(*continued from above*)
Will adventurers be able to reclaim abandoned fortresses for their Civ through capturing the main building, such as a keep or mead hall? When goblins capture a dwarf fortress, is the site map converted to a goblin fortress template and vice versa? How long does this take? Will players be able to embark on recently conquered sites?
What happens if you attack the leader of one of your retired fortresses? Can you claim it with your adventurer? Can you claim dwarven fortresses at all?
If so,
Will there be some variation there, or will the dwarves from retired fortresses always be the more loyal types who will try very hard to kill your adventurer before surrendering?
What complications would occour from doing something like dethroning a dwarven king? Is that going to be possible? I imagine you would be able to take the dwarven capital by killing a whole bunch of people and making the king yield to you. But what happens then? Is it possible for your adventurer to aquire the title of king if he conquers enough dwarven settlements?
I think the way it "works" now, you could claim one of your retired fortresses, but it wouldn't actually know how to have it change hands, since there is no power location (at least not in a way that is currently understood by the adventure part of the game). Abandoned fortresses don't have people in them, so you'd have to bring a companion along, state a claim to them, and then not have it recognized because there is no power location. You can kill whomever, but you can't obtain the civ-level positions. If you kill a monarch, you'll end up with a replacement, if there's a claimant around, or a lack of decision making -- which doesn't matter so much for dwarves, since they don't attack anybody yet. I haven't allowed adventurers to place a claim on an existing entity position (they can only form a new entity with a new site claim), but you'll definitely be able to do that when we get into the meat of succession wars later.
Will the new site claim system allow player characters (/and their gangs?) to retire and live out of places like caves and lairs (that is, without "giving in to starvation")? When can we reasonably expect to be able to coax people to start living at sites we capture? "Find a new life in my goblin fortress! Don't mind the goblin bones. And the trolls. Oh, and bring food."
There isn't anything like that yet -- this isn't really the "be a bandit gang"/"have your own entity" release, but elements of that came about as a side effect of the village-to-village fighting. We don't have anything like a recruitment system for your own sites for regular citizens of other sites, though refugees can be dragged around and people can be inducted into your site squad (which is linked to your position as entity leader in the usual way, and thereby usable by any successor to your position).
Is it possible to claim a site for an allied civilization, e.g. expanding the dwarven motherland by defeating a goblin tower? Or do you have to be completely independent for now?
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?
Adventurer affiliations are loose now -- you can't establish a new barony, for example, or conquer a site for a goblin or elf civ. You can subordinate your site entity through a tribute relationship, but I haven't done anything with the official dwarven hierarchies. Once the dwarves are causing some trouble of their own, that'll establish a framework, though I'm not sure in which order things will play out. The adventurer's site claims are real though, in the sense that they have the weight of an entity behind them and all associated mechanics (including succession, squads, diplomacy, reputation tracking and so on).
What happens if you start mistreating the citizens of your new entity? Will they kick you out of the entity, or will they leave it, or will they just be like "well the King can do what he wants, I guess." Are they more tolerant of stealing in the name of the new site leader (considering it tribute or something?)
The only rebellions we've heard about are insurrections against occupiers, so I think this would depend on whether the adventurer is considered an occupier. That might be based on whether you're from the same civilization?
If you start running around beating people up, say, you'll develop a crappy personal reputation with the affected local culture, and technically people can start thinking insurrectionist thoughts, though they don't have enough independence to rise up without an outside catalyst (like another group attacking your village, at which point they can help). The occupation flag is applied in goblin-type circumstances rather than village-to-village skirmishes, but it isn't the sole determiner of behavior -- it's more to separate out populations between occupier and occupied, since the game has some (mainly conversation) assumptions about people and the site entity otherwise. It's an early distinction that may eventually be dropped, especially when we get to law-type stuff in the thief role that can make a change in human leadership a major change (or when we get to the implementation of the vampire laws from world gen, which might have some minor influence even in this release).
With tributes running the town while you're away, will messengers ever find you to alert you to problems in that town, e.g. the guy you left it charge was killed and someone new controls the town? Or will you intrinsically know when your rule is affected?
There aren't any personal messengers right now, so you'd have to go back to figure out precisely what's going on, or if you are slow a rumor'll spread. Depending on how I update the information screen though, you might learn certain things instantly. I haven't yet obscured your own position data, for instance, so you'd know when something is lost, but not to whom. There's probably a line to walk between reality, user friendliness, cruelty and humor in any updates there... you could end up with a string of conquests in your information screen that are all undone without your knowledge, and whether or not people believe them would depend on which group of refugees came through or how fast the general rumor clocks are ticking (ideally recent rumors would never spread by clock, but we won't know how far we can take that until the caravans are moving).
