Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: jaxy15 on March 10, 2012, 11:28:58 am

This makes about as much sense as a bronze humanoid transforming into a statue of giant porcupines.
What's that? Oh, that IS in the game?

Yeah but that is only because Toady has yet to program in it becoming a proper statue. One day in the future I fully suspect it will become a Bronze Collosus statue upon death.

Sad, you beat me to it...

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on March 10, 2012, 08:42:41 am

There are acceptable breaks from reality (no one pooping, for instance, and being able to feed a fortress from a few farms), there are the given magical elements, and there are bugs. No reason to implement an unrealistic, rediculous feature that would be hard for anyone to duplicate.

You might as well have given examples that are acceptable breaks from reality, instead of deplorable stopgaps to be fixed..

You WANT to spend all of your time making huge farms and making sure they're all fertilized, only to discover that your fortress population is too large for your little cesspool you had dug out back when you were making your farms because digging a proper sewer system would take too long, and having a fortress deteriorate in a storm of poo and anger--or worse, to have it ALMOST die, and then have the food stores slowly wither away as you try to build a sewer system and conscript rookie planters to try and feed the farns, and watching your wonderful bedrooms and dining room slowly turn brown, because your best miners and farmers got cut in the melee and died of infection from the sewage flooding your fort? I'd rather get to the fun parts of DF, but in case you differ in opinion with me, how about:
1. Mining not requiring you haul away several times as much rubble as usable stone and ore, requiring trips to the outdoors, near-bottomless pits, or magma pipe to clear it all out.
2. Food, or rather not needing all kinds to keep dwarves fit and healthy. Doesn't sound so bad? What if your fortress guard's muscles wither away due to not eating meat because you also had Toady remove
3. Animals don't need food. Suddenly either animals need more food than they're worth to keep, except for livestock that can be kept on grass, which require you to risk losing your entire "crop" and several of your dwarves to either sieges or nasty underground beasties. Unless you keep them in fungus-filled rooms in your fort, which are another break from reality altogether with the whole "no new nutrients entering the system, and plenty of nutrients exiting" thing.
4. Social dynamics. You think dwarves are ill-behaved now? Just wait until they turn their unique brand of intellect to social manners, and you have peasants demanding their "needs" be met. It'll be like a fortress of nobles. Similarly,
5. Happiness can be kept nice and high with a simple golden dining room of legendary proportions, even if everyone except nobles sleeps in a big dormitory (possibly a plus, if the dorm is nice enough) and works almost all of their waking hours. Even if the few friends and what little family they have get slaughtered or die due to neglect. Oh, dear, my fortress seems to be undergoing a power shift due to me keeping them overworked and underpaid! There go my nobles and other dwarves with awesome bedrooms and offices while they sleep in a dirt dormitory! Oops, I forgot that my soldiers, medical staff, and legendary dwarves all get smoothed rooms in stone layers of varying quality! Ah, well, I shouldn't have neglected my dozens of other peons! After all, it's not like this is supposed to be enjoyable, right?
6. Invasions, which come at the same time regardless of factors like the relative power and number of the attacking and defending civs or if you have a trap system and/or military that kills 100% of them every time. Doesn't sound so bad? Just wait until nothing interesting happens to your fortress for decades because no invaders can scratch it. Assuming, of course, that starvation, mountains of rubble, starving animals, riots, malnutrition, social uprisings, and sewage in the streets haven't wrecked the fortress to the point where getting a crossbow bolt and a loaded stonefall trap to hurt the enemy would be above-average. Assuming they don't never come due to you settling miles away from them, in some locale where the wildlife provides a modicum of Fun.

And so forth. Give me enough time, and EVERYTHING about DF can be found to be an acceptable break from reality, whether due to fortress performance or computer performance.

Presumably, removing the inability to butcher sentients was easier than designing a whole new interface to allow slaves to be properly captured, traded, and used would be. You can tame sentients currently, you just can't make them work without using some external tool. Making them work properly, allowing traders to bring them, being able to sell slaves, making sure slaves could not die of dehydration unless you had an accessible freshwater pond (like nondwarf sentients who are part of your fortress do now), being able to reserve booze for fortress residents (don't want the slaves breaking into the whip wine and sunshine and such, now, do we?), and so forth...so much work, so much more that could be done instead. So it'll wait.

Consider this possibility: The only dragon in your world, who you have planned for catching ever since you started getting megabeasts, finally comes. You lure him into your flawless trap, tame him, and...since he bit a dwarf 150 years ago, he's an enemy of your civ and promptly kills half your fortress before a butcher grabs him and, amid much mourning, slaughters the last megaeast in the world.

Neat tale, but I'd rather have one about a tame dragon (the only one in the world) melting a bronze colossus or smashing a goblin siege or fighting the clowns or something.

It sounds like a great migrant trap. Imagine how many dwarven kills the dragon would rack up before someone was lucky enough to succeed. I can imagine how the dwarves would react.

"Okay, we just arrived at this fortress, and here are the notes on how people tried before; let's read through it. If we can't tame it, these guys won't let us out of this little locked room! Okay, smacking it on the nose with a deer lung won't do it. Smacking it on the nose with cat tallow won't do it. Smacking it...smacking it on the nose with food seems to be a bad idea. Cringing and cowering with a deer lung in your hand doesn't seem to work..."

Yeah, growth is incremental.

"This is a silver bar. Silver's specific heat is 200. Silver's melting point is 11731 degrees, and its boiling point is 13892 degrees. When solid, its density is..."

You get the idea. Almost all of the information about metals and other materials has little to no use for an average overseer. Specific heat? Affects some stuff, but not in a way that matters to me. Impact yield, impact fracture, etc? I'm just trying to make furniture! Torsion fracture? I don't even know what that is!

Point is, either the game needs some way of knowing which info is useful and which isn't, or this is a bad idea. Even if it strains out the useless stuff, though, you'll need to check the wiki or something to know A. how it compares to, say, copper, and B. what those numbers mean.

Example: Silver can be used to make weapons and ammo, but not armor, so while MAX_EDGE matters, the properties relating to armor do not. It can also be made into crafts or furniture (both, actually, but I'm trying to show how the process works), so value matters. Density always matters. Its melting point is not high enough to rank it was magma-safe, so that would not be noted. It would then explain that silver has a high density (checks other metals), the highest of all weapon-grade metals, making it good for blunt weapons. Its max_edge is one of the lowest of all weapons-grade metals, so you shouldn't make silver blades. Silver items are worth 10 times the value of the same items made from average materials (checks values of other metals), a decent value. Stuff like that.

...Oh, my bad. My memory was that U->F was subtracting 9,000. That would put the webs at 1,040 F and creatures at 1,070 F. Both of which are much, MUCH higher than would be safe.