So after this release can we expect any more updates to the adventurer stuff in the next release? Like more crafting/construction stuff?
Hey Toady, do you think we'll have some proper towns to visit in the release after this upcoming one?
Next up, in October, we want to focus on bringing something fun to adventure mode. Exactly what gets released there is just going to depend on repeated additions and playthroughs until we're satisfied that there's something to it, even if it's just a little bit. We think heroism is going to be involved there as a starting point, but continuations of the crafting baby steps we took before and adding more to the towns are possible to the extent that they buoy that up. I don't want to tie myself to any given feature though, since I feel like after the entity population/sprawl sloggy release delay, the flexibility to avoid getting bogged down by a specific feature goal is important to my well-being for this release. That's not to say I'm deviating from the dev page goals this time.
Is the current insane abundance of minerals a feature, testing tool, or bug? Are there any plans on moving back to those in 40d / make them somehow changeable by the player?
I know all this is bordering on suggestion (and directly involves it), but I'd like to know the answer to that question too. I mean, especially with the much higher z-level count, the absurd abundance really isn't necessary, and honestly gets kind of boring/weird after a while, since you're constantly running into things that should be rare/valuable (along with everything else).
Zach and I actually ended up with a different impression during testing at the beginning of the year, not from the higher z-level count but from the open layers which split them apart. When the top stone levels above the first underground cavern were empty, it was really frustrating. Still, there are lots of things that should probably be addressed that might clean it all up, like veins moving between z-levels, making the "rare" inclusions more interesting or at least rarer (there definitely seems to be a problem there), vein quality, etc. If it's easy to throw something together to make minerals moddably scarce, then I'll do that, but I didn't like it that way in vanilla without something else.
Rarity with depth rather than with location on the world map seems a little strange and gamey so I doubt I'll end up going that way outside of non-real minerals or minerals where it makes sense. It added a fun progression to 2D, but ultimately I don't want to rely on that. In the end, starting your fortress on a valuable surface deposit should be perfectly reasonable and lead to an interesting game both militarily and economically -- in the game's current state, there are no military repercussions from having a valuable resource from the start (except maybe the attacks coming a little earlier due to higher trade/wealth numbers), and economically it's just worth more as a simple absolute number and so seems like cheating. It shouldn't turn out that way though. Even in a more highly developed DF, a valuable surface find does lead to a little less excitement in the mining discovery department. Throwing more exotic stuff down there, even outside the strict mineral department, should help with that.
Demons and Devils are probably safe to assume are evil powermongers. What about the other forgotten beasts that end up taking important positions in Human Civs? Are they necessarily an evil influence on the civ? Are we going to see benign Lizard monsters and the like? How do you see these creatures ultimately influencing how the human civs act?
Are there non-violent/evil ways for an entity to assume/use control?
As far as I know, it is only the evil creatures from the underworld that take over civilizations at this point. It might make sense at some point for a non-evil critter to take up an important position in a human civ, but there aren't any candidates right now, between regional titans and megabeasts. That's vanilla anyway. I don't remember the modding situation with megabeasts and human civ takeovers, and there are non-violent means that the humans use when they create the civ-wide positions such as "force of argument" and so on. Of course, it's not like there's much going on now, so it's just flavor text or whatever.
Are there any plans to fix/plant a sanity check on the elven society-wide infertility problem?
When are we going to see difference marriage customs come into play? I don't really see goblins as the marriage sort, and human civs could easily include polygamy and the like. Kings with a harem of a thousand, perhaps? There are certainly some interesting Adventurer quests to be had with that kind of set-up. Elves seem like the sort to bond with one person for a while and eventually move on to someone else. You know, after a few centuries and the relationship has run its course.
As of this last version, historical figures are no longer limited to ten children. If I'm understanding the infertility problem, that should sort out part of it. Remarriage (or whatever fits) would still be necessary to finish it off I guess.
The main barrier to expansion is just the typical thing with the original code supporting one specific id number/relationship for the spouse. The current system is a convenient starting point for fort mode drama and reproduction generally, but I imagine every entity will end up different and it's the proper outcome. I have no idea on a timeline though.
will world entities have the capability to claim ownership over a structure or territory, and use that information to identify trespassers or have a sense of "home" which they can defend or use as a trading good?
Would it be possible to find isolated huts or cabins of some world entity living on its own? Perhaps outcasts, hermits, or sociopaths who refuse living in populated areas?
There are already zones defined that they nominally claim, at least for building interiors, and those were used for theft detection in the shops, but we haven't used them much. They also have an idea of what each space is for in the new villages, like the fields and homes etc. They just need to come up more as we do things.
Bandit/marauding critters are probably going to be the first entity-associated guys living off on their own, but we definitely don't want them all to be hostiles. Before we get to hermits and things, I imagine we might do things like resource-based settlements (lumber/stone etc), and perhaps the combat/religion/night creature etc. related structures (things like monasteries etc.), depending on the order we do the dev page, but we're definitely going to branch out from villages and towns.
How do you plan to change how world gen battles are fought? Will terrain and/or tactics play a role? Will civs, or even just races that are faced with a war of extinction that they cannot win attempt to flee and establish new cities elsewhere?
How far down the pipeline are worldgen battles with actual AI tactics that can be viewed afterwards in histories like a movie of a classical board and chips wargame?
