Bay 12 Games Forum

Hello!

First, I drop the anvil. Then I drop plump helmet spawn and any other subterranean seeds as I do surface farming.

Each dwarf gets either novice mining or novice wood working. The dwarf I want to become bookkeeper gets novice in the required skill and I also give appropriate social skills to the broker and the expedition leader/manager (the latter somewhat based on her personality). Besides that, the dwarves get a variety of novice skills in an attempt to have each civilian skill at least once.

4 picks
4 battle axes (because I often forget whether I have 4 miners or 4 woodcutters (^_^;; )
3 kittens
and the rest of points goes into food and drink

I don't take any seed (not even surface ones) with me, but rather start by designating some plant gathering early on and then simply designate farming for whatever my dwarves find.

Okay, a simple approach, but it works fine for me.

Deathworks

Hello!

I am pretty sure that the civ ordering in 2D at least corresponded to distance. Move the embark zone near a goblin fortress and you get goblins before humans and elves; move away and the goblins will go down as you near human or elven settlements.

To see what things are like, I have started playing a 2x2 in the same square of the map but not right on top of the town but rather directly next to it. Of course, those humans had to settle right on top of an aquifer, so this fortress will be abandoned ASAP.

Anyhow, I have just reached my second autumn: first dwarven caravan - immigrants - first elven caravan - immigrants - - immigrants would be a summary of what has happened thus far. Dwarves and elves were timely and I have seen normal immigration patterns, but no human caravan. Thus, the human civ is not listed in my civ overview (there is just my dwarves, the elves, and the kobolds, thus far). In the site selection screen, none of the races was listed as being at war with me.

So, how many summers delay can the human caravan have (within the same square, to boost)? I am asking because play is relatively frustrating with an aquifer shortly beneath the surface and a lot of macaques... I want to check whether I will get any human caravans at that site at all and the abandon that fortress.

Sorry, but I really do not like aquifers (^_^;;

Deathworks

Hi!

My suggestions for having a more interesting world (besides modding megabeasts):

Megabeasts:
* max out caverns + cavern size
* set year of testing for megabeasts to 2
* set percentage of megabeasts to the one you want
* reduce number of civilizations and/or population cap

Wars(uncomfirmed, so no guarantees they will work):
* max out civilization number (part of the peace problem seems to be that eventually growth slows down so much that there are no border conflicts - an overcrowded map should add some trouble)
* stop around 200 - 300 (actually, with the new stop world gen options, you can check regularly what the world looks like and enter game just when you see some ruins cropping up).

Deathworks

Hi!

Okay, I still haven't had time to test 39d which has now even become obsolete before I unpacked it (^_^;;

The emoticon I use is indeed the sweat drop which among other things expresses slight embarassment.

Anyhow, without having seen the new versions, there is no information I can add to the discussion of the thread right now. The reason I am responding now is because of the unexpected interest people showed in the RPG I mentioned. I want to give some public information and otherwise would suggest discussing details if necessary via the forum's message system - while I like that RPG, this thread here is just too important to get permanently derailed, and I am sorry that my general remark had that effect.

Anyhow, the RPG I am talking about is called "縮小学園". As the name implies, it is being written by a Japanese in Japanese. That Japanese happens to be a macrophile and that is the theme of the game (as any who can read the title will already have guessed (^_^;; ). It uses Enterbrain's commercial RPGツクールVX engine (people may know the RPGツクール series from the English language pirate copies called RPGMaker 2000, 2003; VX is the latest release in the series), so the core functionalities of a 2D RPG are stable and reliable.
While it features some insider gags (even references to previous test versions (^_^;; ), a major strength is its focus on normal RPG gaming (retrieving items, beating monsters, finding keys, solving simple riddles). About the current version, people have already complained that they never get to the macro stuff. The size of the current test version seems quite good to me; I have not yet cleared it, but someone reported needing 8hrs to clear the version (which is supposed to be 2/3 of the game once it gets finished), which seems a reasonable estimate.

Unfortunately, there is a general tendency towards naive/misinformed fear towards foreigners in Japan, and the fetish communities are no exception. I have promised not to give away information about where the game is discussed, but I received permission to advertise it at Eka's Portal and provide a link to the download there. Currently, that link is obsolete, though, and given that an emergency update was released 24hrs after the new release, I wish to wait before updating the information there.

I am sorry for having so long an OT post, but I figured that by providing as much information as possible, I could stop the discussion and speculation. If you wish to know more details about this game or have questions, please feel free to contact me via the forum's message system.

So, with this distraction gone, I suggest to focus on whether the changes in 39d/e have had any effect on megabeasts and semimegabeasts.

Deathworks

Hi!

I like this suggestion.
Personally, I think the later ages of the world gen are lasting too long, while the initial ages (especially Myth) are extremely short. While this suggestion does not directly address that problem (unless you succeed in stretching age of heroes), it adds favorable flavoring to the entire mechanism.

Another thought would be adding an "Age of <civ>" name when a civilization gets a decisive advantage over all others - depending on the parameters and how wars develop in the future, this may even lead to changing ages. (You know, like the age of the Greeks, then the age of the Roman Empire...)

Anyhow, it sounds like a neat flavoring idea, so cheers from me for it.

Deathworks

Hi!

With people pondering the historian challenge and I myself also considering hidden legends the real default, I thought it would be good to have a look at legend mode.

