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[Ribs]

Dear Toady:
When the War Arc finally begins are there plans to allow us to control a militia commander sent on the siege of the hamlet like an adventurer?
Also when shall you fix the extremely slow training of warriors? The only efficient way to train a squad of 7 or more dwarves is to throw them in a danger room which is an extremely broken way of training anyway.

The slow training does kind of make sense, if you think about it. It would take a good decade or two of intense training for a normal person to "master" a weapon or fighting style. If anything, dwarves get experience too fast for most things. Achieving legendary status at any skill should be rare. So maybe some of it is intentional? You shouldn't expect to have a legion of +5 legendary axedwarves after a few seasons of normal training.

I think that the problem with training is that it takes to much time to train a recluit into
a decent warrior(say, caravan guard level). While legendary warriors should need extensive training and combat experience, a year of
training should be able to give you a competent soldier, and now it can't without micromanagement.

The big problem with training is that dwarves don't spar too often, and teacher/student skills are a little weird right now. But even with that, I can get my dwarves to being "adequate" macemen in a year or two, and I don't think that's too imbalanced. It could go faster, but what bothers me about skills in general is that dwarves seem to evolve them exponentially in a lot of cases.

For instance, a mason will go from dabbing to adequate more slowly than from adequate to professional, becase the better he is at making stone doors the faster he makes them and therefore the faster he gains that skill when he's constantly working. The fact that doesn't happen with combat skills in regular training actually makes them more reasonable than other skills in my opinion.

[Uronym]

snpaa: I too find it very displeasing that goblins don't eat or drink. Why stay together, though? They have a little bit of reason to tolerate each other. Imagine if a single goblin attacked your fortress; easily dispatched, even by a mob of untrained civilian dwarves. But an ambush/siege with many goblins is much more difficult to eliminate.

Because they like to cause chaos and misery, they should group together because it lets them produce more chaos and misery in proportion to the number of goblins, and they can all share the chaos and misery with each other.

On another note, the game never says that they don't like inflicting pain and misery upon themselves... in which case, banding together in the miserable goblin settlements would make sense, basically a pain/misery factory.

[HySh777]

A question that I had, but I don't know if it's been answered/brought up or not:

With the introduction of climbing, will we ever see climbing large creatures in the future? For instance Bronze Colossi/Rocs/Dragons/Hydras? Obviously that's a big undertaking, I'm just wondering if anything like that is planned.

[EmeraldWind]

A question that I had, but I don't know if it's been answered/brought up or not:

With the introduction of climbing, will we ever see climbing large creatures in the future? For instance Bronze Colossi/Rocs/Dragons/Hydras? Obviously that's a big undertaking, I'm just wondering if anything like that is planned.

Toady does talk about this in a Talk. And the answer is yes. Eventually, there will be places you can't reach without climbing or a reaction moment. (IE, You'll need to climb a dragon to reach its head or get a counter attack in when the dragon tries and bites you.)

I can't remember exactly where this is talked about though.

[snpaa]

Not liking something does not stop people from doing it in order to achieve a goal. Goblins may be like people in that respect. You're simplifying goblins to make an argument against their lack of eating requirement.

Im simplifying it a bit because there hereditary attributes and general temperament all point to a individual mentality instead of a pack mentality.    You can still be evil, but you don't need to be a pawn of someone else.

Re snpaa... I think you're missing the 'evil nature' part.  Yes goblins can be independent but they like doing bad things, so there's a large incentive to band together under a demon or similar such entity to maximise the one thing they do need; death and chaos.  As was posted before, there is some exposition of goblins in Threetoe's stories, where you get the impression that gobbos are in equal measure mean and unempathetic because they have no afterlife, thus no future.

There evil nature seems like a cop out reason, since there are plenty of creatures in the game that are evil that don't form huge civilizations.  I could see a goblin banding together with others goblins , like for mating, family, or friends and cause panic and dismay with them  but not on a large scale like they are now, because forming a civilizations just doesn't benefit them in the long run.

