Will there be a form of true rebirth or possibly reincarnation? Rather than mummies that rot in tombs, will we ever see a fallen entombed general ever leave the tomb and rejoin society for some cause? And if an entity member worships a god of rebirth or something, will we see any form of reincarnation, either as a new birth of the same species, or perhaps different species? And would they be aware of it?
If either or both of these are implemented, would they show up beyond just being viewable in Legends mode? Would we see a dwarf be reborn/reincarnated in fortress mode, or perhaps have an adventurer do the same and be replayable from their new life?
On a completley unrelated note:
My wife was wondering, Will various foods in the game have viewable flavors? Such as if certain food is sweet or spicy, and if dwarves would prefer different flavors, as opposed to/in addition to specific foods. Also, would they have allergies to particular foods? Or at least disliking a particular food, which would cause a minor bad thought?
We have a resurrection effect already, but we don't do anything interesting with it. I'm not sure what will happen in the future.
Trying to come up with general taste categories for things like bananas seems like a nightmare, or at least something that I couldn't do at all myself. I'm technically for having that sort of information, but have no idea how to do it.
If we have a modded world where some good regions resurrect the dead, are the dead returned to life and the population during worldgen?
Nah, world gen doesn't use the effects well, especially modded ones.
So now that you are working on elven trees, does elven woodwork get special tagging now? An Elf snaps if he sees non-elven woodwork, because trees are being killed for it, so they do it differently by growing their furniture out of the tree or something right? Does elven woodwork get special tagging now, so they don't go crazy if you buy their stuff and sell it back to them?
It doesn't have a tag yet, but it should. One would hope they could recognize their own work, especially as it becomes more unusual.
Regarding Elves and their affection for trees; have you read Orson Scott Card's sequel to Ender's Game called "The Speaker For the Dead"? It has a very interesting take on a kind of "tree husbandry". The "Piggies", as they're called, use dance and song to ask the trees to produce the objects they need (the trees are grown from the bodies of their slain ancestors, and they're sentient). I'm basically wondering how you're planning on Elves having wooden homes and wooden tools and other wooden stuff, but not carving it or hacking it out of the trees.
I haven't read it. We weren't planning on dancing so much, but yeah, trees are growy. We wanted something forest-dwelling humans couldn't do.
Are there any near-future plans to integrate tree products into existing fortress industries (e.g. pressing juices from mangoes, oil from coconuts or kapok, tapping maples for syrup, and then having those products for relevant brewing, cooking, or soap-making tasks)? Also, will any of the fictional trees (e.g. goblin cap, etc.) be given harvestable products?
I don't have a timeline for any of that.
Will NPC forts fall prey to HFS? Trying to reclaim a fort you didn't design (and thus don't know where the important things are) from HFS, Moria-style, would be pretty amazing.
Ideally we'll get to that sort of thing. I think it should all be on the table to make world generation non-static. I'm not sure what I'll get to though. I'd like to have some reclaimable forts from the start, at least a lot of the time.
How will the game handle preventing fort retirement exploits? Essentially, if a fort is full of goblins or a syndrome sweeping the populace, what will stop a player from retiring the fort and preserving it as an NPC fort? Will there be some means of ensuring that forts with !!Fun!! stay !!Fun!!?
It'll probably work out the way adventure mode retirement works, in that only a properly situated adventure can retire. A fort in danger will likely need to be abandoned if you want to quit right then. Danger is hard to track in certain circumstances though, so there will be exploits, just as you can exploit the current adv mode system. I'm happy with allowing extra retirements rather than trying to restrict the option based on possibly dubious heuristics. I think the siege light would ideally be a good block on retirement for instance (although it still stays on forever, sometimes...).
Say you manage to make your fortress the capital of a dwarven civilization and then retire said fortress, starting a new fortress with the same civilization somewhere else. Will it be just as easy to make this new fortress into the capital? Because with the standards we have right now it would be easy to make a new fortress every three or four game years or so and make it into the civilization capital. And if you could retire every one of them you'd see the king just hoping from place to place every couple of years. So, will each successful fortress raise the standards for making the upgrade?
and
What if you refused to be "baroned" and still retired a very sucessful fortress? How would that fortress work? Would it then be treated as something of an independent city-state or realm, maybe even becoming it's own entity sparking a new civilization of it's own?
