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Total Members Voted: 69

[The Urist]

Hmm... pale rider children are called ''halfling children''

[Dorsidwarf]

I just started up a new fortress, with the Formics - but I couldnt make any shovels. I spent the entire year deforesting and building overground houses, and was forced to steal all of the caravans stuff because i desperately needed the pick they were hanging on to.

[Halfling]

Meanwhile, this thing happened:

[StLeibowitz]

Oh, God, xenomorphs. Gentlehalflings, prepare thine throwing pebbles!

I just started up a new fortress, with the Formics - but I couldnt make any shovels. I spent the entire year deforesting and building overground houses, and was forced to steal all of the caravans stuff because i desperately needed the pick they were hanging on to.

Formics don't make shovels. They forge picks instead; find some metal to get new ones. On an ignorable playstyle note, formics are sort of antlike, so underground hives for them are justified

[Halfling]

Yes. I want to try out some new stuff, an entirely syndrome- and flesh-based economy. However...

Sadly I discovered on my own and then found out Meph had tried it earlier: while my queen can spawn-resurrect "friendly" creatures to join your fort, these won't actually be fortress members. So Xenomorph Fortress is kind of hard because the economy I'm planning on depends entirely on constantly having massive amounts of drones, because getting work done actively sacrifices them. As you can't actually control your larva that I was planning you would use workshops and "overlord" creatures to transform into drones, this is impossible.

However, apparently intelligent appropriate-creature offspring of friendlies will join your fort. So I'm thinking...

Queen spawns a very large "queen's court" of friendly female and male larva (it is recommended to keep them indoors) that give birth to drones in massive numbers. (drones can then be converted into resources, into "goo" on the map that hinders enemies, into more useful creatures that can do actual work, etc).

Anyone know that this wouldn't work?

[Meph]

Speak my name and I shall appear!

You can do that easily. Have your normal workers, larvae, male. Pop-ratio:999999. make a cheap workshop with a free reactions to transform one larva into the queen. Queen is female, has litter-size 10-20 (or whatever you like), only female in fort. Queen has interaction that targets all civ-members and gives a syndrome class that blocks the reaction to make a queen. That way you can only have one queen at a time. (i use this for my black/white mages).

You now have a breeding queen and a lot of larvae. Now make workshops that have reactions using truetransform to mutate these larvae into bigger, more interesting creatures. Maybe some breeders as well, female, littersize 1-5, or a immobile male caste that has a ranged material interaction.

You can also give larvae (or any other castes) a timed interaction that transforms them into a stronger version, so every year for 5 years or so they upgrade on their own.

All castes would have a pop-ratio of 1, except the larva. So (almost) all born creatures are larvae.

What do you think? Alien/Zerg Fortress coming up?

EDIT: Now that I wrote all this... you know what? I'll put that into my todo list as a playable race for Masterwork. The idea is too good to pass up, because the gameplay mechanics are fundamentally different from vanilla DF.

[Halfling]

We were thinking the same thing on a great many things, except I plan to have the larvas be both male and female because there should be literally hundreds of drones. Here's my outline from earlier:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Castes:
Queen - disables ability for others to turn into queens, spawns larva (split + resurrect) -> friendly larva
Larva - just chill there, give birth to drones
Drone - can do reactions that consume drone, can morph at evolution chamber
Overlord/Synapse - required to spawn higher level creatures, who die soon without one on the map
Broodling - minor warrior, consumes no resources, emergency unit
Swarmling - minor warrior, fast, consumes few resources, can learn skills (unlike others)
Tormentor - minor warrior, fast, consumes few resources, explodes in combat
Metamorph - middling warrior, consumes more resources
Viper - spits poison, consumes more resources
Ravager - massive warrior, consumes enormous amounts of resources
Despoiler - spell caster, consumes enormous amounts of resources

Worldgen mode:
1. "Rampaging xenomorph" civ consisting of the dangerous castes only
2. Siege enemies (ambush)
3. All creatures spread "goo" (1x/week) -> when walking over this, +10% speed for xenomorphs, -10% speed for others (removed by cleaning self which these creatures do automatically)
-> eventually terrain covered in purple creep

Fort mode:
"Friendly xenomorph" civ, drones at a ratio of 10000 to other castes
Entirely syndrome based economy:
Cannot dig, cannot chop wood
5 racial buildings: Hatchery, resorption pool, underground network, evolution chamber, creep spore

- Embark with drones
- Hatchery can be built from nothing, hatchery reaction: 1 drone -> queen
- Queen -> queen's court of larva that spawn drones
- Resorption pool can be built from nothing, pool reaction: drone -> 10 organic blocks + gas (kills drone)
- Underground network requires organic blocks, network reaction: drone -> 1 mineral/wood/silk of choice + gas (kills drone)
- Evolution chamber: drone -> other caste (including queen), consumes minerals and resources
- Creep spore: reaction to spread large amounts of goo

I may take up that timed interaction, except actually make it make higher tier creatures die after a while so you have to keep making new ones. I can't work on it right now (going somewhere in 10 minutes) but it shouldn't take that long and is pretty cool, so maybe this weekend.

Oh, megabonusfeature: "despoiler" (is there really a point to renaming these when it's so obvious they're zerg ) can convert civilized races into infested variants. Infested halfling... now should it explode or just have tentacles?

