A few throwaway thoughts re: Hydromancy: Water manipulation is often seen as part of the traditional arts of fleshcrafting of various sorts in fantasy settings. Mutation, creature husbandry, crossbreeding, etc. There was a particular race of seadwellers in a fantasy setting I worked with a bit that were basically magical bioengineers, ferex, breeding ships and various servant species for personal use and trade. If you're looking for strategic applications for it, crossbreeding, mutations, strange beasts, etc., is a thematically viable direction to go. Biological battering rams, artillery, specially bred domestic creatures (Food/moral bonii), so on, so forth.
It's also not uncommon for it to turn towards blood manipulation if you're getting particularly nasty about things.
All interesting thoughts! I'm not sure what I'm thinking about breeding and similar at the moment; I guess it will, in part, depend on what kind of creature system I end up implementing, which is a major thing I'm thinking about at the moment. However, I really like the idea of 'biological battering rams' and similar; the siege weapon for the undead is... well, I'm not going to give that away yet, since I rather like it. But I'm definitely interested in adding more unusual 'biological weapons', but I'm not sure if crossbreeding and similar are the ways to produce them!
If you feel like weaponizing water, Ice is a popular choice- firing sharp ice like shotgun pellets, coating a battlefield in it, freezing armor (which is really quite unpleasant if you're still wearing it,) so on and so forth. Water also rusts, which has obviously detrimental effects on iron weapons and armor. Lacking an Air school, Water also does well for causing storms and other weather effects. And a final thought, Water magic tends to play a role in divination magics, for settings that don't have that as a separate school, or being fulfilled by Air instead.
Yeah - I was actually currently thinking of getting away from the ice option, but I totally agree with you on storms, diversions, rusting, etc. I think ice has been done far more than water (precisely because, as you say, it's an obvious way to weaponize it) so I'm interested in whether water per se can prove useful
I know we have these schools for rituals but what about smaller spells? Does it go to "non-epic-stuff" category?
Not sure. Probably, they won't exist! Strategic-level spells only, most likely, and not for some time.
Yep, in Python. Apart from BASIC when I was very young, I've never touched any other programming language, so I don't know if Python is stronger/weaker for this project, but it's serving me perfectly well so far
Hey just wanted to say this has grown unbelievably since I first saw it on the python/libtcod forums, wish one of my projects had grown this much this quickly. But the main thing I found that limited my projects is the fact that python is soooooo slow when compared to C++. I was just wondering if you had noticed this and just have ridiculously optimised code, or if you found another way around it?
Awesome game, can't wait for it to be released .
Thanks! I'm not sure how optimized my code is
. Before release I'm obviously going to profile it and try and speed up every bit I possibly can, but loading a chunk of a map normally takes 15-20 seconds, so that gets a loading screen (though it's not a hugely common occurrence to move to a new map chunk anyway). Otherwise, everything seems to run fine. It's possible as the game grows I'll have to make more changes, but at the moment, there aren't any real speed issues, imo!
Seeing URR working on his game with a passion and ambition like this is encouraging me to start developing roguelikes myself (which I have been thinking about, for like a year) but the majestic world of codes seems a little scary. Is it difficult, teaching yourself and not taking any classes about it?
Cool
. I thought it seemed bloody terrifying before I got started, but I found it pretty easy to teach myself. Find a good tutorial or two, and buy a book or two (I recommend ones that are more general reference for the code, rather than 'tutorials', as code reference books make it easy to look up whatever you need) and I guarantee it'll go well.
Just got to say something about magic and... well, fairness in the game.
Magic should not be undodgeable. That is, all magic should be able to be avoided, or resisted. But from the previous comment about the 4 schools of magic, it seems some clever wizard could just come along and suck the moisture out of your body from a distance, killing you.
I'm hoping you plan to make magic more fair. Powerful, but fair.
I would hope to keep it fair. There will be ways for both you and other creatures to develop/deploy resistances to various magics, but again, magic is a long-term goal, so I don't know yet how that will pan out. However, I do need some idea, since I'm currently redoing creature code, and I want to leave 'space', as it were, for magic resistances and similar in the future. I strongly suspect a lot of magic resistance will come from either a) a friendly mage protecting your force, or b) specific items that resist specific magics.
So... Encountering a giant that proceeds bashing you into a pulp with a tree, walking into that dragons lair, catching a stray arrow with your eye or slipping on a banana peel by a cliff is just equally unfair?
Magic will be rare and presumably there will be magical countermeasures, which you probably wont gain that easy, just as wizards won't get their powers easily.
Yep; and while there WILL be horrific deaths out there, I think since you're likely to be fighting in a force much of the time, I'd like to keep combat realism high while trying to reduce the number of truly sudden, unexpected deaths. Somehow.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the game should be easy. I'm just saying that it should be possible to fight these forces, or at least run away. If you were stupid enough to get close to a big, dumb giant wielding a mace the size of a tree, you deserve to die. If you decided to enter a dragon's lair and you weren't prepared, you deserve to die. If you're walking next to a cliff, you're asking for trouble, and deserve to die. If you took an arrow to the knee eye... well, bad luck.