That's how it would work right now, yeah. Once it understands the situation in the original capital, that'll probably change.
We don't really have the consequences all coded for refusing the barony -- once that relationship is established more formally, it should be respected when your fortress retires. It could very well end up as its own civilization at that point (and you'd also have dwarf invasion trouble at times).
Does this mean if we play as humans, we will be able to reclaim cities that have fallen into ruin? If so, how will we get around the 16x16 limit on the map size, given some cities are 17x17?
Is the new stuff in this version going to make the saves from 0.34.11 incomptable? If not, what will happen with the "non-existant" settlements in that world?
When it's modded, I'm not really sure what your site is supposed to represent -- I doubt you'll be allowed to reclaim villages (just as you won't be able to reclaim hill sites or deep sites for dwarves).
I certainly wouldn't count on using your old saves for this time. There have been a lot of changes.
Do you see DF as city building/management sim and roguelike game with the whole world generation thing around it as "gimmick", or do you think, possibly contrary to what DF might have started out as, persistent and continuous interaction with the World that is generated is now the core game mechanic of DF, with the three modes being various facets of that mechanic?
Relating the game to the whole world has always been the point of our main fantasy game (DF used to be a side project). If you look back at the Armok 1 days, we were basically going for the same thing, but from the bottom up (too much). The old Dragslay game had a little more world activity than DF (and was vastly more simple in most other ways), with towns being sacked and so on, and it was fun. DF is just now starting to take that stuff up, and it should be really cool to finally get it going.
With the fort retirement thing, will we be able to simulate the world a la worldgen, but after we leave a fort? And will adventurers gain in status over time?
There aren't many plans to simulate world gen after play has begun, since there are lots of difficulties with re-abstracting information. There'll be times when time needs to be advanced though, and I haven't gotten into that yet. I'm not sure what you mean by status. There's the current "you're a hero!" thing, and we'd like to improve on that.
With the inclusion of underground sites, will tunnels be reintroduced to worldgen? and will they on longer be blocked up in fort mode so that dwarven caravans can enter your fort through the underground.
I've been ambivalent about this... it could be that the deep sites are the tunnels now. In a lot of those forts you could walk from a fortress, down into a deep site and then move between deep sites until you arrive at another fortress without stepping into an unclaimed cavern tile. Eventually you'll get dwarven caravans from the underground, but perhaps not until we give you some associated sites of your own.
With the dwarven sites is there the possibility of whole mountain ranges carved inside into giant dwarven cities, riddled with corridors and rooms and similar not unlike Moria, or are you thinking smaller?
I've posted some of those pictures now, and you can see the amount of sites there. I'm not sure exactly how carved deep sites will be though, since I'm still on the hill sites. They won't carve every tile on every z-level, but there should be a healthy amount of carving going on -- enough to get you across the mountain range if they've settled it. It is a huge area since they've got many z's to play with, and I don't want dwarven populations much higher than the populations of other civilized creatures, so the could be certain sparseness or clustering (or just a ton of mine tunnels). We'll have to see how it plays out.
Will there ever be an option for Fort Mode to play as a deep mountain site? I.e. is the description of (paraphrasing) "fortresses are what you play as in fort mode, but in addition we're adding hill settlements and deep sites inside mountains" merely indicative of how these sites compare to what is currently in fort mode, or is this restrictive in that we should not expect to be able to play these other new types of sites anywhere down the road?
The reason the fortresses are small on the map is that playing 17x17 sites isn't really on the table. I wouldn't rule out a starting scenario in the future that takes place in the underground though. Those kind of sites would then occur in world gen as well, as small forts (or whatevers) within the mountain that don't have surface entry. Perhaps they'd occur on the boundary with underground animal people or underground goblins when those are fleshed out.
I'm curious to know if we'll be able to link ourselves through underground roads leading to the formation of these "deep sites" on the outskirts of our fortresses.
Do you plan on having underground cities forming themselves semi-independently around your fortress, just like you plan to have aboveground villages being formed on surrounding territory as the game progresses?
Yeah, the deep site plans align with the hill dwarf plans there. When we do them for fortress mode play, it is now almost guaranteed that we'll do hill and deep site linkages/mechanics at the same time.
