Bay 12 Games Forum

Toady's previously said that he's sooner or later going to implement moving fortress parts.

That's not new. However, I'd like to submit that if this release has one piece of feature creep, this should be it. Firstly, he's going to be doing dwarf sites, and if dwarves is dwarves, a mature, prototypical fortress (which after all is what those sites are) is going to have at least a few such moving parts. More to the point, we just got done with minecarts, and at least a few moving fortress parts would be obvious extensions of the same concept. Making at least a quick foray into the concept, if for no other reason than to program in the framework for any later extensions, would make a lot of sense after the hauling changes, and would lend the dwarven sites a more unique feel.

Please note that I'm not really asking for the entire framework for us to build a ferris wheel fortress with each industry in its own car, although that would be really frickin' awesome. But a few, simple improvements would make sense. For example, minecarts, by carrying more and heavier materials across tracks faster than dwarves, have finally made longitudinal fortresses viable for the first time since 2D, when they were the only option. But I kind of doubt dwarves would use them to transport rocks between Z-levels; we have minecart helixes, but those are complicated. It seems far more likely that they'd use primitive lifts for things that had to move up and down more than north, south, east and west. These could be powered by waterwheels or windmills. Simple things like these strike me as being great inclusions in the upcoming release.

This is a board game I'm trying to design, which is so named because it is neither chess (though it's not unlike it) nor does it have anything to do with the Tocharians. However, it's a cool name, and that's a good enough reason for me.

At present, the plan is to play it on a square board with 15 squares along each side. Six of these squares are special; we'll get back to them.

There are only four kinds of pieces.

Infantry act like kings in chess; they can move one square in any of the 8 directions, and capture anything on that square.

Archers get a moving turn and a shooting turn. During the moving turn, they can move into any vacant adjacent square in 8 directions; it cannot be occupied. During the shooting turn, they can capture any adjacent (8 directions) piece, but don't move into that square. They may do these moves in either order, allowing them to engage in hit-and-run tactics.

Horsemen are like infantry, but faster. They can move twice- not necessarily in a straight line- and may capture like an infantry piece on one of these moves.

Generals can move three squares a turn, but can't use any of them to capture. They also get a shooting move that can happen anywhere during their run. Each player will get two generals.

Now, here's where the fun starts. There are no king pieces, so you could lose both your generals and still win. There are, however, camps. There are six of these: four in the corners and two on the sides of the board, in the very center, between where the two players begin.

You own the two camps on your side, though not the ones in the middle. To win, you need to capture both your opponent's camps while still being in control of your own. To do this, you need to move one of your pieces onto that camp. That's not too incredibly hard, but take note: you can't *keep* a piece on a camp to defend it; once it moves on it gets a free ticket to one tile off the camp. So, to capture your opponent's camps, you need to also be able to kill anything in the vicinity. Generals (but not horsemen), however, may move *through* unoccupied camps (which will capture them).

Camps can also be used to spawn extra units. When the game starts, each player has 4 points. You win extra points in two ways: by capturing opposing pieces or sacrificing your own. Capturing an opposing piece will give you 1 point for an infantry, 2 for an archer or horseman, and 8 for a general. To sacrifice a piece, you move it onto a camp (either your own or one of the neutral ones in the middle). You will get 1 point for a sacrificed infantry, 2 for a sacrificed archer or horseman, and a dozen for a sacrificed general (though as we'll see, you might not want to do that).

Points can be used to buy extra units. It costs two points for an extra infantry and four for an extra archer or horseman. You can't buy extra generals, so you should only sacrifice them when (for example) they're backed in a corner and you could really use some extra units. The point system rewards you for capturing lots of units, but it also gives a bonus to strategic retreats; by sacrificing units that you'd otherwise lose you deny your opponent points and get something for your troubles. However, since you get half as many points for a sacrificed unit as it costs to buy it, it's not a sustainable long-term practice.

A bought unit can be spawned in any neutral camp, or any camp you own, provided that camp has a free space adjacent to it (the spawned unit gets a free move off the camp). Each player starts with four free points, allowing them to spawn a free horseman/archer or a couple of infantry, whichever they prefer.

If you can capture your opponent's camps while still hanging onto your own, you win the game.

So, I suppose the only questions I have are:

-Do I have enough generals? Is two per player enough?
-Is the points system balanced enough to work?
-Is the board too big or too small, and related to that...
-What sort of starting setup should I use? I need to make the players use one where each of their own camps has a blank space bordering it, for spawning purposes, but beyond that I really don't have any idea how many of each piece they should have or where those pieces should begin the game.
-And, since it's a bigger board than chess, would allowing players to move two of their pieces per turn instead of one be a good idea? Right now the basic idea is that the turn starts with a spawning stage- the player spawns as many pieces as they want to, up to as many camps as they have access to spawning to (you cannot capture the camps in the center, but you can spawn with 'em, and you can also spawn with any camp you've captured, but not any camp you've lost), provided there's a free space next to the camp, which the units immediately move onto. Then the players actually move, and then finally, they sacrifice as many units as they want to, with the proviso that you can sacrifice one unit per camp per turn.