Also If they have no afterlife why waste this life, doing the bidding of some random demon or humanoid? I think that would motivate them to leave the settlement as well.

snpaa: I too find it very displeasing that goblins don't eat or drink. Why stay together, though? They have a little bit of reason to tolerate each other. Imagine if a single goblin attacked your fortress; easily dispatched, even by a mob of untrained civilian dwarves. But an ambush/siege with many goblins is much more difficult to eliminate.

Because they like to cause chaos and misery, they should group together because it lets them produce more chaos and misery in proportion to the number of goblins, and they can all share the chaos and misery with each other.

On another note, the game never says that they don't like inflicting pain and misery upon themselves... in which case, banding together in the miserable goblin settlements would make sense, basically a pain/misery factory.

That's a good point but I think they would change there whole way of attacking, instead of a suicidal 1 goblin attack  on a nearly impenetrable fortress they would act more like a glorified boogeyman and kill you while lost and bewildered in a forest.

As I said in an earlier reply I think some would band together (because otherwise how would they keep the species going), but just not on a large scale . Also it doesn't necessarily have to be goblins they team up with, it could be any sort of like minded evil creature out there.

[CaptainArchmage]

Happy New Year, Bay 12!

Disturbing lack of an end-of-month or end-of-year report.

Goblins don't eat, but players may mod in races which both need to eat and use dark fortresses. How will their worldgen and non-player-controlled farming work in that case?

[WillowLuman]

snpaa: I too find it very displeasing that goblins don't eat or drink. Why stay together, though? They have a little bit of reason to tolerate each other. Imagine if a single goblin attacked your fortress; easily dispatched, even by a mob of untrained civilian dwarves. But an ambush/siege with many goblins is much more difficult to eliminate.

Because they like to cause chaos and misery, they should group together because it lets them produce more chaos and misery in proportion to the number of goblins, and they can all share the chaos and misery with each other.

On another note, the game never says that they don't like inflicting pain and misery upon themselves... in which case, banding together in the miserable goblin settlements would make sense, basically a pain/misery factory.

I guess once the kidnapped children grow up and become generals/warlords among the goblins, they instill some more concrete order.

[Dutchling]

Goblins don't eat, but players may mod in races which both need to eat and use dark fortresses. How will their worldgen and non-player-controlled farming work in that case?

Curious to this as well. Although the same could be asked bout captured children. Those surely need to eat...

[Cruxador]

Disturbing lack of an end-of-month or end-of-year report.

Check again. Toady's not instant you know, he's subject to the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

[WillowLuman]

Also, takes him a bit to type it up.

[Scoops Novel]

As there are he's and she's, are goblins infertile or are  (visible)goblin children? Reading through the old dev page, reference was made to goblin and troll children playing together.

[Trif]

As there are he's and she's, are goblins infertile or are  (visible)goblin children? Reading through the old dev page, reference was made to goblin and troll children playing together.

Goblins have children all the time. Just check the legends.

[CaptainArchmage]

Disturbing lack of an end-of-month or end-of-year report.

Check again. Toady's not instant you know, he's subject to the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

Its come up now. Apparently the end-of-year reports take a while to write up compared to the end-of-month reports.

I'm not going to suggest progress has happened yet, but how will succession work when the position holder dies leaving no heirs? Will the Outpost Liason come to ask us to select a new Baron or will a random dwarf be elevated to a position?

Are you planning to make major changes to the style of the HFS sometime in the future? For example, exceptionally high levels of Fun within gigantic mountain spoiler deposits?

Yes, goblins reproduce. I believe there was some bug or cap with a limit on the number of children immortal beings could produce in their lifetime, mostly mentioned regarding elves, who are also immortal.

Toady said goblins won't automatically learn to farm to feed other species, but in gameplay they can build farms and grow food on them once they obtain seeds. I think there should really be a good fix for this before the upcoming release, though.

[Scoops Novel]

I did say "visible". Will we see goblin children in play?

[Knight Otu]

I did say "visible". Will we see goblin children in play?

Yes. Once goblin sites are back for us, we will see goblin children there again, too. Most likely you'd be able to find goblin children already in a few human towns, if you're patient enough to search for them.