If caravans and/or migrants arrive through the cavern layers and tunnels, would they still be able to arrive during sieges on the surface? If we get underground sieges, will there be a differentiation between the levels that are being sieged and the levels not being sieged to allow migrants to arrive some way or other (i.e. by means of a sealed underground road that leads to the next fortress)?
Will other races set up trading outposts around our fortresses as they grow?
I think eventually there will be a differentiation between the levels. There isn't really a need for it yet, since I haven't added lower caravans.
You'll likely have a more explicitly stated relationship with nearby sites as you get your own associated outside sites, but I don't have specific plans.
Toady, will the Three Tiered Dwarven Sites implement another site flag, similarly to the Lair Flag, to indicate which type of site they are? Are there any practical, overhead, coplexity or gamey distinctions between them? Will we be able to reclaim any of these three types? What will be complications/restrictions for borders of these underground sites be if/when they do indeed span multiple areas (2x2 - 4x4) and/or have tunnels connecting them?
The hill/deep sites are too large to reclaim, and that's the main difference, though the maps are also completely different. I'm not sure about the borders -- the layers of the cavern tend to be connected, though there are water areas. I'm sure I'll encounter various problems when I get to the deep site maps. Ideally, the fortresses will go down to at least the first layer (and sometimes all the way down to have magma forges), and through the cavern layers they will connect to the deep site maps. I'm not sure every deep site map will be on a cavern layer(s), but it'll probably be very common for them to have a significant presence there, especially for food and lumber.
will two sites be able to occupy the same x-y-coordinates, even when theyre not from the same civ? in general, will two civs be able to occupy the same territory, as long as one is above and the other is below ground level?
Will multiple sites be abel to occupy the same map time, as in fortresses and deep sites on multiple levels on the map?
Eventually we'll need to deal with x/y overlap of sites, but we've just managed to avoid this time. It's a not-difficult but lengthy rewrite I'd like to continue to avoid since it'll overload me for this release. Once we get to underground animal person sites, I think it'll be unavoidable, but that'll be good and it'll lead to some cool things.
When a dwarven civ expands, either in worldgen or in the general lore of the game, is there a regular order in which the three types of settlements emerge from the mother civ - e.g. hill dwarfs migrate then decide to dig down and make a fortress which eventually begets a deep site, or deep site up, or something else - or are they independent of each other in terms of origin?
I think we'll explore the concepts more deeply when we get to start scenarios, but right now we work with a starting fortress at year 1. They prefer to go deep, but if they have no room, they degenerate and go hill. They try to ring the mountain ranges with forts, and these also determine political/economic centers of power, since everything passes through them. Dwarves tend to cling more tightly than other civs overall, since they don't seek the best river squares within their overall area of influence, but are happy with planting a new deep site in their range.
Will dwarven sites ever become separate ruins, as a dwarf site becomes a deep site and than a fort will the above ground fort ever be abandoned and become ruins and the lower site remain a underground city?
Yeah, the sites are treated independently, so dwarves can go full-mountain if things don't go their way. All the market flags are on fortresses, so this would isolate them economically in the simulation as well.
If fortresses now connect the surface to the underground societies will we now find restrictions upon where we can embark, or if not a restriction then a new possibility to make a fortress as an entrance to our mountain home?
Will our fortresses still become the capital after a time? It seems a bit weird to turn the front door into the throne room, so to speak.
Until we get to start scenarios, I'm not placing any additional restrictions. The dwarves in world gen never place forts away from border mountains, but it still lets you put them wherever you want. Even when I get to start scenarios, there will still always be a way to put a fortress most anywhere you can already, I think. The start scenarios will also govern your relation to hill/deep sites and other forts, and you'll still be able to have the monarch be your live-in buddy. It might make sense to make the monarch a deep site dweller at the center of the mountain range, but the way it works now, the forts are the important part and the only places where nobles higher than barons live. We'll see how this plays out over time.
Toady, do you have any ideas or goals for when ships, boats, and vehicles are added? Specifically, do you see ships, boats, and vehicles as being optionally designed by the player within the game, or just being hardcoded or defined within the raws?
