Bay 12 Games Forum

So, I'm taking this great idea Felius had in the Aurora thread and running with it. Single player Aurora can be a fun experience, but the ratio of time spent in space battles to time spent doing everything else can be disappointingly low, and even then, AI built ships don't really provide varied experience after a while. Here we'll aim to have all the fun of a multiplayer Aurora game minus the boring bits.

The What:
With a fixed number of research points, design an order of battle that will defeat the fleets of your fellow B12ers in a variety of combat situations, from chance encounters in frontier systems to assaults through jump points on fortified colonies.

The How:

• Everyone will start out with the basic transnewtonian techs, jump point theory and tier one jump engine technology, and all the other standard ship components (basically everything in logistics/ground combat along with a few others).
• On top of that you'll have 150,000 research points to spend on customizing your tech base.
• Ship components won't be free to research, so players should budget accordingly.
• We'll assume shipyard capacity is infinite, so there won't be a limit on the hull size of your designs or the number of designs you can have.

The Battles:
At least once a week (hopefully), I'll be running a scenario battle with two or more of the available players. Scenarios will consist of one or more star systems, a build point limit for each player's fleet, instructions for deploying each fleet, as well as some kind of victory condition. I'll then take fleet compositions and orders from the players, run the battles, and then post the results!

This sounds cool, sign me up!
To get started just send me a private message with at least some of the following (in order of decreasing importance):your technology choices (here's a list of options), password for your empire, main empire theme, commander name theme. After that, I'll send out a copy of the database so you can actually get started designing your ships.
NOTE: The linked aurora wiki page is currently several versions out of date, however, I'm working on updating it.

Like the idea but think my rules stink? Feedback is welcome!

I defined a dormitory and placed several beds in it. However, when given the option to sleep in the beds or on the smoothed floor, dwarves appear to prefer the floor.

There's always lots of talk about how amazing such and such mod is, or how cool it would be if we assigned all dwarves boiling points of 0, but let's get our noses out of the raws for a minute to appreciate how incredible the DF stock world really is.

Now, there's about a million things I could write here, but for now, let's focus on the major races of DF: the elves, the humans, the goblins, and the dwarves.  (I'm excluding kobolds for now because I can't think of anything interesting to say about them)

First, let's consider the world itself.  When it was created someone or something sealed a whole bunch of demons inside pits and then covered the pits with adamantine and then covered the adamantine with mountains.  Who could have done this?  Dwarf and human gods don't actually exist in and of themselves, elves don't believe in gods, and goblins worship the aforementioned demons.  The only actual [POWERS] in existence that would be capable of sealing the fiends of hell underneath the mountains are the demons themselves.  So personally I've taken to believing that the demons we see ruling the goblins are the strongest demons, who imprisoned their brethren underneath the mountains so they wouldn't have to share the overworld.  Discuss.

My next thoughts are about the elves, who are one of the most fleshed out races in the world in terms of development plans. Most players dislike the elves, as they should, since from a dwarven perspective they are insane hippy pansies that live in forests and actively seek to hinder industrial development.  However, I'd like to keep talks of drowning the elves in magma out of this thread, since my goal is to better understand the elves as a player and appreciator of Dwarf Fortress, and not as the spokesperson for the dwarves themselves (in other words an OOC discussion not an IC one).  That said, the elves are an enigma to me.  I see that they value preservation of the natural landscape more than anything else, but it is a mystery to me how they can exhibit such serenity one moment and such savagery the next.  What do you guys think?  How do the elves see themselves?  How do they see the other races?

My favorite race would probably have to be the goblins.  I think I've got them mostly figured out.  Think about them for a moment.  They are the most technologically advanced race above the ground, building massive towers that make the human castles look like run down shacks.  They live forever.  They actually worship something that exists in a tangible sense, and don't waste time shouting words at the sky like humans and dwarves.  They obviously believe that they are vastly superior to the other races, but they also believe that other races can be shown the light and converted to their superior society.  This is evidenced by the fact that the child snatchers consider themselves to be the "liberators" of children.  Now their [ETHICS] seem to suggest that they've adopted something that could only be called Social Darwinism.  The strongest goblins rise to the top and the weakest rot at the bottom.  The Demon is always at the top, and I'm not sure what role he plays in the direct control of the civilization, but that's still a point to ponder.  In short, the goblins view themselves as the noble immortals of the world, watching over it from their stone palaces, and seeking to redeem the lesser races from their own inferiority.

The humans, on the other hand, seem to be very primitive.  I view them sort of like Vikings, large barbaric warriors who drink all day and have very little science or social structure.  I hope that when boats are added, humans end up owning the seas because that would fit very much with my idea of them.  But, how must the other races see them?  Short lived, hairy, pink creatures trying to ilk out a living on the surface in their simple wooden shacks.  They're just as likely to go to war with each other as they are with the other races.  How uncivilized they must appear in the eyes of the other races.  I'm not sure what else to say about them, other than I hope they'll be fleshed out in future releases, because what we have to go with is rather bland at the moment.

Of course, everyone loves the Dwarves.  They seem to have the most advanced civilization, possessing the art of steelmaking and having a rather complicated nobility system.  Dwarves only seem to be concerned about metals and gems and stone and making things, in general.  Other races envy their craftsmanship and the dwarves do a roaring trade with the elves and humans.  They overlanders get beautiful stone crafts, and the dwarves get leather and meat and fish and all of the delicacies of the above ground land that they cannot secure themselves.  Even goblins, who won't lower themselves to trading as equal partners with the dwarves, admire their craftsmanship and their ability to make steel.  The goblins clearly want these things for themselves and actively attempt to capture forts.  Dwarves seem like they would rather live in a mountain than anything else, and they certainly don't enjoy the sun as much as other races, so it seems like they would prefer a more isolationist stance than anything else.

Anyway, these are my thoughts on the stock world.  There's a lot of missing pieces in my understanding of these societies, so I was hoping that we could help fill in each others gaps.  And I hope you weren't too put off by my wall-o-text.

The game crashed while I was trying to pawn off some of my stolen goods.  The terminal window read:
err:seh:setup_exception_record stack overflow 1656 bytes in thread 001a eip 7bc6de3a esp 00240cb8 stack 0x240000-0x241000-0x340000


So there's been several times when I've been slightly unhappy with the tilesets I've used and wanted to make changes to them.  Unfortunately, whenever I've tried to do this DF crashes on start-up.  Obviously this can't be such a common problem or it would have been reported earlier, causing me to come to the conclusion that it must have something to do with my Mac.  So my question is, fellow mac users, have you ever successfully made or modified a tileset, and what methods did you use?

So I had an elven caravan arrive.  They were loaded with wooden items and caged animals and all sorts of other things that they would normally shun.  I didn't get the chance to see how they would react to any wooden items I offered them, because I seized all their goods, but is this normal.  I've heard stories about the elves doing this in the previous version, but never encountered it myself.

Ok this is pretty weird.  I have Slate in my fortress.  Usually this wouldn't be too unusual but its Slate, with a capital S.  Usually its slate, lowercase.  This Slate doesn't appear to be a normal rock for two reasons.  
1)It has a value of 0 and uses the tile for sand.
2)It MOVES.  Yes that's right, it MOVES.  I have seen it move.  It appears to move kind of like a vermin, randomly appearing and disappearing.  

   

Here you can see it.  Its the one to NW from the cursor.
 

I've got a save ready when needed.

[ May 15, 2008: Message edited by: Karlito ]

I think she's wearing every cloak I've ever made.  There's a couple more if you scroll down as well.