Thanks to Valtam, Footkerchief, mastahcheese, Knight Otu, Manveru Taurėnér, MrWiggles, smjjames, Putnam, Trif, thvaz, Calathar, Bandreus, BlackFlyme, Witty, misko27, LordBaal, lethosor, and anybody else that helped to answer questions this time around. If your question does not appear below, please have a look at the discussion right after you posted it -- it is likely that it was handled by one of these fine forumgoers.
There were some statements up there somewhere concerning fortress AI or how forts behave after retirement that seemed to suggest some people thought a lot was going on -- there isn't a lot going on. The game doesn't run a fort mode while you aren't in control -- the human workers still don't perform jobs in their towns, and the forts aren't any different.
The other day I had an idea of making giant trees which are 100 z levels tall and 50 tiles wide, but are extremely rare. Is it possible to do this kind of thing? I'm sure the height and width of it would be doable, if extreme, but is it possible to use a population token like creatures have to control the rarity?
I haven't added any new frequency tokens. Plants have a frequency token, but I don't remember if it is applied to trees. I didn't change how it works if it does or doesn't. The 48x48 map limitation is an odd constraint, especially for large trees. The trees get crunched near the edges, but I tried to give them a bit of space by not placing trunks there so much.
So how big are the squads we are talking about, and why would there be multiple leaders?
And exactly what kind of orders are we talking about? (I assume it has to far simply been "conquer that village," but still.)
PS: Also, are we talking about our own group, (why would we have other leaders?) or about the village garrison?
I think I lost a thread somewhere about the multiple leaders part. I'm not sure what that is referring to. The entity squads are limited to 20 right now, but that's just to get a name and be considered close to the position holder, rather than an army limitation. I'm not sure if that'll be retained. I think the dwarf ones are limited to 10 just because of the interface list size. There aren't any interesting squad orders you can give right now, if you are talking about adventurer squads. I mentioned follow/wait before, and that hasn't changed.
How will you avoid all the (mortal) adventurers loitering in taverns from dying of old age?
Will NPCs that are born post-worldgen be able to start careers and gain skills in some way (without being the player character's companions)?
Yeah -- it's not complete at this point. People don't seek out regular jobs or anything. That's just beyond the scope of what we're attempting for this time. The things that people can do can provide them with some development, but since we don't have active NPC heroes, we don't have that angle yet. I'm not sure when we'll see regular workers being utilized, since we've already pushed the economic stuff down the road a few times. The tavern/inn stuff will probably see traveling types and adventurer types activated to a reasonable extent.
With the personality rewrite, will vampires hide their identity in a more complete manner? Such as fake group associations and the like?
I haven't done additional work on night creatures.
In the upcoming version human civilizations will apparently consist of clusters of city states in various tributary relationships. The only supreme lords will be the god impersonators and their successors. (Is that actually the case in the current version as well? I thought they had lawgivers as their standard civ rulers.) Considering that, which entities will be responsible for the construction and garrisoning of the fortress sites that usually show up on the frontiers of human civs? Can fortress sites be claimed and fought over just like towns and hamlets? Can the goblins occupy them?
Are the elves and goblins going to build forts as well? The ones goblins make are probably similar to humans, but I can see the elves forts looking more like a frontier fort made of wood.
The existing human fortress sites are one of the mysteries to be handled in the notes. They indeed don't currently get constructed because of the lack of central authority.
I don't remember about the current version. That lawgiver position can be inherited after an impersonator dies, but if they create it without god impersonators I wouldn't be completely surprised.
All goblin sites have fortress elements, so I don't have any plans for this time for them to do anything else. No plans for elves either. Hard to say what'll happen down the line.
will accusing vampires of being night creatures still result in an immediately lethal fight, and will peasants in the home still take part?
If we get caught sucking someone's blood and a witness escapes, will it immediately result in the civilization exiling us on pain of death or just start a rumor about us?
It's basically the same as far as the accusations go. I still have a pass to go on vampire witness events, because I think a lot of it got screwed up in all the ruckus, but I anticipate there'll be just a tad of interest there. Not sure exactly how it'll gel. There aren't going to be any formal law actions in this release, so no exile for you or anything.