First of all, I noticed that the ages include all important events like wars and duels as well as all rampages, even if legends are hidden.

While I can understand the wars and dragon slayings, I think it is a bit overkill to have all abductions of human children listed right from the start or each and every rampage of a giant. These are local events which are good for discovery by an adventurer visiting the affected communities.

So, I suggest to hide most if not all of the unimportant events initially.

Then, I started an adventurer, talked a bit to my local mayor before getting myself killed by a cyclops. When I checked the legends, I was kind of disappointed:

All kills of the cyclops were listed both historically and at the bottom of his CV. I am quite positive that I heard of maybe a dozen or so of them in the game, and the others were unknown to my character. This is especially sad since the mayor talked about 70 killings when giving me the quest, but the cyclops had more than 120 killings actually, many of which were elves, so I assume the mayor simply ignored those from different civilizations.

Again, I think that only the killings I have uncovered should be listed so that you really can discover the world bit by bit via adventurer.

I also noted the following: All categories claim to have no uncovered entries, except for historical figures, which usually has a few dozen officially revealed. Checking on them, these are the deities which are always know. That's fine.

However, as stated above, the ages also have all important events uncovered. Yet, the ages show as 0 events uncovered!! I think this discrepancy is quite confusing and thus I suggest that all events that you can few should actually be counted as uncovered.

Currently, we have a problem that important events become relatively rare towards the end of world gen. Therefore, I suggest adding an indication to the legend main menu for how long an age lasted, like this:

Age of Myth (1 - 26)      xxx/yyy
Age of Legends (27 - 76)   uuu/ooo
Age of Heroes (77 - 237)   ppp/mmm
Age of Fairy Tales (238 - 1050)  nnn/www

Finally, I noticed that generating the view for "show all events" takes a lot of time. When I check on an event and then return to the age view, there is still a large delay, so I am wondering how much optimization has been done on this. If it is not already implemented, I would suggest storing the generated list in the RAM so that it need not be regenerated when you leave the event view.

Deathworks

Hi!

Thank you for the informative answer, Toady.

Too bad it is not as easy as I hoped. Like the other two recent posters, I also see a lot of potential in such a feature.

Deathworks

Hi!

Personally, I have the impression that people in this thread are way too hysteric or rather already on the verge of becoming drama queens. In my experience, such ways of arguing rarely result in any improvement of the situation and only help divide a community.

How about keeping calm about things and taking stock of what the situation is and what can be done about it except for general protest and arguing between various factions.

According to what people here say, one of the many ways of playing and enjoying the game has effectively been deactivated or at least become incredibly hard to achieve.

In my eyes, this has several aspects we should keep in mind:

First of all, this is not the only way to play the game, or even just adventure mode. There are also people who prefer playing classic heroes, or maybe just petty thieves and murderers, or even scholars/historians exploring the land. None of these ways of playing the game has been impaired and some of them have improved over time (I just tried a little bit of adventure mode and I thought it was quite nice to hear the cyclops heap verbal abuse on five of his 120+ kills before bashing my adventurer into an unrecognizable pulp).

So, unlike the sleep bug, this loss does not make an entire game mode unplayable.

However, I agree that diversity is one of the big advantages of DF and that by removing the ability to create conflict due to adventurer action means a loss of diversity (whether it is realistic to demand an attitude similar to having Japan go to war with the US because their G.I.s regularly rape Japanese women in Okinawa, is a completely different debate).

With the thought established that an interesting feature has been lost, we should then turn to what can actually be done about this.

Personally, I think one option would be the history mode I suggested in context of the world gen discussion. If the mechanisms used during world creation were to be applied to a running world for some years, they may pick up the adventurer's actions and take them as the basis of wars (I just checked legends in a world and saw a war that was started because of a theft). It may be a bit more indirect than what was there before, but it does offer the potential for notoriety.

The other development I saw lamented here was the general decline in inter-civilization conflict.

Again, this seems to be a valid point as the number of wars dramatically declines during world generation with stable peace being very likely at the end of generation.

Personally, I think that this is a balance problem. The density of sites in general seems to be relatively low (both for caves and civilizations, although wars are a civilization issue solely). The bug fix for the number of civilizations should enable us to work at least on part of that aspect.

But secondly, it is probably related to the philosophical sphere and how likely they are to cause conflict. Instead of using a primitive tag system of GOOD vs. EVIL, it seems more reasonable to strengthen the incompatibility between religions. Just look at real world earth - thousands of people have been killed in conflicts between the various sects of Christianity alone and even the current narrowing of the differences is actually just an unloved reaction to the perceived outside thread of secularism.

Finally, concerning the alpha state of the game, the following should be kept in mind:

These forums here have been created by Toady for people to comment and make suggestions which he looks through and may implement if they seem interesting and feasible to him. So, discussing what is good and what is bad about the game as it is at the moment is indeed what these forums are about, and if there is something you consider bad, you should say so here.

However, it is also true that Toady is basically offering this splendid game to us for free. We are not forced to donate. We have no right to force anything on Toady and if anything, we owe him respect and thanks. This does not contradict pointing out flaws in the current version of the game, but you should be aware of this situation and choose your words accordingly. Toady is not our slave or employe, so we should not make it look as if we were pushing him around.

Well, these are my thoughts on the issue, and I hope that people can return to a constructive discussion on how the game could be improved rather than calling each other names.

Deathworks