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Author Topic: New Power Source?  (Read 1730 times)

Kanddak

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Re: New Power Source?
« Reply #15 on: January 28, 2009, 03:31:28 pm »

Good god, I actually read through most of the things in the above linked threads. It's enough to make me want firearms implemented just to shoot myself with.

But I did not find anyone simply saying this:

I am strongly in favor of electricity being in the game but I am just as strongly opposed to being able to do almost anything practical with it.
Like computing, it should be an obscure luxury which ambitious players can play with for their own amusement. Common, practical electricity would definitely break the game's setting, but so does not getting an electrical phenomenon if I build a construction that ought to produce one.

Dwarves should not know it exists, there should not be any electricity-related buildings or objects to build, and it shouldn't show up in any of the sites the game generates. I'd take electrical fish or lightning elementals, and I'd accept ambitious players chaining the latter in their basements and then building them into a circuit with their copper entryway of death, much as people have been known to exploit spirits of fire.
And I'd accept being able to build a reservoir with a copper wall, a zinc wall, and copper constructions connecting the two around the outside, fill it with acid, and get a small current, just in a "wow, this game really does have everything" kind of way.
But if we started going in a direction where a screw pump built with a magnetite block and a copper corkscrew would generate power, that would cross a line. I do not want electrical lighting or heating, electrical traps as a trivial everyday occurrence rather than obscure and expensive novelty, or any other such silliness.

Anything electrical should be an enormous megaproject undertaken more for its creator's vanity than any practical advantage over simpler ways of doing the same thing... which is exactly why we ought to be able to do it.
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Fossaman

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Re: New Power Source?
« Reply #16 on: January 28, 2009, 04:01:54 pm »

Quote
Dwarves should not know it exists, there should not be any electricity-related buildings or objects to build, and it shouldn't show up in any of the sites the game generates. I'd take electrical fish or lightning elementals, and I'd accept ambitious players chaining the latter in their basements and then building them into a circuit with their copper entryway of death, much as people have been known to exploit spirits of fire.

This is brilliant. I love it. As long as it's impractical enough that it's not a common defense method, it would be a great addition. But no artificial electricity, please. (I'm also a proponent of using lightning rods connected to tables with corpses on them. Nothing wrong with that.)
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G-Flex

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Re: New Power Source?
« Reply #17 on: January 28, 2009, 05:12:42 pm »

I agree with Kanddak's post a lot, except for the fact that doing something like representing electricity in-game would take a hell of a lot of processing power (the electricity would essentially have to be pathfinding constantly to ground, and so forth), and also development time.
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