You've previously mentioned that the current inability of the game to simulate the duties, relationship and general "role" of historical figures, or notice/handle people "breaking character" is the reason we can't assume control of them, but how important is acting like a historical figure as opposed to playing like a historical figure? Obvious examples include combat, but even simple things like a player controlling a unobservant character looking at everything, or a new player controlling a experienced tomb raider triggering every single trap, would be relevant. Would players in this position be able to use abstraction, or be able to use (limited) hints?
Presumably some of these things would be governed by skills, unless you are talking about deliberately screwing up. I'm not sure I understood.
I was reading through some old devlogs about tracking and combined with giving companions orders this question popped up:
When being tracked, can you tell a companion to wait and then ambush the hunters while you escape?
Or better yet, will you be able to give your companion your shoes and then tell him to head in another direction to confuse them and if so, will they follow him?
You can't tell them to ambush anybody -- right now we just have wait/follow available. That'll definitely change, but perhaps not for this time. But yeah, if you had your companion do this or that later on, as things currently stand they would leave tracks, and these tracks would have the same standing as your tracks in terms of your pursuers.
So, Now that the duplicating populations are being fixed, does this mean that bringing the age of death is posible, like in the old days?
Just having the higher population numbers makes it more work to accomplish if you don't abort world gen really early, depending on how old days your old days are, and I'm not sure what other obstacles there are, but the hist fig and entity counts seem zero-able now.
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?
I haven't linked skin colors to actual sun effects or anything, so it doesn't understand any of that. The game understands cave adaptation, but that doesn't have any physical ramifications aside from the barfy stuff. Putnam posted some of our speculation, and we'll work toward something over time.
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?
It is harder to start fights now, since the game requires more context. It's likely still possible to get any sort of configuration of entity reps, though the gaining of enemy status doesn't work the same way any more. Civil war bugs have probably changed. It's unclear if it'll be for the better, especially at first.
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.
Enemy climbing AI is still an open question for this release. It depends on how easy it is to adapt a few of the existing functions -- I can hope for a two line change and end up with a train-wreck. It's hard to say until I try with this one. Jumping seems harder, or at least more prone to slow things down since it has to look outward farther than they've had to in the past. It'd be especially bad with running/long jumps. I haven't taught them any new tricks with ranged combat. The reason the AI is still an open question rather than something I've put off is these kind of concerns, and I'm mindful of having cheap exploits lying around even if it doesn't seem that way many times, but it might be difficult to prioritize depending on how tough it is.
As part of the tavern arc, can we expect to see better detailed and possibly less dedicated motivations of adventurers and monster hunters?
I'm not sure what'll happen with the arc when it comes to tangential issues. There are many tangents for that one. Presumably when we have the dwarf mode taverns in play, you'll need visitors with the initial release, and they'd need a variety of reasons for being there to make the taverns properly bustly.
Toady, as there has to be more and more dialogue options, would it be reasonable to have Threetoe write the dialogue? Since he's the writer and all. And you're already working together, so it's not exactly like expanding your team.
This wasn't the issue with the speed of the conversation additions. The moving parts that bog down the process are all technical.
Toady: Will refugee populations camping outside towns slowly disperse into that town's or other towns' populations, or will they remain there indefinitely/until the rumored force of darkness is rumored to have left?
They don't spread out at this point, though since we have populations mixing together in world gen, I'm pretty sure it'll happen at some point, and it would be ideal to mix diffusion and tension there.
Toady: Currently underground tunnels are capped at the map's edge in fortress mode to prevent invaders from using them. In future will this be different? Drums, drums in the deep!
I suspect when we get to the deep dwarves under-outside of your fortress map (which'll very likely happen at the same time that the hill dwarves matter, and that's not too far away), the game will come to understand how to use the tunnels. Once it knows that, anything's possible, and I'll probably feel compelled to take advantage of the situation.
Are we at some point going to see non-omniscient dwarves?
I saw a few people ask for clarification, and I'm also not sure what this was referring to. There are a few things like witnessing deaths now that they don't know immediately, and (most) other things that they do know. For something like pathing, I suspect it would cause more trouble than it's worth, if they didn't know that a passage had become blocked for instance, though there are probably cool cases and annoying time-wasting cases.
Will refugee camps share any common framework(s) with hill dwarf sites as far as relating to and communicating with your fortress?
Keeping in mind that none of that happens yet, yeah, I think all of them (deep dwarves and others as well) will probably work in the same way, though the hill and deep dwarves might have a more official relationship that affects the options (especially if they are considered a part of your barony/county/etc.). The refugees are also a bit more uncomfortable in that they have both an army status and a pseudo-site status -- armies can't leave sites everywhere as they move, for memory reasons, but once refugees have settled for a while, you want to be able to tie diverse site information to them. It isn't fully resolved yet because refugees won't have a full set of mechanics for quite a while.
1. How were goblins running away from themselves?
2. Do you have any plans to do something with the refugees on the fringes of dwarven settlements and the like before the next update?