About six months ago, maybe longer, my carpenter/woodcutter got hit by a falling boulder (garbage chute accident). It took me a while for me to set up a hospital, but eventually I did, assigned a chief medical dwarf, and told him to get crackin'.

Since then, most of my carpenter's injuries have been healed. Now he's in this weird loop. He's in the bed at the hospital. CMD comes along, diagnoses him, says he has a wound that needs to be cleaned and put in traction. CMD gets some water from the river, cleans the wound, puts him in traction.

Now, due to a bug that I've already recognized, the carpenter never leaves traction, so I have some grunt destroy the traction bench, as the wiki tells me to do. Carpenter wanders off a bit, goes back into the hospital, sits in bed, and waits for the CMD to come diagnose him...It's happened four or five times by now and it's getting obnoxious. What do I do?

This is my kitty, Prufrock. (And part of my face in the background.)

Here he is looking like a cantankerous, fat old boy, for he is all four things (ten going on eleven and eating more than he probably ought). We love him, though- until he lands us with another four-figure vet bill (kitty blood transfusions are not cheap.)

So, uh...your pets?

I've had an idea for a megaproject.

Gen a world whose sky is 100 Z-levels, and embark somewhere that's frozen and thawed for about half the year each way.

Now here's the problem. I want to make a tower that is constructed as a "cast sandwich". This means that during construction any given cross-section of the wall is a hollow square, whose sides are 3 tiles thick, and a section of wall would look like this:

OIO
OIO
OIO

where O is a tile of obsidian and I is a tile of ice.

This would be easy enough if it were just a rectangular tower. However, I want to make it more like a pyramid, which means that it will be made of "blocks" stacked on top of each other, for 100 Z-levels, with each successive block being smaller than the last.

I obviously need to do the obsidian casting first, one block at a time. Now here's the problem: once I've built the walls and deconstructed them around the inner shell, I have to rebuild them to cast the outer shell- but then there's a wall between them, which must be removed to pump in the water that will freeze to become the ice. I could use magma-proof floodgates, but then I have to build floors, which I'd rather not do. So how can I go about this?

Here's the problem with being a polyglot: if where you live is a highly monolingual area, and is monolingual for hundreds of miles around, how are you supposed to find people to speak with?

Well, you sort of have to advertise yourself. To that end, I'm thinking about designing a series of pins and buttons. The pins will be large enough to be read but not obnoxiously large, and they will have "Talk to me in X" in X (where X is a language), with the associated flag as the background.

So I need translations. For the following languages, "Talk to me in X":

Portuguese
Spanish
Catalan
French
Italian
Romanian
Irish
Scottish Gaelic
Manx
Welsh
Cornish
Breton
Dutch
German
Icelandic
Faroese
Norwegian
Swedish
Danish
Polish
Czech
Slovak
Russian
Ukranian
Belarusian
Slovenian
Croatian
Serbian
Bulgarian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Greek
Albanian
Finnish
Estonian
Hungarian
Arabic
Turkish
Farsi
Hindi (and any other Indian languages you can think of)
Mandarin
Japanese
Korean
Vietnamese
Cambodian
Thai
Indonesian
Swahili
Afrikaans
Malagasy

That should do, I think. Sure, some of you nattering naysayers might say that nobody speaks Cornish (and that's completely true), but, hey, it costs nothing to design, and it's all in good fun. And even if your Cornish is rusty, it makes a good conversation starter. Any other languages you know that have national status will also be used. So help out?

This is a spin-off and hopefully more fleshed-out and coherent expansion onto a couple of posts I made here.

The basic premise is that the current systems- in which entities are treated as objects- is essentially the wrong way to look at the DF world, even if the computer will have to look at entities as objects when it gets down to moving the bits around. I argue in this thread that the correct way, and a more flexible and interesting way, to look at social and political interactions in Dwarf Fortress is in terms of sets.

This is a long post but a good one, so bear with me.

The Set in Dwarf Fortress
A Dwarf Fortress set is anything that can contain other sets or objects. In this post all examples of objects will be creatures, both sapient and non-sapient, and all examples of sets will be framed in terms of the relationships that creatures have. Although you could certainly use a similar framework for stone or mugs or prepared meals, the framework I am attempting to construct will, as you will see, have very little to do with the sort of thing stone or mugs can do. While mathematical sets are defined by common properties, DF sets will simply be defined as "whomever DF wants to group together," and are only kept together by their constitutions (see below). They are not defined by common properties in the same way that the set of all odd numbers is defined by the property of not being divisible by two.

