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Author Topic: Future of the Fortress  (Read 2838262 times)

Inarius

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #465 on: June 20, 2018, 06:58:44 am »

I have no problem imagining magic based on stress. Or suffering and pain.
Is this something you think about as a possible base for magic ?
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Random_Dragon

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #466 on: June 20, 2018, 11:18:31 am »

I have no problem imagining magic based on stress. Or suffering and pain.
Is this something you think about as a possible base for magic ?


Ooh. Elven sith lords when? XP
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Egan_BW

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #467 on: June 21, 2018, 03:14:08 am »

Power not from focus, or knowledge, or even from innate ability. But from angst.
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KittyTac

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #468 on: June 21, 2018, 04:23:12 am »

Power not from focus, or knowledge, or even from innate ability. But from angst.
Something that might appear in a crappy fantasy novel written by a 13-year-old. So it's probably in.
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Eric Blank

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #469 on: June 21, 2018, 07:14:04 pm »

Can we send parents and children off to the hillocks so we dont have to put up with them?

If we keep one parent behind, can we then arrange visits to their family by sending them off temporarily so they dont get all freaked out about not seeing them for too long?

Can we also send away peoples pets and unwanted livestock?

If i embark on a site with intelligent residents like animal people in the caverns or a cave or camp occupied by something other than kobolds, can i forcibly relocate them too?

On that front, do we have any say in who is allowed to settle in our hillocks sites? Would there be repercussions, like do other civs recognize evicting their diplomats or nobles as a potential insult to them? Does this count if we evict the populations of sites we conquered/forced to submit to our rule? Separately from the act of attacking and subjugating the site, obviously.

We can ask that poetry troupe we granted residency to to get lost right?
« Last Edit: June 21, 2018, 11:28:17 pm by Eric Blank »
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Mort Stroodle

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #470 on: June 21, 2018, 08:10:22 pm »

Not sure if these questions are too fine-grain for where you guys are at in thinking about magic, but any insights on where you want to take these systems is appreciated.

1. You've mentioned sphere-associated regions replacing good and evil regions. Can we expect ALL of the existing spheres to be represented in there (not in the same world necessarily, but all in the pool that the game chooses sphere regions from)? Some seem obvious like death-associated regions having the current evil region effects of reanimation or other nasty weather, some spheres could lead to cool things like dream-associated oceans, but some spheres don't seem to make as much sense for this system. A forest associated with "oaths" or a desert associated with "rumors" are hard to come up with magical or otherwise interesting effects for. Can we expect less interesting spheres to be omitted? Or do you guys think you're creative enough to be able to come up with interesting enough effects for all of them?

2. On a similar note, are some magical artifacts going to be similarly sphere associated? Will it be possible to have a revelry-associated magical scepter, or an agriculture-associated armor stand, for example? There's a whole bunch of spheres so it seems crazy-ambitious to try and come up with world region and artifact effects for all of them.

3. You've talked about changing the underworld into something completely different on a per-world basis, based on procedural myth stuff. Are there plans to try to preserve the "digging too deep" ending of the game between worlds in spite of this? I always kind of liked playing devil's minesweeper.

4. Since there are going to be new origin myths for different species, where does that leave the relationship between goblins and demons? Are the narratives just going to be twisted to fit the current status quo (ex: goblins were created when the gods cursed the dwarves, then a demon grew from the primordial fungus pits and enslaved the goblins) or is it going to be more dynamic, where goblins might not have had a demon master at all depending on how they came to be? If demons aren't necessarily a package deal with goblin civs anymore, might intelligent demons be able to manifest in the normal world during mythgen of certain worlds through some other means?

5. Since regions and magical systems are now going to change dynamically over time, is the myths update going to include a way to have a world re-enter world-gen after you finish a fort, in order to generate more history before playing again? Seems like a lot of effort to make things dynamic is going to waste if the average playtime on a single world doesn't last long enough to see those effects progress much. It would also be cool to see how wars and civilizations change over the long term based on the actions you made in your fort.

