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Messages - Paul

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2776
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Name That Currency!
« on: September 08, 2008, 11:02:33 pm »
I say we call them Elfs. That way the elves will visit and overhear dwarves negotiating the trade of a hundred elfs for some cheese. They would then be shocked and appalled that their brethren are not only being kept as slaves, but are worth next to nothing.

2777
DF Modding / Re: Making goblins hostile again
« on: September 08, 2008, 10:47:20 pm »
CAN_CIV is what you need for them to form a civ. I believe CAN_LEARN allows them to gain and use skills (like wrestling and such), while CAN_SPEAK allows them to behave diplomatically toward other species. INTELLIGENT combines all 3 into one flag. So if you put in CAN_LEARN and CAN_CIV, they do everything the INTELLIGENT creatures do except talk - which makes them permanently aggressive toward every other race, but still just as capable a fighter and builder.

CAN_SPEAK may cause things in fortress mode too - I haven't tested it. I wonder if dwarves could still talk and make friends in fortress mode if you removed their ability to speak...

2778
Other Games / Re: Mount and Blade
« on: September 08, 2008, 07:02:21 pm »
It's a fun game. I just hope 1.00 has some serious AI improvements. .960 AI is terrible, especially in sieges. Field battles aren't much better, with them usually just auto running in your direction and not using any kind of formation or tactics.

2779
DF Bug Reports / Re: Creature raws quibble
« on: September 08, 2008, 06:15:22 pm »
Just turn a blind eye to the situation. I'm sure the satyrs won't see.

2780
DF Suggestions / Re: Making due with exsisting resources i.e. get rid of all that stone!
« on: September 08, 2008, 06:03:13 pm »
Swords and axes don't require a wooden or leather handle, that's to make it more comfortable to use and, in the axe's case, to save money. Let's face it, in the real world wood is WAY cheaper than steel. You could make a fairly comfortable handle out of metal. Many dinner knives have metal handles. The problem with it is when you swing that big metal weapon as hard as you can and hit a hard surface, say an armored body, your hands are going to hurt from all the shock of it. Wooden and leather handles provide a bit of cushion.

There's a lot of force behind a sword swung full speed, and the nice leather handle helps a lot. It's easy enough to compare - get a piece of rebar or similar rod of metal and hit the ground with it. Then wrap the handle in tape or leather and hit the ground again. It's easier to hold on to and much easier on your hands when theres a bit of cushion.

If you compared two axes, one made of solid steel and one made with a wooden handle, the wooden handled one has several advantages: It is lighter (so less tiring to use), the wood has a bit more give than the metal (so not as much vibration from impact), and it's WAY cheaper to produce the wooden handle version. It's also less durable, which is one reason some tools are made with metal handles.

Anyway, the point of my post is: Dwarves COULD be making their weapons, even spears and axes, out of solid metal. Maybe they like metal so much they just use it for everything, and we already know that dwarves are pretty hardy creatures - the heavier metal handles may not even phase them.

2781
DF Modding / Re: Making goblins hostile again
« on: September 08, 2008, 05:20:39 pm »
I'm not sure if it will work after generation or not... I've never tried it.

It MIGHT, so just try and see. I kind of doubt it will, because I think the civ being hostile or not is determined during world gen, but you never know.

As for when they'll come, it depends what you set the PROGRESS_TRIGGER_ things to. I believe its 1-5 relating to the different stages of fortress growth, so for population it would relate to the sizes needed for the different fort distinctions, but I have no idea what the exact numbers for trade and production are.

The default 2 is quite low, as you can easily trigger the goblins in the first year if you set up production facilities early. I actually had them come in the first summer one time when I had embarked with magnetite/coal and set up a metalsmithing area right off the wagon to build my starting tools and some armor/weapons for my military while my miner worked. If you upped it to 5 it would probably require more production. You could even remove the production trigger entirely so that only trade or population causes it. As long as you leave one of the triggers they'll come once that one is triggered - if you remove all 3 they will never show up.

2782
DF Bug Reports / Re: Creature raws quibble
« on: September 08, 2008, 05:11:57 pm »
I never noticed that. Probably just an oversight.

2783
DF Suggestions / Re: Food value is extremely high / ease of farming
« on: September 07, 2008, 07:47:40 pm »
If it was only stored on farms it would be trivial to "rotate" crops. Just deconstruct and reconstruct the farm in the same spot - presto, new land for farming.

