Bay 12 Games Forum

I've realised one reason for the decreasing number of friendships.  You can't be friends with a relative.  Over time, more and more of the dwarfs coming into the fortress (as immigrants) are related.  So each dwarf can have 10 cousins.

In other news, the "second seven" have yet to make a single friend after 5 months.  I've moved more of their workshops into their specific burrow and segregated the work a bit more to encourage isolation in the burrows, however I'm starting to be swayed into thinking that there really is something broken here ;-)

One theory I have is that dwarfs build up need for companionship over time.  Dwarfs with lots of relatives don't feel the need to make friends.  The starting seven are "poofed" into existence without friends or family and so make friends quickly.  Immigrants, generally have lots of family.  This would explain why PatrikLundell is able to be successful in making matchups in his dying civ, while Squirrelloid is having no luck.  If I get some immigrants without family, I may burrow them separately to see if they make friends.

How distantly related must a dwarf be before they're considered unrelated? Or does the family line continue forever, forcing us to depend on non-historical figure migrants for continued procreative fraternity?

Quote from: AceSV on March 18, 2017, 11:19:36 pm

Sorry if this has been asked,

Someone in the past suggested that the artifacts updates would involve the ability to give powers to items, like a sword of fire or amulet of extravision.  Is that actually something you want to do?  If it were implemented, should expect magic items to be only randomly generated artifacts or would it be possible to mass produce particular items, with or without modding? 

I seem to recall an interview where Toady mentioned that he liked the idea of explosives.  So maybe his plans for gunpowder would be more like the orc's explosive attack at Helm's Deep.

I am hoping that black powder charges have some mining applications if they are implemented.

There is the problem that explosive charges, that if it's affected area could compete with dwarven miners, the affected area would be HUGE. Unless dwarves were made to dig much slower through harder rock.
That said, lever operated blackpowder charges would be much more useful for breaching walls and floors remotely without having to finagle with cave-in nonsense, as well as for traps. You'd certainly have to measure it out so you could control just how much structural damage you're planning to do with these things, but I can imagine a fragmentation blackpowder charge would do some serious damage to a squad caught in a kill corridor.

Correction: "a priori" was the wrong word, I meant Casus Belli.

Currently, any walls that cannot be climbed are too high to realistically jump to, anyway.
That said, being able to mod creatures to be great jumpers (and great landers) would definitely be useful.

Mainly for future consideration by the toad, feel free to pitch your own ideas. Not all of these are boat related, some applying to general inter-site interactions.

-When on an island isolated from any civilizations, make it so the parent civilization may or may not know about your fortress's existence, dependent on availability of hearsay or starting scenario.

-Allow expeditions to cross water, the amount they can cross controlled by the size and supplies available to the expedition. They will likely need a wagon to transport any boat components to shore, and a shore of appropriate roughness for the boat they're planning to deploy. You could also send an expedition out specifically to build a rudimentary dock to allow bigger boats. This would allow inland fortresses to potentially connect to the outer world whilst in isolation, though this would depend on the distance to the nearest coast. Things could get hopeless really quick when all you have is seven dwarves, many hundreds of miles away from a smooth highly savage coastline, in the midst of a Terrifying ocean, with mountains in the way...
-Setting up a coastal fortresses on both coastlines in question, with docks and boating infrastructure, and retiring them should help mitigate the above point.

-Allow expeditions of diplomats, issuing a general desired goal and the flexibility and resources they could agree on to achieve it, when discussing situations with other civilizations. Certain topics include:
--Asking about events occurring at the visited site or informing the site of specific or general events with a degree of authority above general rumoring.
--Request the general expectation of a trade channel going either way, encouraging sites to send you a caravan or to send you a "caravan wishlist" to increase the chance of giving them the items they desire.
--Declaring or requesting changes in the inter-site relations of the site in question, with a given chance to declare 'a priori' for such, or lack therof, or even lie about it. The latter two will likely cause your diplomat to be upset based on their ethics, will make other sites and civilizations trust your fortress less due to it, based on their ethics (including your home civ), and will cause unrest if your civilians catch wind of this action, based on their ethics (which means absolutely for default dwarven ethics). Anything up to and including demands at threat of war or war outright.

-Add "kill diplomat", "kill civilian", "kill surrendering", and "war no a priori", to ethics, to allow dwarves and other civilizations to react to such incidents. The first four should ONLY apply if the kill target is in any combat level at brawling and above.
--A unit voids their ethical protection in the first three mentioned ethics if:
---They initiate lethal or higher levels of combat.
---They go into No Quarter at any time during combat.
---They raise the combat level after successfully surrendering.
--They will still be affected by other kill ethics however. Dwarves can be given specific actions for combat ethical situations, and will attempt to adhere to them based on their ethics and discipline, or can be left to decide on their own.

Just a few ideas.

Quote from: iceball3 on March 07, 2017, 02:24:31 am

I wonder if, for fortress insurrections, there should be a means to introduce some sort of ideological paradigm that the player can have direct or indirect control over (ethics being followed, people being in power based on merit/lineage, etc).

I think that citizen statuses are basically that.  In a prison prisons would not have the ability to become head jailer for instance.

True, but currently, status is a little limited. We can control labors, very vaguely and not-discreetly control standard of living, control nobles somewhat (with positions that don't do or mean too much besides what they strictly do currently), and control citizenship (barely, we can't control whether not-full citizens have full legal rights in the fortress, nor can we demote someone's citizenship or exile anyone without killing them outright), and even then, citizenship levels isn't such a big difference, as anything below "full" is excused from a very large portion of the burden of labor full citizens do, as well as the fact that they eat all the same food and hang out in all the same inns anyway.

The only meaningful control at the moment is bedrooms, everything else, the units will help themselves to unless you deliberately wall them off.

During world time, (or after) does older dragons have better chance to survive an encounter than younger ones ?

If I'm not mistaken, seeing as dragons gradually get larger as they age (up to a cap), assuming the dragon didn't start off at full-grown age, it'll gradually get bigger and thusly become a stronger combatant for the combat simulations that take place during worldgen.

I have an idea for an appointed noble position much like the bookkeeper: A census taker.
The idea being: those responsible for collecting census (which may or may not be the same person who organizes all this information) goes from dwarf to dwarf in your fortress, briefly consulting them about their general needs, desires, skills, opinions, et cetera.
This information is then relayed to the census bookkeeper, who documents and writes out a player readable report based on what is requested, such as the proportions of religions worshipped, the popularity of insurrectionist movements and their desires if applicable, a list of dwarves that can be sorted apart based on stats, ideologies, skills, and preferences, as well as a general list of what ails the population in the fort in terms of needs, desires, and upsets.
The accuracy and completeness of the information gathered should be dependent on the gatherer's social skills, as well as how liked they generally are amongst the individuals they poll.
The representation of information and the persistent accuracy of generalized results should be based on the record keeping skill and on occasion the biases of the one doing the organization of the report, as well as the development and education of the "anthropology" related research topics.
Reports require a quire or scroll, and when they are completed, they can be viewed through a menu, or through the item of the report itself, which is to be stored in a special room called the "site archives", which functions similar to a library, but is used minimally for studies, instead holding administrative documents such as the census reports mentioned. Other things these archives could be stowed with perhaps could be the quire-written equivalent of reports on trade agreements made with liaisons, as well as stocks/monetary reports made by the bookkeeper and broker, or the record of mandates issued by nobles, and their successes and failures.