How are civilians reacting to an invading monster that happens to be their object of fervent adoration? I know this happens seldomly with dwarves, given that their usual spheres might be related to a few titans and creatures from deep below, and they'll often kneel before their appearance while those same twisted gods rip their heads and souls apart.
Also, is pilmigrage only considered with marriage and violent displacement in the next release? Or do you plan to enable bare-bones religious or political reasons to show up as well? Now that the personality rewrite is up, I was thinking about scenarios of moving to the town that has the temple of a preferred god or just because a peasant is "sick of it all" and packs up to a place with an agreeable government, and they seem valid and simple (not trying to shoehorn them as suggestions, mind you). Maybe not for this release, but in regard of both questions, it would be awesome to see a lot of ill-advised townspeople flocking to the outskirts of a ruined fortress or town, just because their megabeast of choice is nesting there for the time being.
There's nothing interesting going on with the religious stuff at this point. It was definitely going to be a part of start scenarios, at which point there might be some all-around action.
In the current version, there can quite a few difficulties in getting Dwarf civilisations to grow, especially when there are a lot of good-aligned mountains or on smaller maps. Larger maps, meanwhile, end up with large amounts of empty space. How much has this changed in the new version, especially with the new sites?
They have an easier time staying alive with the hill and deep sites as incubation areas. The dwarven civs don't die nearly as often. There's still a lot of empty space in larger maps -- that's probably not going to change since sites are expensive and the largest maps have 66000 tiles.
This post raises one major question for me, which is: if a player adventurer kills a megabeast occupying a fort and makes a claim on the site, is the fort still reclaimable through fort mode? Will a reclamation party have to fight a hostile band of adventurers if they're an enemy of the dwarves' home civ? Can such a site claim generate hostility by itself?
The presence of moving armies on the world map during play also raises tactical and strategic concerns about the placement of forts. How do hostile civs target each other's sites for attack? Could an "outpost" fort placed between a metropolitan fort and a necromancer tower or dark fortress divert attacks away from the larger fort? Will attack frequency and strength be reflected by proximity? (apart from the 20-tile necromancer tower "attack radius")
If you actually make a successful claim on a site, to the point where your entity is linked to it as the dominant entity (by taking your unopposed self as a stated claimant to a power location), then the site will no longer be reclaimable by anybody. That would be an invasion, which we don't have in fort mode at this time.
There's nothing interesting about the targeting at this point, and since human sites are the targets, your fort placement doesn't enter into it. I haven't tried to do anything tactical or put much thought into the targeting because there are no army fights and no supplies/economics. We're just starting with some stuff to get the ball rolling and it'll eventually make more sense.
Have you ever world genned a city/town/hill fort/fortress that was completely inhabited by vampires?
Nah -- the general populations are always numerous and they don't get vampire effects. It would take some very rare oddness with a small pop hf-only hamlet for it to happen.
Will sites be abandoned/claimed by beasts/become reclaimable/get reclaimed by NPCs during time passed in Fort Mode? (Not due to player actions, of course)
They don't fight beasts, but they can go for empties. There aren't enough mechanics active for forts to become abandoned or taken by monsters yet after world generation.
It is possible to retire a fort to become and adventurer or start another fort planing to return to the retired fortres latter, and while playing the new adventurer/fortress, the first fort to succumb to invasion/destruction like it does in world gen?
Forts aren't targeted the same way human towns are at the moment, but that's the general idea. Retiring a fort is giving it over to the forces of history. As it stands for next time, you certainly aren't guaranteed to have everybody stay at your fort -- they can migrate to your new fort or run a reclaim on an empty NPC fort, etc.
Will all sites be susceptible to beasties from above or below?
If they don't have a connection to below, they don't get attacked by those. Deep site don't get attacked by upper creatures.
when given the option to react to an attack and you decide to dodge, do you get to decide which direction you will dodge in?
When you are acting, there is a dodge away option that is different from "jump", and you move to an adjacent tile. You get to select the destination. It unbalances you and takes some time. There is still a dodge roll when you are attacked, and if you narrowly fail that, you can dodge to a non-chosen square, and you can turn that off in your combat preferences (but then those failed rolls will result in you being hit instead).
If we happen to reclaim a fort which fell to a FB or other MB, and if the beast happened to set its lair there, are the initial 7 to actually confront it? I.e. will the beast be there when the party arrives?