Now, all interactions will be much easier to code if they are between sets, not objects. The simplest set, then- let us call it an alpha set- is the set that every creature exists in. Basically, although dwarves or elves or badgers are coded as objects, they are the sole members of their alpha sets. Alpha sets are coded in such a way that they can contain and interact with the creature they are linked to.

All other sets, no matter how large or small, are framed as beta sets. Beta sets are different because they can only contain sets, and cannot contain objects. To clarify: sets don't just contain things; they contain other sets. Alpha sets are a special framework that can only contain things, but with beta sets, the sky's the limit. For example, a marriage might be an example of the simplest beta set, because it contains two alphas- the wife and the husband. But more complex beta sets will contain smaller beta sets, so that as the world grows and complex political structures are defined, beta sets can become quite massive indeed: a civilization might contain hundreds and hundreds of parliaments, towns, councils, monarchs and nobles that all have their own separate role.

All beta sets are defined in essence by what I have termed constitutions. (Alpha sets will have a constitution too, sort of, but it'll be hardcoded and nothing like the constitution of a beta set). Originally, this proposal was to deal with entities and other organized groups, which will of course have to have constitutions written or unwritten so that they can work. However, as it became clear that sets could be used as a framework in which to term all relationships between creatures and the structures they create, it became clear that even the most seemingly disorganized sets will have constitutions.

Constitutions will basically have four parts to them: inclusion terms, expulsion terms, internal organization and external affairs- these last two can be basically lumped together, as we shall see.


Inclusion terms
All sets must have inclusion terms. Inclusion terms are, in essence, rules attached to the set that state who can join the set and what needs to happen for them to join.

One of the first things that needs to be remembered is that although many sets are conscious, like entities, in that they are "aware" of their status as a set and of their internal organization and external affairs, many are not. Conscious sets will have the framework to change their own constitutions; unconscious ones will not, or will not in the same way. A constitution is simply how the computer handles the set.

Here's a good example of an extremely simple beta set: a herd of badgers. A herd of badgers does not have much of an internal structure- no hierarchy to speak of, really, except maybe a "head" badger (we'll get to that in the organization section). The herd's inclusion term is probably as simple as "being born into the herd."

Or, another set, possibly even simpler: all the children in a fortress. The inclusion term? Be born, be a dwarf, be in the fortress.

Or the set of all mechanics in a fortress (not the same as a mechanic's guild): be at least dabbling in mechanics.

If some of these sets seem to be self-evident and not worth presenting as sets, they are! The set of mechanics in a fortress is exactly that. But they need to be defined for the computer to deal with them.

Likewise, there are expulsion terms. The badger is shot by a hunter, or the child turns 12; the game expels them from the badger herd or the set of children. Expulsion is just a blanket term. It could be a crime against the set that the member committed- in conscious sets, mostly- but most of the time it won't be.

For both inclusion and expulsion, remember that beta sets contain both beta sets and alpha sets, and that it's sets that are expelled- not objects or creatures. Alpha sets are not beta sets; they are a set that contains the creature and only the creature, and as such do not have inclusion or expulsion terms. When a creature is born, an alpha set is created for it; the alpha set never really disappears, since the creature will always be buried and be remembered in Legends. (Well, sapient ones will. I doubt ravens or badgers are kept in memory once they've been chopped up, so their alpha sets might act differently.) Because they do not have internal organization, they do not have expulsion, inclusion or internal hierarchy. However, they interact with their supersets the same way beta sets do. Just as alpha sets containing individual members can be expelled, so too can beta sets; for example, a group of countries that had signed a treaty might choose to kick out an entity for acting up too much.

This may run into difficulty when combined with zombification- a living raven will have its own alpha set, but an undead raven head might need a different one from the rest of the resurrected raven. However, we can consider that a minor kink for this discussion, which is mainly a proof of concept.

Now onto the really fun part- set interaction. This can be seen in terms of subsets- in other words, how a set's subsets interact with each other- or supersets- how the set interacts with other sets. Both are equally valid analyses.

This can give rise to hierarchies, especially in conscious sets. One of the tempting possibilities here is to use a version of fuzzy set theory. In fuzzy set theory, the idea of "either you're in set X or not in set X and there are no other possibilities" is thrown out, and every member of the set has a number between 0 and 1 attached to it, which can be seen as basically a percentage of membership. Member A is 25% a member of set X, member B two-thirds a member of set X, you get the idea.

