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Trinimac

Malacath

Gork

Mork

Morgoth

Saruman

Bhall

Father Sky

[gwathlobal]

The solution to mass production of katanas is making them costly in terms of bars. Either you have do dig down to level 3 and face your inevitable end at the hand (err, tentacles?) of facehuggers, or you need to grind like 10 bars into one bag of powder. Or add more complicated conditions, like grinding this and that as well (similar to the requirements for the philosopher's stone). Besides there are maps with no mithril ore at all, so I think it could be rather unfair to the player as Orcs already do not have that many distinctive features.

Another feature I'd like to see is production of oil from some aboveground crop (preferrably from seeds )

[Meph]

You really hate seeds ^^

If you just mean to make katanas harder by needing more bars, just upping the material size by a factor of 3 and enabling them in the entity file is enough.  Or were you thinking more in the lines of:
Building: Bladesmith/Blademaster, reaction: Forge Katana, needs tons of different stuff.

[gwathlobal]

Indeed I do 
Seeds are worse than catsplosion. Dwarves require alcohol, alcohol is produced from crops, crops generate seeds, seeds clog up your stockpiles so you have to enlarge the storage area, craft more barrels and bags, and the process is unstopabble. The only method to deal with it is seed cooking. But dwarves don't seem to eat as often as they drink.
What's good about orcs is that they do not need alcohol so any well will do (though I've seen some orcs "needing booze to get through the working day"). Thus they are more close to an ideal "seedless" fortress that I strive to achieve.

As for katanas, my idea was like this: add a reaction to the damascene shop - "grind <metal> bars into powder", which requires 10 <metals> bars and produces 1 bag of <metal> powder. I think this is balanced enough. If smakemupagus want katanas to be even more rare and unique (after all not every map has mithril ore), then some not-so-common stone could be added to the reaction.

I started another fort, got ambushed by elves in the second year, and got like 15 bars all in all. As the sieges can be as large as 40 units, making 4 katanas out of a siege is ok to me.

PS. Is it possible to make enemies send troops fully clad in armor? Because they seem to have lots of exposed bodyparts that my orcs are eager to chop off. Even without katanas

[smakemupagus]

Yep, no problem with adding a reaction to grind bars to powder with some cost in efficiency, I just hadn't thought of it yet.

Note that the Damascene shop weapons are pattern-welded which means they're a better material than the common forge too (that's why the katanas require steel too for example)

The enemies not wearing gloves and boots is a Masterwork design decision, so I refer you to Meph on that one   A while back I also noticed a lot of fights seem to end with un-armored hands getting lopped of, did some arena testing and found that, the impact was smaller than I originally thought. 

[Meph]

Yes, I removed boots and gauntlets from invaders, otherwise 40 invaders would bring 160 metal items more, means 160 goblinite bars more.

A while back I also noticed a lot of fights seem to end with un-armored hands getting lopped of, did some arena testing and found that, the impact was smaller than I originally thought.

I thought the difference was not too bad, especially considering the amount of invaders the mod has.

[smakemupagus]

Did you try out the merchants/diplomats for goblins ? I am really curious about what they would trade/offer, and what message the diplomats and traders bring. I know they exist in vanilla, so they might have a custom wording, and not just: greetings to your stout dwarves. That would be bad of course ^^

It seems to have been lack of [COMMON_DOMESTIC_PACK] and/or [COMMON_DOMESTIC_PULL] that prevented Goblins and regular Orcs from trading, not missing diplomats. 

Our Clan liason still says greetings from the Mountainhomes.

*more edits

Just met the first round of Goblin traders.  Regular stuff made of goblinite metals.  Leather and cloth (no bins). Caged cave turtles.  They come with a small load of stuff, more than once per year.  I haven't noticed that they even give a greeting.  Under the settings I have now there might be a (auto generated) trader but no noble yet with Diplomatic responsibilities. 

Elf fanatic traders say "Greetings from the Merchants Guild", and when they leave "Farewell to you and your stout dwarves."

