I'm not sure why a forced (optional would be my guess) Ragnarok would override anyone's story any more than other planned or existing features. If Toady decides the base game will have a certain type of cosmos won't that always override someone wanting to tell a story in a world with a different one? It could also lead to some interesting stories set in the end of days (depending on how they work).
Well you can ignore game elements that interrupt your story for the most part - want to ignore the goblin siege that you let just fill up your massive corridor of cage traps in your story because you're talking about the massive infinity engine you're building or something, and that's fine.
Ragnarok ends your game. You can't tell a story around it. It renders everything else you were doing moot.
Again, I'm always arguing for things that some people won't like, but something I think most people will like when they have it.
The farming thread is something most people won't like just looking at because of the sheer length of the thread and perceived complexity, but something I worked hard to try to make something I think most people would happily incorporate into the underlying story of their games when they get used to it, since it works to streamline the whole process of the complex assembly of components into something where you, as a player, just command the output.
(That is, you can ask for strawberries to be planted in a farm, and the game tells you, functionally, "In order for strawberries to grow there, they will need 20 strawberry seeds (you have 30), 5 units of potash (you have 8), 15 units of bonemeal (you have 10), and dwarves will need to make 80 trips watering the farm. It will take 4 months. Is this acceptable? Yes/No." The concept is to put a simple interface over a complex backend, so that people won't be as overwhelmed as they think they will be.)
Comparatively, I think this is one of those things many people who say that they want random magic would not like it when they actually got it. A wizard that blows up your fort occasionally doesn't make the game feel "thrilling" and "unpredictable", it just feels like you got cheated out of playing the rest of your game because a little text box pops up and says that your fort is now abandoned.
Further, people are always going to be gaming this system, and that means that all you're doing by introducing such massively interruptive events is to massively encourage save-scumming.
This applies especially so to "artifact technology advancements" - you
know players are always going to keep re-engineering their environments to try to get "everything" in a single fort. They want waterfalls and sand and clay and chasms and magma and HFS in every fort they start. (Toady even rearranged the game to allow for HFS and magma in every fort...) They will gen a hundred worlds to find one with the specific geographic features they want. (Your sig, incidentally, has a link to a guide for creating specific geographic features...)
So... how many people do you think are going to be content to let their moods get "wasted" on another granite flute when they could be inventing trebuchets with that mood?
When you make the only "skill" it takes to play the game the patience to re-roll everything until it comes out in your favor, it's really going to make the game just a contest of the patience and stubbornness of those players who want to get "perfect" things... and then they'll get tired of it and quit the game entirely, because they aren't having that much fun with it. People don't like save scumming not just because it's "cheating", people don't do it because it's just plain not fun and takes you out of the game.
SirHoneyBadger's methodology of creating a "you can't have everything" system, meanwhile, is at least a player choice through-and-through. You just choose whether you want to spend some ridiculously long period of time setting up the process for building something that has the extra +1. It's at least the player's deliberate choice whether to go for that "technology improvement" or not. People are much more likely to just say from the outset that the Infinity +1 sword isn't worth the effort and stick to the Infinity -1 sword and stay happy with it.
(And while I meant to say it this way in the previous time I mentioned your mods, Badger, what I was trying to say was that the difference I perceive between what you are doing and what I try to do is that I tend to focus on the forest and blur over the trees as only important in how they contribute to the forest, while you (and Toady, for that matter) tend to go into depth on the trees while leaving the forest to sort itself out. I'm not interested in Improved Farming in making an exactly accurate farming sim so much as representing the meaning behind the carbon and nitrogen cycles in a non-micromanagey way. Meanwhile, your mod seems to be more intent upon watching the ant farm - seeing each and every tiny step that has to happen along the way to achieving some goal, like tracing back the production path of the grip on the greatsword.)
Hence, I keep pointing back to this idea of "you build up the invisible technology bar simply by having a lot of people working at a single job". If you make the technology leaps in metallurgy become a side-effect of just plain smelting a lot of steel and cooking a lot of charcoal, and thereby learning how to build a more efficient wood burner, and produce higher-quality charcoal, and therefore learn how to produce a more pure steel, then it's something that you're totally in charge of seeing done. You're responsible for choosing to do it or not. (It also doesn't have to involve anything too complex on a player's part - just "level up" your whole fort by doing that job a whole lot, the same way that you "level up" your individual smiths by having them constantly working.)
Compared to getting it out of a lucky random roll, you neither have save scumming (it wouldn't help, anyway) nor feeling cheated - you have an ownership over the outcome, good or bad. (This is why being able to build your own fort as a whole is so rewarding - you have ownership over its outcome as a whole because you were involved in all of its design.)
What this could mean (since I hate the notion of "upgrade" buttons that require manual pushing, that's what kills Majesty) would be dwarves just suddenly deciding to upgrade a workshop on their own, and having it possible for them to do it without your input when they understand how. Then, upgraded workshops might do that thing where each job completed produces more than one of a product, or have other advantages like enabling a previously unavailable reaction. (There might be some basic form of a magma workshop where you can't use magma kilns for clay firing or other specific, more delicate calibration of the heat of magma until you've used the basic magma furnaces for a while to "work out the kinks" unless you start from a civ with magma-working tech. Then you might work your way up to magma kitchens or something when you have a very refined idea of how to control how much of magma's heat you let into your ovens.)
I still like the old idea I had about porcelain firing, however, where you had to actually build a powered mechanism to the workshop in order to have an automatically-turning air pump that could stoke a hotter flame and significantly more fuel in order to have a porcelain-firing kiln actually work. (And have a reaction where you could fire more than one item at a time...)
Hence, you have advanced workshops or branching workshop types that aren't available at first until someone has worked out the kinks at the more basic workshops, and the ideas on how to improve the workshop don't come about until you've used the basic workshop enough times.
If you'll forgive me being contrarian to my own idea for a little longer, however, I do also oppose an over-reliance upon too many tech upgrades within just the workshop itself. Almost all of the most interesting emergent behaviors of DF occur because of the Spatial aspects of the game - when every system is playing in the same virtual physical space as all the other systems, the sheer permutations of the different systems that might collide creates very unexpected events. When you confine things to invisible progress bars, however, things become stratified, and you can't advance those progress bars without doing those explicit, pre-planned things.
Hence, I still think there's something to be said for just making technology understanding how to put together a pump stack from multiple individual pumps, while the actual progress bar technology takes place with worldgen cities that don't have the capacity to come into the game with foreknowledge like a player does.
That is, as long as someone doesn't come up with some way to include a means of representing the technological leap of finding a way to tie that pressure gauge to that lever in a spacial way for players to be able to have technological progress that can be seen spacially...
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Topic: Working through Medieval stasis (Read 31640 times)