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[thvaz]

I asked because there is many solutions to this time problem, though all of them wouldn't be trivial to be implemented.

One that could work was if the fortress mode used the same timescale of adventurer mode, but you could set the speed that time would pass (if you want to finish a bridge, you would just set set the speed to max while the dwarves worked at the bridge).

 It works well in Banished (although in Banished you always set the game speed to max because nothing interesting happens, ever)

[Vattic]

Will the generic creature men (amphibian, reptile, rodent, and serpent men) going to be removed in favour of species specific ones?

[smjjames]

Will the generic creature men (amphibian, reptile, rodent, and serpent men) going to be removed in favour of species specific ones?

Doubt it and there are plenty of <insert random DF species>-men already. There are already species specific snakemen as well.

Also, you forgot the olmmen, batmen, and cave swallow-men.

[Knight Otu]

Will the generic creature men (amphibian, reptile, rodent, and serpent men) going to be removed in favour of species specific ones?

These underground animal men are in some vague ways different critters from the specific animal men, and are apparently supposed to be different from those. There should be more differences as the time goes by - Toady has hinted that a possible origin for the "surface" animal men might get implemented sometime in order to reduce their number, for example.

Ratmen mysteriously vanished in the transition from 40d to DF 2010. Since you'll now be adding new creatures such as bees, maintaining the sameness of the creature raws between versions will no longer matter as much. Assuming the removal of ratmen was an oversight, does this mean we will see ratmen reintroduced in the next version of DF?

Removal of subterranean ratmen was intentional -- however, with the new amphibian/serpent/reptile men we were also supposed to get "rodent men" underground, with rat men being moved outside with the regular outdoor rats.  Since March of last year, I've had a half-finished raw file on my desktop that I always forget about that has many new animal people, but when I added panda men and capybara men I remembered it again, so we should have official subterranean rodent men in the next version, and perhaps others, as well as the next round of sponsored beasts and their allies.

[TalonisWolf]

 Thanks for answering my questions from before! But, of course, I now have even more...

How widespread will insurrections be? Will they be localized within a settlement, or throughout a civilization?

If a settlement frees itself from it's oppressors, does it become a new civilization?

[Untelligent]

Will the generic creature men (amphibian, reptile, rodent, and serpent men) going to be removed in favour of species specific ones?

They actually used to be called frogmen, lizardmen, ratmen, and snakemen (and olm men) but they were changed to the more generic ones at some point, so probably not.

[hermes]

^^^ yeah, this is the main problem

How fast dorfs walk and drink and do stuff matters much less than who and what they bludgeon.

But when those actions are combined, things get silly.

That's a good example, but I'm still inclined to see it as more of a balance issue rather than a fundamental design flaw that needs an overhaul. If anything I think fortress mode borks things in the right direction... Time is 72x that of adventure mode, so dorfs get less done in the same amount of time, but as a collective they make something great.  Individual sacrifice where the product is greater than the sum of its parts.

I doubt most really have a beef with the time abstraction per se, but rather the consequences it has (and increasingly will have) on history progression and the surrounding world. Right now it's really only a minor nuisance at most but it's bound to get worse and worse as the game develops :>

What kind of problems are going to get worse?

I asked because there is many solutions to this time problem, though all of them wouldn't be trivial to be implemented.

One that could work was if the fortress mode used the same timescale of adventurer mode, but you could set the speed that time would pass (if you want to finish a bridge, you would just set set the speed to max while the dwarves worked at the bridge).

 It works well in Banished (although in Banished you always set the game speed to max because nothing interesting happens, ever)

Hehe, i guess that's the key point right there!  All construction takes ages where nothing particularly exciting happens.  Real time Sim City would be brutal.  I just can't take calls for real time fort mode seriously, as it is you already have to watch dorfs bring all the materials of a bridge to site and then watch them construct it... Now you want to see that same thing happen 72 times slower?  What great stories are going to come of it?

[Uristsonsonson]

I don't understand the beef with time abstraction in fortress mode, are we living in some alternate reality where Populous never existed??  God games always abstract time and action, that's in the definition of the genre.  If stuff doesn't make sense you probably need to approach things from a more Armok/god-like perspective.  How fast dorfs walk and drink and do stuff matters much less than who and what they bludgeon.