I have no idea. Ideally you'd have a good deal of control over how a ship works, though as with human site buildings for example it might take a while to get any of that out into the raws. If you produce a ship for yourself in game (for instance, as an adventurer), it would be cool if you had the option to custom make it exactly how you want.
Will we ever be able to play out the trip towards a new site? Such as, when a site is being chosen, would we see a travel line from the entity's capitol toward the desired embark and actually have the wagon move along it, sort of like adventure mode travel, but in control of the dwarves?
If this were possible, would we also be able to change the path taken, such as making it longer in order to avoid going through an evil forest?
It has been an idea that's floating around, and I'm not against it as an option, but it's quite a bit of work, so I suspect we'll arrive at it more indirectly through the adventure trader stuff. If you start as a dwarf adventurer, and take on a wagon and some buddies, then it's almost all handled, once the caravan stuff is in. We have some ideas for running a site while you are an adventurer, but switching over to a dwarf mode style game might also be an option once you meet certain criteria.
Are the dwarven settlements outside of mountains still called Mountainhomes or are they Hill-, Plains-, or Whateverhomes?
He he he -- right now it says "Dwarven Fortress", "Dwarven Mountain Halls" (for deep sites), and "Dwarven Hillocks" (for the hill dwarves, who can get a little moundy in their jealousy). I'm not sure at this point if a Mountainhome constitutes the entirety of the deep sites and fortresses in a given mountain range, or the spot where the monarch is.
When you say that "you'd be able to get communities like these settled around your own fort", do you mean that we'd be able to send migrants out of our fort to settle/join other areas?
If so, that sounds kind of cool.
Also, how will nearby communities affect trade?
Yeah, that'll be part of it. The trade ramifications are something we're still trying to comprehend. It could be an almost permanent fair-like presence since time runs too fast to have a weekly market setup.
So then, are we going to see more territorial conflicts in world-gen? As sprawl is now so much more important, are various civs going to fight to establish themselves in a given are? Sorta of overlaps with the can sites overlap with underground ones, since that'd make it easier.
It's certainly getting there. As more and more uncomfortable situations arise, with the upcoming succession and so on, I imagine things will fall into place here, to avoid it being bonkers.
will the "outside" nobles (baron, all the way to the king) will now have different requirements? link to the capital like a secure tunnel through one of the cavern layers from inside the fortress to the edge?
will we be able to found underground "link" fortress to link two parts of the civ each on one side of a mountain chain (dawn of time challenge any one?)? if yes will there be rules such has "dont breach the above ground" or something like that?
Not right now. Once we know more about your relationship with the world, it should be more natural to update exactly what it means for one of your dwarves to be elevated, or for somebody to come from outside. I addressed inner fortresses elsewhere in these questions. I feel a little weird about restrictions about digging through the ceiling, since the surface would be sitting right there.
Will there be an underground dwarvern equivalent of human farmland?
Yeah, they'll need to get their food someplace. Deep sites will do it one way, and hill sites will go another. Mostly the same, mushroomy, but hill dwarves might also degrade to a bit of outdoor work in keeping with their fallen nature.
Now that the maps are being filled in with more realistic sized (scale-abiding) settlements, will the overall size of the world* change so as to preserve undiscovered wilderness areas?
They are plenty big right now I think, and you have control over the amount of sprawl with the world gen site cap. It should be okay. We'll see how it plays out when player forts starting eating up more than one tile with their own hill/deep sites.
Will we only be able to reclaim sites of our own race or civ?
I'd like to be able to take over an abandoned human fortress and then transform it into a proper dwarf one, personally.
Will reclaimed world gen fortresses already have workshops and areas that were formerly stockpiles?
Right now we're sticking with dwarf sites. A human fortress or a necromancer's tower would be the next likely candidates, since they are small enough to manage, but we don't have specific plans there.
The workshop questions is one of the trickier parts of the non-player forts, since it needs to also align with whatever our solution ends up being for human towns, and one of the highlights of the ultima style games was being able to mess around with stuff at a greater level of detail than "workshop". Not sure what the end result is going to be.
Will invading Humans/Elves/Goblins be able to conquer the deeper dwarf sites, or will they be restricted to the hill sites and the fortresses?
A player founded fortress will be able to spread to deeper dwarf sites as well as the hills, yes? Will the player be able to direct/incentivize this spread in a particular direction?
