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Author Topic: Difficulty+ Plugin Races: Orcs, Beastmen, Ratmen & Gnolls  (Read 33119 times)

Mysh

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Re: Difficulty+ Plugin Races: Orcs, Beastmen, Ratmen & Gnolls
« Reply #75 on: July 09, 2012, 07:59:46 pm »

Here's the seed...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)


I'm not entirely sure how you designate a world location on the embark map? Like i said, i'm a noob still.  :)

Here's a screenshot of it, using the ironhand tileset.  The name will probably be different, but you can identify it on the world map from the vertical line of 3 mountains adjacent to the east, and from the volcano chain it's in and the coast to the north on the region map.  The 5x5-square previous civ in the center of the local map is the location (not the currently highlighted selection), that was my initial embark to scout it out.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I just started it up a couple of hours ago, mod is working fine with the language files deleted, and it's much more challenging so far. :)
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1v0ry_k1ng

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Re: Difficulty+ Plugin Races: Orcs, Beastmen, Ratmen & Gnolls
« Reply #76 on: July 14, 2012, 08:01:34 am »

Interesting, I normally start a fresh world when adding new civs.

I'd welcome feedback and/or screenshots of your sieges  :)

Mysh

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Re: Difficulty+ Plugin Races: Orcs, Beastmen, Ratmen & Gnolls
« Reply #77 on: July 14, 2012, 11:45:21 am »

I didn't take any screenshots i'm afraid, but yesterday the fort was vanquished finally after 17 years.  Sieges weren't the cause, essentially there was so much death in my fort that migrants stopped arriving and my population stagnated, so i ended it with fun - disbanded the military and then unwalled to let the clowns come in from below.

Some feedback on the mod, although bear in mind it's from the one long playthrough only.  I had those worldgen issues originally and genned the world with the orc language files removed to get the embark i wanted, and on the embark screen i had beastmen, gnolls and orcs as nearby civs.  However in-game proper the orcs never showed up, despite replacing the language files after world gen.  That's probably my fault for screwing with the files, and so i can only give feedback on the gnolls and beastmen.

Early game the sieges were just right for me, i think the first one arrived after the first migrants, and i had to hold them off with my 2 man militia, losing one.  It was a good challenge.  I noticed the sieges rarely coincided with goblin ones also, which i liked.

Once i got a dry moat up around year two and popped a drawbridge over it, it pretty much negated the sieges entirely.  Ocassionally someone would get left outside before the bridge came up, else they weren't too threatening.  Perhaps some kind of flying ability for one of the races would help that?

Then i got my steel industry rolling in year three and had a decent full-steel 5-man axedwarf squad, and the sieges actually became more like meat deliveries.   It seemed the dwarves were butchering the mounts/animals from them, unless it was just local wildlife collateral damage.

I had some slowdown issues as the years rolled by (4.2GHz 2500k cpu).  Sieges got up to around 60-70 enemies each time at least, and the area around my moat and bridge was a sea of corpses, bloodstains, bones and clothing.  I don't know if it's possible but you might want to prevent enemies dropping full sets of clothing/armor.  At one point my game had over 22 thousand items according to dfhack.  I had to d-b-c then d-b-d the entire outdoor area of the map, dropping me back to around 10k items.  On the same note it seemed impossible to have 50+ haulers manually clean the corpses+items in the 2-4 months before the next siege occured.  I had to use autodump.

It went on like that for over a decade, every few months my militia went out and destroyed the 4-5 spawned groups (each about 15 units) that constituted each siege.

I liked the ambush squads of 7 enemies inbetween the sieges, it kept things interesting when i went out on the map to chop trees and claim steel/iron/silver weapons from the bloodbaths.  Not sure if it was intentional but i would often get one ambush from beastmen and then another ambush on the other side of the map from the gnolls at the same time, making me split my militia to handle both.

Overall i found the mod pretty awesome, it added a lot more action to above-ground life in the fort.  I guess the bullet point summary for how i think it could be improved would be:

- flying enemies
- less armor/clothing dropped by enemies
- tougher+fewer enemies in later sieges, since the game engine struggles with all the pathing otherwise, plus the challenge level doesn't scale well with a forts military improvement (ie. it becomes a no-risk meatgrinder).
- perhaps some occasional super-bosses?