Calathar answered this, but it was a little farther down the thread so I just wanted to confirm that the beast will indeed be there. I haven't done anything like what we had before with many squads of armed dwarves (that's all going to be up to start scenarios later), so you'll just have to be cautious until you can manage.
Toady, how do civilizations stablish their priorities for post worldgen town founding? Does it work the same as the worldgen process (like, looking for the right ecosystem/elevation/savagery/alignment)? If, for example, you somehow hunt down and scour wildlife at an untamed wilds area that is otherwise right for human thriving, does this turn the place into fair game for settlers to come in?
Yeah, it's the same function pretty much at this point. I don't recall that you can actually change the savagery field of an map tile though. It decreases during world gen, but that's an abstraction that isn't carried over. I'm not quite sure how this'll play out in the future. It needs the abstracted information, and it could probably just do a recalc based on wildlife population sums vs. their normal levels easily enough.
Will migrants still stop when the unit list reaches 3000, regardless of the population cap and number of dwarves, or has that changed now?
In the devlog you said roads are not expanded during gameplay yet. Is this completely put off for another release or do you think you will get around to it for this one?
If we retire a player fort, will dwarves (or invaders) add new buildings to it?
I haven't knowingly fixed any bugs in that regard.
I'm not doing anything with roads.
There are a few issues with new buildings in player forts -- the main one is that space isn't controlled the same way, so the game doesn't know how to handle it. That's surmountable but it requires a concerted push exactly in that direction. The second is that other cultures never take player forts, so far as I know, so you'd never be in that position anyway. In any case, we have additions of architecture, but it's more something I'm frameworking and toying around with than full site growth. We don't have any changes to the economic data so full scale site growth wouldn't work yet as the fixed pile of world gen furniture becomes more spread out, amongst other issues.
Will dwarves migrate to player made fortresses that have been retired? If so, can we set specific restrictions on the number of immigrants that are allowed?
It doesn't use the same mechanics -- there aren't regular population migrations moving around at this point. That'll probably happen later with either start scenarios or market movements. There are marriage migrants and other special cases.
Does that mean there will be demon civilizations in those depths of the world?
Or something.
The 1/17 devlog entry seems to hint that these mysterious demon sites may be bringing new, randomly generated classes of items into our worlds. If that's the case, it sounds like a really exciting development with lots of implications, but I know it's something you don't want to spoil until after the release. So, without getting into specifics, I'd just like to know if it will be possible to see some of these grey-goo items finding their way onto trade caravans in fortress mode, or if we'll have to set out as an adventurer to get a taste of them.
I'm 90% sure that you'll be able to embark on top of a demon site in Fort Mode, and play with any items therein.
I wouldn't expect it. The demon sites seem to be visible by default, and you can't embark on such sites, like towers. You can embark on lairs, caves, and camps, I think, the sites that aren't visible by default.
If I remember Footkerchief's spoiled comment, he had a different sort of demon site in mind. The outside ones aren't embarkable if they are visible, and their items would only become available in trade through bugs and other issues, which are common enough. However, the outside ones have conditions upon which they become visible that are a little different than normal, so if you stay away from adv mode you'll probably find yourself embarking on them once in a rare while. In any case, item-wise, I'm trying to keep them contained. It actually is gray goo if they come out of their areas before they are ready, and they certainly aren't ready for prime-time yet, unless you like adjective soup.
How many styles of player-designed defense systems will become obsolete with this release?
Most of it still probably works... people can use magma and traps and stuff, at least.
Will it be possible to jump from downward slope? Will walls upgraded with overhang be still unpassable? And which creatures (or parts of creatures) can jump and climb?
Are creature body plans and/attributes (cangrab, number of manipulators etc) factored into your current concept for (non-player) climbing?
If you are standing on the ground, including slopes, you can jump (you can also jump when clinging to something). There are some odd conditions with overhangs -- I think they can negotiate an overhang one tile wide if the tile above is a wall and not a floor, since the game lets them advance their hold up the wall and around in that direction -- there's a missing case right now of being able to hold a thin ledge without a wall underneath (where you'd be hanging in the air down and to the side probably), which may or may not make it in depending on how much of a headache it is.
