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[darkflagrance]

http://img07.deviantart.net/32ef/i/2016/093/e/7/drect_applactalkwave__lagome_bard_by_acethesupervillain-d9xk8ey.jpg

"Darkflagrance is euphoric near a completely sublime artwork."

This is hilarious, amazing, and awesome. That's is exactly how I imagined her chilling out on a pile of barrels. I love how the hejian came out too. I'm going to remember this picture every time I see her now 

[Eric Blank]

Hehe, I love it. It is the essence of getting shitfaced when nobody gives a damn about you.

As to the problem of too many individual civilizations; I felt my game got crowded sometimes too when I play with the most up to date version of EVIL, but in the end it never felt too bad. You can limit the number of civs to only one from each entity archetype. You can also merge some where more than one species could be believable in a given culture, by having multiple creature tokens. The game will only use one, choosing at random, but still that reduces the number of civs without reducing the number of species.
Technically, not all species need to have an advanced civilization from the start. You can let many species be available (not necessarily exclusively) as simple cave dwellers the way kobolds are, but without the thieving tokens, but permit them to have wandering bards, beast hunters, etc. During worldgen I bet they would get mixed in with the other species and adopt their cultures well enough.

[darkflagrance]

To add to what Eric Blank said, I think you could sacrifice the EVIL versions of default dwarf fortress races (blizzard men, gabbro men) in exchange for more (EVIL) animalman races with unique flavor. I'd also like to see more attention focused on giving the animalman races longer descriptions that talk about their cultural tendencies or behaviors, or giving the less unique races like the lagomers more custom clothing items (perhaps all animalmen should stick to anklets for their feet, because they increase the exoticness of any visitors you see).

Some always evil corrupt animalmen might make interesting foes, and could even be given the qualities of blizzard men or gabbro men as part of their "corruption" along with the unique clothing/armor items from the mod (crystal leokin? amethyst formicians?). You could then solve the problem of "too many civilizations" by pruning the civs at peace with each other to the ones most likely to have interesting trade interactions, and make the others corrupt predatory baby snatchers.

Edit: The formicians sent another siege composed entirely of tadgers and gazeal descended from kidnapped babies. There were 45 of them total, with no accompanying animals. They managed to kill a visiting axeman who was the brother of one of my captains, so my troops exacted righteous vengeance upon them, leaving none alive.

[AceSV]

Glad you like the image. 

So you're suggesting a bunch of things that I would like to do, but I've never been able to really flesh them out strongly enough in my mind to translate them to the DF engine. 

The problem with writing descriptions is that each animal race acts exactly the way I would expect it act in a DF universe, so it is not always obvious to me what should be written down.  Or I feel like things get too technical.  Ideally, I'd like to make something like the DFwiki for FuFo, but I don't really know how to do that and I'm tragically unorganized. 

The plan has always been to phase out the DF badguy races once I have something sufficiently interesting to replace them.  If the bad furry civs are working correctly, then I'm probably ready to do that now.  I would like to finish up some more monster civs (like wyverns) since those strike as potentially more fun/FUN than civs who forget their helmets. 

Maybe instead of copying each furry civ into a bad version, I could use some regional mythology from each civ to make them more monsterous.  For example, Vulps are japanese, I could make the bad-vulps into Kyuubi, or the pan-African Gazeal could have a bad form based on African vampires. 

It would be an undertaking. 
Vulps - Japan - Kyuubi
Tadhgers - Steam Punk - Steamborgs? (although the name tadhg comes from Gaelic)
Simiate - Thailand - Thai Yaksha or Thai Kinnara
Pingu - Pirate - ? (Maybe something Caribbean instead)
Pandamon - China - ?
Mammovich - Inuit - ?
Leokin - Fantasy - ?
Lagomer - English - ?
Komodo - Ancient Egyptian - ?
Horstang - Mongolian/Polish - ?
Haukyngr - Viking - Draugr or Troll (I remember a story about sea-zombies with heads made of seaweed; can't remember their name)
Gazeal - Africa - Vampire or Witch
Formician - ?

I'm not a fan of making any animal race evil by default because things can get treated unfairly.  Like, I like reptiles, I'm always bummed that they are made into badguys all the time. 



It's not really the civilizations themselves or the creatures that make it feel crowded, it's adding new equipment and reactions that clog up all the in-game lists that bothers me, and yet those are what really make things interesting to me.  So the equipment lists now are a compromise between being to long and making the civilizations feel unique.  As for giving all animal civs anklets, or similar things, the intent of Furry Fortress is that you play as the animal people, so if everyone wears anklets, none of them are exotic to each other. 

