Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MightyEvilPunk]

I would be happy, if I can have a map without dwarven fortresses. For fortress mode for sure. Because dwarven migrants and dwarven caravans make playing much more easy, while I like to count only on natural population growth and on goblinite, as a source of metal.

[Incanus]

I fully, totally and vigorously agree with the OP.

I've wasted tons of hours generating World hoping to have the embark site i seek. Frankly, it was not fun, not even instructive, not even useful.

I don't care if it's highly realistic or not, i just want the choice. Make everything "realistic" by design, and let the player choose how he wants to interact with the gameplay. That would be ideal.

Dwarf Fortress highest quality, gameplay wise, for me, reside in the fact that players can appropriate themselves the game and play it the way they prefer: i mean i always play at a VERY LOW speed, and with 40 dwarf max. I wouldn't even play if i couldn't set the speed of the game, because i want to be able to follow each task, each dwarf, to micromanage everything (control freak inside maybe?^^). I wouldn't play the game at all if it was mandatory to have 200 dwarf, if i couldn't have a waterfall AND a volcano on the same map etc..

I'm not asking at all that everyone play like me, but only to be able to choose how you interact with the game.

Letting the player choose how he wants to deal with the randomness of the WorldGen (full randomness, controlled randomness, little randomness), for me, would be not only wise, but, dwarfic^^.


[Sorry for my poor english skill btw, it's not my mother tongue].

[dudlol]

I like this thread very much, and would like to comment that for a lot of forts I care so little about world history (sorry toady) that a simple slider for distance and population for each race and a toggle for trade, no contact, or war would be more than enough to get me going. Obviously history and all that are a lot of fun, but it'd be cool to make your little slice of the world and then have world gen build the rest around it. After all, my fort and experience are much more important to me than the fact that it was totally logical for the humans to plump down a city on my perfect embark zone.

[GavJ]

That makes me think of another similar idea, actually:

If you want to build a for on an existing NPC site:
* Let us do it
* Obliterate the site (go ahead and put in an amusing tongue in cheek mention in legends if you want)
* Redistribute the historical figures to other sites of their same civ as refugees
* If it was their only site, they just die (which would also give us a side effect bonus useful way to control extinctions if we want for roleplaying or community forst, etc.)
* If it was their only site and it's the same civ as you, they don't die, but go to a future immigrant pool.

[Scruiser]

   I think in general a "God Mode" for world gen would be nice.  The player carves out the world perfectly to fit a story.  They then weave a narrative by pushing key historical figures into certain actions, handing out curses and secrets, directing megabeasts (or adding them entirely), and other such things (think Greek God at their most manipulative).  The player can set up the perfect world for an adventure or a particular fort.  Its not even about making things super-easy, its about being able to tell a particular story. 
   Let me give you a scenario to illustrate the value of this suggestion:
    The fortress narrative the player wants requires a five hundred year war between goblins and elves.  The key pass between them has a volcano in the middle.  To the north are evil glaciers from which goblins come.  To the south are joyous jungles from which the elves send their raids.   East of the pass, on the mountain range, are many necromancer towers and mega-beast lairs.  On west of the mountain ranges that makes up the border between the goblins and elves are the dwarfs.  The dwarves, who border on extinction, noting the existence of magma, iron, flux stone, woods, and 4 biomes worth of biodiversity decide to put all of their resources into settling that volcano in the middle of the pass.
   Right now there is like 0% chance of that scenario happening randomly.    It would make for some of the most epic conflict possible.  But it requires a perfect steady state in warfare and impossibly close positioning of biomes.
   Gods puppeting world creation and events to entertain themselves is perfectly in line with the flavor of the game, and gives the avenue for players to create such scenarios.

[GavJ]

Well actually that sort of thing you largely can... sort of influence, Scruiser, using worldpainter (advanced gen -> e -> p) or third party apps such as perfectworld that plug into that part of the game for you.  You can make mountain ranges with glaciers beyond them. You can also fairly easily manipulate where civs end up by just toying with which biomes they are allowed in and by painting neutral savagery which essentially amounts to a "civs can go here" brush.

Although you can't dictate where evil occurs, you have crude ability to influence resources exactly, you'd have to run a few worldgens to make sure dwarves actually allocate exactly the way you want, and individual biome boundaries are totally out of your control.

War is very crudely and annoyingly controllable, but you have to set ethics to make it favorable, run world gen, go into legends, find a war, then go use the same seed to regen the world stopping it manually right then, blah blah. Clearly could use some help.

Higher resolution world painting would solve many/most of these, I think.  Others would require more specialized features for controlling especially the political landscape and how it ends up better, for instance.



Also there is a tension between sometimes when you want the world to shape your play, and other times when you want your RP to shape the world. The best DF should allow both methods.

I really like your wording of "let us tell a particular story"

[Scruiser]

Opens dwarf fortress... opens advanced worldgen.  Well dang, "Set Preset Field Values" just isn't an intuitive name... I always assumed third party tools were used to create those maps.  Shoulda read wiki more   
Well, I have a new goal for the latest version... thousand year death match between elves and goblins with dwarfs in the middle.  Thanks!

Yeah, I read this whole essay once about how dwarf fortress is good and popular because it allows the generation of narratives.  Found it. 255 pages http://cmsw.mit.edu/dwarf-fortress-gathers-at-the-statue-and-attends-a-party/ and actually google searching I found another similar essay... http://www.academia.edu/4010197/Dwarf_Fortress_Narratives_of_Multiplicity_and_Deconstruction

I really like having detailed mechanics to explore and high levels of realism to engage my imagination, but I think the narrative generating elements is DF's greatest strength.  This suggestion would really open up some new fronts in terms of that.

[GavJ]

I always assumed third party tools were used to create those maps.

They are and they aren't.  What PerfectWorld does is basically just to give you a better system of brushes and algorithms for using the in-game world painter. It makes a much prettier hand-painted map than you could make, and then uses a feature Toady included whereby the game allows you to just import whole matrices/bitmaps/whatever they are I don't remember, which the worldpainter then interprets the same way as if you had painted all those things by hand.

But PerfectWorld doesn't actually allow you to do anything you couldn't technically already do in-game if you were a genius robot savant with too much time on your hands. It doesn't read or write any memory addresses or anything hackish. It just auto-determines and then types in prettier patterns than you would be able to do manually (but still physically could).

Therefore the PerfectWorld people can't or won't do embark tile-level resolution for us, because the plugin they are using into the game doesn't accept that as legal input. The in-game engine has to offer that raw feature first, then the third party apps will update to make it actually usable shortly thereafter.