[fasquardon]

I salute you for the work you've done on this smakemupagus - these Orcs do manage to tempt me to play as a non-dwarf!

I have not played the mod yet, though reading through has certainly given me some ideas for differentiation:

1) Tolkien's orcs were good at mass producing things, perhaps easier/earlier access/more efficient mass production buildings could be one of their differentiating features.

2) On the other hand, orcs were known for mining, but not for being good at it - maybe if they learned how to mine at slower speeds, or if they are made better and brick-making or wood-industry than dwarfs are, to encourage players to stay above ground except for recovering minerals.

3) I do like the idea of orcs having a special relationship with evil biomes - either because their civ comes from evil biomes and thus farms evil plants and uses evil domestic animals - or, if it was possible to mod in, because they were immune to the syndrome weather of the evil biomes, and instead got syndromes from the weather of good biomes (orcs going into berserker rages and slaughtering each-other when covered in rains of honey makes for an amusing mental image).

4) Restrict their machinery - say don't give them access to traps, waterwheels or windmills, and make the orcs stronger so they were better at pumping and straight-up fights.

I agree with Meph about multiple litters sounding Orcish.

fasquardon

[smakemupagus]

Thanks!

(1) Yep, mass production is one of the themes, the goal is to make "factory orcs" vs. "tribal artisan orcs" both valid playstyles.

An example is my conversation @gwathlobal earlier -- he definitely plays the artisan style and likes to turn all the elven loot into one of the best available weapons (the damasc katana).  And I definitely will add the reactions so we can do that.... But in the 'Isengard' factory style one could instead use the Slag pit Refitting reactions to reforge the elven daggers as "mithril makeshift scimitar" and small root armor as "mithril makeshift breastplate" and for the same material cost, very quickly gear up 2 or three grunts with a quite serviceable blade and a scrap of good armor. 

(2) the next step in this direction is probably some more reactions at the Factory for using sand, clay, and wood.

(3) so far, just allowed to use evil animals if they happen to catch them, but this reminds me it might be due to re-examine their Preferred biomes list a bit.  At first my priority was to give them lots of biomes to make sure to survive world gen

(4) They're definitely restricted with tech with respect to the Dwarves in Masterwork (and I will go farther, like remove/change their Trap engineers workshop), but not relative to vanilla.  Since I am going for having some of that mass production / Isengard pits of industry feel, I don't think I want to take away waterwheels or windmills, in fact I would probably require mechanical 'power' for the Factory if it was possible.

[gwathlobal]

I read your post and understood why the slag pit felt so redundant. Because you could still access the smelter, and reforge everything using normal means. So, a radical suggestion - remove access to the smelter altogether so that the player can only melt enemy possessions via the slag pit. This will also mean that ore->bar reaction should be recreated, evidently in the slag pit. Moreover, make those reactions use grinding ore to powder.
Otherwise the player has no gameplay reasons to use the pit, only flavour ones. And this would certain stop all claims that orcs do not feel unique.

[smakemupagus]

Ah, OK  i see where you're coming from.  The slag pit recycling is already much better than smelter melting though, because (a) it's faster and fuel efficient, one reaction instead of two and (b) It's about 3 times more material efficient:  conventional melting gives you only 0.3 times the object's material size return whereas recycling gives you the whole weapon. 

Item (b) that is, with respect the Harder Smithing setting, but it's balanced for Harder Smithing since that's how I play   melting stuff under Standard Smithing settings is inherently broken anyway, you can easily get greater than 100% returns, etc.

re:  Another feature I'd like to see is production of oil from some aboveground crop (preferrably from seeds  )

You might be able to get this if you turn on the Flora/Fauna mod plants, which in Masterwork are called "More Tree Types" and "More Plant Types."  I look into it just a bit and it's sort of overwhelming, but a quick search for [MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:PRESS_LIQUID_MAT:LOCAL_PLANT_MAT:OIL] and it looks like there are 5 plants  including Flax, Peanut, Soy and 10 trees including Olive and Almond.

