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[Veroule]

something like that for meat gathering, elves will have...elf stuff.

Soilient Green, gets its color from the many layers of splatter and covering that are on the dwarves before they are ground up and pressed into neat wafers.  An excellent example of how elves use the cave adapted dwarves.  Remember that Soilient Green tastes better then Orange.

[paladin_of_light]

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.

And then, we will become what we hate...

[Beardless]

"No! I must kill the nobles" he shouted.
But Armok said "No Urist. You are the nobles"
And then Urist was a Baroness.

[Kogan Loloklam]

I'm curious about how important having every underground feature is to people.

I remember when it was limited, I would usually look for either a underground river end, or a chasm. I looked for these because I liked having fancy waterfalls in my fortress. I didn't need 4 or 5 features. And as I played, I stopped looking for those features too. And a short time later we got our undergrounds in their current state.
Right now I use the underground for it's different raids. I make my fortress connect to the surface first, then connect it to the underground. I do this to increase the chance of a game-ending raid without triggering the deepest HFS.

Ultimately, I don't need a ton of features. Connection to a cavern layer that allows the HFS is more then enough, and that only so we have the option to be besieged in a few more directions. For adventure mode, a fortress alone is a point of interest. More people go to see Mesa Verde(561,163 in 2006) each year in Colorado's 4 corners than go to see New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns(407,367 in 2006).

I'll put my current fortress up as a candidate for exploration over anything I've found in the underground currently any day. If it doesn't add anything to the design of my fortress, it's presence underground isn't needed. If it does add, it's presence explains partially why my fortress is there anyway. So make them rare for adventure mode. As long as we can see them, we can place our fortresses where we want to take advantage of what we need to. That way adventuring will remain more fun. But on that route, I am unhappy with the current interface between adventure mode and lost fortresses...

Will there be a difference in loot left on site between abandoning and the fortress failing in different ways?
 (Loot taken with the conquerors or the departing dwarves, Dragon taking the loot to it's cave. Loot being left to rot amongst the "cursed bones" of the tantrum spiral, exc.) This could be a reason players abandon fortresses when they can carry on otherwise afterward. You don't want the goblins that have been the thorn in your side for 80 years to get Othilcugshil Tharnas Dusak.

Will abandoning/being defeated in the fortress result in the instant defeat of the hamlets and other sprawl?
If not, combined with this..

Can the method of your fortress's destruction influence it's next incarnation?
if you fell to the dragon Smaug Saràmlimul, you'd just have to search in the caverns for a troglodyte with a ring. Of course then the greedy elves would come by demanding a share of the reclaimed treasure, and expect you to save them when the goblins show up...

[Tormy]

I'm curious about how important having every underground feature is to people.

Honestly? I don't care about underground features anymore. I want a fully functional Army Arc. I would like to send out my dwarven armies to conquer other settlements and empires. I want to enslave the Elves. I want to create my own Empire, I want a much more advanced diplomacy system...and the list goes on.

[Psieye]

I'm curious about how important having every underground feature is to people.

Magma and to a lesser extent, HFS are two features I consider essential. And really, on Earth the magma is guaranteed as you WILL eventually dig past the crust. That the Earth's crust is a lot thicker than what DF's z-levels imply is a minor detail in fantasy generated worlds. Underground plants and underground water sources I also consider very important. Add in underground life forms and I count 5 'features', maybe 6 with forgotten beasts. How many features do you count that you approximate it to ~20?

Running two sites at a time where you have access to both of the maps is a messy matter.  Limited things like road building projects are possible, or even site sprawl to sort of Moria-ize your main fortress, but actually playing the two maps is tricky, for the same reasons as fortress retirement, but worse.

Is Digging or even Deforestation included in "Limited things"? It could be made more abstract than an actual fortress map: you send off some miners with food/drink, equipment (might include furniture) and some means of transport (pack animals or mine cart rails) and after a period of time (for travel both ways and the work itself), they come back with stuff they've gathered with options for ignoring common stone. It would suddenly get complicated if the player wanted to watch it in real time, but 'snapshots' during Paused Time of how the off-site map is changing might be feasible.

