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[WillowLuman]

I think the animated statues thing is pretty straightforward. They could perhaps be hollow, though.

IIRC, Talos had a single vein full of molten lead, held closed by a bronze nail, and someone popped the nail and made him "bleed" to death.

[Witty]

Coming next release, will hill, mountain or deep dwarves differ from one another on any level? Will hill dwarves tend to be more tan, or deep dwarves pale? Will hill or deep sites fight amongst themselves in a similar manner to human villages?

[Putnam]

Coming next release, will hill, mountain or deep dwarves differ from one another on any level? Will hill dwarves tend to be more tan, or deep dwarves pale? Will hill or deep sites fight amongst themselves in a similar manner to human villages?

Capntastic:   So the deep down dwarves, when they come up, maybe they should just be very very allergic to the sun?
Toady:   Well they will be cave adapted.
Rainseeker:   Exactly.
Capntastic:   But extremely cave adapted, have another tier.
Toady:   Maybe blind, they'll just lose their eyes.
Capntastic:   They'll be blind and they'll be completely white, you know, like those cave fish.
Toady:   Beardless, beardless, no, they'll have flesh that replaces the beard or something like these tendrils that come out..
Capntastic:   Fleshy beards?
Toady:   Translucent fleshy beards that generate light, but they don't have eyes, so it doesn't mean anything. And yeah, they have alcohol detectors in their stomachs and so on, they waddle around and roll in the mud. And yeah, so that's about like a dwarf. That's what we expect from a dwarf.
Rainseeker:   Ya, that's pretty good.
Toady:   A Cthulu-esque mob that comes out of the deep.
Capntastic:   But they're friendly and they talk with a Scottish accent.
Toady:   That's right. Scottish deep spawn. It's interesting being in this position, because now we've got all kinds of choices. I'm not sure those are the choices we're going to make, but got all kinds of choices, so it should be cool.

[misko27]

friendly fire is nice though. will a loyalty cascade happen if i order a marksdwarf to shoot another dwarf?

I doubt you will be able to do so, it's only because of the (I hope I remember this right) [ETHIC:KILL_NEUTRAL:JUSTIFIED_IF_SANCTIONED] that allows you to kill merchants anyway, killing citizens (friendlies) is still covered by murder. Loyalty cascades work in that being a member of an enemy entity or being an enemy of a entity overrides being friendly for most things, but keeps it for reversing a dwarves allegiances when they attack someone from friendly to an entity to an enemy.


And, depending severely on how fort mode loyalties are affected by the new system, there may not even be cascades. Which reminds me: How is fort mode loyalty now? Is it still possible to be friendly to a civ and an enemy of the fort and vice versa? And will dwarves still attack someone who is friendly to one of their entities but an enemy to others? This one might have been asked earlier.

[King Mir]

Coming next release, will hill, mountain or deep dwarves differ from one another on any level? Will hill dwarves tend to be more tan, or deep dwarves pale? Will hill or deep sites fight amongst themselves in a similar manner to human villages?

Capntastic:   So the deep down dwarves, when they come up, maybe they should just be very very allergic to the sun?
Toady:   Well they will be cave adapted.
Rainseeker:   Exactly.
Capntastic:   But extremely cave adapted, have another tier.
Toady:   Maybe blind, they'll just lose their eyes.
Capntastic:   They'll be blind and they'll be completely white, you know, like those cave fish.
Toady:   Beardless, beardless, no, they'll have flesh that replaces the beard or something like these tendrils that come out..
Capntastic:   Fleshy beards?
Toady:   Translucent fleshy beards that generate light, but they don't have eyes, so it doesn't mean anything. And yeah, they have alcohol detectors in their stomachs and so on, they waddle around and roll in the mud. And yeah, so that's about like a dwarf. That's what we expect from a dwarf.
Rainseeker:   Ya, that's pretty good.
Toady:   A Cthulu-esque mob that comes out of the deep.
Capntastic:   But they're friendly and they talk with a Scottish accent.
Toady:   That's right. Scottish deep spawn. It's interesting being in this position, because now we've got all kinds of choices. I'm not sure those are the choices we're going to make, but got all kinds of choices, so it should be cool.

That's talking about future direction though. Maybe Toady can answer more precisely what's the differences will be in this release.

[thvaz]

I think the animated statues thing is pretty straightforward. They could perhaps be hollow, though.

IIRC, Talos had a single vein full of molten lead, held closed by a bronze nail, and someone popped the nail and made him "bleed" to death.

