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[Meph]

My thoughts exactly on the magma piston/pump.

Food thoughts are mostly based upon how often they eat the same, if they eat something they personally like/dislike and the quality modifier. Masterwork roast and such. Dont think that the value has anything to do with it, but that is only a guess.

Less valuable food sounds reasonable, even if buying from caravans gets even easier then. I wish there was an easy way to take it away from caravans, without the homeciv starving ^^

[Firehawk45]

Is it possible to only adjust the value of the finished meals? Something like making it just the value of the ingredients summed up?

[Tierre]

No. It is already ingridients summed up, but they all have a quality multiplier and you cannot mod that out. Maybe just make it so only 2 piece foods are there and no lavish foods? It should make them less valuable as less multipliers stack.

Meph - i will see wht i can do, but not today - it is midnight already here:) And i am a little bit sick:( So can't think really good:( I will try some tests then i feel better.

[Firehawk45]

And throwing away the whole cooking reactions and making a new one that does the same doesnt work either, right?

[raledon]

Another, similar option is to make it require more work- what if you can only make meals from two ingredients, but it might use an existing meal? (a+b=ab, ab+c=(ab)c which might have a different multiplier than abc) in either case, the dwarves will have to spend a lot more time at the kitchen to make the food.

[Meph]

The entire kitchen is hardcoded...

[raledon]

The entire kitchen is hardcoded...

And now we know why men don't enter the kitchen... (j/k)

[Meph]

Inspired by the orcs from smake, here some ideas...


Elves
 - no digging, no woodcutting, no metals => no constructions.
 - Army of pets and treants
 - Special plants that produce lots of stuff
 - Special way to get wood, ironbark and steeloak
 - Good bows, spears and knives.

Buildings
Druids Circle (Magic)
Druids Hut (druid transformation)
Rangers Outlook (ranger transformation, like ranged legion dwarf)
Warriors Circle (combat training)
Big Archery (ranged training)
Enting (Spawns treants)
Tree (1x1 tree deco)
Herbalist (creates more plants/items)
Treesinger (creates more wood types/items)
Smokehut (upgrades, temp. buffs)
Elven Craftsman (to replace the dwarf version)

Problem with these two: Items will be "foreign"
Bowmaker (makes bows)
Fletchery (Makes special arrows)


Humans
 - no digging => aboveground fortress
 - Quarry and Blockproduction
 - System based on prayer (?)
 - Heavily trap and ranged unit dependant
 - No steel (?)
 - Guns
 - No pet trainers. Only domestic animals allowed.

Buildings
Gunsmith (guns)
Ammo Mint (bullets)
Quarry (produces boulders)
Mine (produces ore)
Supply Workshop/Human Craftsman (quarry and mining supplies)
Altar (praying, minor magic)
Church (praying, medium magic)
Cathedral (praying, higher magic)
Monestary (monk transformation, unarmed melee mage)
Holy order (paladin transformation, like legion dwarf)
Engineer (special trapcomps)

These two maybe, or plate armor by default for heavy bar costs
Weaponry (weapon upgrades)
Armory (armor upgrades)

Drow
 - digging, but no smelting
 - Metal only bloodsteel and ironbone
 - System based on kills/bodyparts
 - Can summon dark helpers
 - Fast moving
 - Cant have many good/normal things
 - No aboveground farming (can this be done?)

Buildings
Bonecrafter (bone stuff)
Bloodworks (blood stuff)
Bloodsteel Forge (produces bloodsteel)
Ironbone Forge (produces ironbone)
Summoning Circle (summons minions)
Great butchery (makes stuff from bodyparts)
Dark temple (magic, mage transformation)
thrall pit (pet upgrades... evil ones)
Shadowdancers guild (fast melee caste, like legion dwarf)
necromancers guild (necromancers and spawn skeletons, IF the entire system can be made to work)


Now, criticism please Or better names, more ideas for buildings and game mechanics, and so on. Currently elves should live on the surface, have no walls/moats, and fight mostly with giant pet-armys and some soldiers clad in metal-grade wooden armor. Economy based on farming, most adv. products will be made from special plants, like thornbushes that replace barbed wire, or menacing spikes. They can spawn living trees (friendly unit, but no pet) and have some kind of Druid-Mage.

