Bay 12 Games Forum

*breath in*

Humans > Dwarves (thankfully it's easy to play as them, who wants a barrel-sized, bearded hero? Who would play Demon's Souls if your character was half a meter tall, huh?)
Tall spires > Elegant fortresses and gardens > Confusing mountain halls
Two-handed swords > Long swords > Short swords >> War hammers
Steel > Iron > Bronze > Magic Candy
Flax > Peahen leather >> Stupid, unrealistic spider silk
Nerve damage is brilliant and an excellent feature, and if I had to name an example of the things that keep me playing that would be one. Needs accurate nerve, artery and muscle compartment simulation.

Adding magic in the form of night creatures and necromancy to the game was a bad idea and has severely detracted from the atmosphere. In many ways, 40d > DF2010. In fact I still play it. Why couldn't you do steam power instead of magic, huh?

Adventurers should be able to randomly trip on roots and break their neck. Hunger should still kill you. Meeting strange civilizations should give you exotic illnesses that make your kidneys rot and eyes bleed.

Expand the ascii set to include Chinese Characters, so you don't have to represent everything with the same symbol.

What the game needs is more fleshing out of the anatomy, disease, job system, farming and construction, not story arcs and magic.

On the other hand if you're going to add a story, do it properly by letting players pre-define kingdoms and heroes and their relations so we can create scenarios, procedurally generated things are just stupid 90% of the time. Seriously, if I want to generate Wind Kingdom Rolante with its princess in the mountains, let me do it so it doesn't end up The Civilization of Soapberiddled in the land of Armpitsweatomens situated in the Hills of Sociolinguistics and my heroine getting named the Obscure Dimples of Lucrativeness. It was funny the first maybe 3 times, but if you want to get really immersed it gets really, really stupid. What would make this game really good would be the ability to add pre-defined scenarios a la Battle for Wesnoth.

Somebody should create an open source clone of the game to compete with Toady, like has been done for many other closed source.

Sorry.

Agreed on most part.

Why would I want a beardless hero? That is, in the rare instances I do not play a heroine.

Perhaps not the tripping on root stuff though. Realistic or not, such random chances of instant death are not fun.

And a limited set of characters is easy to remember. Perhaps Toady should group creatures together. Example: Elephants, horses, elk and others could use 'H' or 'M' or something to represent "a large herbivorous mammal".

If random name generation is to remain, I would prefer if it was slower and had a sophisticated algorithm to reject dumb names. Although a huge list of predefined, complete names for the game to choose from could be better. Finally, names need not necessarily have any relation to English.

This seems almost exactly what I have been looking for. Time to test it out.

i don't play to win. i roleplay my forts, and often die early.

i don't use uncrossable trapped corridors or trapped training rooms, i don't wall up myself, and don't use steel or full sets of armor.

i don't design efficient forts at all

i embark on ironless locations, and play with high mineral scarcity. i've moded my civs to always have access to iron, though.
i've tweaked dwarves to learn 10 times slower, but also did that for all other mortal races, so invaders have manageable skill levels.

elves and their evil counterpart i moded in (the Elgblin) learn 10 times faster instead, so they're all legendary, which kinda overcompensates for their wooden equipment

i don't use any cheap food sources, i moded out organ meat, egg laying, and plump helmet or cookable plants, instead my staple farmable food are biscuits made of flour.

i've modded agriculture to give a very low yield, and farmers never skill up: half of my population is drafted into the planter army during the planting season

other non-increasable skills include mining, but dwarves get a racial skill of adequate,

brewing and cooking is also unskillable, and because of my learning speed mod, getting a decent engraver is now 10 times harder... keeping my dwarves non miserable is now a real chore


yeah, i'm one of those people that actually still believes in fun

This sounds hardcore, any chance these RAWs might be made public?

Traditionally, I am a big supporter of the extended ASCII display. It looks good, the tiles are small enough and characters look different enough. The three critical features no graphics set to date has. Examining an unknown object is a minor issue. And anything frequent or important will be memorised quickly.

However, as previously linked, Toady has run out of characters. Adding more will remove one of the biggest advantages ASCII display has, the limited number of characters to remember and recognise. I am not too thrilled about the alternative though.

Graphics sets have huge issues with tile size. With too small tiles one cannot convey even as much information as the ASCII set does. But not all of us have wide screen full HD televisions to display the game on. And the two overlap. A 16^2 tile is both too small and too large at the same time. Some of the monitor area could be recovered if the map display was disassociated from the menus which are fine with the default curses font.

Will a vampire be able to drink from their sleeping travel rations...I mean companions?

Obviously said walking blood supply would turn hostile, along with the entire offended entity. Desperate times call for desperate measures, however.

Is vampirism a crippling weakness for an adventurer? I will assume it is impossible to feed off people and remain friendly with their entity. I suppose since it is a divine curse it can be bad. But I fear vampirism will become yet another item in the checklist of things to avoid under any circumstances. Right there with nerve damage and the ominous curse of bad luck.

It has been asked several times already so I will not bother greening.

If it happens that a vampire feeding on a person turns their entity hostile, adventurer mode justice will have to move up in priority.

Quote from: Anatoli on December 14, 2011, 12:07:35 am

Quote

The fewer spontaneously generated objects the better

Why?
For that matter, what does "spontaneously generated objects" mean in this context?

Items that are tacked-on; added from nowhere. This is opposed to items that arise from the natural mechanics of play.

A good analogy is the goblin invasions;

The current, spontaneous system has goblin invaders generated on the map boundary; except for the odd leader, they do not exist in the universe prior to the siege.

The planned, emergent system is to have Gobbo McGoblin be born in year X to parents Gobbo McGoblin Snr and Gobbo MsGoblin, of the noble line of McGoblin, train as a pikeman by killing dwarves in a number of clashes with the neighbouring civilisation, the Syrup of Boats, then get summoned to war against you and get thoughly smooshed by a degrinchinator. All of which is viewable in the legends.

Although, as far as I know, said goblin only becomes a historical figure at the moment it comes to your fortress. It will be taken from existing population pool but all the detailed history will be generated on the spot. Unless the goblin is somebody who had been made a historical figure before.

You are missing the obvious. Toady clearly plays Orks and it reflects on DF. Orks are awesome though.