Who wouldn't be? That's not something you settle for, that's something you aspire to... especially the ‼sky‼.
Haha, yes, I agree. Disaster and dwarven ambition are pretty much synonymous. I suppose the difference is the player's intention. Did the player intend to set the sky on fire or not?
Either way, the result is awesome. So that's the keystone of anything I'd suggest for implementation.
You do know dwarfs have drained the oceans to more easily engage in deep-sea fishing, and emptied them into the caverns or hell just for shits and giggles, right?
Hahaha, yes, I did know this actually. I must have forgotten my place.
It would be great if these things were expanded upon in terms of mechanics. What exactly happens to a biome when its ocean is drained? I'd like to see the biomes of spans of land transform under the duress of dwarven ingenuity. So for instance, drained ocean tiles becoming salt flats, the tremendous humidity of the ocean evaporating causing nearby forest areas to transform into swampy marshy jungle land. Noxious steam clouds. Stuff like that -- guess it would depend on how exactly the ocean was drained. It would definitely make the game feel tremendously dynamic. I could see dwarven terraforming plans becoming an embarkation standard.
Many of your statements are fairly metaphoric and abstract, so I don't quite get what that would exactly entail to actually critique it.
Yeah, I guess I don't much care about suggesting ways to implement hard logic or anything. Although you spoke about some pretty hard mechanical truths of the game pretty brilliantly in your thread,
It's not like we're going to have control of the numbers or the logic. Strictly brass tacks: all we really have the capability to shape is an idea or maybe the spark of one we didn't anticipate.
I've suggested some things that have been implemented in games (well, plenty of shit that hasn't, too.) In my experience, the ideas for the exact mechanics typically get thrown out the window, the developers extract the essence of whats good and fun about what thought you put forward, and then they make it happen sensibly since they're the ones that have to deal with the circumstances of the way the program is engineered.
We drain the oceans for shits and giggles now because that's something clearly deviant from what we're supposed to be capable of, but when you make it normal, then it loses all the appeal.
Well, just for the sake of the argument.. Say you're not supposed to be capable of digging past the magma sea. Then you find a way to do it, but there's nothing special there. Dev sees the player doing it, thinks about this. Instead of removing the way to dig past the magma sea, he build a circus at the bottom.
Digging to the bottom didn't lose appeal -- actually, it became a core piece of the identity of the game.
Or take like Missingno from pokemon. What if, instead of removing it, they took what was so appealing about getting this weird bizarre buggy pokemon, built a bit of lore around it, got rid of the fact that it corrupted your save file, and then left it as this totally wierd tangential part of the game? That would still be pretty damn cool.. especially if it was as immersive an experience as the main quest objectives.
More to write, I know, but gotta run for now.. Next time I have a minute I'll come up with something more concrete.. just as food for thought, though, really.