Toady in the future will we see Armies taking other towns without the total destruction of the opposition? Right now as long as one person is barely defending the town an army no matter how large cannot take it.
There's a token terrain/site bonus for defenders now. Having more tactical information in the legends readout is something I've neglected to add three major releases in a row now -- something always comes up, but I definitely want more variety. We usually imagine those bars and so on from shows like that American Civil War and other documentaries and so on, but we'll have to see how it turns out. Hopefully it'll be something that carries over in part to the post-world-gen fighting on the world map.
There's a tactics/leadership/organization roll as of this last version, and it's what causes the outcomes to vary at times from the center of the bell curve on the combat duel outcomes. Refugees go into the wilds now and resettle, but it's on a site by site basis. Continuing on in that way, and allowing refugees to merge with or displace a third group should be pretty important for the overall shape of world gen later on, since it needs to be less static. Disease and famine will help a lot too, but I need to handle the resource tracking first for famine at least.
Some of the current battles are definitely goofy.
Toady when armies, adventurer groups, and other such organisations finally can attack single units in unison (Megabeasts for example) do you forsee Megabeasts getting stronger, weaker, the same, or will they have the ability to out manuver them so to speak?
I can't say specifically which way it'll go until we see how much it affects the kill rate. If a bunch of peasants bounce off of a dragon the same as a single peasant, then it won't require as much of an adjustment. We'd generally like to emphasize heroic or specialized/weakness-based kills rather than random overwhelming of a beast. This might require megabeasts to be more manueverable or at least not get caught sleeping out in the open by large groups of regular soldiers -- beasts that are neither intelligent nor powerful enough to defend themselves from that kind of thing don't generally deserve to be megabeasts. Having a megabeast-killing hero/heroes emerging from obscurity during a regular town defense is fine, but having it be the norm from the combat mechanics would lead to larger problems, I think, so that sort of thing might end up being a kind of specifically chosen outcome in world gen or something. It's sort of unavoidable in the information-scarce time-crunched environment of world gen -- sometimes things happen all at once instead of step by step.
On the maps you just posed it looks like the goblins have expanded out to swamps and rivers. Are they moving out from the mountains now? Or did you just add more start biomes for them?
We decided to soften biomes up greatly for goblins, so that there'd be a broader range of areas under threat.
Toady, where do you see the ability of players to affect AI behavior? Will we see something that goes more towards having the ability to directly script dwarven AI to use certain items or take certain actions using some logic operations or a rudimentary scripting ability? Or do you see this as being more a matter of dwarves having to somehow learn how and when to properly perform actions or use items from the properties they have in the raws alone? While I'm obviously interested in the effects this can have, I'm also interested in what sort of game design philosophy you have about what level of control you want players to be exerting over their dwarves.
At the extreme end of the potion/material discussion, out beyond what maybe anybody was asking for, I'm absolutely against having to master some sort of scripting language just to get dwarves to poison their weapons. At the same time, it'll be difficult to get dwarves to use certain exotic syndrome-causing materials in a reasonable way that satisfies a player, especially one using potion mods. Maybe it'll end up being usage hints in the raws and classifications in-play for use in the military etc. with some sensible defaults. Ideally they'd be able to handle it like food, water and alcohol (to the extent those aren't broken), and perhaps those would be brought into the same system. For more exotic actions and random weirdness, maybe there are cases in the mods where you'd really want to write some kind of script down, especially for a non-dwarven mod race that does something or other, but that level of support is pretty hard to prioritize when I don't really need or want it for dwarves.
On the other hand, writing from the perspective that every command the player gives will be credited to fortress position holders, if an appropriate official were to order that a liquid, with usage hints/whatever in the raws, will now be used for something entirely outside those bounds (like coating a weapon with syrup), that action might be anything from brilliant to quirky to wasteful to tyrannical to suicidal, depending on the situation. The dwarves aren't currently capable of judging their officials and it's a very difficult problem most of the time. If a randomly-generated creature has a weakness to syrup, maybe coating the weapons with syrup is simply a practical strategy, and in that case syrup wouldn't have the "weapon coating" usage hint in the raws. That coating action is entirely up to player ingenuity, much like ordering the creation of a complicated machine, and it's a reasonable thing to allow.
Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build. It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected. The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview. If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed. Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.
Toady what is your opinion on this issue and how long would it take to get drugs and ethics for them? It would be nice for fleshing out thetribals and theyr more animistic religions and worldviews.
Like a lot of non-crucial suggestions that expand the game in interesting ways, I'm all for it and don't have a timeline, he he he. Alcohol will probably get more work done on it in terms of drunkenness and cultural conventions first, and that might force a framework for the larger picture.
Can we get Overground tribes?
We used to have nomadic groups, and now we've got the underground entity pops that don't really do anything outside of making camps and staging attacks. I'd like to diversify what's going on with humans and others up there, and it might start more with the bandit/roving baddies more than anything.
Were the pathing problems with (locked) doors, climbing and digging solved? (for invaders)
Nothing has changed there.
Toady, adamantine's impact/compression/shear/torsion/bending/tensile yield/fracture values have been changed to 5000000 from their original 4000000. This makes adamantine impossible to mine. Was this intended and if so, was there going to be another tag to make slade unminable?
It was an oversight, and I'll take care of it one way or another for next time.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1607429 times)