Strange.  I haven't had that problem, and the mounts should be subject to the regular invader/marauder code.  If the mounted humans etc. are always running off, it's a bug.  I'm not sure what training was involved for horses used in war in real-life.  The current attack bonuses are a little weird and would be even stranger applied to mounts.

Amphibious mounts may decide to swim, drowning their riders while continuing their invasion path. Considering you don't want mounts to be unthinking 'motorbikes with legs', will this be perfectly acceptable behaviour if the mount is badly trained?

[Askot Bokbondeler]

eh, i used to capture chasm creatures in 40d and dig out enormous chambers several z levels high to flood with water, then dry them all and leave a stream running, then i'd release the ratmen, giant moles and cave crocodiles, all this with dwarves with [speed:0], [no_eat], etc. then i'd remove the cheat tags from the dwarves and start to dig my fortress with it's entrance on the underground it was terrible on my fps, tough.

you can see how i enjoy the new underground

[Armok]

Ok, some questions inspired by the recent talk:


Some of my horse questions from before got answered, however: Will sapient mounts (say, a classic dragon rider) be handled any special way, or just like an ordinary mounts except they can talk, or just like ordinary followers except you cling to them?

How much personality will, say, your random horse have on average, and how much  will it affect the game? Realistic, probably lots of personality and unless it's some kind of elite warhorse in a lot or ways, but that may be distracting...
How well will animals personalities and behaviour be modelled after the species behaviour in the real world, as opposed to just generic herbivore/carnivore AIs?

Some things you've said indicate there will be some more general spectrum of trainability for species rather than just boolean tamable or tamable_exotic tags, is this correct?

Will the zones mentioned for combat also be used for other things? For example, random creture generation of stuff along the lines of shimeras and mermaids could have more use of swapping zones between species than bodyparts maybe.

Will all kinds of creatures have the same zones, or will that be something defined in the RAWs?

You mentioned a dilemma of giving adventurers emotion or not, couldn't you just make that an init/worldgen/per adventurer option?

I found the hallucination discussion fascinating. Will random hallucinations ideally be interesting enough that you'd want to just fire up the arena and do shrooms, kind of like ideally fights between equal opponents were said to have that goal?

Will dreams eventually use the same or similar mechanics to the hallucinations described? Perhaps it could grab a random location where you have been and then simply run the exact same thing it would if you were hallucinating badly, and then it grabs whatever actor the hallucination brings up naturally to deliver it's prophecy or something like that?
About the sight cones and sneaking up on the adventurer, could it work to have it a toggle able "paranoia" mode similar to how sneaking is now? So that most of the time you'd walk and be vulnerable, because keeping a 360 degree sight is tiring/distracting/slows you down.

[Mel_Vixen]

Heh and were was the question if the drug created the Halucination or if it really happend. So could things happen because you used a certain substance? So entering some kind of "I see dead people/God/demons" whatever mode or somekind of spritual travel? Heh maybe true and wrong could also be mixed.

[Kogan Loloklam]

eh, i used to capture chasm creatures in 40d and dig out enormous chambers several z levels high to flood with water, then dry them all and leave a stream running, then i'd release the ratmen, giant moles and cave crocodiles, all this with dwarves with [speed:0], [no_eat], etc. then i'd remove the cheat tags from the dwarves and start to dig my fortress with it's entrance on the underground it was terrible on my fps, tough.

you can see how i enjoy the new underground

Do those classify as features?

Are we talking about having ubiquitous caverns as the "features" and plants in them?

