Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: rephikul on January 24, 2012, 01:50:46 pm

It's actually the point: Randomly drop by in large number, screw up trap lines to bait and gore some of the idiots that run out.

"Actually the point?" That doesn't make it anything but irritating. It also doesn't make syndromes a good way to implement various "special effects" on creatures' attacks. Those effects probably should be in the game, but the way they're implemented here is just bad.

The point is to make it irritating. The players need to be able to cope with losses and move on. And, I dont know how to make special effects aside from syndromes. Enlighten me if you have any idea.

Quote

What I actually meant was "dwarven management" and not "player time". Pets in my mod go to the food stockpiles and water sources by themselves and require no micromanagement. I consider it a superior solution to pasture. Ironically pasture was implemented not long after my feature and introduced some unsolvable bugs effecting my feature.

They also cause no significant amount of additional dwarven management except for that the player has to do. Again, requiring pets to eat and drink like you do simply makes more busy work for the player, which is not fun, and doesn't make the game significantly more Fun, either.

It does. The burden of extra food production now lies on dwarves, chipping away dwarven time which can be used for other things such as making equipments for themselves or trade goods to sell away. The maintenance factor of pets also affect how the player can use them. For example, if the player has obtained a dragon pet, he cant just chain him outside and hope the dragon's steel skin to tank every single siege coming his way without a single loss because dwarves have to somehow feed them occasionally. Sure all of these occasional losses are minor, but every single minor things add up.

Really, piercing metal armor with anything but a very much superior metal shouldn't be realistically possible.

At its height, medieval war gears were all steel. People died. You do the math.

Important skills, like metalworking, are difficult enough to raise as-is, and it breaks verisimilitude to have them increase faster than other skills. That whole category of "fixes" aren't.

As much as you do, I'd like to go this route too. However, xp gain need to be balanced against the chance of a high master immigrant or artificers. Neither of which can be adjusted with the current modding system. If the chance is too low, people would just gamble for good immigrants instead of wasting valuable ores training one. Sometimes I settle for awkward solutions due to reasons like that.

-Snip-
So... Yeah, if I were to make a simplification mod, that's about how I'd do it. I'm not 100% certain how viable all those things are, but I think that with enough effort they could be made to work. The hard part would be replacing body plans.

If you use an automatic raw replacer then you dont need to keep too many raw copy and allow you to fine tune the level of changes required. Since changes to body plans are sweeping, it can be solved with the help of some relatively simple IF-ELSE. That's the thing I talked about in the other topic, since I personally have never used automatic raw replacer before but it is the most efficient way to keep things compact and highly customizable. You dont ask me to do this, yes. But I am a god damned programer during day and I consider this a valuable chance to learn more about usability.

Is it possible to re-equip invaders? For example, removing copper weapons and armor and equipping steel and stuff?

If you send a dabbling militia wearing nothing but a weapon to fight them one on one then there's a chance they'd wrestle the weapon from the militia then use it against him. That's the only method I know of.

I'm going to do a bit of nitpicking before the main reply.

The whole "more dangerous wildlife" thing is just annoying; random syndromes isn't the right way to implement those things and isn't even a good hack to do it.

It's actually the point: Randomly drop by in large number, screw up trap lines to bait and gore some of the idiots that run out. Wildlifes are present the moment you embark so it's not fair to make them overwhelmingly fatal. "Random syndromes" are used as they are because they are very easy to notice. It's easier to understand that your dwarves wont have much chance against a deer because its ram inject shockwave just like an elephant's kick or a megabeast's stomp would then if I massively increase the deer's size because there's no good visual indicator for the change in size. When possible, I try to make it intuitive for a random player who dont read the long list of feature and just want to play. Most of the systems exist as is arent totally random.

pets that require more management than simple pastures don't seriously increase the game's difficulty but just make more busy work for you

What I actually meant was "dwarven management" and not "player time". Pets in my mod go to the food stockpiles and water sources by themselves and require no micromanagement. I consider it a superior solution to pasture. Ironically pasture was implemented not long after my feature and introduced some unsolvable bugs effecting my feature.

and if I want more challenging sieges I'll install FD myself, thank you very much.

The decision of adding FD was due to the large amount of variations need to be kept to make my mod FD compatible. Rest assured however, for your opinion is shared by many and once I've stabilized my variation of FD, it'd be set to be optional.

I also don't like the economy "improvements," noble, metal, or skill overhauls

Oddily enough much of theses I consider bugfix. The irrational noble bug, fixed by allowing the player to choose who to give the mandates. The metal weapon cant pierce metal armor of the same metal bug, fixed by metal adjustments. The dwarves get legendary too quickly and too many useless immigrant bugs, fixed by the skill overhaul.

The worst part is that that seems to be about where you started, and then as you worked more and more on the mod you added more and more crap in.

Because I work on the parts of the game where I found the most annoying first ;p

So, a "just simpler" mod would: remove functionally-duplicate raws, simplify body plans, and remove clothing. Nothing else. You know, a mod that just simplifies things.

There's an easy way and a hard way. The easy way can be done very fast, but will generate lots of worldgen errors (but wont be noticable in-game). The hard way will take... sometimes... as I have to rewrite every core creatures again from a vanilla raw. Then test them. What would you prefer?

Yep! 2 billion 147 million 483 thousand 647 to be exact! Though what you would ever do with that many points I'm not really sure.

Like, you know, embark with five hundreds sixty eight thousand one hundred seventeen steel large serrated disks, which's enough to create a trap room that is 238 cells long and wide, an equivalent of a 5x5 embark area.

Well Toady does seem to be fond of 32 bit integers in DF (I know that embark points is stored as one as well) so you could technically go all of the way up to 2,147,483,647 as your maximum number.

You mean I can haz 2 billion embark points?

What I think people want, is compartmentalization. Like a couple of seperate mods. One that removes extra creatures, one that removes extra stone, one that adds in the colored block reaction, etc. I love mods like yours because they're filled with great stuff, but sometimes there's things I don't like that it's hard to find to change!

Hmm I think you have just given me the idea for the greatest mod customizing capability ever but I'd research abit more about this before talking. If I conclude that it'd work (and would be realistically realizable) I'd throw you a PM or something.

I'm pretty much just trying to get a purely vanilla game with less clutter. So more or less a bugfixing and FPS-increasing mod.

I see, then make sure you delete the 2 files below after installing and when you embark make sure you bring moldy stones for brewing. The rest you can pick up as you play.
+ entity_fdchallenge.txt
+ entity_fortdefense.txt

Alternatively, If I'm not mistaken, the masterwork mod can be set to bugfix/remove stuff only but I have never actually played it...

I'm sure I've seen some simplifying mod which does just that and nothing else. I haven't found it despite furious searching.

I've been constantly asked to make a "just simpler" version of my mod but I cannot tell what's "just simple" myself. For instant, some have told me they like the make-block-color-of-choise reactions, which's clearly an addition, in their "simpler only" posts. I think they dont want a simple-only mod, they want a megaproject building oriented mod which I dont know how to make myself.