I think Iron Men are hollow, and release a poisonous gas when breached, though they don't "bleed" to death.

[magmaholic]

Replication bug will be fixed?
huehueh,i can cause massive genocide now.

[Footkerchief]

Regarding this answer from last week:

Dear Fearless Toady One,

In the next release, will there be any alternate options to advance a world's timeline besides playing as an adventurer and playing through fortress mode (including, of course, the "skip to next spring" thing when starting new forts)? Will there be options e.g. to "retire for one year" as an adventurer or to advance time indefinitely in Legends mode? What are your views on player interaction with long stretches of in-world time?

There was a previous exchange about this:

There isn't yet the ability to time-skip, but it's a planned feature. Right now the best you can do is start/abandon a fortress a bunch of times- each new start will cycle the year forward to the next spring. Though actually, with worldgen activities continuing into play, that might change, or be a more involved process. Do world activities advance after an abandon? Will the game simulate world activities before the next fortress is founded?

Dealing with the abandonment/post-adventure time-skip is one of the clean-up things on the menu.  It'll have to advance the events, but as you can imagine, that's a reasonably messy process.

Does "post-adventure time-skip" refer to an automatic skip forward in time? Or is it an option to manually advance time in years (like a manually-activated world-gen continuation of history)? Because the latter sounds interesting, especially if it also allows time-skipping after abandoning (or retiring) a fortress.

In the current version, there's something like a two week skip for a new adventurer and a skip to the next spring for a fortress.  The ramifications for such a thing vs. the new active-world mechanics have not been addressed, and I'm not sure what'll end up replacing the time-skip if anything.

There's more info in today's devlog:

More handling of tangential issues related to all the new people running around. The main goal today was to get something in place to deal with the passage of time between games. Since there are people running all over the map now, it can't just set the clock forward when you want to play again, at least not without being very weird and time-freezey for any pre-existing travelers. The basic rule of the current release is that the next fortress starts at the beginning of the next year, and that new adventurers push time forward two weeks, and I haven't changed that -- this means that sometimes quite a bit of time is passing. The first step was to take that time advancement out of a single function and make a new screen for it. There'll need to be work done with abstraction -- passing a pre-fort-mode calendar through almost an entire year to the next spring is actually pretty fast, since not a lot of fine-grained detail is going on in fort mode outside of the fort, but in adventure mode it still insists on handling things like tracking information, which can be slower in highly-populated worlds when you are trying to crunch it all through rapidly. Ideally, you'd keep some details from what it does in the two weeks it passes for adventure mode, so that you start off with accurate trails to follow and so on, and you'd also prefer to perform every decision made in diplomacy and war and so on as they happen, but we'll probably end up making some concessions there depending on how optimization goes. At least overall, it seems like it'll work out fine for the amount of information it is handling.

Theoretically whatever the screen becomes could be used to pass time arbitrarily between games later on if we decide we want to do something there, but right now you just watch a little calendar go forward to the standard target date. A fuller "resume world generation" option might fit here as well, although it would be a different creature than regular world generation, even after all of the world generation mechanics work in play. The same screen more or less could also be used later to handle dev goals relating to passing longer-than-sleep chunks of time in play (with training or study or work or whatever, if you don't want to play a fort or another character in the non-adventurous downtime), and it would be reasonably easy to make it sensitive to interruptions (like your training area being attacked three weeks in).
[...]

[PersonGuy]

Just a few questions will fortresses still be active when you visit in adventure mode as in soldiers still patrolling, Brewers making Booze, smiths making weapons and armor, and will we be able to see Urist MCDumbasanelf still ignoring mandates and fiddling around with the magma cannon levers and exploring the giant spider infested caverns while walking around with valuable objects.

Also will world gen battles be improved in the future as in simulating companies of soldiers engaging in massed combat in varied terrain with formations and fortifications with archers using them to rain down indirect fire and artillery taking out chunks of soldiers from phalanxes or said phalanxes holding off a cavalry charge and will we be able to do that in dorf mode in the near future.

Will we see some more building types and items in the next update such as vats and pots that are used for various purposes( industry and warfare such as boiling oil/molten lead) with things like a portcullis for defense and player built and operated wagons and things like slings and flame ammunition like barrels of oil/burning material for catapults and fire pots with possibly some gunpowder weapons such as grenades, rockets, bombs, and cannon(no guns) for defense/conquest.   

[smjjames]

I swear I had posted on that question that Footkerchief responded to. Wierd. Oh well, we were thinking of the same question anyway.

@personguy: Make your text green if you want Toady One to answer the questions.