I thought we were talking about things that aren't in the game anymore like underground rivers

Spoiler: and things that are like this (click to show/hide)

Mysterious Constructions

I'm perfectly content with what we have. I don't think eliminating the "wet caverns" all over the place would be bad. I think setting it up like water on the surface would be perfectly adequate, and I think having interesting underground features scattered around for adventurers would be good. Likewise I don't think forcing multiple underground "features" of this sort in a fortress doesn't seem to be beneficial to me.

I think focusing on new stuff to make the underground fun for adventurers without doing anything special for those features for fortresses will be just fine. Some people can get a new feature in their fortress if they want, but I don't see anything addable to adventure mode that would be absolutely required for every fortress.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm curious about how important having every underground feature is to people.

I'm not sure about "underground features", but as we are moving towards having satellite villages and more trading in a hopefully eventual implimentation of the Trader/Caravan Arc, I'd like to see different sites that are actually capable of having specialty products that are at least unlikely to appear in other regions. 

I mean, is there even a POINT in having caravans when everyone has everything they need right below their feet?  (Excepting that traders can bring in infinite gold and platinum, although the trader arc may actually end that.  Of course, when that happens, DF will seriously start to need a more serious effort at Conversation Of Matter, because the fact that most materials have infinite off-map sources is the only thing that keeps matter annhilation from mattering so much.)

Having a greater diversity of crops that are much more biome-specific is a pet project of mine right now, and I'd like to see a greater expansion on the uses of farmable materials in general.  If different areas are more suitable for different crops, then we could have caravans trading distilled liquors from the far corners of the world as high-priced commodities that are prized for their rarity in other parts of the world.  Likewise with certain dyes or even products like lacquerware.

[Mel_Vixen]

And if we get "traits" for plant types we could see - over a longer time - different crops arising from one species. Like potatos before the industrialisation of farming and Seed-creation. There were thousands of different potato variants (White and red one, sweeter and Muddyer tasting ones, Big ones small ones - you name it) sadly the number declined - [sarcasm] thank you Monsanto and Consorts [/sarcasm]!.

On Fort scale you could trade these Variants and with some skill cross-breed them like Mendel did with his peas.

Heck toady could start with a smaller number of plants and Mushrooms in the raws and get - if geographical separation, Pollen-flight, Seed transport by birds etc. could be tracked - by genetics and some actual mutation a fullblown Plant-world. Could you do that toady? It would be a nice extension to random generating plants. Naturally the same thing applies to animals.

Oh one question since i am at breeding stuff: If a female and a male demon of the same kind meet each other can they have offspring (In the games current stage i mean not in general)? I have seen in the legends-mode a pair of demons that were the same kind with different genders so i wondered if "Demon"-lineages ruling something.

[Cruxador]

And if we get "traits" for plant types we could see - over a longer time - different crops arising from one species. Like potatos before the industrialisation of farming and Seed-creation. There were thousands of different potato variants (White and red one, sweeter and Muddyer tasting ones, Big ones small ones - you name it) sadly the number declined - [sarcasm] thank you Monsanto and Consorts [/sarcasm]!.

On Fort scale you could trade these Variants and with some skill cross-breed them like Mendel did with his peas.

Heck toady could start with a smaller number of plants and Mushrooms in the raws and get - if geographical separation, Pollen-flight, Seed transport by birds etc. could be tracked - by genetics and some actual mutation a fullblown Plant-world. Could you do that toady? It would be a nice extension to random generating plants. Naturally the same thing applies to animals.

Oh one question since i am at breeding stuff: If a female and a male demon of the same kind meet each other can they have offspring (In the games current stage i mean not in general)? I have seen in the legends-mode a pair of demons that were the same kind with different genders so i wondered if "Demon"-lineages ruling something.

Megabeasts do not breed.