1. Once they took a town, a form of the old invasion rumor persisted in the new site entity, and a portion of the occupying population fled at the rumored invasion (as if the demon were somehow displeased with them even though they were the ones that carried it out in their old affiliation).
2. It'll be best to wait for hill dwarves to become fort-mode integrated so it can all be under the same umbrella.
will refugees in camps give players quests to go investigate/free their hometown, or do they expect us to take the initiative? Will they also know something about the happenings in the area they are now in and give quests to kill local night creatures and bandits?
The refugees and people in general have their list of problems, which is also the list of things they react positively to if you do something about them. For refugees, the main one is what happened back home. It's not quite questy but it's functionally similar. Their new local night creatures and bandits don't yet bother them (due to the lack of battles and complete site data), so no associated rumors are generated and they don't know about them. Once we get the world gen night creature antics moved over, it should happen naturally once the refugees encounter trouble. The bandits don't know how to target refugee camps, but if they did, that rumor would be generated as things stand. I'd need to handle the site data there (a tricky question of timing) or abstract bandit actions a bit (which is similar to adding army battles).
Is the role of the starting 7 going to be given especial thought when fortress founding scenarios come up? Logically, they could be forward scouts, prospectors, merchants starting a inn by the road, hardened mercenaries looking to claim long-rumored gold, and so on.
The old jokes have tended to be removed over time as things become generalized. At the same time, if it is convenient to keep a sort of "party" of initial dwarves for familiarity purposes, that might happen. I'm not sure the same population growth speed will be maintained in different scenarios though. They could be very different from each other, and some might not involve immigration at all, which could affect starting numbers (though having to define skills for more than seven starting dwarves might be a bit much as well -- it might be that a core group works well there too).
What did you think of Atrocious Beards Part Two (assuming you saw it)?
I guess it's appropriate that the one that didn't even have a beard fell for a flesh eater. We knew going in that it was silly, so we could appreciate it as an extension of Peter Jackson's earliest movies more than a Tolkien adaptation. Even in that vein, the action sequences were too goofy to enjoy a lot of the time though... barrels for instance.
With all these changes to how rumors and such get spread, is there any change to, say, demons impersonating gods?
There probably should have been, but that's still something that exists from world gen and then isn't continued on as anything but an odd fact. It'll technically matter when civ-level actions can be taken by non-gob entities, but there's something inherently rumory about it that isn't touched by the new rumor stuff.
Can the AI loot sites?
There aren't any objects to loot yet. Just as the tribute is "abstract", anything like looting has to wait for all the economy stuff to come to fruition. The part from the 2/8 devlog that Footkerchief quoted with demons pillaging dwarven capitals was the world gen backstory -- once you get into play, everything involving items doesn't matter. Items move around in world gen with trade, though I'm not sure if even the pillaging at that time is abstract or not. The tribute is.
Will there be any indication NPCs are having a conversation?
Will eavesdropping be possible?
What happens if the conversation is interrupted by player antics? I'm thinking especially of important conversations; can you create Groundhog Day style loops by constantly interrupting conversations through violence or other shenanigans, etc
All conversations currently happening around you pop up in the regular announcement list, and if you can see a speaker, they get a number printed over them with a corresponding number on the announcement line. Conversations aren't so frequent that this has caused problems, but as more banter goes in we'll see if adjustments are required. Conversations fizzle over time if they aren't used, so if you start a fight, anything going on would need to be reestablished. I'm sure people will find many ways to mess with the poor critters. It just takes a simple two statement exchange to establish sweeping entity changes and so on, though, or even less (like a declaration of a site claim), so you'll have to be on the ball if you want to disrupt the march of history at a given location.
Question/thought partially related to the underwater trees bug (which might not even exist in the next version), how do multi-tile trees and cavern fungi deal with tight spaces like one tile wide corridors that would otherwise be too small for a tower cap with a 2x2 trunk to grow in? Do they just sort of force themselves into the space or simply not grow at all?
Trees start at one tile and they grow from there, so issues with blockage and all that haven't really changed.
Will we be able to make the dirt and sand into walls in the arena? (actually, thats the same as my origional question, I just didn't know we could place them in the new version).
And will we be able to plant trees and shrubs on the soil in the arena?
I don't think you can set the wall type, and it doesn't let you plant and age specific tree types to test them out yet.
Will fantasy in the game ever grow beyond Euro-centric fantasy?
The randomization was mentioned while I was typing this up -- there's definitely going to be a randomization and a smearing out of things, and the sources of inspiration there are varied. I have no idea about adding specific stock elements from real-world cultures farther afield, since we were never really strongly pro-stock-stuff to begin with, and we'd just be looking stuff up and putting crappy versions of it in (not that what we have is much different from that already). There are no doubt several more general thematic biases of which I'm not even consciously aware, and each of those would have to be raised and tackled separately. The genre/atmosphere/plot stuff from Armok 1 was supposed to address this, or at least allow you to play very atypical worlds, but we are a long way from that.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3848936 times)