It's tempting to use fuzzy set theory to define set hierarchies. For example, a mason's guild might have a rule that any member receives a tomb and burial at the guild's expense. But, surely, the corpse isn't really a member anymore. So you could say that a deceased member of the guild is a 20% member, while, say, starting apprentices are at least 30%.

The problem with this is that it doesn't accurately take into account real hierarchies. It's perfectly fine in a simple set to say that the 70% members have this authority over the 30% members, but in more complex sets different subsets will have dominance over others in different ways- and if you're going to assign them all numbers, you're basically just creating numbered subsets anyway. What's more realistic is to say "OK, here are the subsets of the mason's guild: the head mason, the master masons, the apprentice masons, and oh yeah the dead guys that the guild provides maintenance for." These subsets will have their own constitutions which will be referenced by the higher constitution of the guild, specifying what duties, benefits, authority and status apply to each subset.

Remember, in this case, that all beta sets are created equal. Or, at least, their framework is. In other words, the set of master masons has its own constitution that has the potential to be just as complex as that of the mason's guild- it has its own rules for inclusion and expulsion, its own rules about how it interacts with other sets and how its members interact. It is probably wise to invoke an adapted version of the 10th Amendment: a set's constitution may invoke any powers that are not expressly delegated to or prohibited by any of its supersets. As an example: the mason's guild in fortress A might make a mandate for rock blocks to be made at least once a month, assuming its head mason (or whatever) liked blocks and its constitution (and the constitution of the guild's supersets) allowed its constitution the power to include the equivalent of a mandate clause. In Fortress B, the head mason also likes blocks, but the constitution of some superset of the guild bans guilds from making mandates more than twice a season. In Fortress C, meanwhile, guilds can't make mandates at all.

This is not to say constitutions can't change, especially in conscious sets, it should be noted. For example, if the king of a civilization dies without an heir, a civil war would create new subsets and conflicts.
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So, uh, that's sets. The question remains: what can we do with sets?

Well, a hell of a lot, I think.

-Obviously, entities can be framed as sets, since they can contain subsets- "king," "monarch," "parliament", etc.- which can easily be used to create a government system, a social hierarchy and obligations between sets. Taxation is just payment from set to set! This can be expanded to create free-er or less free society (a caste system like India's would be quite easy to set up, for example), or societies with more or less organization; consider Earth's hunter-gatherer bands versus its petty chiefdoms, wide-ranging tribal societies, and states.

-Likewise, any group of creatures can be framed as a set. Not just entities- this includes guilds, clubs, families, households, marriages, lover pairs, bandit gangs, your band in adventurer mode, or even just groups that the computer finds it convenient to keep track of, like all the legendary dwarves in the fortress, all the dwarves in the fortress that have used up their strange mood, or all dwarves that have died.

-Laws and agreements can be framed as sets, because of the aforementioned 10th Amendment. A treaty between two warring entities is actually a set, and can be made to act like a set! When two entities sign a treaty, they construct a set of which they are the members and of which the treaty comprises the constitution. Thus, the terms of the treaty overrides the desires of the nations to go to war- however, since it is a conscious set, that is not to say, as I noted above, that the treaty cannot be broken- the game just needs to figure out how that would happen; perhaps the treaty would have a "line" past which incidents between the entities would override the treaty.

-This extends to wars as well as to conflicts. Two entities at war are in a "war" set. Likewise, so are two armies at battle- since armies are sets- and possibly two soldiers fighting.

-Castes can simply be framed as subsets of a species.

-Ethics, behavior and professions, and the like, can simply be written into the constitutions of their appropriate sets. This allows for more diverse species, for example: one human civilization might find it acceptable to cremate the dead; another might find it unthinkable.

-Modding will become much more versatile with sets. In essence, all Toady would need to do in the raws is to create a standard set of tags which, together, make up a set's constitution, once he's decided what a constitution can define- ethics and hierarchies would be a good start, but as development continued he could add in more possibilities for constitutions. Certainly, some sets it would be useful to hardcode, but others would be in the raws, and modders could create subsets or supersets of these as they saw fit. The constitutions must be similar enough to be universally applied, but versatile enough to create very different sets. This will scrap the current caste, entity and even species system by allowing modders to create sets out of thin air. It is likely that alpha sets, at least, will be hardcoded. It will be up to Toady which beta sets will be hardcoded and which will be in the raws, allowing the players to screw with them. Later today I might give some more thought to what a constitution in the raws might look like, perhaps write up a sample constitution for a simple set like a badger herd.

Comments, constructive criticism and musings about my proposal are much appreciated.

The TV Tropes page on the DF community mentions a 2008 mod called Goblin Fortress that has apparently been banned from the fortress. What was so bad about it?