Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[misko27]

Sounds like you're going to have to whip out the old perpetual-motion engines: HFS-powered hamster wheels.

I must sig this. The mental image is too funny.

[Hanslanda]

Right, so I'd finally gotten a huge orchard set up. All kinds of fruits and stuff, all planted and tended so that the harvests were staggered all year. Then I downloaded the latest update, and updated my save game for it.
A few months into playing, and a few of my apple trees are dying. Shit, well, that's okay. I loo'k' at them, and it says, "Diseased". Hmm. Wierd. Must be the new update. Anyway, I keep playing, and figure that the rest of the apple trees will die, but I've got a ton of different fruit trees.
Another few months pass, and all the apple trees are dead. I sigh, and write it off. Another month passes, and an orange tree is dying. Well, shit.
Then I read the update.

"...also I added some randomly generated diseases, some of which can get pretty nasty. Some of them continue to randomly generate to simulate evolution, and some just stay the same and are treatable. It's pretty neat, but during testing, I got an outbreak of what I call, "Spinal Flu" that left my whole fortress parapalegic, then started killed all my livestock..."

Shit. Well, at least it's just the fruit trees. A year passes, and my whole orchard is dead. My orchard tenders have gone insane from watching their trees die.
And then I see something horrifying. The lead treetender has 'Diseased'. I check his description. Dear god, it's eating his skin and bones, but nothing else.
And it spreads like wildfire. But the tantrum spiral spreads faster. As dorfs start dying, people start flipping out, breaking things, rioting, looting, murdering each other. Finally, all I have left is the mayor and several of his bodyguards, locked hermetically on the other side of a several squares thick granite wall, and a couple plague victims slowly dying.
The final plague victim, before he dies, crawls into the air vent network right outside the Mayor's safe room, and starts breaking the air filters...

Your fortress has crumbled to its end.

[Mel_Vixen]

I am surprised how few of you go with (geo)-thermoelectrics. Getting the cooper and nickel-rods in the early days of electrics (started for in 1243 with a scientifc-mood) was luckely rather easy as the neigboring dwarfes traded this for spices, dyes and aluminium. I started out with the heat form my Kilns and Forges after which i upgraded to magma-thermal. 

I have now a small aluminium-smelter for my imported bauxit (funding a mine half a continent away was a good choice afterall!) so i undercut the market-price somewhat and i finaly got my entire fortress and the Hill dwarfes wired up with Underground-cables.

[tomio175]

Sounds like you're going to have to whip out the old perpetual-motion engines: HFS-powered hamster wheels.

I must sig this. The mental image is too funny.

I agree. Sigging!

[Doodooist]

Sounds like you're going to have to whip out the old perpetual-motion engines: HFS-powered hamster wheels.

I tried that a week ago,  but all my &'s didn't want to move those hamster wheels. They just sit inside and throw curses at my dwarves. And one of them started to write a book (He is using his regenerating skin as paper and his blood as ink. I looked at some pages, and it's just "durpa durpa durpa" and drawings of cheese everywhere, wtf is he doing?)

Obviously they figured out that I am trying to use them as an energy source, so I have to choose less brainy clowns next time, or something.

[Draco18s]

I agree. Sigging!

You might want to fix the closing quote tag.

[Mel_Vixen]

Sounds like you're going to have to whip out the old perpetual-motion engines: HFS-powered hamster wheels.

I tried that a week ago,  but all my &'s didn't want to move those hamster wheels. They just sit inside and throw curses at my dwarves. And one of them started to write a book (He is using his regenerating skin as paper and his blood as ink. I looked at some pages, and it's just "durpa durpa durpa" and drawings of cheese everywhere, wtf is he doing?)

Obviously they figured out that I am trying to use them as an energy source, so I have to choose less brainy clowns next time, or something.

Shambler the big Zs and husks work fine. Just rig up a goat in front of them. Undead slave camps arent as powerfull as before if you dont have a necromantic artefact to sustain them outside "necrotic" / "dead"-biomes (they fall apart and decay after a time) but they work fairly well.

[optimusjamie]

Guys, my dwarves are threatening my Steam library. What do I do?

-----

Right, my adventurer is about to ascend to godhood. What's the most OP thing to be goddess of?

-----

Some smartarse Urist has uploaded a virus to the humans' computers. No, wait, that's MY computer!