Raws aren't very interesting for jumping -- there is a CANNOT_JUMP tag. Flesh balls have it, thankfully. I haven't yet decided exactly on how climbing is going to be restricted. Insects have to be able to do it, but they don't have grasps in game terms, and we want humanoid climbers to need free grasps. At the same time, we don't want flesh balls to climb. There will probably just be a special graspless climber tag or something, for now.
Is there a chance that goblins will jump over a one-tile gap and fail, or does it always succeed?
Jumping one tile succeeds if they don't collide with another jumper or something strange.
Now that noise is a potentially important factor in sneaking, will NPCs respond to the noises produced by fighting? For instance, if an adventurer is assassinating a hapless lord in his bedroom, will other NPCs come to help when they hear fighting sounds or the intended victim calling for help?
Also, will monarchs and law-givers that die post-worldgen be entombed/mummified during play? And, do you plan to eventually allow the practice of mummification (if it is a practice) during Fort mode?
Camp guards are going to respond to such noises, for instance, but I don't think everybody is going to run to every noise. I'm not really sure what the overall restriction should be at this stage. It has to be at least enough to make the spontaneous insurrections interesting and a bit lively.
There's no handling of post-world-gen burial, and I don't have particular plans for how that is going to play out.
Will falling water have any impact on climbing?
Water has that pushing effect in general, although I don't remember if it happens with falling water. I suppose the best thing to do is fire up the arena with a climber and challenge the waterfall... It changes my text from "in air" to "swimming" and it makes me moves slower, but it doesn't actually push me, and I still use my climbing gait/hold the whole time (so I'm not actually swimming). I also tried dumping a whole water column on myself, and I was drowning briefly and moving very slowly, but it didn't push me. Yeah, upon checking, flow pushing bits are just stored for horizontal directions (the thing controlling the water animation is also what does item/unit pushing for that kind of liquid).
In a retired fortresses, will caged creatures remain where they where?
Yeah, this is the hope. It's still a dev note, along with the preservation of some pet data that isn't in a readily save-able form.
What's the rewrite you dread the most? I mean that one part of the code you know you have to completely change sooner or later but wish you didn't have to.
An annoying thing is the planar/afterlife/etc. stuff that is basically like adding a 4th coordinate all over the place that isn't as straightforward as going from 2 to 3 coordinates, since the nature of the 4th coordinate can be mushy. That should be painful, although there is a commensurate payoff for it.
I figure that all units can climb/jump up, however, can they climb/jump back down?
The way pathing works, what may actually end up happening is goblins climb up and get stuck up there for your dwarves (preferably behind fortifications) to pick off, or for weapon traps to trick them into dodging off wall and falling (into magma, if possible).
Will dwarves be able to jump out of minecarts or through fire?
They do get a more limited set of options once they are up in something, since connected components still govern the majority of pathing. There'll be a few safeguards in place to stop them from going completely braindead though and hopefully back to main areas of the map.
Critters that are riding on something don't know how to jump, I think. Fire is just as respected as it ever was, so I suspect they'll be jumping through whatever.
How much of an effect does the new dwarven personality system have on the way they work i.e. item quality?
There's nothing like that so far as I remember.
Will people in armor climb slower/get tired faster than unarmored climbers? How fast do creatures climb in general, compared to walking up stairs?
Climbing speed depends on the raws. It's generally slower than walking, especially because initiating a hold on a surface is an extra move to get started. Armor isn't particularly regarded any more than normal.
Do caravans still bring barrels of blood & ichor? What is the intention for those anyways - Blood sausage/black pudding production in butcheries or kitchens?
I haven't changed the liquid trade goods... I don't remember what the deal is there. If there was any reason for it, it might have been fertilizer or something, since I remember considering bone meal for the same reason at the same time as it was being used for night troll/minotaur mills, but that was a while ago.
Does a dwarf take whether he detests or has a phobia of a certain creature type into account when yielding or running away?
And how does he actually take it all into account? Are two sets of variables added up and compared, or is there more to it?
It doesn't use the phobia information, though if I remember phobias only ever apply to vermin so it wouldn't come up.
There's quite a bit going on, though the sums of strengths and percentage loss from each side are a main part of it, and those are simple numbers. There is also the wound/etc. state of the dwarf, and amount of fear vs. mastering fear, which are governed by multiple personality facets (some dwarves simply don't get as afraid in the first place, and some feel fear but can handle it -- in adventure mode you can see which by what they say, and I may direct those statements into dwarf mode combat logs so you can get a measure of what's going on).