I doubt most really have a beef with the time abstraction per se, but rather the consequences it has (and increasingly will have) on history progression and the surrounding world. Right now it's really only a minor nuisance at most but it's bound to get worse and worse as the game develops :>

Basically this. If the time differences make it more convenient to have travellers just detour around a fort, then it would follow that having them visit the eventual fort taverns will need this to be at least somewhat first. I also don't really care for the abstraction itself much, like with dwaves only drinking a few tons of water a few times a year,  but I acknowledge that's just personal preference thing.

Hermes brings up good points. It would definitely slow the game to a boring crawl without some way to speed everything back up. But at least anchoring it to adv mode time would seem like it would fix a lot of the coming (and current) problems like with travellers and bar patrons. I believe I recall Toady mentioning how staying the night at your fort would take a season, but it might have just been another forum poster.

[smjjames]

"Plenty of loading up camp sites and pressing the dismemberment button to test it out."

Ooh, so he has an auto dismemberment button thing in his dev console? cool.

[Vattic]

Will the generic creature men (amphibian, reptile, rodent, and serpent men) going to be removed in favour of species specific ones?

These underground animal men are in some vague ways different critters from the specific animal men, and are apparently supposed to be different from those. There should be more differences as the time goes by - Toady has hinted that a possible origin for the "surface" animal men might get implemented sometime in order to reduce their number, for example.

They actually used to be called frogmen, lizardmen, ratmen, and snakemen (and olm men) but they were changed to the more generic ones at some point, so probably not.

Thanks for answering my question.

[Xanmyral]

A dismemberment button? I can only imagine the many people who'd love to have access to such a button in fortress/adventure mode.

[Manveru Taurënér]

...

I doubt most really have a beef with the time abstraction per se, but rather the consequences it has (and increasingly will have) on history progression and the surrounding world. Right now it's really only a minor nuisance at most but it's bound to get worse and worse as the game develops :>

What kind of problems are going to get worse?
...

For example, as have been mentioned all visitors to our future taverns will be forced to stay for close to a season at least, factoring in all the time it'll take to move across the embark, time spent in the tavern, eating/drinking/sleeping at least once etc. This isn't necessarily an issue just from the perspective of fortress mode, but taking the rest of the world in account this could seriously affect the outcome of various events when important historical figures literally are removed from the world scene for a season or more.

Another thing that is already somewhat of an issue is werecreature transformation, and any future features following the same mold of being linked to dates or recurring events. As it is now they only transform for a few moments before turning back, rarely having the time to actually do anything. You could argue that it's simply a matter of increasing the time they are transformed in fortress mode, but with how fast a month passes you'd then end up having werecreature citizens spending most of their time in their transformed state.

The by far biggest hurdle however is when we eventually get to sending out our own armies etc. With how long simply moving around the embark takes, just having your militia gather up and make it off the map could take several seasons. For cases such as being asked to send help to another besieged fortress (which would be an asap kind of deal), this simply wouldn't work without silly fixes such as teleporting them off map as soon as the order is made. Pretty much any interaction with the outside world that from a story perspective needs to be quick would need cheap fixes like that. There's probably ways to solve most of these issues but as Toady have said, it's a lot of extra work to "fudge things". And it might end up making legend mode quite messy for those who like that as its own game mode.

Our fortresses will pretty much always be stuck in a time dilation field, bending things out of shape every time we need to interact with the outside.

[darkflagrance]

New dev post!

Can we rob people too? I'm thinking since the mechanics are in place you'd just tell them you were robbing them, and then they'd start following the hard-coded procedure or resisting.

Also, I feel it's gonna be fun messing with robbers.

[MrWiggles]

New dev post!

Can we rob people too? I'm thinking since the mechanics are in place you'd just tell them you were robbing them, and then they'd start following the hard-coded procedure or resisting.

Also, I feel it's gonna be fun messing with robbers.

Well, probably very indirectly. You can demand folks to yield, but ToadyOne hasn't really touched upon the Thieving Role for adventure mode yet, which greatly implies that NPCs can't be robbed by the player yet.

[Genoraven]

I've never been so excited with the prospect of being mugged before! =D