Well just finished a 5ish year play though of an orc fort version 1.321 installed over masterwork v3a. Only changes to the raws was to remove the [special] tag from mithril.
Great! Thanks much for all the feedback.
Limited access to gems, as far as I can tell my only sources of non-glass gemstones was from raiding merchants and equipping kobolds to go steal shit. Both avenues were rather expensive routes and left me with only a handful of gems.
The lack of gems meant that the Icecrystal Sanctum and Sun and Stars Orrery were quite difficult to use. Their rituals both require 3 non-glass gemstones to run, whereas the requirements for the Altar of Storms (totems) and Stone Circle (raw crystal glass) were extremely easy to acquire in large quantities.
Gems are also used for every single shaman missile type in the Arcane Forge. The rituals also provide these and are generally less resource intensive. The only reason I can think to run these reactions at the forge is to use up spare ironbone bars and to train SOAP_MAKING (runesmith).
Good feedback, I'll think about it, it's a matter of thinking of one other good reagent for one of the rituals, and maybe too about increasing the efficiency for missle crafting at the Arcane forge. Of course, you were doing a limited-digging fort; a mining fort would have more junk gems lying around.
The balancing changes to raids are good, it’s a much longer process to equip the warbands with top quality gear now. You now end up with a fair amount of junk. But the raids do seem the only way to get the superior class of weapons.
Nice, Thanks for helping with the balance. Yeah, if you mean the weapons that are actually called "superior ... ", that's a dwarven technology and generally only available through raiding. The Warrior society kits are our domestic industry that's roughly comparable.
A mass-smelting reaction for malachite would be nice. My armoursmith training loop of batch makeshift mail to be destroyed in the melt produced rather a lot of the stuff (also a great way to produce near infinite flux stone, potash and malachite. Probably should increase the bars required to 4 to make this loop not self-sustaining ). With the slagpits turned on, you end up with a lot of slag by smelting it in the smelter. A minor annoyance really, but the goblin tinker could do a mass smelt.
Batch of pig-iron produces only 7 bars, but 8 bars are needed to run the batch of steel reaction. Another minor annoyance would be nice to be able to set the reactions to run one after the other. Not that I ever ran the batch of steel reaction, you get a much better return at the crucible for your pig iron input (probably ought to remove both the efficiently make reactions from the orcs).
All good stuff, thanks. Yes, in fact we're probably eventually losing the crucible entirely, and the few reactions from there that we should keep will get added somewhere else. Suggest that you run with slag off by the way; the "inefficient batch processing that produce flux/potash/malachite" was already my implementation of slag, so with both on it's sort of doubling up. But yeah, we can add a malachite batch, and of course closing any infinite loops would be good.
Initiate a black forest assassin uses the primary material for the final set as the one coming from the secondary weapon (the dagger) and not the primary (the greatbow). It’s a bow skill to build, so logic dictates the material should be the bow?
The logic in the case of the hybrid melee/ranged weapons is that the crafting skill comes from the primary weapon, but the material comes from the melee weapon (because that's the part you actually stab with). I know it's a little confusing.
The clay clubs exploit is still there. I seemingly lack the willpower to not exploit it. Would adding [MAGMA_BUILD_SAFE] to the requirements for stone weapons make them too difficult to create? The magma safe rocks seem to be the harder rock types which makes more sense to make weapons out of. I think they also could do with a wood component too, for the handle.
No, it wouldn't work, MAGMA_BUILD_SAFE is a building token, not a reaction token. Besides, it also implies that the object is a buildmat (like blocks, rocks, or wood) so you can't apply it to weapons, furniture, etc. The only solution I think is to either remove rock weapons (meh) or remove the "use any metal weaponkit" reactions and add more "use silver weaponkit; use rustyiron weapon kit; etc.".
The elegant solution would be to define a custom reaction class on the material, but the metals are defined at the MDF level not the orcfort level, so that's sort of a modularity issue.
There seems to be some imbalance in the captive buildings. The elf and the dwarf buildings both create primary resource materials to embellish your economy, but the drow and human are of limited use. In the mid to late game I found myself selling fish for copper at the market rather than making more crafts. Its mildly annoying to have to go through 12 crates of crap to sell. Trade fish for more substantial trade goods?
And the drow… 5 plants gets you on average… 2 silk threads? The same 5 plants can be used to make 25 units of booze which can be sold for 5000 rusty coins. The 2 silk can go through an extra cycle of improvement and in turn be sold for 1000 rusty coins. Perhaps they could mine and cut gemstones instead.
Humans seem the least well liked, although i suspect they can be very effective too with a different playstyle -- skilled corsair to run the camps, and a few fisherorcs, maybe an artisan orc applying decorations, and you can work a very efficient little sweatshop and buy out the travelling caravans without any of your own heavy industry. But, yeah, if you're running a raid heavy fort then supercharging the Grog & Shipbuilding industries with dwarven and elven labor is the way to go.
Drow .. true, maybe I will bump the yield on thread a little, but I don't know if the price in rusty coins is the only good metric though -- cloth can be used for other things, like sails and ropes for raiding xebecs, or clothes for your poor naked insane orcs
I also periodically get CTD from autosyndrome periodically. I haven’t been able to trace the source.
Well, please keep me (and Putnam) posted please if you can track it.