-----

My dwarves have just discovered gunpowder. How do I stop them from  blowing up the world?

-----

Ok, the HFS is getting really- OH MY GOD ONE OF THEM'S ARMOK.

[Buggy]

So I set the preferences variable a little high for my new world gen, and wouldn't you know it, my dwarves like fish more than beer.  Really!  I thought that was set in stone, but I guess it's that one in a million chance, huh?

It's kind of roundabout though, but this lead to my dwarves' population capping at ~10,000 after 2350.  You see, all of their civs built coastal towns for easy access to the delicious fish.  Most of them had a below sea level cave, which they would flood and drain to collect masses of seafood.  A neat system, but I had to go in as an adventurer and hang out for a while to see what was really going on.

It turned out that the cave was not built by the dwarves, but by the merfolk civ that lived along the continental shelf.  The dwarves had been merely choosing the ready made caves as a starting point for their own sites.  (I even found one being dug out by the merfolk, but had to make a hasty retreat; my adventurer's right leg has an inner and outer scar now from a thrown trident.  Every few years, the merfolk would pull a hidden lever and flood the cave while the dwarves were gathering fish.  Then they would dart in and pull the drowning dwarves out before the rest of the dwarves would catch on.

So, can anyone here tell me why the merfolk are so fond of Dwarf Bone Crafts?   

[Imp]

So I set the preferences variable a little high for my new world gen, and wouldn't you know it, my dwarves like fish more than beer.  Really!  I thought that was set in stone, but I guess it's that one in a million chance, huh?

It's kind of roundabout though, but this lead to my dwarves' population capping at ~10,000 after 2350.  You see, all of their civs built coastal towns for easy access to the delicious fish.  Most of them had a below sea level cave, which they would flood and drain to collect masses of seafood.  A neat system, but I had to go in as an adventurer and hang out for a while to see what was really going on.

It turned out that the cave was not built by the dwarves, but by the merfolk civ that lived along the continental shelf.  The dwarves had been merely choosing the ready made caves as a starting point for their own sites.  (I even found one being dug out by the merfolk, but had to make a hasty retreat; my adventurer's right leg has an inner and outer scar now from a thrown trident.  Every few years, the merfolk would pull a hidden lever and flood the cave while the dwarves were gathering fish.  Then they would dart in and pull the drowning dwarves out before the rest of the dwarves would catch on.

So, can anyone here tell me why the merfolk are so fond of Dwarf Bone Crafts?

Ahh, now this is my cake and my cup of tea.  I so hope your version reflects our eventual shared reality!

[Pyro627]

I'm still messing around with that custom race of mine; the one with hereditary skill memories. It gives them awesome base skills after a few generations, since they remember all the combined skill of their ancestors.

I finally managed to get them stable, a bit more so than kobolds, during woldgen, (no more dying out anticlimactically) so now I can focus on tweaking their social and cultural structures from the human baseline I copied.

It's been going pretty well, and I managed to get really close to my goal of having them favor longevity and building their structures to last; in some of my test worlds, their abandoned cities are the number one source of beast lairs and sealed-away ancient evils, which I'm really proud of.

I've also managed to get the intended non-hierarchical profession-based caste system working, (that's where they breed into socially isolated lineages of different kinds of craftsmen) but this has caused two problems I can't seem to circumvent:

First, they always stay with the same few castes they get early on; I'll have carpenters and stonemasons, but they just refuse to form new castes as new technologies develop, (since the children always end up doing what their parents did because they're insanely good at it from birth) and usually end up being curbstomped by civs with decent tech. I've tried making 'research' castes that are supposed to develop new stuff and bud off into new lines as necessary, but they always just turn into a caste of whatever technology they invent first, usually firearm operation. (not production, which makes them all but useless) This is driving me crazy, because if I give them even one of the advanced technologies from the start, they do it insanely well regardless of what it is, and usually conquer the world with it; if I could just make them design the stuff themselves they'd be amazing.

Second, if the castes get too large, one of them invariably tries to establish itself as the ruling class and causes a massive inter-caste civil war, which is why I'm using non-hierarchical castes to begin with. The military castes almost invariably win these and then kill the families of the other group's warriors, (they do that because of the lineal skill thing, it's pretty neat when it works) which since the castes are essentially just really big extended families is basically a genocide. So then the military, which can't make anything, just runs around desperately raiding nearby settlements for weapons and eventually starving to death.