[Kogan Loloklam]

Oops, I started to form this while it was a huge oddball quote pyramid. It's been edited since. Well that changes things, but since I went through the effort of creating this, here it is. This is how I came to asking this question:

The convo broken down in spoilers:

Spoiler: isitanos (click to show/hide)

Link
    Adventurer Role: Explorer

        * Lands and beastiary   
             
              o More overland map features and local variations       

Will you keep improving the underground in the short term, and add incentives to dig down and face the dangers to find useful stuff? I'd love if you could bring back cave rivers, and get them to repopulate (and have creatures not get stuck or suicide in waterfalls), together with surface rivers. Some rivers could disappear underground and resurface elsewhere, as happens in real life.
A sea monster swimming up the river and attacking you from either underground or the surface would be a Fun surprise.

Spoiler: Toady One (click to show/hide)

Link
The previous problems with cave rivers make me wary of them, but it would be cool to get the place looking nicer.  The underground is pretty dreary right now.  The treasure hunter role is the best bet there, probably, though that might focus on areas of concentrated local interest at first.  I guess enough of those makes for an exciting underground, but we'll probably need to find some middle ground stuff to avoid over-saturation.  Dwarf mode wants interesting stuff all over underground but it makes adventure mode cave exploration goofy.

Spoiler: Jiri Petru (click to show/hide)

Link
How about if some features were added at embark? You could generate the word with the feature frequency optimalised for adventure mode, and then throw in some extra features when the player embarks in fortress mode. Or alternatively scan the neighbouring map squares and move the features from there to the embark idea or something. Or something... The question is whether retrospecting "cheating" like this (that could probably help even in other ideas) is something you might consider, or a thing that doesn't fit into your idea of simulating the world.

Another example might be ore veins and gems. Generate the world with realistic (low) amount of these, then throw in some extra ones to the embark area. Presumably hardcore players could turn off these extras in init, playing a realistic fortress in an area with a single metal vein, not veins of every metal possible. (Site finder would be needed to avoid completely empty areas, though)

Spoiler: Toady One (click to show/hide)

Link
I think it is more likely that you'd just get to interact with features in a wider area by being able to send out squads/armies through the underground layers to off-screen sites that have been harassing you, and then you'd get to seem them in their full glory (even if it is in frozen time or whatever).
Taken strictly as an isolated single-fort worldless game, it would make sense to add a special feature on every level, and perhaps that kind of thing would work as an init option, but when it comes to villains/etc. I prefer having a historical villain attack from offscreen over a generated villain base being guaranteed, for example.  We'll have to see how it plays out as you have more off-screen interactions.  If it takes care of itself at that point, with the occasional point of interest actual being under the fort, perhaps with site-finding options, then that would be good.  The deepest underground can more afford to be glutted with features in adv mode as well, so that should also help a bit.

Spoiler: isitanos (click to show/hide)

Link
For the record, I don't get what's the excitement about having every single underground feature in every single fortress. Which means that once you've seen one fortress' underground, you've seen them all. Rather than regularly having, say, all 20 interesting features, I'd rather have 4-5 picked at random, and hopefully some variation on the contents of each of these. For obsessive compulsive or very casual players that must absolutely have them all, or for the time where you absolutely need a specific feature for a community game, some option that adds these features to the underground after embark would be perfect.

Spoiler: Toady One (click to show/hide)

Link
The all-feature thing is requested, especially back in 40d, but it's not what we were talking about here.  Your 4-5 suggestion is along the lines of the situation I was staying would still cause trouble, because even if you only have 4-5 features, or one per layer per 4x4, say, you'd still have a glut of them as you walked over the adv mode map.  It would be like increasing the density of the new village map I posted by sixteen times and making them all really neat.  It's good for fortress mode, but very weird in adv mode.  Like a carnival or something.

Spoiler: Me (click to show/hide)

Link
I'm curious about how important having every underground feature is to people.

I remember when it was limited, I would usually look for either a underground river end, or a chasm. I looked for these because I liked having fancy waterfalls in my fortress. I didn't need 4 or 5 features. And as I played, I stopped looking for those features too. And a short time later we got our undergrounds in their current state.
Right now I use the underground for it's different raids. I make my fortress connect to the surface first, then connect it to the underground. I do this to increase the chance of a game-ending raid without triggering the deepest HFS.