Humans should stay on the surface as well, but have access to both stone and ore, can make constructions, big castles, engineer eloberate traps, defenses and guns, and do a lot of holy prayer. They would have very hard to build high end building, cathedral, monestary and holy order, to allow people to join one caste of special soldiers, but only after a lot of prayers have been done. Food comes from animals and farming, and essentially everyone lives in a fortress and prays a lot. Then you unlock the castes and be ready to defend better. (Maybe I can make a mining pick an ultra-high-end item, so after your fortress is awesome and you are done, you might be able to descent into the darkness below. Any thoughts on that ?)

Drow are evil and underground. They have access to stone, but have no smelters for normal metal. You need to butcher animals, hunt and kill to gain blood, meat, bone and bodyparts, that they can then use to create better gear. Which then results in more stuff killed. After a while you should be able to start some dark magic, if you have enough bodyparts left The thrall pit should mutate/transform normal animals you buy into twisted, evil counterparts that help you hunting. OR give more bodyparts when butchered.

If anyone knows of more interesting game-mechanics, or new races, please go ahead and post them. For new races, please use the same system I did for the three above. Makes it easier for me to compare them.

[Firehawk45]

I put my ideas into spoilers, as they become a huge wall of text, born in a sleepless mind at 4 AM.

At first, the humans:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

No steel for humans? They actually have steel stuff already, so i would leave that in. I would also change the way they obtain a lot of stuff. Humans are in most fantasy worlds great traders, so i would center this stuff around the trader part.

What if you (instead of a mine) mod in a building where you can buy ores for food and tools (essentially from the mining communitys which dont have the industry/manpower/fields to produce this stuff).

The reactions would be like this:

trade a pick for ores:

needs a pick (material dependand? No, i dont think that would be good, too much work)

gives a fair amount of ore (bars?) of different degree. The highest chances for the stuff you need for rose gold (which i dont have in my head right now ), smaller chances for stuff like iron, and no chance for anything better than iron (so no wolfram/mithril/cobalt/chrome or things you need for steel).

Same for food, but with lower chances for ores (but so you get something, not wasting food on a reaction, or making it really unlikely). Preferably with prepared meals (if thats possible). Also a reaction for booze, miners like to drink.

Then, give the dwarfen traders a item called "dwarfen trading contract" (cost a LOT, the dwarfes want to see money before they install all time trading in your city), with which you could build a dwarfen trading station. Now thats where you get the really good stuff, like mithril, steel, wolfram. Or only equipment, as humans lack the skills to properly smith mithril and better materials.

But what would the dwarfes want for this stuff? Guns would spring to mind. Bullets too, maybe the blueprints for your buildings? Maybe even trade away the clockwork parts from the automatons and the bifrost from the frost giants, as humans have no use for this stuff.
But rose gold should be the focus if you play with the humans, and it should be the highest tier of armor/weapon material to be avaible most of the time.

Dont get me wrong, those are still buildings "producing" ore and stone, but i think the idea of trading for stuff just blends into the whole idea of the humans being a really diplomatic race.

Another idea (if thats possible) would be that they could be able to hire mercenaries (humans, dwarfes, maybe even drows, orcs and goblins?) for a short duration of time for unreasonable high prizes (kind of an emergency thing) to fight instead of risking human lives. What to offer? Gold, silver, gems, shiny stuff. Again, humans are diplomats and traders, so that would fit into their race.

The drows:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I think they should feel really dungeon keeperish when you play them. I speak about really dark stuff like ghosts who strangle enemies (most likely human adventurers looking for treasure ) to death, gargoyles ripping intruders into pieces, prisoners getting tortured...

I know, living enemies cant be used in reactions, but hey, making a really evil torture camber to kill them in a interesting fashion and then utilizing their remains is still valid. But without smelting, whats with the gear the adventurers (i will just call them that, it reminds me of dungeon keeper) drop when they leave your realm in a brutal way? I would say, possesed armour sounds great as a first line of defence (not so good that you would want to produce gear to make them, more like a evil waste disposal).

The whole idea of drow economy should be (in my opinion) that no body part of a killed enemie gets wasted. Modding a extra building is actually perfect for this. If that wasnt impossible, i would suggest to let every body go through more then one state of processing (first getting the blood out of it, then the skin, nervous tissue, internal organs, meat, and at last, the bones), but i realize thats impossible, or if its possible, you would beat me to death after two hours of coding, using your !!Keyboard of Modder Rage!!.

Is there a way to mod whole bodys into reactions? Im thinking of a fleshshapers workshop, using meat, maybe whole bodys, some dark magic..... Everyone who played Warcraft 3 knows what i want. Yes, Fleshgolems. Wielding big hooks and butcher knifes. Chopping enemies to pieces.

