Bay 12 Games Forum

Nice... good luck controlling the titan, though.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to just take the whole idea from Mr. Boyle, perhaps we should just include "berserk" as a symptom for random infections? Random illnesses and diseases could be an interesting factor.

Well, what exactly goes into the vanilla version doesn't matter too much- I understand if some players wouldn't *want* hard-to-fight diseases that cause forced tantrum spirals, but so long as the syndrome tags exist, they could be modded in for zombie-mode, or a whole mass of other things. Goblin (or elf) rage bombs. Or a spectral night-mist that sneaks through your fortress, causing melancholy. Or something that makes a creature fall unconscious, then wake up and tantrum in the hospital. Or hell, some sort of enemy that causes your pets to all become enraged and attack your dwarves, but doesn't effect the dwarves themselves. Or something that poisons a creatures blood with the same effect, causes a (brief) bout of insanity so they drop their gear, then slowly ramps up dehydration and causes random tantrums- cause really, who *doesn't* want to see rabid dwarves?

Syndromes are my golden boy lately. Want to make the game harder? Give more creatures nasty poison attacks.

So, I came up with a cool, easy mod for a fortress that I think would work.

1: Up the population of Rhesus Macaques.
2: Give RMs a gas syndrome that causes RMs only to breed profusely.
3: Give RMs a contact syndrome that causes slow necrosis in anything.

Hopefully, this would cause the surface of the world to become a blood-covered wasteland; your fortress would have to either abandon all trade, or, for more fun, build a decontamination airlock out of grates and waterfalls. Traders would slowly rot as they came in, and dwarves going to the depot would be briefly exposed, causing some damage, which you'd constantly have to fight.

Working on ideas for new chapters to the Art of War (not just for use against demons or titans). Wanted ideas on using the new syndromes as weapons.

So, starting with common creatures... we have trouble. The only hard-coded syndromes are iron men, cave floater, cave blob and gnomeblight. Seeing as gnomeblight only works against gnomes (and I have no idea how to implement it anyway), our options are limited.

Cave floaters and iron men can both be captured and put in rooms adjoining the enemy, seperated by fortifications- just keep your dwarves well away, and they should get *some* damage, but not much. Maybe enough to turn the tide of battle, if it wouldn't mean exposing your dwarves to it as well.

Cave blobs have an even weaker attack, but are tameable... still, the best you could do is establish a breeding pit (do they breed?) above the entrance way, and drop a ton of them on your enemies.

Actually, all of these are so weak so far you might bet better off using them as part of a torture chamber.

That leaves us with syndromes from forgotten beasts and titans... for the moment I'll assume you can't capture them (if you can, you certainly have the skill and creativity to figure out what to do with them yourself).

The real idea seems to be to use syndromes with SYN_CONTACT, and try to spread the creature's blood to where your enemies are... an uncleaned "Death Room" could work for this, where you put your infected champion and a bunch of sacrificial animals and lock them in to track blood over the floor, then run your enemies through it... poses significant danger to your fort.

More fun would be to keep adding animals to the death room, (pref. war animals), so they all get nice and coated with blood- then release them at the enemy, hoping the latter will get coated during the ensuing fight.)

You can also, of course, use creatures directly- snakes and GCSs will do nicely.

Oh, and if you're lucky enough to get a contact syndrome that causes unconsciousness, try to make a "death room" on the entrance to your fortress from the caverns, or even from Hell, with the floor covered in the stuff- then you might actually be able to capture a forgotten beastie or two.

Thoughts, comments?

Hmm... if anyone should get annoyed at the prospect of shiny blue stuff, it should be other dwarves. Humans probably wouldn't even know.

Tab explosions are a good thing. It's healthy to close everything once in a while, even when there's stuff you might like. It's a good way to come to grips with the ephemerality of mortal life.

I think the spoiler stuff is silly. We have a ton of tiptoing all across the forum and wiki- both of which are populated mostly by experienced players- in the hopes of shielding newer people and not ruining a (fairly minor) surprise for them. I mean, this is DF we're talking about, not Harry Potter. I mean hell, the introductory movie gives away everything you need to know.