6. You've talked about players having to make decisions about whether they want to use an artifact, given the harmful side effects they have, like a staff of fire that pulls your fortress closer to the fire plane and causes everything to light on fire. How do you plan to communicate information about their uses and risks to the player? In some cases where the downsides aren't too horrible and it's not too hard to figure out what's going on, just making the player experiment and try using it could be fun, but the stronger the negative effects are and bigger the consequences, the less likely players will risk it at all. It's not worth playing with the Flaming Obsidian Mug of Lebesnóton if there's a chance it might fill your fortress with magma because you don't know what it does in advance.

7. How might players actually use magic in fortress mode? You've shown screenshots of the myth gen describing how dwarves could sing or speak a word or whatever to make some kind of magic happen, but right now we can't force a dwarf to sing or speak a word on command in fort mode. Will we be able to control when and where a particular dwarf uses a particular kind of magic? If some magic artifacts are clothing, will we get functionality to force a non-milita dwarf to wear a particular piece of clothing as well?

8. You've talked about religious sects forming in your fort and demanding certain things, like nobles. Is this system going to be integrated with temples or magic? I'm imaging a system where building a grand, high value cathedral for a cult will increase the success of their worshiping and rituals, improving your relations with a deity, which in turn could grant you strange moods to produce magical artifacts, blessings of good harvest/success in battle or other such benefits.

9. Similar note, right now dwarves can worship megabeasts like gods, presumably to appease them so they chill out and stop destroying everybody’s cities. This doesn’t actually do anything at the moment though. Might this relationship be expanded upon? Do you think we might actually be able to keep forgotten beasts at bay by worshiping them? Or maybe even convince them to attack your fort’s enemies? Or do you guys like the one-sided worship as it stands? It is kind of fun to think of dwarves desperately trying to appease the eight-legged bismuth porcupine that doesn’t care about what the dwarves are doing at all, and just wants to kill everything.

10. You’ve mentioned how worlds without magic will still have origin stories, they would just be fictional. Does this mean that worlds which DO have magic might also have fictional elements to their myths? Such as false gods, magical rites which do nothing, artifacts which are said to have certain magic effects but actually do nothing, etc. Would the players have an easy way to distinguish between fake magic and real magic, or would experimentation be necessary?

« Last Edit: June 21, 2018, 08:13:45 pm by Mort Stroodle »
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KittyTac

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #471 on: June 21, 2018, 09:12:29 pm »

All decent questions, but 10 would depend on world.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #472 on: June 21, 2018, 10:11:18 pm »

I think the point of 5 is not that things change gradually over time (although they might, of course), but that characters (especially your adventurers, but probably villains too) have the ability to actively change things and will have an idea of how to do so. I mean, you could just stop playing before the bad guy throws the Ring of Goodness into the volcano, thus dooming the pixies, but now you're motivated not to. So it's not a matter of having to wait for years until something happens, it's an active part of your adventure(s). Which could take years, yes, but it's years of progress with an end goal.

"Back to worldgen" was covered in a video and fotf not so long ago. To summarize, it's really hard, but will be tackled. Which is to say, might happen during Mythgen development, but I imagine Toady's going to be avoiding adding even more time sinks to an already massive gap until release. We'll see though. :)
« Last Edit: June 21, 2018, 10:13:27 pm by Shonai_Dweller »
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Egan_BW

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #473 on: June 22, 2018, 04:34:27 am »

Power not from focus, or knowledge, or even from innate ability. But from angst.
Something that might appear in a crappy fantasy novel written by a 13-year-old. So it's probably in.
"It's not a generic bad fantasy universe. It's a generic bad fantasy universe generator." :p
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #474 on: June 22, 2018, 05:32:14 am »

@Eric Blank: So far it's been talked about relocating citizens to hillocks, not anyone you happen to encounter. This would mean you couldn't relocate hostile cavern dwellers, invading goblins, migrating wild animal people, or normal visitors, merchants, or diplomats.

There's a grey zone for residents, but it would make little sense for a monster slayer to accept to be relocated to a hillock where there'd probably not be any monsters to slay. Mercs might or might not want to be relocated to act as a resident protection force, although you can move them there as squad members.