Instead it could start out at 0 fertility (the lowest it can drop to) and have that as the basic farming, producing a small crop and allowing you to do it anywhere. Then if you want to fertilize, you add potash (or whatever fertilizer that might be added later) to the spot and it gives it a bit of fertility boost, up to a maximum. Stored entirely in the farm plot, as it is now - and giving a bonus to the crops grown in that plot, with each maturing plant eating up that square of the farm plot's fertility. So if you fully fertilize a 5x5 field, once you plant and grow 25 plants (one in each tile) the fertility would be back to 0.

Water could increase fertility, but only up to a certain point. This would make having a water system important - you could save a lot on fertilizer just by flooding your farms before each fertilizing/planting cycle, and it would boost it up to, say, 25% of the max. So you could farm decently with no fertilizer and a seasonal flood of water and fresh mud, or you could fully fertilize and just use it to cut 25% of your potash usage.

You could even add in a simulated crop rotation system, where every season a farm lies fallow it gains 5% fertility. Alone, it would take 5 years to get 100% fertility out of a field without any fertilization. Starting with water it would be 3 and 3/4 years - but you wouldn't have to wait for 100%, every fallow season would just slightly boost the crop for when you do plant.

This is a fairly simplistic way around the issue, but I dare say it would be effective and hopefully not too difficult to implement. It would be similar to the system that's in place now, except base farming would produce very little, while a ~50% fertile field would produce about what we get now, and 100% would be the same boost that we get if we fertilize with the current system. Fertility would stay with the farm plot across seasons, gaining a bit when you wash them with water or when the field is empty for a season. You could get the same results as you get now without any fertilizer if you made enough farmland to be able to wash the plots with water and then wait 5 seasons between each planting, or better results if you either waited longer or applied fertilizer. So newbies could still farm ok, and farms overall would require either more land or lots of potash to run effectively.

I also think the grow durations should be upped, but since that can be done in the raws, the rest of the system is most important.

Damn I'm long winded... sorry for the wall of text :)

Short version: Farms would use similar fertilizing tag as now, starting at 0, but 0 would be a significant cut in production. Applying river water would raise it to a point, leaving the field fallow would slowly increase it per season, and applying fertilizer would increase it up to a maximum. Each plant grown would eat up one tile's worth of the total fertilization, until the plot returns to 0. 50% would be equal to current production, 100% would be equal to current production with fertilizer. All data would be stored in the farm plot's building, to prevent extra data usage on all tiles.

2784
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Name That Currency!
« on: September 07, 2008, 02:53:20 pm »
Except that 'person' doesn't exist as a word either :)

I guess you just call them "Tall" and "Tree", but that gets a big confusing...

Dwarf A: "Thirty Trees are attacking!!" Dwarf B: "Oh shit, I knew this day would come! Call the woodcutters!" Dwarf A: "No, I mean the Trees that walk around and shoot at you with bows!" Dwarf B: "Armok help us, the trees have bows now?!"

2785
DF Suggestions / Re: Food value is extremely high / ease of farming
« on: September 07, 2008, 02:49:36 pm »
The main thing with fertilizer currently is it needs to be kept year round and not erased every season. The way fertilizer currently works is it will increase the yield of plants done that season and after the season is over the fertility bonus is gone, even if you grew NOTHING during the entire season.

This makes multi-season plants not work correctly, since you fertilize and then the fertilizer is gone before the plant actually grows - and yield is seemingly the same.

2786
DF Suggestions / Re: Food value is extremely high / ease of farming
« on: September 07, 2008, 01:43:59 pm »
If you cut the value too much you might end up with something silly like lower quality foods being worth less than the materials, and high quality foods still worth too much.

The current quality modifier for masterpiece is 10x. That's a LOT. Even if food was a straight ingredient value x quality it would be 9,000 of pure profit just for buying two stacks of dwarven cheese and having your legendary cook smash it into biscuits.

Honestly I think being able to sell cooked food to the caravans is dumb anyway. People export flour, vegetables, cheese, meat - they don't export cheeseburgers. (OK, in today's time they DO as frozen meals, but back before refrigeration they didn't). The fact that caravans sell meat is already kinda pushing it, having them accept meals that would likely rot away on the return trip is just silly. I'd be fine with cutting out quality on meals entirely, and having it just as a way to process food into meals that make dwarves happier. Maybe a happy thought from eating cooked food over raw, and just have all the meals no quality and valued the same as the ingredients that go into it.