Is it possible for a dwarf to panic and fight in that state, or will running always be the chosen option when broken by fear?
There are levels of dealing with it, but the top state is either running or cowering. Some dwarves are capable of avoiding the flight state when their terror is maxed out if they have an outlier personality facet. Whether or not they run or cower currently just depends on if they think they can get away, but there should probably be more to it.
When escalating combat from non-lethal to lethal, will both creatures simultaneously escalate combat or do they do this independently of what their opponent is trying to do?
The conflict stores the lethality state separately for the different sides (and just one state per side at this point), but effectively now they move together. When there's more need to use it, it'll be there waiting.
While you are working fixing the bugs from the personality rewrite and AI changes, have you implemented improvements to the military (besides climbing) or not yet? Are we now less likely to have trouble getting soldiers to shoot through fortifications?
The conflict system has changed, so I'm not sure all of what has happened, but some of the old annoying stuff will no doubt be there. I haven't done more than I've said, generally.
So a dwarf ran up a tree, does that mean one of the situations in which they climb includes running away? Will civilians do that too? When will they decide it's safe?
Yeah. They have to wait for the conflict to be resolved, which happens a bit after nobody has taken direct combat action. Theoretically they can be treed for a long time if somebody grumpy is hanging out nearby.
Does that include breeding thus are the Spores gone for the Forts own animals? Will Males be aggressive to other Males say if you have territorial Animals? Hunter/prey relationships? Will pets be begging for food? Will cats knock over dwarven Keyboards?
There hasn't been any work on that sort of thing.
Will we need to start a nobles cattle raising program in order to keep our local War Grizly Bear community fed? In other words, are carnivores going to actually need to keep themselves fed up appropriately just like grazers?
I haven't done anything with that for this time. If I remember, a long time ago we had some strangeness with all of that, but cut it out, and I suspect it'll eventually be back.
Will these animal-animal encounters be both in adventure mode and fortress mode? Would predators now enter adventure mode cities and prey on livestock?
Yeah, both modes. There isn't anything happening with regular predators away from your adv camera in that mode, but accidents may happen as you are walking around.
Merged the in-play morale calculations with the world gen combat info so that they can assist each other and be encouraged to continue to simultaneously make more sense over time.
I guess this means that combatants can use the simplified combat system to make a quick educated guess about whether they'll win?
Maybe it is both ways? So we won't have a elf farmer dueling a dragon in world gen.
Toady, could you clarify that?
World gen doesn't have access to existing map-based behaviors like running away -- all of that still needs to be programmed in manually as a specialized w.g. action. For this particular case, the information flow as one way (from w.g. to play), but since they are merged now, and play is more front-and-center than w.g., any improvements to the strength estimations and morale calcs will flow backward now and it's the more likely way for it to work. World gen actions/responses still need their own work, but as we put them in they'll be able to pick better ones.
Since there only seem to be two native herbivores in the caverns (at least that are explictly said to be herbivores, if not in the raws) and everything else seems to be either carnivorous or omnivorous, I'm wondering how you will deal with omnivore vs omnivore interactions?
Also, would it be possible for a pack of crundles (which are carnivores btw) to hunt together and attack a Rutherer or Draltha? Basically, will we see pack hunting behavior in this version even if it's an emergent behavior?
I know we see pack behavior already in the form of a pack of dingoes or wolves attacking an adventurer, but I'm talking in the context of predator-prey interactions.
The interactions don't have a whole food web of thought put into them at this point. It's just the standard sort of fight-or-flight stuff it thought about vs. your dwarves. Crundles don't have LARGE_PREDATOR, which makes underground creatures in particular much meaner, but adding it would cause them to attack all sorts of creatures in packs most likely.
In retired forts, do the various denizens of the fort respect pathing while the fort is retired? That is, if I put a dwarf vampire into an oubliette, retired the fort, and then unretired the fort, would the vampire still be there? Would the same hold for an army of captured goblins held prisoner in a giant pit with smoothed walls (or a sealed off chamber)? Would a revealed circus destroy a retired fort from the inside even if it was isolated from the dwarven population by, say, some cast obsidian?
