea of a random roll for events though. It adds flavor and good RP to every game. It would go a long way in keeping people interested in playing multiple runs of adventure mode. There was a thread awhile back that mentioned a similar mechanic in fortress mode. The idea was basically rolls to determine what happened during the journey. Your wagon might show up with half your dwarves dead or wounded from a goblin raid, or you might pick up a few dwarves who ended up traveling with you. I thought it was a really cool idea. just my 2 cents.

I presume that an embark party is sent forth in an official capacity, or at least with some sort of official sanction by some sort of organized group of dwarves as an enterprise. Especially with starting scenarios on the horizon, there will be pre-defined reasons (at least, officially) for starting a fortress, and pre-defined scripted official support. 

You "buy" talent by arranging with the mountainhome for more talented dwarves to be allowed to go with you on your new venture, with the most talented dwarves being considered too valuable to send off on such a dangerous expedition.  Your starting dwarves are all notably ones who do not mind being caught out in the rain, so they're selecting again from within a select group. 

I see the pool of resources, then, is more of what sort of official sanction you have.  They're only willing to spare so much leaving the mountainhome at once on such a risk, so either you can have valuable goods or you can have talented dwarves, but you have to balance one against the other.

As for random rolls, there are fairly simple ways to deal with that becoming too powerful.  The first is to simply limit their odds of getting a really good roll, and limiting the power they can have when they are the best rolls.  Skills are pretty cheap in DF, it's not hard to train someone up to legendary, so getting a +1 skill rank wouldn't really make a huge difference, nor would +10 of a personality trait.  (And personality traits are already totally random and open to savescumming.)  Beyond that, DF Hack and simple modding allow players who are dead-set upon getting "perfect" character personality traits to simply mod or use the "brainwash" function to force a set of personality traits. Someone who wants to sit there rerolling their characters to get exactly what they want like someone playing 1st Ed D&D by rerolling characters until they get all 18s is free to do so, because all they're doing is wasting their own time and probably enjoying the game far less than if they just started playing before boring themselves half to death.

Which brings me to my last point: Randomness should be limited in impact. A game isn't fun if it seems like the dice are playing the game more than you are. The random events in Mechwarrior are pretty minor in scope - a plus one or two to a skill versus a minus one there.  Yes, there's the losing of limbs, but it's a futuristic setting, (it's all about piloting giant bipedal robots) and full-functionality prosthetics exist and are readily available to players in any but the most desperately backwoods or poor areas, so they're more like getting a scar that makes a neat conversation piece than a real detriment. Killing most of your dwarves and stealing your anvil before you even get to start playing the game is basically just grounds for deleting the save and starting over until you aren't arbitrarily screwed over for no reason. Likewise, you don't want to have random positive qualities that make the game simply better, or at least, far, far easier if you have them.  Whether you have magma on your map used to be like this - if you didn't, you were missing an important part of your game, and nobody wanted to play without it, so Toady eventually just made it so everyone always got magma, because people were just hunting for maps with volcanoes, anyway.

Silk comes form a worm's ass.  Honey is bee vomit.  Red food dye in the modern world is often made of crushed insects boiled in fermented piss.

Purring maggots are just some creature that has a sack of milk-like substance that dwarves can wring out of them.