I did consider using more interesting types of clothing, but they wouldn't have translated well.  For example, the quasi-Mongolian themed Horstangers might have produced a Deel or a Mongolian shepherd hat.  Deel probably means nothing to you, and I don't like to use the real-world places to describe things, so "Mongolian shepherd hat" is out, "shepherd hat" is too unspecific and "vaguely conical wide-brimmed fuzzy hat" is unweildy, so instead they just have robes and caps.  I'm used to drawing things instead of explaining them, too, so I'm often at a loss. 


I wish there was a to have the game sort of flip a coin in each world that decides if the animal civ is going to trade or going to siege.  Using the doppleganger badguy civ is the closest solution I know of. 

[NW_Kohaku]

You could use values and ethics.  Sadly, there's no random variation of ethics, but there are for values, and I think that might play a role in how likely they are to start wars. 

Just set up ethics to make conflicts likely but not inevitable, and you should have frequent enough wars. Setting the values to be random around some extreme values (like -50 to -10 instead of the -30 to 30 of human civs) should further randomize it while slanting some races into dispositions of antagonism against other races that are not strictly Always Chaotic Evil. 

Japanese Kitsune are notorious tricksters, so make them value lying highly, and have permissive ethics on lying, while the highly organized Formicans find lying to your own unthinkable, and you have a conflict waiting to happen.

You can also try to help make populations larger.  The aggressiveness of different civilizations depends quite a bit upon how many people they have in their sites, and crowded cities are warlike cities. Elves and goblins, if "naturalized" in another civ, tend to explode in population due to immortality and even not needing food, so they make excellent recruits.  Make creatures have longer reproductive lives, or produce food more easily to keep populations booming.

It depends upon leader values as well, so try keeping "Power" and "Military" as high values for everyone, as well as aggressive personalities.

Also, the current game tends to have far more wars per-year after worldgen than during worldgen, so maybe just letting it run for a while will help. 

[darkflagrance]

You could use values and ethics.  Sadly, there's no random variation of ethics, but there are for values, and I think that might play a role in how likely they are to start wars. 

Just set up ethics to make conflicts likely but not inevitable, and you should have frequent enough wars. Setting the values to be random around some extreme values (like -50 to -10 instead of the -30 to 30 of human civs) should further randomize it while slanting some races into dispositions of antagonism against other races that are not strictly Always Chaotic Evil. 

Japanese Kitsune are notorious tricksters, so make them value lying highly, and have permissive ethics on lying, while the highly organized Formicans find lying to your own unthinkable, and you have a conflict waiting to happen.

You can also try to help make populations larger.  The aggressiveness of different civilizations depends quite a bit upon how many people they have in their sites, and crowded cities are warlike cities. Elves and goblins, if "naturalized" in another civ, tend to explode in population due to immortality and even not needing food, so they make excellent recruits.  Make creatures have longer reproductive lives, or produce food more easily to keep populations booming.

It depends upon leader values as well, so try keeping "Power" and "Military" as high values for everyone, as well as aggressive personalities.

Also, the current game tends to have far more wars per-year after worldgen than during worldgen, so maybe just letting it run for a while will help.

I've personally found ethics a difficult to manipulate entity element in the present version, especially in combination with the greatly delayed arrival of sieges and the fact that many sieges at "war" with you may still never attack. If there are mods that can reliably use ethics to set up wars in the current version, please let me know so I can look at them as well.

Many of the people who play this mod will be familiar with the equipment sets for dwarves from vanilla, so playing a race that uses metal anklets and sashes will already feel exotic even if every other new race does so. Dwarves, humans, and gobbos are also in this mod as npcs, so if the playable civs use anklets, now shoes and boots get to feel foreign. An additional solution might be to have two basic "styles" of new clothing: maybe half of the animalman civs use anklets and the other half use wrappings. There is some level of exoticness, but the item proliferation is minimized, and I don't have to think about bunnies wearing shoes on their massive toes.

[AceSV]

Many of the people who play this mod will be familiar with the equipment sets for dwarves from vanilla, so playing a race that uses metal anklets and sashes will already feel exotic even if every other new race does so. Dwarves, humans, and gobbos are also in this mod as npcs, so if the playable civs use anklets, now shoes and boots get to feel foreign. An additional solution might be to have two basic "styles" of new clothing: maybe half of the animalman civs use anklets and the other half use wrappings. There is some level of exoticness, but the item proliferation is minimized, and I don't have to think about bunnies wearing shoes on their massive toes.

