Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Jonathan S. Fox on April 28, 2013, 04:33:45 pm

Quote from: tahujdt on April 28, 2013, 04:32:16 pm

As in a hostage.

Yes, how did you do it?

The reason it's super buggy is that you shouldn't be able to put Conservatives in your squad.

A conservative captive. I simply created a squad and he showed up as a potential member thereto. I assumed it was intentional, since there's a TDTTOE and it says a squad can't just have conservatives. I assumed it was so you could take prisoners with you to sites, like capturing a CEO and taking him to the Cable station.

The ability to put Conservatives in your squad was cut by Toady many years ago, and the code for preventing you from forming an all-Conservative squad was vestigial and shouldn't ever come up if the game is working right. This is the same bug that let you put sleepers in your squad, and will be fixed in the next release.

While conceptually forcing captives to travel with you in your squad is cool, the actual behavior once you show up on site isn't coded to properly support that, as you discovered.

Quote from: ShoesandHats on April 28, 2013, 04:38:46 pm

Okay, does losing an eye severely nerf your driving skill? Felix Fudge is now absolutely horrible at escaping from the police in his sports car.

I'd imagine it should--he's blind on one side now, after all.

Losing one eye makes a small difference; maybe a point of driving skill's worth. Losing two eyes will absolutely destroy your driving rolls.

Another possibility is that if a character is currently wounded (not just blind in one eye, but actually shot up), they're much much worse at driving.

Quote from: Cheedows on April 28, 2013, 12:12:06 pm

I guess so, and I'm positive that no one has any other charges since I literally just started out my squad.  Kidnapping is a pretty serious crime IRL I know, but attacking 6 unarmed guys with tanks, and the national guard?

If SWAT didn't raid you first, I'd call it a glitch too.  I thought the Guard only came out if you beat a SWAT raid.

They can come out early if heat is EXTREMELY HIGH. Still, one kidnapping charge should never trigger this -- it definitely sounds like a bug. Did your safehouse show insane amounts of heat?

Anyways, my problem is that if you have a conservative prisoner in the squad (love that idea btw), and then you assign someone to interrogate him while he is still in the squad, your game will crash and corrupt the save. Also, if you have a conservative in your party, he will still fight other conservatives.

How did you get a prisoner in the squad?

Quote from: Capital Fish on April 28, 2013, 07:19:27 am

Will we be changing versions for this? Seems like a big enough change to the game to bring us to version 5.

I've been curious what the sufficiently significant changes were in the last few version number updates...

The actual change from 3 to 4 was the introduction of Nightmare and Classic modes back in September 2009. The real reason wasn't those options, however, but a reflection on the cumulative changes of all previous versions over the years. I just figured it was about time. I actually don't know what the changes from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 were; those were changes Toady made, and it was either before I played the game or before I paid attention to the versions. It was certainly before Dwarf Fortress was released.

The thought of bumping up to 5.0 crossed my mind as well, but I'd want to wait until we have a bunch of Washington DC sites and ways to more directly affect the Liberal Agenda screen.

I imagine Pacifist Fox wouldn't be killing others for food.

Well, I'm not a vegan or even a vegetarian, and I think chickens are delicious, so I suspect I'd still be killing chickens. My philosophy doesn't rule out eating tasty animals, police violence, standing armies, or self-defense. So I guess you'd say I'm a "weak pacifist" rather than a "strong pacifist".

I make a philosophical decision to take violence off the table for conflict resolution. Which is to say, it's not a "never kill" rule, but a "never kill out of convenience" rule. And I believe that nearly all killing is done for convenience. A tremendous amount of the violence in the world comes from people choosing to allow themselves to believe others are hopeless, stupid, or evil, rather than treating others as real people with legitimate if conflicting interests. It's really amazing what you can achieve with some pragmatic respect for others. When violence is on the table as a way to solve conflicts, it's too easy to reach for. Once engaged in, it escalates dramatically and disproportionately.

There are some pragmatic and legitimate exceptions, but they mostly exist in the domains of self-defense and law enforcement.

1. Further simplify location code so that it's even easier to set up and maintain large location hierarchies.
2. Get everything working in one city.
3. Get everything working in two cities.
4. Handle travel between cities and prevent casual cross-country raids.
5. Generalize the "needs car" thing so that what areas you can reach without a car depends on where your squad is based.
6. Ensure the display tags on cities are useful. I mean the <safe house> tags.
7. Have cities display with a short description on the right, especially for the benefit of players not familiar with US cities.
8. Any left over testing and quality control.

Well, the alpha of the system is basically working; I have the barest bones of multiple city play online, with one-day "car needed" travel to re-base to the homeless shelter of another city. Much more needs to be done before it's ready for prime time, but I'm thinking of committing as a branch and releasing a test build to gather feedback.

There are going to be a huge amount of obvious easy things that need to be adjusted before it's really working, so I'll need to make a list of all the areas of the game that need to be updated. And there will be a lot -- everything from the way site names are displayed in places (needing city names attached) to the reorganization menu needing to not teleport vehicles and people between cities.

I'mma bump this.

Better to link to it, but what's done is done. Since we already have an active thread on this subject, I'm going to lock this one as a precaution to ensure that we don't split the discussion into two. Anyone who wants to continue the discussion here is welcome to post in the National LCS Revisited thread.

Quote from: Karlito on April 27, 2013, 02:08:12 pm

Found another little oddity. If you get caught by the police selling brownies, the message 'As you exit the site you notice you are being followed by conservative swine!' appears before the chase scene, as if you were leaving a raid.

I recall seeing this in 4.6.7 too, come to think of it.  Didn't seem terribly important at the time, sorry.

Me too. I vaguely recall investigating it, but don't remember the outcome of the investigation.