Bay 12 Games Forum

Cyborg aliens.

My suggestion is simple, wouldn't be that hard to implement - at least I dare think so - and would add a little bit of flavor to the life of your fortress.

To get quickly to the core : make it so that any people killing an enemy of your fortress gains some friendship points from anyone in the fortress. It makes sense that the people of your fortress would be grateful towards the people protecting them from evil lurking from every direction.
This way, your legendary axedwarf would be an actual hero, loved by the population.
Once the caravan arc is done, I expect people will give gifts to their friends so he'll be the real subject of admiration.
Since elections are strongly influenced by the number of friends you have, he'll get access to power quite easily - thus completing the story of the war hero become leader, or the one who refused leadership each time.

Initially I was going to include only your dwarves but I then thought of the case of caravan guards fending off goblin invasions. It would make sense to see your dwarves giving them gifts as token of gratitude, since they saved the day.
Obviously, you wouldn't want hunting to be concerned with that, so let's limit it to sentient, hostile creatures and hostile legendary beasts.

The only "problem" I see is that many people loving someone that prone to dying would create tantrum spirals too quickly. There are several ways of dealing with that.
The first would be to reduce the negative thought received for the death of a friend proportionnally to the time said friend has been in the military - you can think of it as being prepared to that possibility.
The second mean would be, at the moment a dwarf goes berserk, to keep track of which event triggered that state and who is guilty. Then instead of going berserk, they could enter a martial trance - at least if they're drafted : then we'd have the scenario of the legendary squad fending off goblins when suddenly a troll smashes the very loved leader, triggering the berserk rage of his teammates who quickly retaliate against every little foe. The keeping track part is not really necessary, it would only be needed to set up bonuses against only these enemies/civilisation/race etc and perhaps to the long term make the whole D&D "foe specialist". Plus, if grudges are given to someone who kills a friend, and fight bonus against someone to whom you hold a grudge, it's already in ! We'd maybe need to generalize that grudge to the whole race or civilization though. That tendency to racism could be a new trait part of the personnality rewrite.

Then of course we'd need the funerals, because a hero needs proper burial. So, make the requirement for someone's tomb proportionnal not only to its title but also to how much he's loved, granting real heroes proper tombs, unless you want a great big negative thought for everyone.
Also, I think dwarves currently go visit the tomb of a loved one - I saw that a few times and I think it's not chance, correct me if I'm wrong. So for more flavor, let's make people lay gifts on the tombs of their loved ones.

Currently we don't have gifts because dwarves don't have anything to give nor do they really have a drive to acquire anything. This will probably have changed by the end of the caravan arc. As to what makes a good gift, I think a simple algorithm such as this would work : take the obejctive value of the object, multiply following the receiver preferences. So a copper, lapis incrusted sword would make a better gift than a steel, diamond incrusted hammer for someone who likes copper, lapis and sword.

That's about it. I thought I should suggest it while we are in the development of the caravan arc. Your thoughts ?

Ah, apparently Toady is on to adding criminals. How deep will criminals be implemented for this time ? Random formation, ot will it be tied to for example poverty ? Does this means Stalkers will get in too ?

No missing features compared to a mere game. Just have a look at the development goals and you'll understand how massive DF aims to be. It takes litterally hours just to read the list of features.

There is a significant difference between "fixing a bug" and "replacing a placeholder with the fully-feature" in a game like DF. DF is ambitious on virtually every side of it. Each placeholder is there because a whole other arc of features is missing, so before fixing it said features have to be implemented. If you consider it that way, he is actively working towards fixing your bug. It's only the sheer scale of the projet that makes it a long way.

Also, please consider what you're saying. "Basically, the better metal will win" is the common design in every other RPG and no one ever complains about it. Here it wins because its mechanical properties are more suitable for the weapon used. I don't see why you're complaining.

Dwarf Fortress : Throwing CPU begging on their knees with more efficiency than a french politician would a maid.

Also, if he does stalker he might need some more types of stalkers, which means some more types of death. At the moment, people die of old age (not really stalker-worthy), killed in battle or of starvation. He specifically mentionned criminals sentenced to death, which means he'd have to implement some form of crime.

I would say to hold them until marketplaces are around and personal fortune is kept track of. This way we'd have poor people and rich people with actual stuff to steal. Let's just throw a quick check for "am I really poor ? did i use to be richer ? is there someone rich near ? Damn, i might very well try to steal that person." and then take a random decision for the outcome.

Wait, for criminals to be sentenced to death, they need to go to jail somewhere, which means they need to be taken alive. Dungeons could be used as jail, but making people capture other people without killing them, even only in worldgen, could require some significant work, depending on how it is for the moment.

I'm pretty sure food rotting will have to come with the caravans and livestock so fresh products are still bought locally and not imported from the end of the world. It wouldn't too bad a bug though, so it could come a little after but I would bet the time between the two will be short.

For the adventurer, rotting food wood be good if we had in the vanilla game some way of getting it from game we'd hunt. Mods such as wanderer's friend already include that so it wouldn't bother me By the way, does wanderer's friend add a way to cook butchered animals' hum... products ? Raw goat intestines aren't really tasty.