Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Karnewarrior on November 05, 2012, 05:30:56 pm

Well, the axe works as planned, but some refinement is certainly needed.

If you think about it logically, the worst part is sharpening and tying on all the stone blades. We need a better way to sharpen stone. But how...

No matter. The axe works as planned, if a bit shoddy, and the Atl-atl was a brilliant idea. That should improve our protien intake which'll lead to more discoveries quicker.

Now that we have a way of getting wood reliably, if slowly, we need to think about what else is keeping us from progressing farther. We're farming and so control our own food supply of plants, the water doesn't go anywhere so that's not an issue. Resources are abundant, even if we still rely mostly on random drops, and our hunting boost from the Atl-atl should keep us fed with animals for quite a bit.

That just leaves shelter. We need bigger houses to fit more people so we can have more people. And we don't have enough skin and twigs to build bigger tents. We need to build out of what we have more than enough of: wood, stone, and mostly, mud/clay.

Stone is too difficult to work and wood is still too difficult to obtain. We need to find a way to build permanent shelters out of clay or mud. try shaping some into a block and leaving it in the sun to get the water out.

+1

+2

Also keep searching for those damn stones. (aka looking for sharper, better, stronger stones.)

I think healing magic should be considered a regular part of the medical profession. I also like the idea that most magic ultimatly comes from deities.

The Docs should be a part of the healing god/godess' priesthood. I agree with BoredVirulence (page 2, bottom of), mana should be introduced as a new resource with a low recharge rate. There should also be a few fundemental spells, I believe:
1) resurection (Only avalible to proficent healing priests, and with the god/godess of healing's absolute satisfaction, must be attempted within 5 days of death (otherwise the soul will have permently passed out of this realm), and takes up the mana of a proficent priest for a year)
2) Restoring a limb,  (2 seasons off of a proficent priest's mana, god/godess must be  very happy with you, does not matter how long ago the limb was lost)
3) healing the spine, or another mortal injury (a season of a proficent priest's mana, god/godess must be happy with you.)
4) Healing a cut, an infection, or setting a bone (a month of mana,  godess' opinion irrelevent)

The Docs should be able to preform these out in a field, or on the operating table as part of an operation. If you can get them to the operating table, you can choose not to use magic, or if you want to use magic to make the treatment more effective. Also, I would suggest a base decrease of 50% for using an operating table and the other assossiated medical devices(but not for resurection), so it is still worth your while to have a medical industry.

This would only slightly decrease the use of the medical industry, as although the magic would replace many operations, it would add a new type of operation, whoose demand would likley largely make up for the demand lost due to on field healing.

I think the gods should require sacrifices to appease them, requiring a fixed number of a set of random objects out of a category set for that god. So the god of war chooses 5 of x war-like goods, god of healing 5x healing goods.  You would bring them to an alter, they would be striked by divine fire, and the fire would consume the them. Some of these objects could be animals. A god of war or blood could demand a sacrifice of one sentient being instead of any goods.

You should be able to sacrifice for three things:
1) leveling your wizard, would require 3x the normal sacrifice but would grant him an entirelly new level of magic instantly.
2) restore mana, would restore a years worth of mana to one wizard
3) achieve favor, makes the god like you more, causing spells to be marginally more effective (1-10%, would make a difference but not too big of a differance) and allows you to use certain spells.

Also mana regen should increase with level, to encourage leveling of mages. Should increase as a fraction of proficent dwarf's mana generation, so with no skill in magic you have zero mana, skill 1 you have 1/5 of normal mana regen, legendary +5 you have 4x mana regen.

I don't know what the god's would be off the top of my head, but for the god of healing they would be items related to the medical industry, so in order to get more experinced clerics you would need to set up a medical industry. God of war demands axes, god of nature wood, god of the aether would demand (actually no idea), etc.

Damn, that was longer than I thought it would be.

Also magical talent should be rare, 1/100 with a natural talent, starting at one in all skills, 1/20 with natural ability to learn, but still learn only 1/2 as fast as the 1/100, and everyone else just has no clue how to use it and takes 4x as long to use. I also say 1 year for a talented person to learn one level by just reading books and practicing. So unless you sacrifice, it takes 20 years to get that migrent who happened to be talented up to lvl 20.

This makes sacrifices necessary, and thus wizards far more valuable.

Urist McRowling withdraws from society...

lol

Urist McRowling claims a writer'sworkshop

Train the lion to hunt alongside the men. Develop a signel for the lion to attack.

Send some men out to search for stones that make better, sharper, stronger spearheads (this is how we discover things like copper, and iron, and minerals in general. Also whoever said that surface ores would be more common now is right. If you think about the major mining areas today, they are areas that historically never contained a civilization that was exploiting the surface or near-surface ore deposits of many major minerals (Austrailia, North America (not including Mexico), Siberia, Mongolia, South-Eastern Africa , Brazil, etc). That is because there exist in those areas minerals closer to the surface that are easier to exploit than minerals elsewhere, in large part thanks to the previous lack of explotation of resources. So there should be much greater concentrations of minerals near the surface now, since nobody has been around to mine the deposits. Copper won't be all over the place, but there should be atleast a very small vein in our area.)

Also take a look at your wrist now, to make sure it is healing correctly.

Then again dwarf fortress is not a game where you invest X resources to get Y superweapon, but a game where you get many small parts, and are allowed to construct a doomsday weapon of your own design.

Hence why I propose to allow siege weapons to be moddable, maybe attachable to switches and power, and that there should be an ammo select button for catapults. With these you can make a rapid fire ballista with some clever stacking. Or you can mod it in yourself.

+1

You export objects under the title of "Other Objects" (as most players do)

You also like a centrelized fortress. You prefer to centrelize and/or organize rooms passed on function.

Your fortress is in a sedimentary layer.

Your fortress is quite large, at least 100. ( as evidenced by the size of hospital facilites and the fact that you have a dedicated team of engravers.)

You are using the water as part of a magma piston.

Wild educated guess, above the hospital are bedrooms, residential dinning rooms, or residential studies.

I've played a couple of times but in total it was probably only 24 hours.

Well there should probably be a seperate building above the seige engine. The engine should be around 5x the parts of a normal catapult/ballista, all in a 5x3x2 ( x2 is height) space, with many more mechanisms, no siege operator, of course, and a high power requirment (I'm thinking around 5 water wheels).

Both catapults and ballistas are wound up before being fired, which gives them their power. So you need to attach the ropes winding them up to an axle, which pulls it taunt and then spins in the other direction to release it, and then you could simply have the ammo drop from above a set number of second after the axle switches it's roatation, reloading the machine.

There was appearently a actuall semi-repeating ballista in REAL LIFE, called a Polybolos. It was small, had horrible aim, and a short effective range compared to a regular ballista. If we simply make the ballista bigger, then you could make it more powerful and increase it's range. (hence the x3)

No way for it to detect enemies though, so it would have to be attached to pressure plates or a lever.