Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh well, I'll just refrain from making that race playable, and make their technological advantages apparent with unique buildings and interactions.

Not true. To my knowledge, there are quite a few European countries without a two-party system. However, the media oftentimes tries to portray elections as a two-person race, because that's what sells better.

Can someone please rerail the topic?

Perhaps they're some creature that was never fully implemented? Also, use "a" to assume form and then check for body parts using "z".

Weird, but that's probably just your new creatures. In my version, I've only seen one "Nothing" so far, and that was fixed immediately.

IMO, the main problem with the world today is that our systems are entirely dependent on growth. Our economy is set up in such a way that entities have to keep growing or die. They can rarely just find a stable niche. Stability and equilibrium are required.

Exactly what I was about to say. This is more or less required if you want something to work well; you need to test a system over and over again to see if it works well, and if the system is constantly changing, that doesn't work.

But if you use webs to cover the traps, they'll be captured even with [TRAP_AVOID], right?

I feel that the human advantage stems from the same source as their relative inefficiency: they don't focus on one task. They'll randomly combine concepts for reasons that have nothing to do with either concept, leading to radically new ideas. Sure, you can make an AI do that, but it would take a lot of work and people often have an aversion to doing stuff that helps in the short term, instead of the long term. And if a project takes away an advantage they have, well... The only way I can see that happening is that humans have an instinct that says "Hmmm, what would happen if I do this thing? I mean, I can predict what will happen, but what actually does?", which is also what causes humans to do stuff like making sticking their fingers up electric sockets, which is why we invented safer sockets, but what if doing so makes it harder for people to make things safer for themselves?

About the automatic cars debate, I feel that the problem here is going to be people who apply the Bay12 motto of "any peaceful technology can be adapted into a much more amusing and violent one" to real life. Some people will just decide to buy an old car, strip out as much of the electronic stuff that can be used to trace them by the auto-drive stuff and then just go crazy. Hell, in that scenario even standing still would probably cause the automated car system to kill at least one person.

I agree with Tschusigumo. But why stop at being a mecha? All you really need for fast-switching, multiple-body processing is a central computer and some system to send signals (more reliably than just electromagnetic radiation-based versions, as you don't want someone to start broadcasting on a specific frequency and cause you to walk off a cliff by accident). That's basically the technological approach to the concept of a "soul".


Mostly, what humans can do better than robots is being absurd. We're a mess of several redundant systems left over from past usages and using several systems (both electronics and fluids), with no one having attempted a bug fix yet. To me, that means that what humans are better than robots is not science, but mad science. No robot would do the sort of stuff as we humans have done with DF.

Evolution isn't exactly the same process as innovation. Evolution is like water, it always flows downwards, but that doesn't mean it always finds the lowest point. It won't flow up the side of a basin to reach the floor, and in the same way evolution will rarely follow a path that is less well adapted in the short term, but can branch into something more well adapted in the long term. It is for this reason that we are full of all these biological redundancies and poor design choices as a species. I imagine your food creation method would be much the same, you would get a very refined dish, and it would change over time to suit shifts in cultural taste, but you would rarely, if ever see the kind of brand new innovation that is so indicative of human design.

Also, superfluids do flow up the sides of basins to find the lowest point. But you're right about evolution, and that's exactly my point.