I suppose that's true.  I would also consider the cultural themes though.  It doesn't make as much sense for a Japanese or English themed race to be wearing anklets as their only footwear.  Some different wording might be appropriate. 

Another thought I've had is to overhaul the clothing system and try to compile all the little bits of clothing into a single outfit.  So instead of having shirts and trousers and so forth, one would simply have a Peasant's Garb(or Simple Garb), Merchant's Garb, Noble's Garb, etc.  A more expensive garb would require a larger amount of cloth to produce.  I would want to do cultural variations though, so Vulps might produce a Peasant's Kimono, Kabuki Garb, Ninja Garb, Noble's Kamishimo or Zaibatsu Garb.  It might prove difficult to sufficiently differentiate that for all 14 civs though.  As far as I know, the head, hands and feet still need to be covered separately.  I might do armor in a similar way to make it more like D&D's simpler system where one simply wears something like Chain Armor, Lamellar Armor or Plate Armor instead of tracking all the individual pieces.  In this case you might see something like Samurai Armor, Knightly Armor, Mirror Armor, Muscle Armor.  But I forget what methods DF has to differentiate armor. 

Since that's on the table, another thought was to create reactions that produce multiple tiers of cloth.  So you might take a pig tail cloth and turn it into pig tail brocade or pig tail tartan.  But I've always been indecisive about this.  For example, I don't know if a custom reaction would allow you to import brocade. 

[Eric Blank]

One issue you might find with such a plan is that npcs generated in-game won't necessarily claim or be generated with garments and materials appropriate for their societal status. require some micromanagement to ensure only your king or whatever claims that masterwork really expensive robe you made.

[variablenonsense]

PTW / play with later. 

[Dirst]

Since that's on the table, another thought was to create reactions that produce multiple tiers of cloth.  So you might take a pig tail cloth and turn it into pig tail brocade or pig tail tartan.  But I've always been indecisive about this.  For example, I don't know if a custom reaction would allow you to import brocade.

How would you do that?  I wasn't aware that weaving was moddable.  Or are you setting up different levels of thread?

[AceSV]

Since that's on the table, another thought was to create reactions that produce multiple tiers of cloth.  So you might take a pig tail cloth and turn it into pig tail brocade or pig tail tartan.  But I've always been indecisive about this.  For example, I don't know if a custom reaction would allow you to import brocade.

How would you do that?  I wasn't aware that weaving was moddable.  Or are you setting up different levels of thread?

I assume it's possible, just a reaction that turns one type of cloth into a kind with higher value.  So I said that wrong, it wouldn't be pig tail cloth to pig tail tartan, it would be pig tail cloth to tartan cloth.  It would make more sense to use the thread than the cloth.  I haven't completely thought this through yet. 

[StupidElves]

PTW

[Atomisk]

I've found an error for you. MILITIA_CAPTAIN's 'squad' is still listed as 'militia-dwarves' in the raws for all your entities. Figured you'd want to fix that.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

   [POSITION:MILITIA_CAPTAIN]
      [NAME:militia captain:militia captains]
      [SITE]
      [NUMBER:AS_NEEDED]
      [SQUAD:10:militia-dwarf:militia-dwarves]
      [APPOINTED_BY:MILITIA_COMMANDER]
      [PRECEDENCE:200]
      [DO_NOT_CULL]
      [DUTY_BOUND]
      [MILITARY_SCREEN_ONLY]

[AceSV]

One issue you might find with such a plan is that npcs generated in-game won't necessarily claim or be generated with garments and materials appropriate for their societal status. require some micromanagement to ensure only your king or whatever claims that masterwork really expensive robe you made.

True point.  In the world of DF, wealth is not measured individually but societally.  So I would probably want to word it as something like Opulent Garb, Average Garb or Ragged Garb that suggests the status of the fortress that made it and not the individual that owns it. 


Edit:  I've got my own amusing Lagomer bard now while playing Tadghers.  Brahro Lance Chances, also my only foreign resident.  She was bummed out for a long while and spent a lot of time in the generic temple praying fervently to Cardis, Tadgher goddess of Art and Inspiration.  But she happened to be back in the tavern just in time to join a pile-up on a wereiguana.  Axes, picks and cone hammers pelted the monster, but the killing blow was apparently dealt by Brahro's cassiterite horn, causing the wereiguana to bleed to death.  Brahro is 60 years old, but I guess she's still in shape. 

[darkflagrance]

It's too bad 60 is the beginning of the end of their lifespan.

Amusing lagomer bard should become a stereotype. It's basically canon now. You could incorporate it into their description even!