ive had my flying city of Mwetalbad (Deathworshipped, appropriately randomly generated) for 31 years. initially the plan was to just let it run indefinitely but ive started having constant save corruptions, can barely make it through 1 year now without having to make and load 5 or 6 back ups. earlier it was because of save compression, and fixed for a while after turning it off, but i think the quicksaves and autosaves have done something weird to the fort, or maybe it's just an accumulation of 150+ skeletons with crashes. i don't really know, but it's become unplayable, so i'm retiring it.
some pictures:
the fort underneath to protect the entryway
above view of the city, it doesnt reflect in armok vision but the square platforms hold the various rituals to raise the dead or use the various magics
view from the ground
iron men make great sentries, i have at least 1 in each tower with the hatch locked
the very bottom floor, containing the hospital and the temple to the north (all furniture made out of silver, the beds were modded in)
the entrance with the dining room and kitchen, featuring one of the many, many ghosts i was too lazy to memorialize (plus i felt having them float around the fort was thematically appropriate)
barracks and training area just under the entrance, housing the 100+ skeletons, all of whom were slowly outfitted with all soulforged gear over the course of about 20 years
area just south of that where the corrupted elf squad lives and trains, all soulforged gear, as with the skeletons. the elves were used as a home defense force and rarely went out raiding, not a single member of that squad has less than 120 kills, and the highest is 172. as such, they're the only ones besides the warlocks who are allowed to have silver furniture. their swordsman levels ranged from the lowest at Legendary+86 to the highest at Legendary+101. i guess thats what happens when you have 25-ish years to just train all day
at the top level we have the bedrooms of the 3 most important warlocks, the sorceress supreme (who was initially our expedition leader but usurped the title... somehow? not sure, but it was cool thematically since my fort is easily the most powerful of our civilization), the steward, and the keeper of knowledge. below this level lie the other 10 bedrooms, all with silver furniture of masterwork quality, which took an absolutely ridiculous amount of silver to pull off considering the rooms all have cabinets, weapon/armor stands, at least 4 statues, a silver bed, 4+ chests, and a sarcophagus. but one advantage to being at war with literally everyone is you get a lot of goblinite/dwarfite/humanite to facilitate these stupid
dwarf warlock tricks. this particular bedroom belongs to the sorceress supreme
i included a library, but it's empty save for a slab we pillaged from a vault, cause i've never had a scholar before and severely underestimated how long it takes to write a damn book. was going to raid for more, but started getting this corruption all the time, and i just don't have the patience to deal with it lol
overall, i actually feel the mod is as well balanced as something can get in
dwarf warlock fortress. not being able to get any new warlocks makes me care way more about their wellbeing than i normally care. ive been annoyed at the loss of a legendary dwarf before but knowing you can get another in like a year stops it from being much more than that - an annoyance. early on, i almost lost a warlock because i wasn't paying attention, and it would have delayed my fort tremendously, which made the risk feel much greater.
add on top of that their frankly ludicrous demands for their rooms and their constant mandates, it can make their moods hard to deal with early on.
in terms of the entities added, forgotten beasts seem to have really weird behavior. they never fight back, against anything, ever. not even hostile invaders. and caravan guards attack them after you bring them out of their cages, so you have to wait for the caravan to leave. it's odd, and i'm not sure what causes it. i thought i'd be clever and put a bunch of forgotten beasts behind floodgates then open them with a lever to kill invaders, except, the forgotten beasts just milled around while the elves smacked them to death with sticks and such.
skeletons and ghouls are good additions, but, skeletons are superior to ghouls for one fact: they don't get stressed. i think using some kind of df-hack script to force ghouls to spawn with the kind of personality you'd assume a ghoul to have (high violence, low stress vulnerability, lack of anxiety because they're more like animals than people, etc) would be good, if it's indeed possible, because it is a little surreal seeing a slavering cannibal go into a mental breakdown at the sight of dead bodies, though funny.
the corrupted variations of the races are very cool, but i would remove the max-age from them all because if you're going for a long fort as i was there's not really any point to making corrupted humans since they can die from old age so early. dwarves have less of this problem but still i would pick elves and goblins so i can see them doing the most stuff in legends when i retire the fort.
there seems to be a glitch currently with the squads that stops them from gaining any combat exp from training. it only affects the base squads you start with (the 4 horsemen squads and the 100 horde squad), normal 10 man squads made from the "create squad appointed by this leader" function don't have this issue.
the metals are well balanced, i thought soulforged would be easier than steel to obtain but i found i was wrong. it's
very strong on morningstars. i don't really know the exact !!SCIENCE!! behind it, but the piercing+blunt nature of the morningstar just seems to fit perfectly with soulforged. it would maybe be even better if you couldn't use animal souls to make it, but i don't know if that's possible to restrict.
the magic system is very useful, though i found that between pyromancy and geomancy only the former was viable to fight people. the spells from geomancy didn't seem to do much, while the fireballs are... well, fireballs. i didn't experiment with necromancers or werebeasts or vampires, but i plan to make my next fort either an all-werebeast druid grove or an all-vampire blood knight type deal.
the things i would change are minor little tweaks like listed above. i don't think this mod has any huge glaring issues (outside of technical ones but those aren't your fault, it's just dfhack being weird). things i would like to see added? maybe an ability to resurrect megabeasts and semi-megabeasts, like giants, cyclops, and dragons, at an altar that costs soulforged bars to make and requires the soul of the creature in question. the thought of a towering skeletal giant crushing an army of humans beneath its bony foot is incredible. possibly an expansion of the magic system, like aquamancers and such, but it's really not necessary.
i think where the mod succeeds most, however, is in it's overall theme, atmosphere, and design. you don't feel like you're playing reskinned dwarves - it really feels like a race of evil eldritch creatures who see people as tools and not living things (which i guess is also a way to describe the average dwarf fortress player). if i was a new player and this was a race you could choose besides dwarves i would not expect it to be a mod. the design and assembly of the way the warlock fort works is cohesive and doesn't feel bloated or haphazard. can't wait to see what you'll do next with it and how it might possibly fit into another masterwork release
edit: i've found why sometimes meat isn't recognized to be used for extracting blood - it's because it's in barrels. non-barreled meat is used just fine. two food stockpiles (one for unbarreled meat that you intend to use for blood extraction) is advisable
DOUBLE EDIT: i had the idea to try extracting the warlock fortress zip into another new folder and then copied a "corrupted" save into that folder, and... for some reason, that fixed it. so, i guess if anyone else starts having constant corruptions, extract the zip again into a different folder and copy the save into that new one
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Topic: [44.12] Meph's ☼Warlock Tower☼ - V1 - Be more evil! (Read 24040 times)