We have an arena. The arena is awesome for testing stuff out, whether you're playing Fortress mode or Adventure mode. This can't be denied. Sure, it's a little clunky to use, but hey - you can do just about anything you want, and that makes it worth it.
Now, what if the arena could double as something else, for those among us who love the blood-and-gore aspect of Dwarf Fortress? What if, instead of a testing area, you could play in it the same way you could in adventure mode, without it getting boring? I think it might be called 'Battle mode'. I'm talking randomized auto-spawning creatures, difficulty settings, customized spawn rates, etc. In my opinion, it would be awesome to spawn in the arena with a group of allies, running around and killing everything in sight - zombies, skeletons, rampaging giant badgers, carp, you name it - and it just keeps coming. Your mission is to see how long you can survive, and have lots of Fun in the process.
It would be incredibly easy to implement - almost everything for it is already there. Here's how it might work:
- Choose the arena. I'm sure DF fans would enjoy submitting their custom-built arenas, so that would take quite a bit of the workload off Toady One. The Arena is already created from a file in the Init folder, if you've noticed.
- Choose your race. Naturally, I would assume that you would be natural - no vampirism, no lycanthropy, no being a necromancer. You would also have to start as one of the Adventure mode starting races.
- Choose your skills. You could make and keep presets - one might be named "Living Shield" and be extremely good at staying alive. The preset-choosing for skills isn't in the game yet, but it wouldn't be hard to add, and the skill choices are already in Adventure mode - that's where this would come from. You choose to be a peasant, hero, or demigod, and then you set your stats/skills. Another option could be to randomize your skills - to let the game choose random settings for you - this would keep you on your toes, and force you to adapt to what you have. Also, I would assume that it would give you your armor/weapons automatically - and that you'd have to scavenge weapons/armor from slaughtered enemies.
- Choose your allies. Why not? It's simple enough, and it's always fun to fight with a team. After choosing their races, you could choose from various custom-made presets you've created, to help speed things up. You could choose to fight alone if you wished, or have the game give you a randomized set of allies, the quantity of which would be your choosing.
- Choose the game settings. I imagine they would be things like:
- Initial Difficulty - controls the enemy difficulty - hardest might spawn dragons or forgotten beasts. Easiest would let you run around killing cats and rabbits. (This would, unfortunately, require a datafile for the difficulty rating of all the creatures.) This setting would also affect the quality of the enemy's weapons/armor, and their skills. It would also probably slowly increase over time ingame to keep things interesting.
- Spawn rate - choose how fast the enemies spawn. They would likely spawn on random floor tiles (or water for water creatures) on the map, a certain distance from the player, making adding spawn points unnecessary.
- Max enemy density - while the Spawn Rate setting would control how fast enemies spawn, this setting would control the maximum number of enemies on the map at once, so that you can't sit in one place and wind up with a map crawling with enemies. However, I'm more for this not existing - losing is fun. If you want fewer enemies, you could set this lower.
- Undead/Cursed/Necromancers/Werebeasts/Vampires On/Off - does what it says on the tin.
- Begin! The battle begins, and you're ready to slaughter enemies until you die of exhaustion. (Though, possibly, healing rates out-of-battle could be increased, and exhaustion could be turned off. Hunger/thirst would need to be.)
After you're done, you could possibly save and have your character and party exported to the unused world of your choice, ready to go adventuring, with all your stats still intact. This would be handled the same way as the initial embark in Adventure mode.
I've looked through everything, and this doesn't appear to have been mentioned before, which I find strange.
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Topic: Arena Battlemode Suggestion (Read 1973 times)