If a player fortress generates significant deeper sites, and then releases HFS, will the HFS spread to the deeper sites and claim the whole mountain for themselves, or will they just hang out in the site where they were released?
It happens that way now, pretty indiscriminately -- ideally they'd have to nab the fortresses before they can get underground, and hopefully I can get to that. I don't think it would be unreasonable to direct your deep sites, particularly if you have some kind of start scenario about forming a tunnel connection to a previous fort or something like that.
I'm not sure how HFS will play out, or how much I'll share of that if I do change it, he he he.
Toady, with dwarven settlements now being common, will it be possible to fast-travel through them?
I think that'll be necessary, yeah. When I'm done with site maps I'll try to wrap my head around it. The annoying part'll be when you have two forts with their own deep sites but an intervening square or two of unsettled cavern. I guess that's kind of like zooming in to cross rivers, but it'll take a bit longer. The caverns need their own travel maps, and I need to strike a balance between travel speed, knowing where you are, exploration and maintaining some mystery and adventure.
Toady, will other races have these sorts of new site divisions at all? I can easily imagine a true distinction between cities and surrounding hamlets for humans, or maybe a goblin dark tower having a clutch of small, scattered camps around it to better protect against invasion and act as outposts. Connected to that, will sites ever "mature" into another class of site, or decay into a less populous class?
Finally, are we ever going to be able to play as these different sorts of sites? And, will the depth of sites be more variable to account for the different site depths, especially on embark?
I'm not sure what you mean by a true distinction. There is a flag that differentiates cities and hamlets based on the presence of a market, and it works fine that way. There are various sites surrounding goblin towers now -- they were there before, but now they are displayed and they have maps. Cities grow from hamlets during world gen already, and they can outright die, but there isn't much change in the world -- wars, disease, migration and economic variation should have more impact.
There were very vague long-term plans for other modes of play, but I'm not sure what's going to happen there.
In the first map in the upper 1/3rd of the right side there is a darkgrey "Block". What does it mean?
I guess people who are curious will have to go on a little journey, he he he. It'll be there waiting.
In older versions, dwarf fortresses had a color relevant to the population, so darker grey fortresses had smaller populations and the largest fortresses showed up as white. Now, white settlements indicate fortresses, light grey settlements indicate hill dwarves, and dark grey settlements indicate deep dwarves. The symbols for the sites of other entities still change depending on the population on the world map, so will we still have such an on-map indicator for fortress size or not?
Fortress size isn't that important now, really. Forts have player-levels of dwarves, so they are always pretty small, pop-wise. The dwarven sites overall have the least population variation now.
Will you changed anything about how succession works in this release or the ones immediately after it? For example, if a monarch dies with no heir, will the game try to find a more distant relation to take their place (siblings, spouse, ext), instead of picking someone at random, as the game seems to do now? Or, if the heir is still a child, will the child take the throne (perhaps, in a later release, with a steward ruling in the meantime), instead of ignoring the child heir completely?
I haven't gotten to that yet. I think it might be the last really big thing I said I was going to do for this release -- the whole birth/death/succession/marriage thingy to get the world kicked off properly. It's especially necessary now that so many extra people die during play. I'm not sure if that's going to address specific issues such as going to other relations.
Are we going to get to interact with successions or hierarchies this go-around? I don't know what that would entail, exactly- perhaps trying to promote your baron to monarch or starting a coup?
Aside from the basics of getting things to work in play at all, it probably won't be that interesting this time.
So as it is, the king is going to just move around from fortress to fortress, without there being a main capitol? This seems to make sense but is there going to be a tag on the king to indicate that he will move around? When other entities have kings, will they move around by default or be settled in one place unless there's a very good reason to move?
The idea here is that dwarves may have a king who will move to a different town if there's adamantine or if there are more +<<+platinum goblets+>>+, while human kings will generally stay in one place.
I've notice someone has put up something on the suggestions forum about island settlements. If we settle on an otherwise uninhabited island, will settlements still spring up around the fortress?
The dwarven monarch is a special case as it relates to your fortress in play, so I haven't set up a tag for it. It would be reasonable to do so, so we can see more movement in world gen (right now the movement is just theoretical to explain what's going on with you, in the absence of start scenarios or anything else).
