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Author Topic: Making Good regions more Fun?  (Read 565 times)

Flarp

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Making Good regions more Fun?
« on: May 28, 2014, 05:49:27 pm »

So, I'm about four years into my first serious attempt at a Joyous Wilds embark, and I'm not hugely impressed. I was expecting Savage Good to be roughly equivalent to Calm Evil in difficulty, but even with some nice additions from the DF Chocolate mod (cheese and beer rain, I'm not sure what else), there's not a whole lot besides vegetation types distinguishing this embark from a Calm or Wilderness biome.

So, forums, what do you think could make Good biomes more difficult and interesting, from a modding perspective? Thematically, my first thought is that, rather than being the Rivendell to Evil's Mordor, Good regions should be more like the enchanted forests of classical fantasy - just as dangerous and mysterious as evil places, but more likely to turn you into a frog than get you killed by your horse's reanimated skin. But that's obviously not the only approach to take: I'm interested in what other people's thoughts are.
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sal880612m

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Re: Making Good regions more Fun?
« Reply #1 on: May 28, 2014, 06:14:31 pm »

Don't know if it is possible but maybe make something like a Rain of youth that can turn your dwarves into children/babies or a Memory Fog that erases your dwarf's skills and/or alters their personality. Perhaps throw in some sort of syndrome that will make your dwarves sleep for protracted, near fatal lengths of time and attach it to a new type of creature.
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BlackFlyme

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Re: Making Good regions more Fun?
« Reply #2 on: May 28, 2014, 07:36:27 pm »

You could make an interaction that more or less renders zombies useless by taking away tokens such as NOTHOUGHT, which will kill or at greatly slow down at least some of them, depending on how intact the corpse is.

Though for fun, you could have an effect that can resurrect the dead, which would include invaders. Or make everyone sterile, hindering births. "Pacify" dwarves by having them periodically become sleepy or fall unconscious, or slow their total speed down by a percentage. Or enforce pacifism by tying certain debilitating effects to the creature's combat hardness. The more they fight, the weaker they get.

Or maybe the good magic in the area could make animals intelligent, which would allow them to become mayor and prevent you from butchering some of them. Maybe an interaction makes the creatures of the region will be aggressive, and more likely to attack dwarves instead of running away.
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Meph

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Re: Making Good regions more Fun?
« Reply #3 on: May 28, 2014, 07:54:51 pm »

Make trees that when felled evaporate into gas that affects the woodcutter with "fairy dust" and makes him fall asleep. Or make some of them spawn a living Ent/Treant, a tree person that strikes back at dwarves hacking at them.

Add a syndrome to good grass that is digested by your grazers. Effects may vary.

Add some good rains that make everyone on the surface fall asleep, or take away TRANCES.

Add CURIOUSBEAST tags to good creatures, so that imps and druids and nymphs start stealing your items, drinking your booze and eat your food away.

Add good vermin that chews through your food stockpiles, like pixies or gnomes.
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Wannabehero

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Re: Making Good regions more Fun?
« Reply #4 on: May 30, 2014, 03:17:28 pm »

It's funny you mentioned those things Meph.

I actually designed good biome trees back in the day that, when cut down, would spawn a horde of angry fairy vermin.  Evaporating logs induce syndrome, cause woodcutter to do the whole xform/limbdrop/animate/xform dance to produce fairy horde, fairy horde proceeds to play havok on your fortress if they get inside.

Also had similar "good vermin" that would pop up in the fortress and do weird things, like transforming your cats, or making your dwarves move super fast then fall asleep, or alter your dwarfs' skills (semi)randomly.

Never finished it though.  Wanted to do some other things like mod the fish and edible plants to have strange effects when ingested.
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Meph

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Re: Making Good regions more Fun?
« Reply #5 on: May 30, 2014, 04:44:49 pm »

The evaporating wood has one issue: Embark items and caravan items made of wood (barrels, wagons, etc) are made of ANY wood a civ has access to. Anyone settles in a good biomes, and you suddenly have self-deconstructing caravans full of fairies and pixies. :P

Urist Da Vinci wrote a script to remove specific materials from civs, but it has to be done manually.

Anyway, you have always done really neat little mods. Are you back from "back in the day", and do modding again?
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::: ☼Meph Tileset☼☼Map Tileset☼- 32x graphic sets with TWBT :::
::: ☼MASTERWORK DF☼ - A comprehensive mod pack now on Patreon - 250.000+ downloads and counting :::
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