2787
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Name That Currency!
« on: September 07, 2008, 01:31:31 pm »
Wealth is Limâr.

I like Limul better, though :)

Or Osram, abbreviated Os? I have 20Os :P Although, that looks a lot like "I have 200s"

Pfft, lets just call it coins.

The DF languages really need to be fleshed out, I never really paid attention to how many words they are missing. No words for Dwarf, Elf, or Human - what do they call eachother, exactly? No words for coin or currency. No words for most of the material types. No word for toy. Thousands of things missing. They don't even have a word for bag - now wonder the dwarves had so much trouble organizing bags - they don't even have words to express the idea of a bag, or even container.

2788
DF Suggestions / Re: Food value is extremely high / ease of farming
« on: September 07, 2008, 01:11:58 pm »
The big boost on prepared meal values isn't mainly the base price though, it's the way the quality affects them. Cook with a novice and the values aren't that absurd - cook with a master and suddenly you can buy out a caravan with some quarry bush leaves and syrup. Base values could be tweaked, but quality is the big problem here.

If the base value of the food was average value of ingredient (as in if you put five 100 value cheeses and twenty 5 value dwarven wine, you get a value per unit of the meal of 24) plus a quality bonus, which could be say 10% per level. So a no quality meal would be 24 per unit, the same value as the ingredients, and the best (masterpiece) would be worth 36 per unit - with the other qualities in between.

You could still make big profits cooking cheese from the caravan (3 stacks of cheese = 1500, good cook making masterpiece out of it = 2250) but it wouldn't be extreme to the point of allowing you to buy out the entire caravan by first buying their cheese and cooking it.

Considering that nothing else food related has quality at all (cheese, plants, meat, fish, alcohol), I don't see why we need the same huge value bonuses that other items get for quality. If anything, we could just make prepared food qualityless - like alcohol and all the other stuff. That would certainly nip the high priced food problem in the bud, but I personally would rather see quality still around - just having a much lesser effect on value.

-edit- As far as wheat and underground plants and such, it's a fantasy world - maybe the 'wheat' is actually a type of fungus that, when ground up, produces a flour like substance, and the spores are large enough to be considered seeds by the dwarves. This is the same world where hordes of demons are lurking in hundreds of chambers in every mountain, underground lakes exist as working ecosystems (even though they're completely sealed off), creatures live in mysterious underground river chambers that come from nowhere and fall into darkness, and massive chasms - completely sealed from the outside world - support hordes of dangerous cave creatures. Fungus that happens to look sorta like wheat isn't that far fetched in comparison.

2789
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Name That Currency!
« on: September 07, 2008, 11:50:29 am »
How about Limul. (from Toady's dwarven language, word for gold, same spelling is plural for golds).

Or Osram (fortune, or fortunes, the one used for wealth - not luck)
:)

2790
DF Suggestions / Re: Food value is extremely high / ease of farming
« on: September 07, 2008, 11:28:15 am »
Basic food and farming prices can be fixed in the raws, the only real problem I see is the RIDICULOUS prepared food prices.

If the base price was set to average ingredient value + a small quality boost (say, 10% per quality level, so master is +50%) then it would be more balanced. That way even if you make a masterful dwarven cheese roast, the highest value you'll get is 150 per piece instead of thousands per piece.

I've made stacks of prepared meals worth 50k+ in the current system. It's just absolutely ridiculous. You can trade a couple junky items for a few pieces of cheese, cook the cheese, and trade the cheese roasts for the entire human caravan, including 50 more stacks of cheese and the items you initially traded for the cheese.

As far as farming unbalance, I personally set all of my crops to take 2 seasons to grow. This makes you plan ahead and plant fields 4x as large to keep the food coming in. It goes a long way toward fixing the system, but things like soil fertility and crop maintenance (farmers having to work the crops during the growth cycle) would really fix things. As is, you just plant it and forget it. If you had to plant it and then tend it for 2 seasons before getting a crop, it would require some real dwarf labor to get food - as it should be. You could also add in a system of crop rotation to balance out the soil, and running river water through your farms could help with this as well - new mud from the river would contain nutrients that your old mud has lost. Fertilization could improve yields, but I'd rather not see it made mandatory - at least not without alternate methods to fertilize, as woodless maps are difficult enough without requiring you to use up all the wood that you import on fertilizer.

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