For islands, I'm not really sure. It's one of the things that start scenarios are meant to address -- why are you on an island? Ideally, it would detect that (it knows where all the land masses are as it stands), and restrict your scenario options based on that -- assuming you choose location first and scenario second. I'm not sure if you'll pick the location first or the scenario first. I think that'll probably be a matter of taste. I'd personally pick the scenario first, but with things like the site-finder and people looking for the ideal fort spot, I imagine being able to pick any location first would be a high importance item to a lot of people.
Will hill-dwarf settlements spring up naturally around our fortresses, or will we send migrants out in the hope they establish colonies for us?
I can imagine scenarios where you bring a whole train of hill dwarves that give you a small starting hill dwarf site from the beginning, or one where you try to get something set up from your initial fortress after migrants arrive (or even just from the native-born population, though that would be slow).
Will it be possible to bring a player fortress out of retirement in case you have a new idea or something, like you can with an adventurer, or is the retirement process strictly one-way?
I think it's a little different, and it's a more difficult problem. I don't have an issue, theoretically, with unretiring fortresses, or being able to assume control of a non-player fortress that isn't dead -- we've talked about it in terms of adventurers, where you might in the future be able to assume control of an existing historical figure. I don't think I'm going to do it this time around, and it's something that should be considered more in terms of world gen options than as a basic mechanic, since it does spoil the otherness of computer people and sites. For unretiring player forts, which isn't that way, it still has the technical problem -- if an adventurer has visited the site, the unretired site would be a very different critter than you started with, and I'm not confident that there would even be a point in attempting it, but we'll see what happens once I get a site retired.
Also, with the addition of hillocks, are dwarves actually going to be moving earth around in the next release and if will this facility be included in fortress mode for players?
There isn't going to be a new feature there. We're definitely at the point where we need to draw a line around what we are doing. There are already a ton of outstanding issues.
for the next release. how smart do you want the AI that control retired player fortresses be? will it actually simulate the fortress similar to the way players do it or will it "cheat" a bit? if it cheats. will it then take into consideration what stuff you have at the site for how much chance it have to survive?
For the next release? There won't be much. Human towns don't do much yet either. That'll have to come later. We are doing some basic army stuff, patrol stuff, and birth/death/succession/marriage stuff, but the nuances of town management and development are beyond this release.
Will hill dwarf sites and deep sites be subject to invasions or MB/FB rampages during gameplay? Will you need to and be able to defend them?
Will you eventually be able to control these sites in the same way you control your fort?
Yeah, this was one of the main ideas of the army arc, and one of the main reasons for adding hill dwarf settlements to begin with. Everything will eventually be subject to the issues of the world.
The sites are too large to control as you control your fort, but you should have significant influence over them in many cases.
Since theres now a whole window for nobility and holdings, is it going to remain limited to showing dwarven sites, or will it eventually include the loose allances of the human lords, or what now appear to be goblin and elven sprawl?
I think it'll probably get more interesting, since it is quite dwarf-centric with a lot of wasted space right now.
Now that we're going to find fortress dwarves in their natural habitat, without telling us about how far from their home they are, are there plans to fit or expand their interaction choices with adventurers? Maybe trading with brokers or request healing from medicine laborers?
Yeah, hopefully they'll at least be as interesting as human cities are. They doesn't mean there's going to be healing options yet.
Speaking of interactions, as a modder, are there going to be any expansions of old modding with this release? More tokens for CE_ADD_TAG, more syndrome types, more usage hints, more counter triggers, anything like that? Or is it just a straight shot to expansion and activation of the world?
I think it has been a reasonably straight shot, but there has been a lot added to the raws of course. For new interaction stuff, there's the vampire senses, and maybe various other things. In general between expanding the skeleton of the game and bug-fixing, there's the idea of fleshing things out, which for us usually means lots of feature expansion and interconnections of old features of the sort you are talking about, and I don't think we've done much of that over the last many months. And there probably won't be a lot of it up through this release since we've already bitten off a large chunk. I'm not sure when I'll get around to more of that. We'll be at an interesting spot after this release, with any number of directions to go, and we still need to decide which one or ones we'll choose.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3848714 times)