What should power the magic of the drows? Souls. Make that something every sentient creature drops. One soul per kill. Souls should be processesed (tortured) in a workshop and turned into a crafting material used in everything involving dark magic. To make them worthwhile, give souls of different creatures different value. Forgotten beasts, semi- and megabeasts as well as titans should be highest value (more spellcasting material), kobolds the least valuable. Do automatons have souls?

They are actually a good point here, what do drows do with clockwork parts and bifrost?
Bifrost could result in some dark ice magic (LICHES!). Clockwork parts.... well, twisted evil demon automatons, does that fit? Yeah, think so. Maybe really expensive high tier defense, requiring a lot of ressources and involving the risk of having a demon going on a rampage through your fortress. But if it works, you have a really mighty (but not unkillable) allie

Demons. I think they should be there from the mid tech on. Starting with summoning weak demons (composed of things like earth, Ice, water, nothing to powerful, but good to distract enemies and still really dangerous) over the short time possesion of one drow to be a bringer of doom, maybe resulting in his/her death after the transformations ends, up to calling really really bad stuff. Demons with skins like mithril, requiring tons of lives (represented by meat, souls, blood), magic (more souls) and even the drow summoning him, but basically murdering everything coming at you. (Maybe that part needs balancing.)

You know, i think i should stop designing the drows, those ideas give even me chills

I think i will make another post, i have an idea for a race Please Meph, read what i type, write whats impossible (im almost convinced some of the things im suggesting will not work) and point out whats good and more importantly, where i should give more details. I often dont go deep into my thoughts because i have no clue whats possible or not.

[Meph]

Read it, processing it, will post tomorrow something long about it. I cant use captured enemies or corpses in reactions, but most of the things, including souls, would be possible. Mercenaries... no. The rest ? Yes. It is late here, but no worries, you get something longer tomorrow.

[Firehawk45]

Just want to disclaim: Im well aware that you cant use live enemies, but im almost certain, when the drows get playable, players will build torture chambers in the style of danger rooms instead of killing them in other ways

Also, the mercenaries were indended to be just a normal "deployable allie" (like golems) instead of a big concept which is completely impossible. They were just named so because magical constructs dont really fit the humans

[ioi101]

If you're worried about making food from caravans too cheap, only lower the values of bread, candy, sweet syrup and (maybe) quarry bush. The values of everything else is quite reasonable, and doesn't lead to extremely valuable food. Huge stacks of meat are the only other offender, but those are rare and hard to get so no problem. That should be enough to put it more or less in line with producing traps and the like.

As for the races:

Elves: No way to make rooms/constructions at all would certainly be unique. I hope their armors/weapons/magic would indeed be very good since they will be your only defense. Main problem I see is.. if all your stuff comes from plants, how do you give them better types of material that are harder to get? Cause if say steeloak is best then you just go for all steeloak. I guess one way would be to make various "ritual" plants, that are resources for Treesingers/druids to produce better materials from lots of harvestable materials. Sort of like how volcanic stuff requires silver/steel/obsidian/slade.

Humans: I like the gun/ranged centric idea. Also perhaps making deadly siege machinery (with easy to get powerful bolts/boulders), and a special siege operator caste that's fearless and learns siege operation very easily. The only problem is how hard it would be to make all the necessary fortifications from the start, they should probably have some special mason caste as well, as well being generally superior builders.

Prayer... don't see how you fit it in this. The whole gun/trap/fortress idea fits more with a steampunk aesthetic, not medieval. I'd rather go for machinery (new siege weapons?) and wierd devices through !science! (electroshock traps? heh) and as fire said, trade.

I really like Fire's idea of having different "trading posts" for different groups/races, but on the flip side I liked snake's idea about having a currency. So maybe combine both - have different trading posts that have their own individual currencies. And they sell/buy stuff at different prices (i.e. dwarves want picks, mercenaries want armor). This is such a cool idea that would be so much work though, that if you do it, I'd make it a part of the standard mod.

Drow: I really like this, but the general idea of getting great stuff from fighting/hunting in the caverns would be a great addition to the base mod, doesn't have to be a race-unique flavor. Maybe just have the drow have a more extreme version of it, along the lines of what fire suggested.