Thanks for all the work on the mod, it really livened up my game, especially in the early years.  Great job.  :)

As a side note, how did my fort stop receiving migrants?  Well, i forgot to change the child pop caps in d_init, so by year 10 my fort had 110 adult dwarves and 120 children.  I decided to burrow all the children outside my moat, half of which obliged and got locked out there for the next 70+ mob siege wave to chase around.  I repeated it for another 50 children the next season.  You'd be surprised to hear that the parents reacted poorly to it, and half of them went insane or melancholy despite my fine food, silver furniture in everyones bedroom and an exquisite dining room.  That dropped my pop from 230 to 65 in a year.  I was looking forward to my 200 pop of productive dwarves building up with migrants now, but instead got migration waves of 2, then 3, then 1, then nothing.  Lesson learned - set your child caps before reaching max population, that is, at embark!  Also, abandoning 100+ children to sieges in a single year might give your fort a bad rep.  :)

« Last Edit: July 14, 2012, 11:49:04 am by Mysh »
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Meph

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Re: Difficulty+ Plugin Races: Orcs, Beastmen, Ratmen & Gnolls
« Reply #78 on: July 14, 2012, 11:56:11 am »

Quote
- flying enemies
- less armor/clothing dropped by enemies
- tougher+fewer enemies in later sieges, since the game engine struggles with all the pathing otherwise, plus the challenge level doesn't scale well with a forts military improvement (ie. it becomes a no-risk meatgrinder).
- perhaps some occasional super-bosses?

Flying pathfinding is broken...
Tougher enemies for later sieges is possible. Fewer enemies not, only more...
Occasional Super-Bosses = Custom Megabeasts...

The attack triggers can be raised for later attacks, and those races could have access to better materials to make them tougher.
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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 :::
::: WorldBicyclist.com - Follow my bike tours around the world - 148 countries visited :::

1v0ry_k1ng

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Re: Difficulty+ Plugin Races: Orcs, Beastmen, Ratmen & Gnolls
« Reply #79 on: July 14, 2012, 01:10:32 pm »

Thanks for the feedback  :)

Regarding no show on the orcs, its quite possible that a) orcs were vanquished during worldgen or b) your civ was not at war with orcs

Regarding the low difficulty of defeating seiges, alas danger rooms make acquiring legendary dwarves so easy. I will upgrade orcs to use steel along with other metals, and reduce the non-armor clothing of orcs/beastmen.

The reptile-folk race I am working on now should be the answer to the difficulty question. A small, fast (unarmed) poison spitting caste, a medium weapon using caste, a large poison-bite snake headed class and a hulking, crocodile-headed caste, all with hard scales that resist slashing weapons and water-breathing/amphibious movement. 

Mysh

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Re: Difficulty+ Plugin Races: Orcs, Beastmen, Ratmen & Gnolls
« Reply #80 on: July 14, 2012, 01:37:45 pm »

The orcs seemed to be alive at the embark screen, and are at war, at least they were listed with a red line beside them, the same as gnolls/goblins/beastmen.  Like i said, it's probably the hacky way i genned the world.

Those changes sound good by the way, reducing clutter and upping the mid-game challenge.  The new race sounds great also, and like it will require some new (and more complicated) tactics to defeat.  :)

You're right about the danger rooms making it too easy to build a formidable military, i wish the game offered a middle ground.  Without them the military feels too weak and far too slow to train to competent levels.  That's a more fundamental issue with the game though, for sure.

Anyhow i look forward to doing an embark with the next release, thanks for the efforts.  :)

By the way thanks for the reply from Meph too, i plan to try Masterwork in the interim, looks fun indeed.
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Meph

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Re: Difficulty+ Plugin Races: Orcs, Beastmen, Ratmen & Gnolls
« Reply #81 on: July 14, 2012, 02:18:57 pm »

What I did to reduce clutter is this:

Give enemies natural weapons, like mages with spells/interactions, or things with claws.
Give enemies natural warmor, like golems made of metal, or my frost giants made of thick ice.
No clothing for invaders. It serves no purpose anyway for them.
No boots/gloves for invaders. This makes them slightly easier, yes... but also removes 4 items from each unit.
No corpses. Use itemcorpse to drop 1 item instead. My kobolds for example only leave a "bag of loot"
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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 :::
::: WorldBicyclist.com - Follow my bike tours around the world - 148 countries visited :::
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