1. You can visit them yes, no idea how 'lively' it'll be in terms of activity, maybe thats a later thing.

2. That stuff is a ways off.

3. Come on, gunpowder? That's been suggested and debated to death and no, Toady One isn't putting in gunpowder. Though gunpowder DID exist during the time frame limit of 1400's, give or take a century. Still though, no new buildings in fort mode that we are aware of.

If you want gunpowder, I think the Masterwork mod has it?

[Manveru Taurënér]

Just a few questions will fortresses still be active when you visit in adventure mode as in soldiers still patrolling, Brewers making Booze, smiths making weapons and armor, and will we be able to see Urist MCDumbasanelf still ignoring mandates and fiddling around with the magma cannon levers and exploring the giant spider infested caverns while walking around with valuable objects.

Also will world gen battles be improved in the future as in simulating companies of soldiers engaging in massed combat in varied terrain with formations and fortifications with archers using them to rain down indirect fire and artillery taking out chunks of soldiers from phalanxes or said phalanxes holding off a cavalry charge and will we be able to do that in dorf mode in the near future.

Will we see some more building types and items in the next update such as vats and pots that are used for various purposes( industry and warfare such as boiling oil/molten lead) with things like a portcullis for defense and player built and operated wagons and things like slings and flame ammunition like barrels of oil/burning material for catapults and fire pots with possibly some gunpowder weapons such as grenades, rockets, bombs, and cannon(no guns) for defense/conquest.   

I doubt any of this is in for the next version, since it's all quite large undertakings that I'm certain we'd have heard a lot about if that was the case.  I'd guess most of it will prolly make it in at some point though.

About the world gen battles:

Once we add in some tactics and things it'll talk about that and you might be able to have a general with really high military skills not at the individual combat level but more up at the strategic and tactical levels being able to defeat a superior force, and it could say what happened even if it's just waving its hands a little bit about pincers and flanking manoeuvres and attacking at night, doing a ruse to lure this group of people away from their position; all that kind of stuff. You can pay lip service to that in world generation and then you can start actually working it in over in the actual gameplay modes. But right now it's very blah blah blah.

Also, portcullises are pretty much in the game currently, just make a metal bar gate activated by lever, or is there some particular to it you feel is missing?

[smjjames]

Just a few questions will fortresses still be active when you visit in adventure mode as in soldiers still patrolling, Brewers making Booze, smiths making weapons and armor, and will we be able to see Urist MCDumbasanelf still ignoring mandates and fiddling around with the magma cannon levers and exploring the giant spider infested caverns while walking around with valuable objects.

I doubt any of this is in for the next version, since it's all quite large undertakings that I'm certain we'd have heard a lot about if that was the case.  I'd guess most of it will prolly make it in at some point though.

Yeah, I doubt we will see that much activity in the next version, but the most we are likely to get is the same behavior that NPC sites have.

[Mesa]

So about the whole "site claim" thing going on which I can't exactly understand...
Can we, for example, claim a site of an enemy civ for our own civ to affect the political world map? The idea of running around as a group of soldiers conquering the region for our own civ's good and profit sounds at least interesting, and I wonder if something like this is possible right now.
Or are the site claims purely an abstract thing in that respect as well?

[Xanmyral]

I think I actually have a valid question for once.

How will enemies deal with people who are out of melee reach but attacking them? As in, say they're in a tree, on a roof, or on a particularly large rock and they're chucking bolts, arrows, or other rocks at them. Would enemies be able to climb up there and deal with them, chuck rocks back, take cover, or just stand there staring at the man who discovered third directional movement?

A typical game exploit people employ, rather cheap too. I hope enemies have the sense to scour for rocks and chuck them, or climb on their own.

[Eric Blank]

I think I actually have a valid question for once.

How will enemies deal with people who are out of melee reach but attacking them? As in, say they're in a tree, on a roof, or on a particularly large rock and they're chucking bolts, arrows, or other rocks at them. Would enemies be able to climb up there and deal with them, chuck rocks back, take cover, or just stand there staring at the man who discovered third directional movement?

A typical game exploit people employ, rather cheap too. I hope enemies have the sense to scour for rocks and chuck them, or climb on their own.

Well, they won't be climbing up after you, according to everything we currently know: AI don't have climbing pathfinding yet. They might fly up next to you, if they have wings. Maybe. Highly doubt they're going to be bright enough to take the initiative to either take cover or return fire if they don't already have a ranged weapon, though. They'll at least flee if injured sifficiently.