[gwathlobal]

Yep, but I am still talking mithril here. After several years you will obtain much more armor and weapons than you have troops. Everybody will be outfitted with mithril cuttas and breastplates, but you will still have excessive mithril. Which you have to smelt conventionally to craft the parts you can not make directly in the pit. Which again boils down to the standard dwarven approach, because once you start melting armor in the smelter you have no incentive to use the pit any more.
With my suggestion you can either have mithril flails, cuttas and breastplates or go the long way through rusty iron -> iron -> steel. Yeah, and as for katanas   - powder should be made directly from enemy items in this scheme.
PS. And something should be done to bloodsteel production It is indeed too readily available. The orcish tribal war gear shop is great, and i think that it should be thought along these lines - you can create weapons without the need of the forge. So some pieces of bloodsteel armor and weapons, I believe, could be done in the shop, while the boneyard ironbone and bloodsteel production should be banned. Another idea is to let orcs refine steel into bloodsteel so that the metal line is as follows: rusty iron -> iron -> steel -> bloodsteel (with certain bits of mithril, cobalt, ironbone, etc items).
PPS. Now that I've written all this, I think that next logical step will be to ban the metalsmith's forge altogether and distribute some of its specific reactions for weapons and armor into other shops. Or is this too radical?

---

As for plants. Meph said that removing various item types (like various types of leather) helped fps a lot. Won't those options revert the situation back to the original state? And those plants do create seeds, don't they?

[smakemupagus]

I see the basic smelter and forge just as generic baseline workshops, not specifically Dwarven, and they fill a perfectly serviceable role.  ... What I am taking away from your suggestions though is to expand the range of reactions at Tribal Shop, Slag Pit and Factory so they stay useful longer into the steel/bloodsteel/mithril phase of the game.

Hmm, Bloodsteel is tricky to balance because of course as long as you're butchering your enemies the supply of materials is neverending    But it still employs a lot of orcs in the processing, between the butchery/blood extraction/ashery.  I haven't had a good mass production line up in the last few games, do you really think it's a lot easier than steel? ... The demand for Bloodsteel is a bit higher in the new features under Development which you can look at in the orig post if you like, so that might help, although a lot of it is just one-time not recurring costs.  If it's still too easy I'd be more inclined to tweak the balance in the numbers rather than a total overhaul.

... My preferred tweak would be to require Ironbone as a reagent for Bloodsteel instead of fresh ash & bone -- this adds one unit of [FUEL] cost plus an extra reaction step -- but I don't like to mess with Vanilla or Masterwork reactions unless I really have to, because the more independent the file structure is the better.

Another idea is to let orcs refine steel into bloodsteel so that the metal line is as follows: rusty iron -> iron -> steel -> bloodsteel (with certain bits of mithril, cobalt, ironbone, etc items).

bloodsteel is only as good as steel, not better.  But I could imagine adding an mithril-quality metal transmuted at significant cost from bloodsteel.  Just have to decide whether it is a metallurgy or mystical process ... hmmm.

As for plants. Meph said that removing various item types (like various types of leather) helped fps a lot. Won't those options revert the situation back to the original state? And those plants do create seeds, don't they?

Well, perhaps. I think you press the seeds to get the oil, just like rock nuts.  The great thing about Masterwork is the modularity, so you get to decide whether you want FPS or above ground olive oil   You can pretty easily keep just a handful of plants that you like and delete/archive the rest.

[Ishar]

I know it's not the most productive of ideas, but it just hit me: why don't you call this MasterwOrc Dwarf Fortress?

(Sorry)

[smakemupagus]

thats totally what it used to be called on my computer   well; MasterwOrc Fortress

[smakemupagus]

New version 0.1.8 (please see original post.)



* Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and process them into a wider range of products with new lamellar leather and bloodsteel reactions.
* Breach aquifers as Nature intended:  industrial scale application of magma
* Invoke the old magics through war chants:  empower any Orc to inspire his allies as a drummer, piper, or horncaller for 1 month
* (1) Unleash the powers of change and chaos (2) Tame Giant Wild Boars and Badgermen (3) ? ? ? (4) Profit