@Mort Stroodle:
1. There's no absolute requirement for everything to be orthogonal. I'd expect some spheres to be available for region effects and some not.

2. Same logic here.

3. Digging all the way to the bottom does not mean the end. It's possible to conquer the basement as well, currently. I'd expect the challenge to be present in various forms in many worlds, but it would make little sense with a "no death" slider setting.

4. The standard setting would need to broadly preserve the standard conventions, although there may be other ways to preserve goblins as the bad guys. For other fantasy slider settings there's not much reason to preserve the current setting conventions when they're restricting the resulting worlds overly much.

5. I agree with Shonai_Dweller here. I don't expect putting the world back into the box will happen soon, though.

6. I expect research may play a part in it. It's been mentioned that some magic research might be labeled as dangerous, and I can see researching an artifact might result in either knowledge of its use or a new dangerous research topic to probe further (and possibly failure to figure it out, e.g. if your dorfs lack the abilities required, like blood lines or sphere alignments). There are probably other ways as well, including the artifact description showing what it does and what its side effects are (possibly noting they're not fully known => research).

7. I'd expect fortress magic usage to be tasked work like brewing, or serving booze, or pulling a lever. Anything using a focus "building" (such as a pentagram or whatever) ought to be able to fit into the current system. Low level combat magic would have to fit into the combat system, i.e. be performed autonomously.

8. I'd expect this to have to wait until other internal fortress organization, such as guilds, etc. (re)appears. Given that it's polishing rather than foundation work, I'd expect it to not happen in the first Myth & Magic arc.

9. I'd expect it to vary per world, but it doesn't make much sense to engage in worshiping that's completely ineffectual in a world where other worship very clearly has an effect (in particular if the alternative might actually provide some help against the monster).

10. It's been mentioned that different groups may have different variants of the same basic myths. The real world has lots of cases where "genuine" artifacts turned out to be fakes, and I'd expect there to be crooks in worlds with magic as well (possibly dependent on the ease with which customers can track down sellers). I don't see any real difference between the research required to determine the magic effects to be essentially non existent from that required to determine the actual effects.
Real world fakes range from amateurish attempts which can be seen through by anyone with minor knowledge to expertly made items that require detailed analysis. A mage in the need for a respectable amount of cash might imbue an item with a minor ability, such as e.g. change color, an obfuscation effect aimed at thwarting magic determination attempts, and then add a magic aura booster ability to it, so those who can see magic auras actually seen great power there, but being able to determine its nature.
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KittyTac

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #475 on: June 22, 2018, 05:52:10 am »

In low or no-magic worlds, the magma sea would be the absolute bottom rather than the spoiler.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #476 on: June 22, 2018, 06:32:07 am »

In low or no-magic worlds, the magma sea would be the absolute bottom rather than the spoiler.
I imagine it just wouldn't exist along with the caverns seeing as the most humans would ever get to digging would be sewers (and perhaps mines). Build tall and wide, paint the map with your shade of ascii!
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KittyTac

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #477 on: June 22, 2018, 06:52:20 am »

But won't "humans breaking into the caverns while digging a sewer and having to fight back against monsters" make for a good plot?
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #478 on: June 22, 2018, 08:27:07 am »

But won't "humans breaking into the caverns while digging a sewer and having to fight back against monsters" make for a good plot?
The day real world humans break into the caverns and have to fight back against the monsters, yes.

In a medium magic world playing as humans, you can very well have them break into the caverns, though. I wouldn't expect much in the way of monsters in a low magic world, although I can imagine the possible existence of caverns there.
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Fatace

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #479 on: June 22, 2018, 05:26:15 pm »

First time asking questions and unsure if anyone has asked (or has been answered) these but...


1. When the new Magic System comes out, will it be customiseable for modders to add other magic related things with raws?

2. Will the Fortress Mode AI Pathing for Swimming, Climbing, and Flying be fixed before the Magic Update?

3. If we have a Werebeast in our fort and send them out to a hillock, will they eventually worm their way back to fight or cause problems in the hillocks?

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