[Meph]

Ok, I think trading it is for humans. I just always think of them as the medieval humans, and those spend most of their time doing farmwork (peasants) praying (monks, priests and so on) and fighting (knights, archers) I dont want them steampunky at all, but the entire medieval world was ruled by the nobles and priests, and even kings had to bow before the pope. So I thought an upgrade system based on prayer would be neat.

Build Altar, Pray, get "prayer points"
100 prayer points = Build a church, pray more and has tech tree 1 abilities.
100 prayer points from the church = Build Cathedral, pray more, has tech tree 2.
100 prayer points from the cathedral = Build Holy Order, tech tree 3.

This way you have to build religious buildings and have your peasants pray a lot. A pieous and godfearing fortress will get the permit from the pope (or whatever) to build a cathedral, and later an order or monestary. And these will allow the human "mage-fighters", the monks and paladins. Priests would be a noble-caste, acting as doctors and calming tantruming humans.

I can easily see the drow doing what everyone expects of them, being evil bastards.

I cant really see how to balance the elves, I thought about giving them wooden contructions, but that would make them more similar to the humans... so no constructions, but a giant army of pets and archers should be fine ? I dont know, probably for very advanced players. I just want every race to feel different. Maybe elves can dig soil, but no stone ? (that would mess things up a lot, since I would have to make stone undiggable)

Anyway, I like those ideas in general. Humans as religious trader castle-folk, elves as nomadic pet-loving farmer dudes that mostly fight indirectly, and drow as cave-dwelling evil-doers that dissect people and reassemble them as allies. And smakes orcs to top it off, with their stronger fighters, but worse equpiment, slagpits and all

But yeah, I think more interesting ideas for elves would be welcome. They should have some defense, but I dont want people to wall themselves in... but I dont even know how that would be possible, because of the needed furniture (against bad thoughts) and all of those have to be build inside... damn it, I think they will need constructions (wood only ?) or some digging after all. Any suggestions ?

[ioi101]

It's definitely going to be hard to balance them, and my initial impulse was to say that it can't work heh. Then I rewrote the post a bit, because I do think it's an interesting idea.

Here's what I would do - give them lots of tough melee pets. Not so much deadly, but tough, hard skins, etc, this is your meatshield. Allow the elves to further upgrade them through reactions - i.e. sapling ents-> ironbark ents-> steelbark ents-> Elder ents with even tougher skin(bark. whatever hehe). Make it possible to heal these pets (already in). The idea of these guys is to occupy the invaders while they are getting picked off, not to kill everything. The balance should be such that in a tough fight, you might loose a few, but unless it's an extremely tough fight, you should have enough to occupy the invaders. And then you can heal them afterwards.

Only problem I see with this is that you'd have too few at the start, and too many at the end when they start breeding. The solution could be making them cheap at embark, but weak, and make it so the upgrades are massive and very important. that way the main limitation is upgrade materials, not breeding rate.

And then make the elves very strong archers - superior fast firing bows with special materials that can only be made into arrows, but those arrows are deadly. Bigger ammo stacks in quivers so they don't run out. Then give them extra sight range (can you give them extra firing range too?) and perhaps even the ability to retreat (don't know if that's possible). I personally would also love it if there's some way of obtaining magic bows that don't require ammo - either as a somewhat weaker alternative to normal bows, or as a small chance/high difficulty to get super bow.

The only problem with making archery the primary way of fighting is that DF AI is not nice to archers - dwarves do alot of dumb stuff when it comes to archery. Not having full stacks of bolts, rushing into battle when you're out, taking tons of bolts to land a finishing blow on an enemy that's already crippled cause it's closest etc. All things that would be very bad for a race with weak armor and str that is completely reliant on archery, and since it's AI, unfixable. But I do think that if you can have arrow-less bows (maybe you have to sacrifice 1000 arrows in the reaction that creates them), that would help alot. Also if there's some way to have a pet or something that's generally weak, but very good at finishing off unconscious enemies, that would also help a ton.

As for the humans: That's fine, but isn't that a bit too much like aboveground dwarves? Not that that's a bad thing by itself, but a focus on guns/ranged/traps, is kind of different from medieval knights and paladins.

[Tierre]

btw another thought about balance - if you play elves and get in war with dwarves then you get slademantine armored dwarves as invaders and that's a bit tough for longears. Also spawning ent would be from a boiling stone (as always) and some traders might just start bringing it by caravans with creatures spawning near the edge of map and possibly traders thinking tht you stole an item from them.
So its 2 big problems to think about (nothing comes to negate it yet).