Bay 12 Games Forum

I got it, it isn't unbalanced so much as asymetrical. I wouldn't play it with strangers, but it looks like a really fun game with friends.  E.g. sure broken lords can't heal well, but c'mon: they opt out of a basic resource! I think mods and balances will make it even richer

I find myself frantically scrambling to figure out what all the emotions could be or how they work: "like happy, but also a little wistful" or "sangry" or what?

I didn't know so many feelings existed.

I've been thinking of getting this, but what you all have to say is giving me pause.

It seems like the only innovative mechanic is the winter creep and that is blatantly ripped off from Fall from Heaven. Not even FFH2 but the first one, the mini mod that came with Beyond the Sword, where the God of Winter kept freezing more of the landscape until you killed him (FFH2 let you *become* the god of winter

Also, I hear magic is just artillery in disguise, meaning that none of the crazy redefinitions of terrain and battle mechanics I expect from magical strategy, and that even FFH2 offered years ago, are viable

Necromancer fun: make adventurers, steal necromancy book, drop in your nearest castle and make a bunch of necromancers. Then watch them come to your fort.

Freezing traps: water freezes instantly when exposed to surface: build water holders just under the top soil and expose only trench wired with pressure traps in the middle, linking to doors holding back the water. Hallway of certain doom. Just send miners afterwards to clean up the solid ice.

Dodge traps: actually too easy to be interesting. Build two staircases: one on each side of your outside wall. Make them at least 15 z-levels tall. Connect them with a single tile wide pathway, 5-10 tiles long, and cover it in cheap weapon traps, making certain each trap contains the maximum number of weapons.  The better at dodging the invaders are, the more likely they are to dodge off the edge and plummet to their death, and of course, if they fail to dodge, they eat the trap.  This may or may not have changed with the new version.

Bolt recycling:  After designating a narrow hallway for archery, dig pits where the walls were: when bolts fall a z-level after a miss, they don't break

Forgotten beast pitting:  exploit an odd feature of cave-ins: the suction they produce to trap beasts without killing them.  Design traps by carving small adjacent 5x5 chambers, each outfitted with a piece of furniture in the center tile, like an armor stand.  On the z-level below this chain of chambers, dig out identically sized 3x3 rooms, after these are done, seal them, one by one, so they have no way out.  On the z-level above the furniture, wire a single block wired to cave-in in the middle of the 5x5 and 3x3, using levered supports and sealing each prepared room similarly, to avoid flying F.B.s getting in that way.   When the forgotten beast enters the room, it will stand two tiles away from the furniture, on the edge of the room and try to shatter it. This will give you ample time to pull the level and drop the block on the room. The block will destroy the furniture and blow a hole in the floor to the 3x3 chamber. Since the block isn't above the F.B. it will not kill it, however, the weird suction force created by the cave in in the sealed holding chamber will pull the F.B. down, into the sealed 3x3 room, from whence it will never leave (unless it can fly and its wings were not broken by the cave-in suction)

Puppy Jabberer bombs:  fill a cage with jabberers and link it to a lever, beaked death will spill into the next goblin ambush, without giving the poor invaders a chance to ready themselves or shoot.

My own favorite fort  technology combined the dwarven reactor with the waterfall. It was built into the ceiling of the royal throne room, which I made hollow and 7-z levels tall with engraved walls. The reactor was invisible, but the gears extended down into the royal pool, moving a single tile of water around the entire throne room and generating an obscene amount of happiness fog.  Everything but the actual reactor was wired to collapse violently into the throne room, ideally both killing everyone near it and sucking everyone alive through a hole torn in the pool and into the untapped third cavern full of terrible forgotten beasts with deadly dust. The relevant lever was hidden behind the artifact bone throne of the necromancer duke.

I'd say when you cross the plateau: the place where you are safe and self-sufficient (and bored) and push into full-scale weirdness and experimentation ;p

I find myself perking up weirdly when I hear the words "flux stone", "pig iron" or "steel".  I'm like "oh boy, this is a promising site! err... overheard conversation :/"

Can you not do the old fashioned "retire in the mountain home" trick?

 Mountain homes are apparent on the big map when selecting a fort. Showing up in that territory as an adventurer, in the olden days (last version), and retiring your adverturer there added you to the pool of "citizens" that migrants come from, meaning that your adventurer then joined the fort along with migrant waves (so long as you were not a demigod: those never seemed to come to forts, equipment also seems to disappear)

My last fort in the last release was a necromancer fort with 6 necromancers generated this way, each arrived in a migrant wave normally.  I don't think this feature was removed in the new release.

Actually most locations directly struck by a nuclear weapon will become impressive grass-and-woods covered craters in very short order, plants have incredible radiation resistance.  The largest logical fallacy of 'post apocalyptic' depictions is the blasted wasteland.  That's just not how nature responds to major events, take a look at volcanoes, wildfires, and any other landscape-changing event.  The addition of radiation to the mix is almost meaningless to nature, it simply adapts, and rather impressively cleans fallout in very short order (especially water systems, the only real contamination threat to a water system is ground water, the rest just gets buried in the sediment on the bottom of the ocean).  You just aren't going to find a 'realistic' nuclear war game, because the reality is completely divorced from popular media.

I suppose when I said "barren" I meant "barren in interesting things", I assumed there'd be flora, just I am not sure if living flora makes for a game, necessarily