Bay 12 Games Forum

Sounds like you're in a prime position to start a Dwarven Mental Health Center and Psychiatric Care Facility. He's clearly a very troubled individual.

He tantrummed again - punched a dog this time and toppled two forges. Got another beating and was sent to jail for two months.

Funnily enough, he's doing better now that he was before, and you know why? He feels "repentant" after being confined! It's a fairly strong stress-reliving emotion, and it's dropped him down from haggard to merely stressed. Apparently prison really can rehabilitate some folks...

Meanwhile I have another stressed dwarf - she was basically thrown in prison a week after she arrived for "violating a production order." Yeah, mayor... a production order you gave before she was even here.

In my Zoro Persia game I actually maxed the tax obligation, and used the money to field a standing army of retinues and mercenaries (with the Immortals thrown in for free, since I vassalized them). It got up to ~50,000 men, I think, and could easily have had more.

The main advantages of such a force are:
     1) as a standing army, you don't need to muster levies every time you declare war, and can strike at your opponents before they have a chance to muster;
     2) levies don't reinforce in the field - they have to be disbanded and re-raised. Mercs/Holy Orders/Retinues all reinforce, so losing men isn't as big of a deal.

Main drawbacks are 1) cost and 2) your vassals have more troops available to cause trouble with, but neither of these is hard to surmount.

About mercenary companies though: over time the companies "grow" to have more troops - so, in 867 the Turkoman Company has maybe ~1500 troops, but in 967 they'll have ~3000, and so on. BUT that only happens when they aren't raised - so periodically disbanding and re-hiring the mercenary companies is necessary. Again, no big problem if you can eat the cost.

Fought through a vault full of humanoid jackal angels made of flame - so, basically a bunch of fiery Anubises. They were pretty easy to kill, as one hit to the upper body would destroy them, but every wound caused a large fiery explosion. I learned I had to dodge backwards as I struck, then jump away to avoid the flames, and even that sometimes didn't work. I almost died of blood loss toward the end, and wound up with all the fat melted off my torso and left thigh.

One of the companions I picked up, a human mercenary, told me about his two young cousins who had been snatched by goblins. They were siblings, children of the lady of a nearby hamlet. But I didn't think much of it at the time.

Later this companion died in an ill-fated assault on a dark pits. I bore his body and possessions to the surface and held a funeral ceremony, recounting stories of his life and tragic end. Then I set my sights on the dark fortress: stole in secretly, entered the citadel, and in the first level of the prison I found the two cousins of my late friend. We crept from the fortress and made our escape. I brought them back to their home; on entering the castle the children ran to their mother, who almost could not believe her eyes, and they embraced, tears streaming down joyful faces.

This was at the conclusion of many other adventures, during which I had lost many companions to dreadful foes, especially a bronze colossus. I divided all the treasure we'd claimed on our journey and gave equal portions to each survivor; several portions I donated to a local temple in memory of our lost friends.

I think they are. A while back in the current version I was looking around a world in Legends Viewer, and came across a human religion that was "dedicated to the worship of Name McName [a human vampire] as a god."

I, however, have not actually *seen* a cult in-game since .34. There never was much too them, though; just some random peasants who would stand around the lord's hall and attack you if you called out the vamp.

[pedant]
A quick primer on using "archaic" language:

-st and -th are inflectional endings left over from Old English, for 2nd and 3rd person singular respectively:

I do		we do
thou dost		you do
he/she/it doth		they do

"Thou" is 2nd pers. sing. only (cognate with Latin tu, German du, Russian ty, etc.). "You" is normally 2nd pers. plural, but can also function as a polite/formal address to an individual. Contrary to popular belief "thou" is not the "formal" word, but the informal/familiar -- we only think it's formal because we only hear it in "formal" situations, like Shakespeare plays.
"Thee" is the oblique case of "thou" -- use it only where you would use "me," and use "thou" only where you would use "I." You can similarly use "ye" as an oblique of "you," but it's not necessary: you can just use "you" as in contemporary English.
The genitive case of "thou" is "thine"; this is used just like "mine" in contemporary English, as a standalone pronoun after a linking verb: "this book is mine / thine."
"Thy" is used like "my," as an adjective attached to a noun: "my book / thy book." But before vowels "thy/my" can become "thine/mine": mine eyes / thine eyes." Think of the difference between a and an.
"You/yours/your" are just as in contemporary English: "you" is nominative/oblique, "yours" is genitive (the book is yours), and "your" is an adjective (your book).

(you might notice I say "contemporary English" rather than "modern English." That's because this is Modern English, technically speaking -- English from the Modern period of history, which began ~1500. Strictly speaking it is "Early Modern English." It is not "Old English," which properly designates the language spoken by Anglo-Saxons prior to the Norman invasion, in which for instance Beowulf is composed.)
[/pedant]

As for the magic stuff: it sounds pretty neat so far, although it's hard to comment on someone else's worldbuilding without knowing the whole metaphysics behind it all. I'll only say for the moment that you might avoid using the terms "schools" (and maybe even "magic"), as it seems you're describing something much more fluid and hard-to-categorize. Which is good IMO: I like my magic mysterious and unexplained, rather than extensively categorized like a science. But that's me.

On the poem: well, you obviously know the scansion needs work. The best way to learn iambic pentameter in my experience is to read and watch a lot of Shakespeare. After a while it just comes naturally. Also, as an aside, the "typical" English epic verse uses couplets throughout -- but that is far from a hard-and-fast rule, since there isn't a lot of English epic verse. But Chaucer uses couplets in Canterbury Tales, Dryden used them in his Aeneid translation, and Tolkien in his Lay of Luthien, so there's some precedent for it. Something to consider.

Increasing demon types allows more "unique demons" (i.e. historical figure demons) to generate; in the current version such demons are necessary for Dark Fortress civs to be placed at all, so if you cut back this number it will cut down the number of goblin civs that place, which should make them less of a threat.
If you want to keep dwarves alive, first thing is to cut down the number of FBs, as they only target dwarven sites. Unfortunately the only way to do this is to reduce cavern layers (I usually play with only 1 cavern), but I haven't noticed any downsides from this--in fact it might actually help FPS in a later fortress.
If you want to allow dwarves to start wars (and thus conquer other sites, improving their survival later on), you can change their ethic KILL_NEUTRAL to ACCEPTABLE. I think, actually, that any value "more acceptable" than ONLY_IF_SANCTIONED will work, but I haven't tested that.

As for myself, I haven't noticed goblins being a big threat in my worlds for several versions now. In fact I went out of my way to make them stronger, by making them breed faster and doubling the size of their trolls; only then did I ever see them conquering dwarf sites, and in general making a splash in the world. My problem is the damn elves wiping out humans all the time -- it's annoying how they dominate in worldgen when they're such pushovers in actual gameplay.