I'm trying to respect components and cages when visiting a retired fort or unretiring it, though a mixture of those actions might screw it up, and it doesn't understand that a given creature is trapped in a component if its AI comes up while the site is offloaded. So a captured vampire dwarf might be selected for some kind of patrol duty or migration or AI reclaim, but if it isn't disturbed, it'll probably be where you left it.
There isn't any army fighting, so you don't have to worry about monsters vs. retired forts, but you aren't allowed to retire during sieges. You might be able to cheaply retire when underground monsters are released as things stand.
Seeing as the recent devblog update concerns lairs and night creature abductions, I was wondering how this behavior might play out on "civilized" spouse converters. It is 100% possible to create a civilization of "mono-gendered" spouse converters that survive and thrive in world-gen in the current release (As long as you define their Converted Spouse and set them to never be born the game generates them abstractly.) I was wondering if, when included, the abduction system would cause a [SPOUSE_CONVERTER] civ who declares war on a [SPOUSE_CONVERSION_TARGET] civ to spouse convert their prisoners?
It depends on how the abductions are initiated and how the conversion process works -- if it relies on abstractly feeding people ground-up beetles for a few years in a lair, it wouldn't be expected for stuff to suddenly extend out and work in other situations. Ideally, any actor can choose any relevant action on their turn and make use of any approximate things that are lying around to meet their goals, but it's difficult to give them that kind of latitude in practice, especially as it concerns making the game run at any reasonable speed, and having entire civilizations make sensible amalgams from collections of random tags and data is even less feasible. That's not to say that isn't the whole idea of the project, he he he. It's just hard to do most of the time -- when you've got a population of prisoners, there are a zillion competing tags and individuals, and the results need to be crunched almost instantly, so I probably won't focus on making it understand what to do with an unexpected tag. As the laws and ethics grow into a more sensible system, there might be more natural pipelines that spring up for shunting people off into that kind of activity though -- we'll have vampires leaders hustling large numbers of victims off as they do in world gen and all that sort of thing, and stuff might fall into place. Hard to say in any particular case though. I was going to do prisoner/slave transport from captured sites this time, but I pushed it off since we didn't have enough of the prisoner control stuff that was going to come in with the hero/thief roles, and because things needed pushing off.
Also, for future modding reference, what's the conversion between whatever scale you are using for locomotion speed vs m/h or km/h?
It hasn't been possible to have a uniform conversion -- to have the game be playable for human speeds with a sufficiently fast walking speed and a sufficiently different sprinting speed, critters like cheetahs had to be screwed over somewhat, at least in terms of what they can do at their peak. I'll likely have a little chart that says how I'm handling the curve, but that isn't final yet. I still need to convert some of the data I've collected and decide if I want more wiggle room for the fastest creatures (at the expense of humanoid speed). It'd be possible to do something like double/triple move actions for the fastest creatures (I think minecarts get these at high speed), but I ran into trouble doing that quickly while respecting AI decisions/turns, so it's on hold (at the expense of possibly temporary speed data that needs to be unfolded later). To ease that rewrite, I suspect I'll leave humanoid speeds as they are and just curve the fastest creatures sharply to be revisited later.
If you reactivate a retired fortress, will it have retained the same stage of difficulty from when you left it? IE, will there be massive sieges and ambushes right off the bat?
Putnam mentioned that population and overall goods value would be the same, and that the open question is trade value (which is also a trigger). As far as I can tell, the information retained on unretire is the same as for a reclaim, and the trade sums get reset, which controls beast attacks. This would drop your trade rating back down to zero, which controls some of the sieges. In reality, those numbers probably shouldn't be changed, but there's still quite a bit of dwarf-mode-specific information that isn't tracked for other sites and so doesn't pass through retire correctly, especially when it comes to production and other economic stuff (where other sites are completely deficient).
Oooh, so does this mean that each of the dwarves will have their own personal reputation system? This may have been asked before and I'm not sure if the new personal reputation system was mentioned before
They'll have that now, but that doesn't mean a lot of new stuff'll be going on with it this time. There's more some stage-setting here as we wind down to avoid save compat problems later and all that if we decide to do something, and to keep everything in tune as the modes get more smeared.
IN future releases, would there ever be a way for bandits or gangs to incorporate or re-incorporate inot a town depending on the situations?
Yeah, that'll definitely be happening, especially with the bandits that were once town leaders.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3847412 times)