Bay 12 Games Forum

Gotta say, I like the idea of making you make magma circulate for magma forges and the like, or actually build them over something... would be tough as hell, though.

Can the demons walk off the map once they reach the surface? That could be amusing.

And now I come to think of it, shouldn't opening a portal to Hell be a siege trigger if you somehow survive that long? You'd think your neighbours would be a bit upset about that sort of thing.

Hell, make it be like, 6 siege triggers. Elves, humans, (maybe) goblins, and all of the beastmen races. Throw in a titan or two.

Wouldn't self-repeatable water freezing trap work against demons? At least if you have no water-boiling ones?

The idea is:
Embark in a freezing climate. Have a long corridor filled with water for demons to path through. It must be "outside" so water can freeze. Below the corridor have a magma cistern with a retractable brigde on the bottom. Wait for the demons to come, open the bridge, drop the magma, have the water freeze together with the demons. Then close the bridge, pump the magma back so the ice melts. And repeating mechanism. Have fun!
Am I missing something?

No, the demon's never get to the bridge- you have water/demons, floor, magma, bridge, in descending order.

I like the idea... mind if I add it to the Art of War (link above), and if so, do you want to name it?

Quote from: DarthCloakedDwarf on April 29, 2010, 12:16:48 pm

That reminds me.  Interesting discovery regarding demonic numbers, and whether or not they're finite.  When I released the legions of hell, several earned names by slaying elven merchants and dwarves.  These entities, in the Legends screen, had birthdates; they were not born at the time I released the infernal legions, but rather, had ages around a few hundred years or so.  This leads to two possibilities.
1.  Demons are "infinite" or, more accurately spawned, ex nihlo, like migrants and the starting seven dwarves, with "reasonable sounding" information.
2.  Demons are tracked like every animal and, by logical extension, finite.
Unless someone figures out a direct way to extract information regarding "unnumbered" populations, it's still all theorizing.  And it's all academic in any case, unless the "unnumbered" descriptor is forced, and their populations are not so vast as the exported data indicates.  EDIT: Call it a hunch, though, but I'm thinking the second.  Dwarf Fortress tracks everything.  There are a finite number of flies and rats, and I have little reason to believe this pattern ends at either ants or demons.  So I'd wager on the second, although it's merely an educated guess based on previously seen patterns.

I've read that it's the second case: each species of demon outnumbers each species of creature, vermin or non-vermin.

Spoiler: source (click to show/hide)

Quote from: Eric Blank on April 29, 2010, 03:11:34 am

exactly how many ARE in play at any given point? is there a cap on it?

Quote from: Neruz on April 14, 2010, 08:36:43 am

A single Demon species outnumbers every nonvermin species, combined.
iirc, Demon species are listed as being 'unnumbered', that is normally only applied to highly numerous vermin like ants.
Also, my maths was wrong. I did a quick check; the largest number of vermin creatures that is not listed as 'unnumbered' is Flies, which average around 28,000,000 pop.
That's right, 28 million.
That means that there are, at least, 28 million of each species of demon.
One single demon species outnumbers every single non vermin creature on the entire world.
Together, all the demons outnumber every nondemon creature, combined. Pocket worlds have 20 demon species, that means a pocket world has more than 560 million demons.
A Large world, with it's 52 species, has more than one and a half billion demons.
And remember; that number isn't even minimum. It has to be more than that due to the 'unnumbered' status.
Demons outnumber ants.

Eh... no. That was just speculation based on the fact that vermin are the most populous creatures with given numbers, and since demons are "unnumbered," even if they're finite it's safe to assume there are more. But, it doesn't really prove anything.

In any case, will someone build a cave-in gun already?

I like this idea long-term, but short-term it would be nice to have some placeholder to limit the spread of pets through your fortress- nothing fancy needed, just have a new "meeting zone" type area, that *only* effects pets. Give us some alternative to quantum cages or elephants pooping in the dining room.

Also, with poisons naturally leading to diseases, it leads to the prospect of having to deal with biochemical struggles as your lategame challenge. Sure so you've got your 100 badass dwarves all in shiny l33t gear, but then you get an epidemic in your fort and you lack medical supplies to cope with it (you should have sent off your own trading/harvesting expedition off the map in anticipation)... and THEN the goblins invade while half your fort is doing damage control in the (just freshly extended) hospital.

Sounds great to me. Hell, I *want* to try to run a post-apocolyptic fort where the surface, all caverns and all water sources carry deadly, fort-ending pathogens. Think about it- lone dwarves venturing out of your quarantine zone into the ruins of your old fort to try to retrieve a single valuable item, which they then dump into a "return chute" leading to a magma decontamination chamber, as the (now-infected) dwarf can never return home...

Quote from: FreakyCheeseMan on April 29, 2010, 12:00:26 pm

Christ, are you dwarves or are you elves? If you think Hell has too many demons, then youkill them till the population reaches an acceptable number.

What's infinity minus one? Minus ten? Minus a thousand? Minus a million?

Infinity is still infinity.

Oh, they're infinite?

Well, in that case, here's what you do.

You take a healthy swig of plump helmet wine, pick up your mushroom-wood training axe, pull your kitten leather helm firmly over your ears, and go kill demons until their population reaches an acceptable number.

So, I know a lot of things like this have been suggested, but I don't think this specific one has.

So, Toady's talked about the difficulty of calculated stress realistically, to make a solid cave-in system. Here's my idea- come up with a very rough stress-test system that may take quite a while a run (no framerate issues, it won't happen often), and have a random "Earthquake" event; the earthquake randomly destroys tiles, with a probability based off the "stress" on that tile, and cave-ins proceed as they currently do.

So, if you have a 50-z-level-upside-down pyramid supported by a single tile, it won't instantly collapse, but at the first earthquake that single support tile will be a huge candidate for sudden existence failure.