Bay 12 Games Forum

Sure there's many ways to get around this by, basically, hacking the game.

But that's not the thing.  Shouldn't the game be more playable out-of-the-box so to speak?  Rather than requiring us to download hacking utilities to not make dwarves jump off a waterfall?

I just had a thought that came from this.  Not about variable ethics (use that search term, you'll see my point about it getting shot down), but about Slavery itself.

There is a difference between the Slavery that Dwarves would find Unthinkable and the kind of Slavery you're thinking of.  That absolute power that King and Nobles of the middle ages had wasn't over slaves.  It was over Serfs.

The problem does indeed come from a difference in ethics between the middle ages and the modern era.  Serfs were not slaves.  They were not "owned property" or anything like that.  But when they lived under the rule of a nobleman, that noble was their Lord.  They could tell them what to plant, where to live, that they must give their daughter up to them for carnal relations on their wedding night before they were allowed to see the groom.  They wielded immense power over their subjects, but they did NOT own them.  It was more of a "my town, my rules" kind of thing. They were free to go off into the wilderness, or move to another place.

It's a fine point, really, but the ethics system does not model that at all.

I do remember many discussions about people wanting to have a way to change ethics in-game.  They have all been shot down as unreasonable and untennable to the rest of the Dwarven community.  Basically you'd have branched out and become a different civilization, and would likely be at war with the "mother civ" if you did it due to the way the ethics system works.

So basically you can see this by making an entity that's exactly the same as the Dwarves, [CIV_CONTROLLABLE], and setting the ethics that you think you want those ethics to be.

Then generate a world and try to embark as them.  9 times out of 10, they'll be dead and gone, killed off by the "good" Dwarves.

I'd tend to agree on the point that ethics are different today than they once were.  But the way the ethics system is set up, dwarves are like that so they don't get attacked in worldgen by other races.  DF is pretty standard fantasy in that the Good Guys go to war against the Evil-Doers, while the dastardly Bad Guys just kind of make themselves a nuissance to the forces of good because they can.

If Dwarves were not good, they'd get attacked by everything, and wouldn't attack Goblins even tho they're being raided constantly.

He's got you there.  [ETHICS:SLAVERY:x] exists, but [ETHICS:HUMAN_RIGHTS_VIOLATIONS:x] does not technically exist.

Because that's what this would be.  I hate to tempt Godwin's Law, but this kind of Propoganda is what made the rest of the world so fearful of WWII Germany, was attempted by the US at the same time, and was also used in Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Russia, and even modern China to this very day.

So there would need to be an ethic about this.  Utilizing it would make other entities very worried about the state of your civilization, and possibly wish to "free" your citizens.

Well the value of it is that currently the physics system doesn't make objects fall, ever.  They teleport to ground without traveling through the space in between.  Only unsupported objects would gain an acceleration so it really wouldn't burn up very many clock cycles unless you loaded a lot of objects onto a bridge and then dropped them all at once, for example.

It really wouldn't be computationally very hard to do, either.  Currently the system finds objects which are unsupported and then looks down to the lowest z-level where there is ground, calculated damage, and moves them all at once.  An acceleration based system wouldn't bother with that.

Current system:

• Is the object unsupported?
• Same frame: calculate distance
• Same frame: Calculate damage
• Same frame: Drop Object
• Same frame: Splat

Acceleration-based system:

• Is the object unsupported?
• Same frame: Accelerate downward

• Has a moving object hit something (ground, walls, etc)?
• Calculate damage

So you can see that it doesn't pile everything onto the main frame like the current system, rather spreads it out over time.  Regardless of how many calculations it requires (not many, since gravity doesn't work like that as I mentioned above), they are spread out over many frames and don't need anything more complicated than checking things which already must be checked and adding a constant variable to an object's downward speed if that check fails.

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But this is really about bows and arrows.  It would be nice if there were customizable reload rates.  That would mean bows, crossbows, and even exotic weapons like the Chokuno repeater crossbows would be be easy to make by changing the reload.  Mods could make machine guns and a distinction could be made between a light, easilly loaded weapon and a heavy, powerful, but slow to fire one.

I gotta say tho.

I thought of Google in the first panel.

As far as suggestions:

More playable race options.  It's well and good that you have all these cool things for the Dwarves, but what if I want to kick back and play a human town game every now and again.  Because that, I really do enjoy.  I like making the humans, elves, goblins, and kobolds distinct and functional.

Basically all that is missing in that respect is adding some better positions to the other races, whatever reactions and buildings which make sense for that race, and the [CIV_CONTROLLABLE] tag.  It's really not "very hard", and opens up a lot of options.

Plus, making each race that is playable unique and functional means they have more varied and sensible trade goods.

... jus a though...