Anyone have any ideas for how to fix this?

[My Name is Immaterial]

I'm still messing around with that custom race of mine; the one with hereditary skill memories. It gives them awesome base skills after a few generations, since they remember all the combined skill of their ancestors.

I finally managed to get them stable, a bit more so than kobolds, during woldgen, (no more dying out anticlimactically) so now I can focus on tweaking their social and cultural structures from the human baseline I copied.

It's been going pretty well, and I managed to get really close to my goal of having them favor longevity and building their structures to last; in some of my test worlds, their abandoned cities are the number one source of beast lairs and sealed-away ancient evils, which I'm really proud of.

I've also managed to get the intended non-hierarchical profession-based caste system working, (that's where they breed into socially isolated lineages of different kinds of craftsmen) but this has caused two problems I can't seem to circumvent:

First, they always stay with the same few castes they get early on; I'll have carpenters and stonemasons, but they just refuse to form new castes as new technologies develop, (since the children always end up doing what their parents did because they're insanely good at it from birth) and usually end up being curbstomped by civs with decent tech. I've tried making 'research' castes that are supposed to develop new stuff and bud off into new lines as necessary, but they always just turn into a caste of whatever technology they invent first, usually firearm operation. (not production, which makes them all but useless) This is driving me crazy, because if I give them even one of the advanced technologies from the start, they do it insanely well regardless of what it is, and usually conquer the world with it; if I could just make them design the stuff themselves they'd be amazing.

Second, if the castes get too large, one of them invariably tries to establish itself as the ruling class and causes a massive inter-caste civil war, which is why I'm using non-hierarchical castes to begin with. The military castes almost invariably win these and then kill the families of the other group's warriors, (they do that because of the lineal skill thing, it's pretty neat when it works) which since the castes are essentially just really big extended families is basically a genocide. So then the military, which can't make anything, just runs around desperately raiding nearby settlements for weapons and eventually starving to death.

Anyone have any ideas for how to fix this?

Have you tried teenage rebellion? That should get the descendants to branch off into other careers. It might take a while to find the right value to have it set at, as you want there to be this effect, but not for it to be too strong. Lower, in this case, is better. Note that this is more pronounced when you have an internet or cellphone analogue.

[Imp]

Have you tried teenage rebellion? That should get the descendants to branch off into other careers. It might take a while to find the right value to have it set at, as you want there to be this effect, but not for it to be too strong. Lower, in this case, is better. Note that this is more pronounced when you have an internet or cellphone analogue.

Are you allowing interspecies and intraspecies slave trading?  Your description of how your race is reacting to a ruling class of their own species sounds like your settings are at least moderately against that.

Changing them to tolerate slaves of other species as well as viewing some of their own as slaves too might help your goals for them in two ways.

Some of the slaves your species takes are likely to have some of the absent skillsets, maybe enough to lessen the overall cultural imbalance during the earliest years and allow for more time before your race gets totally overwhelmed by the others.

More importantly, as the other species gain slaves of yours, some of these will be forced to gain new skills and normal inheritance patterns should assist in the retention of at least a few of these skill sets.  If your race accepts slave trading, and is willing to consider their own race as slaves (this is important to ensure that these slaves are purchased back into their parent culture), then periodically some of those should return to the general genepool and over time may fix many of the deficiencies.

[Jarlaxle212]

Bay12 Forum Topic in 2050: "Is it just more or..."

...Was this game created by an ancient being twisted into a humanoid form? I mean this 'man' the Toady One has created a program single handedly that simulates an entire fantastic universe full of strange beings each of which is so high on the Turner scale that their considered sentient beings all in there own and deleting a save has been made illegal by the Galactic Association Of Nations as being inhumane (they must be run by elves)....Also why is does this game still have Ascii graphics while the rest of the universe is using realtime full immersion augmented reality suits for their games...

[hops]

DefilerTempest
Playerlogs from 2100

Inspired by this thread.

So yeah, imagine what sort of crazy mishaps the players of the future will come up with?
---
"Haha, I'm close trading allies with the martian dwarves, according to their '[Treaty of -unintelligable-]', I should be able to keep them happy by supplying them with magma, then they'll send me superconductors. Later a new Sun appeared, but after quick examination it seemed those guys flooded their planet with magma. I bet they're still alive hiding in bunkers."