Likewise, if you run into an enemy mage, you should have the option of fleeing, or a chance of surviving if you fought. They should NOT be capable of simply destroying you from a distance with a flick of their wrist.
My overall point is, the game should not be the kind of game where something just comes along every single time you play and casually wipes you off the face of the earth. There should be foes capable of that, but it should have some level of realism. For example, a dragon in flight should not stop and murder you simply because you're there. Unless it's hungry. Then it may stop in order to fill its belly with your tasty human flesh.
See, DF Adventure mode currently lacks this. If you run into a creature that is labeled, "hostile" it will kill you simply because it can. And that's not realistic. Powerful creatures and beings should not stop to pick off the small fries, in my opinion.
I entirely agree about things not killing you 'just because they can'. I intend to give a lot of creatures basic routines - as in, they might hunt at night, or only certain creatures, or only certain areas, and so on. Every single deadly wild creature will not attack you on sight under certain conditions. Behemoths, for instance, will almost never fight back at night, and if you go past them and don't bother them, they are unlikely to stir. Similarly, I intend to get Dragons moving long distances, and only stopping to fight you if you're threatening their nest, or attacking them, or if they're hungry, etc, otherwise they'll just fly on by...
I would love to see (relatively) mundane counters to common magical/demonic issues. Things like salt circles, running water, cold iron or religious verse working to stymie some forms of magic. The effect would basically be that magic users had to worry about a different set of constraints than foot soldiers and generals have to. Soldier worry about food, shelter and harsh terrian in addition to the guys out there wanting to stab them in the eye. If magic uses instead have to worry about rivers (with or without fords), temples, mines and magical threshholds instead of (or in addition to) the more mundane constraints, you can have a very powerful magic system in the game which adds to the tactical and strategic realities of the game rather than steam rolling them as is so often the case in fantasy.
This is *exactly* what I think would be good. I'd like a lot of the countermeasures - that aren't granted by a friendly mage countering the effects of your foe - to be counters of this sort. Of course, mages fighting might have fallout, other effects, etc, but I like the ideas of magic that can be countered by non-explicitly-magical means, like salt, iron, etc. That could be particularly interesting, though I'll have to think about how to 'scale it up' to army level.
Seeing URR working on his game with a passion and ambition like this is encouraging me to start developing roguelikes myself (which I have been thinking about, for like a year) but the majestic world of codes seems a little scary. Is it difficult, teaching yourself and not taking any classes about it?
It takes dedication and a willingness to screw up. A lot. The best way to start is to give yourself some really, really simple goals. Like, make a flat field of grass. Then add a dude. Then get the dude to be able to walk around. Stuff like that. You're probably going to have to scrap the first two or three iterations anyway as you learn what you're doing, so there's no reason to try and add in the crazy stuff early on.
Now, not saying you can't design the crazy stuff ahead of time, since that's fun. Just don't try to actually code any of it until you have the basic stuff down and working ok.
Yep - I started from the Python tutorial posted in this thread, then made the screen scroll, and I've thus far rewritten the basic code a good four times. I'm fairly confident this will be the last time I do this
. I had to realize that what I wrote when I was starting out was probably going to be utterly terrible; it was, and I had to force myself to re-write it, but what I have now is so much faster and more complex.
I swear by this roguelike tutorial. Python is definitely the language you want to start with if you're learning on your own. Khan Academy has a playlist on Python and computer science, although I haven't watched it so I can't speak to its quality. Best of luck to you! 
Agreed; that was my start too. A great tutorial!
EDIT: Oh my armok how the heck do i install python 
Are you on Windows? It should be as easy as downloading the version you want (I'd go with 2.7.2) and then double-clicking the .msi file to go through the installer. You'll then have IDLE, which is an interpreter you can use to type code into one line at a time, or you can create scripts which IDLE will run (and print out error messages).
As Biag said, the roguelike tutorial using libtcod is awesome, which is what I'm using to base the code for my game off of (The creator of the tutorial doesn't mind if people use his code).
I concur with staying with 2.7.2 for now. I'm sure I'll move to 3 at some point, though...
URR said magic is going to be rare but powerful. It's not like we are going to fight against a spellcaster every couple of hours. If the player did something to piss off a spellcaster, he should be ready for it. But I agree, there should be a way to resist spells. Maybe amulets, small charms, blessings from priests or something.
Pretty much this. Finding a competent spellcaster is going to be as rare as finding any other high-level creature. Similarly, becoming one is a long-term goal, if you want to that direction. Spell resistance is... being worked out, let's put it that way. Either get a friendly mage to support you, or have items/blessings/similar that will negate other effects. Or, of course, just find a non-magical way to kill the opposing mage at the start of the battle. I suspect mages will be a very important initial target like Commanders, for that matter...
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023 (Read 596235 times)