Ultimately, I don't need a ton of features. Connection to a cavern layer that allows the HFS is more then enough, and that only so we have the option to be besieged in a few more directions. For adventure mode, a fortress alone is a point of interest. More people go to see Mesa Verde(561,163 in 2006) each year in Colorado's 4 corners than go to see New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns(407,367 in 2006).

I'll put my current fortress up as a candidate for exploration over anything I've found in the underground currently any day. If it doesn't add anything to the design of my fortress, it's presence underground isn't needed. If it does add, it's presence explains partially why my fortress is there anyway. So make them rare for adventure mode. As long as we can see them, we can place our fortresses where we want to take advantage of what we need to. That way adventuring will remain more fun. But on that route, I am unhappy with the current interface between adventure mode and lost fortresses...

I don't think when we talk about underground features in this train of thought we are talking about Plump helmets or the Bottom of the world HFS. I think we are talking about cave rivers and cave lakes, and chasms and natural ramps up/down, as well as

Spoiler: the HFS associated with the HFS (click to show/hide)

Mysterious Constructions

So, how important is it that the site you are on has features that you cannot currently go to any random point in the underground and have a 100% chance of finding it? I'm pretty certain it's near zero on the importance scale, since the big things, Magma and HFS, are now accessable on every site. I might change my mind if off the map animalmen can't raid once stuff is added, since that used to be a major drawing point of cave rivers and chasms. Some people might want it all, but that is what world gen seeds are ultimately for, so those people can find those sites and share them. It seemed a pretty thriving setup in the past. There are problems if they couldn't be seen in the embark map, but as long as they can be I don't see too much of an issue. Ultimately spawned "features" aren't that important in fortress mode, but will make a great deal of difference for adventure mode. Cavern water is as good (or bad, your choice) as pond water currently (last I checked, anyway) so even the loss of the "great pond" doesn't affect much, since it's the plump helmets that are desired for the wine.

Many times I wished I could follow a underground river with some logic to where it was going rather than forge ahead through the stale water underground in my quest to find previously mentioned HFS. It'd also have been easier to remember landmarks if there was a flowing landmark. I remember passing one particularly interesting bit of terrain that I could never find again because there was no point of reference to measure it off of. Too much was the same underground.
Anyone who has done some serious cave crawling in the newest versions of DF probably knows exactly what I mean.

I'd like to see underground features like rivers, and springs where underground rivers flow into the surface. Huge underground oceans and massive underground rivers. Not every place can have them, but they'd enhance the feeling of underground exploration. When you add in old tombs from lost underground dweller civilizations that sprang up and disintegrated before the beginning of time, you've got some real fun underground activities to do. Dwarf Mode doesn't benefit, but they can certainly be embarked on for flavor. That's what I've thought we were talking about when it came to underground features.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'd like to see underground features like rivers, and springs where underground rivers flow into the surface. Huge underground oceans and massive underground rivers. Not every place can have them, but they'd enhance the feeling of underground exploration. When you add in old tombs from lost underground dweller civilizations that sprang up and disintegrated before the beginning of time, you've got some real fun underground activities to do. Dwarf Mode doesn't benefit, but they can certainly be embarked on for flavor. That's what I've thought we were talking about when it came to underground features.

Hmm... that does sound like a good idea...

It would actually be spectacular if we could combine having Raw-editable worldgen city construction with things like ruins - we could have some randomly placed, rare "landmarks", like the ruins of long-lost forgotten beast civilizations that we could custom create, or have rules for their generation (so that ruins, for example, might be built like a cave town, but have mud and overgrowth plus walls knocked down).  Or things like Stonehenge or burial mounds on the surface.

With enough player modding thrown together, we could potentially create a large enough library of special landmarks that you would literally never see the same landmark twice.