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[10ebbor10]

That would be nice. Especially the mining thing. Allows you to make some representation of underground environement whitout not being a visual mess.

And you could also throw in some red herrings. Talk about a cow disease outbreak or something, so when people who ate meat pies go crazy, you think "Oh, they got some sort of disease from infected meat!", but instead it's because the meat is made out of humans and you'd have to notice that not -everyone- who eats it goes crazy, it's only the meat-pie eaters and not other meat-product eaters, and it dies off as only the people who see it made go crazy.

Then again, one of the only ways in which eating a human meat pie can make humans go crazy is a sort of prion disease, like BSE. There's no biological reason for humans to go insane when eating human meatpies. (Unless, of course, the colony happened to be placed on the location of a former cannibalistic cult, but those rumors have proven to be completely bonkers.)

[Descan]

One suggestion I'd.... suggest, is a sort of "End-game report". Your colony crashes, everyone is dead, and you're a disgrace. Here's what ACTUALLY happened in the game! So if you thought people were dying due to an illness but it was actually cultists poisoning people, you can find out~

[Citizen Daniel]

That's a great idea.  I admit to not thinking very much about the end-game, uh, results, yet.  We'll definitely do something like this.  Dredmor had a somewhat weak end-game report and it was still something people were into, so there's lots of room to improve that.

That said, there's a lot of merit to writing your own...

[chaoticag]

Any chance that newspapers will still be a thing? Either as an unreliable sore of information, or a way of keeping the citizens sane so long as the editor doesn't use some alien material for the printing parts/ isn't insane/ not using madness inducing fonts such as comic sans?

[Descan]

Of course, but a report of what -actually- happened in the game, including your responses to them, can help any Lets Play (written or video) by allowing the presenter to say "Here's what I thought happened, and what I did in response. What ACTUALLY happened is this, and this is the result."

Whether it's an embellished, role-play-ee report, or a line-by-line, minute-by-minute, "At x:xx, miner xyz was poisoned by cultist abc", something which you can compare to your own perceptions and be surprised (or not, as the case may be) would be grand~

[Farmerbob]

Is it the act of eating human meat, or knowing that they ate human meat. Would be nice if it was the latter, as that could suddenly lead to mass insanity inducing food scandals.

Or some very scary scenarios where eldrich abominations take over the kitchen and teach everyone how to serve mankind.

[10ebbor10]

Is it the act of eating human meat, or knowing that they ate human meat. Would be nice if it was the latter, as that could suddenly lead to mass insanity inducing food scandals.

Or some very scary scenarios where eldrich abominations take over the kitchen and teach everyone how to serve mankind.

Yup, I expect the reactions to be:
1) Oh no, Instant insanity
2) Let's grab the pitchforks, torches and burn the cook.
3) I prefer rare actually, but fine.

[Farmerbob]

Yeah, that would be a way of making the paper interesting, for sure.  Truth be told, though, I'm actually not sold on the newspaper idea.  It has some really interesting benefits like being nicely period-appropriate and giving players a digest of information, but it's either going to be so effective that players will read the paper instead of watching the game, or ineffective enough that no one will read it.

One of the ideas that i DO think is interesting to try, that we came up with as a compromise, is having "reports" that are generated by specific professional offices that you can construct, where you have a phrenologist and a physician and so forth, and they go about besetting your colonists with "exams", and their reports could have useful information in them.  It has a nice bonus of breaking up the information into bits that the player specifically requests, and it makes reading these things more character focused, which is important to us.

We also had the idea that geological reports for mining could be compiled in the same way, showing 2d "paper" representations of progress in the mines and so forth.  Sadly, not a lot of work has been done on the mining simulation yet, as we've been focusing on getting the economics and combat in a good state lately.

I'm not so sure that you should measure the paper solely by it's expected "effectiveness"  Don't get me wrong, you ARE correct, that in the absence of anything else, the paper would either be ignored or used to bypass other parts of the game.

But that's where !fun! and humor and lies could be mixed in to make the paper funny, misleading, tragic, or any number fo different things.  The paper could actually be used as a vehicle to help direct the actions of the colonists too...

Say over the period of a few days you have the following articles:
Day 1: You have the article about the awesome meat pies.
Day 1.5: Lots of citizens go eat the meat pies.
Day 2: A story about the baker making the meat pies from Edna's cousin Frank.
Day 2.5: The lawmen arrest the baker, and citizens storm the jail and hang them.
Day 3: Frank has been avenged by righteous justice!
Day 3.5 Frank comes back from a fishing trip.
Day 4: Paper prints a retraction of the Day 2 article

Interactions between guilty killers, angry meat pie lovers, the writer of the Frank story, and Frank himself.
**EDIT** Forgot to add interactions between the baker's relatives and all of the above.

If the paper is too accurate about terrible things, the people could go burn it down.
If it is too inaccurate, the people could go burn it down.

People could have addictions to reading the news.  Perhaps eldritch abominations might take a hand at the presses every now and then.


I could see newspapers being an awesome source of chaos.  "Destruction of the Warship Maine was the Work of an Enemy"

[SquatchHammer]

not using madness inducing fonts such as comic sans?

I dont know how its madness inducing, but hey I might be just mad to begin with.

Well Railroad Tycoon had a newspaper to tell the big events like there's a shortage of x item coming up, or there's been a boom in production.

As you look at the prices of said items, there will be variances of said goods prices from what the event the newspaper had stated. Also you could do something like the newspaper from Red Dead Redemption, where it tells the main story of what you've done along with other sort of stories that either you are involved or just fun stuff.

If you do go with the paper route, you could put wacky product ads in it that claim they do the miracle wonder thing or what have you.

Also making the printing press out of exotic woods and the certain metal alloy that makes the apocalypses come about, aka Ghostbusters first movie where the building's base structure was made out of metal alloy that was a paranormal superconductor, would be fun to have a random story generator slapped on to see some really weird shit going on.

*Inducing maddnesssss....*     

[Mech#4]

A weekly newspaper? Like giving an overview on how a colonies going as major headlines with subheadings outlining things like low food stocks, new resource discoveries or artefacts.

---THE SETTLER---

Today's Headline: New Colony on the Up and Up!
Senior Official Says: "I'm glad I sunk my fortune into this venture!"

Other News: Fish stocks getting low. Fisher regals reporter about the "One that got away".

New artefacts hooked up to news printing press. First print dated 2 months from now, major headline: "ThE ENd".
------

It'd be like... have you read "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett?

Edit: Like SquatchHammer said.

[Citizen Daniel]

I don't even know what's going on over here anymore.  This is more like our work day than you might suspect:

http://www.gaslampgames.com/2013/11/20/the-codebase-of-elemental-evil/

[Puzzlemaker]

I don't even know what's going on over here anymore.  This is more like our work day than you might suspect:

http://www.gaslampgames.com/2013/11/20/the-codebase-of-elemental-evil/

I will admit that made me laugh far harder then it should.  I should refer to all coding practices in terms of a tabletop game from now on.

[Sinlessmoon]

I don't even know what's going on over here anymore.  This is more like our work day than you might suspect:

http://www.gaslampgames.com/2013/11/20/the-codebase-of-elemental-evil/

Haha, oh boy. That was pretty great.

[Anvilfolk]

  Loved it!

[Mephansteras]

Oh, gods, that was amazing!!