I notice that form the Dev pages, that Squad Formations weren't listed. Has that been pushed backed even further?
Yeah, within the larger military goals, we weren't sure what the best spot is, so we're just letting them float. It's something we want to do, but they don't have a home yet.
Surely a catchall "other" category would be superior to leaving stuff off the list?
For training, especially with people throwing rocks for 5000 turns and so on, that kind of thing might as well be part of the pass-a-season mechanic, so that if you want to meditate on your left hook under a waterfall for 20 days, you can go ahead and do that. The tradeoffs would be your character's age, possible reputation fade, leaving whatever sites you've raised going fallow if you aren't working out from them, etc., so it shouldn't be an utterly unreasonable/spoily mechanic.
I reckon it would be best to make the gain from this significantly affected by your current skill. It would be kind of wonky if somebody could just play with a sword, starting from no knowledge, and get up to a professional level just like that. But we'd want the amount of gain to still be at least somewhat noticeable even at higher levels. And this reduces the possibility of someone, for example, starting out as an elf and just meditating for a thousand years.
Pushing this just a step further, setting up evidence so that someone else gets accused in your place (dropping the bloody dagger in his garbage, money under his bed, or whatever), then fearing as the legendary investigator tracks one by one the clues that lead to you, would just be an amazing experience.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how the tracking/suspicion/paranoia stuff plays out. Framing people might end up being the norm rather than the exception early on. That would lead to alibis and so on, and we'd just have to take care not to get carried away with information tracking, but it might be able to wing it respectably (it knows the random peasant didn't kill the guy, after all, so whatever possibly-generated alibi he's got is fine). The computer has the advantage of knowing you are the guilty party in advance, so getting that to work out fairly is just a matter of balancing things out, and then adding in the details that make it fun.
There would then need to be some manner of assuring that the framed party lacks an alibi. If he can't supply one (was all alone) or possibly wouldn't (say, was alone except for his friend's wife. And the situation was... untoward.) Seems to me that the easiest way to figure it out would be to check who's alone at the time of the crime, and hang onto that information until such time as somebody gets punished. But I don't know how big a deal that would be on the technical end.
Another way for a fortress to fall (very common in history) would be a traitor inside
Getting a dwarf to betray the fortress from the inside would require them to have contact -- which would make your broker or mayor/leader the best candidates among the important dwarves (any migrant or entity pop dwarf would do once you are established though). I imagine that would be fairly traumatic for players though, if you've got no way to handle the situation.
You could just make the traitor a valid target for kill orders. If you do that, and provide that his friends would want to protect him, there's a possibility for a lot of fun there, working of a fairly simple base mechanic.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1561099 times)