If you remember it was reported that friendly, uncontrollable larva that you would just have there in your queen's den could spawn civ members for you, which is more cool than just the queen being pregnant all the time and then once per year giving birth to 100 drones, but needs re-testing.

Mm...
Some extra notes:
- Could actually make the queen do a job at the hatchery to spawn more larva so you can control the number of offspring, so you don't get in a situation where you just have to kill stuff off to not drown in drones
- To make sure there's only one queen even if fancy tricks are used, if a syndrome-gas-transformation is used, could use the random number gen system of making them transform at a random time with PROBs and the first to transform disables the ability from others

[Meph]

Yeah, looks very zergy to me.

I dont quite know why you want to do creep... it only works if civ members walk barefoot on it, and I'd assume that they have some sort of clothing, even if it is called "chitinous plating" or something, because otherwise you get tantrums from "emberassed to be naked" thoughts. Even "creep covering" as clothing would work, with itemsyndrome it can get the speed bonus, and it degrades just like clothing, getting tattered and worn.

Dont know how feasable no diggin/no woodcutting is, because you have very little surface space, making hive/fortress design very difficult, and rather boring. In general I'd say that an underground hive would be very fitting, lore-wise... and of course they have access to vanilla DF buildings and reactions, no way to change that. But without access to the caverns and magma and candyland its quite a short game till you are maxed out.

I wouldnt make higher-tier units die after a while, I wouldnt like to play with it, but thats just personal preference.

And yes, I remember making units from this... I use it in MasterworkDF as well, look at the raws for "Broodmother". A drow pet, pop-ratio 1, gives birth to broodling, pop-ratio 100000, broodling has a secretion that affects itself with a transformation, transforms in the dwarven caste of slave, pop-ratio 1. They can do basic tasks, but they need to be a historical figure (killing something, making a masterwork or artefact) before you can make them nobles or put them in the military.

PS: Hundrets of throwaway drones causes tantruming. I made the kobolds in masterwork rely on throwaway military as well, and made them tantrum resistant. You can have a look at their personality values if you like. creature_kobold_camp.txt.

EDIT2: Oh, and have a look at the custom ZOMBIE creature in creature_masterwork.txt, it constantly emits stale blood. When they walk somewhere you have a bloodtrail following them... could be used for the creep... even if so many contaminants will hurt FPS afte a while.

[Halfling]

Posted from phone:

I should think surface only fort is a nice way to break from tradition. You have limitless organic blocks for building. Or embark on a cave. If you can just mine, why not play normally? But I guess could add an expensive short lived burrower

Covering the surface, trees and all in homogenous creep is just cool. I wasn't planning on having them wear much, just optional armor. Instead make them emotionless. Zerg shouldn't care about shoes.

[Meph]

True, NOEMOTION fixes that. Well, keep me updated.

[Halfling]

So far I have the queens working. They have wings, 6 insectoid legs extending from the abdomen, arms, hands, breasts, a humanoid face, 32 head tentacles and 32 eggs connected to the abdomen. The eggs are both upper and lower bodies themselves (necessitates NO_CONNECTIONS_FOR_MOVEMENT in creature for this to work(?)).

An egg connector between the eggs and abdomen is made of a material that vaporizes immediately. This needs to happen at significantly above room temperature, else the creature will consider everything too hot and you can't designate a meeting area, so queens need to be hotter than usual... hence the br

The eggs then splatter everywhere, and are animated. Despite being marked as "friendly", the animated living eggs are hostile. However, this step is necessary as the game won't resurrect something that hasn't been alive in fort mode, despite doing so in the arena just fine.

The queen and any others then must slaughter the animated eggs. Good thing they like that, else they would just run from their own eggs. After that, the queen resurrects them as friendly larva, that are actually friendly and living and everybody loves them. This appears to work and now I can move on to the rest.


larva are brown @, queen are large Z

"Larva larva" is a temporary designation

[laularukyrumo]

Hmm... pale rider children are called ''halfling children''

That is not good. Should be a laughably easy fix though. I'll throw that in with the other updates I have eventually planned. Such as making Iridium and Oxyline slightly less ludicrously rare. :x That was kind of disappointing that I never once ever encountered them.

I'm also pretty sure that, while I REALLY support the idea for the Gnomes, they won't actually work. Creatures can't escape from non-artifact cages, because of bugged games. So unless you have some kind of MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMAGIC solution, I don't think that can happen.

I also need to decide on what I'm going to do for my megabeast. Hmm....

[StLeibowitz]

So, the life cycle of xenomorphs involves the brutal murder and subsequent reanimation of their eggs?

Additionally, from that description of their bodies, I conclude that they are probably scarier than spider-centaurs. I'm envisioning a porcelain-doll-like face surrounded by rows of bloody tentacles, on the end of a somewhat wormlike, slightly humanoid body...

Damn you for giving me a fanart idea when I already have no time 

[Halfling]

Correct. Also, the queen spreads copious amounts of blood everywhere when giving birth. Also, my original intention was that the animated eggs would bleed to death immediately, but that turned out to not work so well.

I'll also add an eye glow to the queen (so her eyes glow in perfect dark). But yes, they're supposed to be sort of humanoid and have some recognizable parts including the face. It'll be up to the interpreter whether they are actual transformed humanoids of this world, a product of parallel evolution, or completely alien beings with an eerie form.

The other evolved forms will have 8-12 limbs, often several arms with claws or just blade arms, often wings, several pairs (if I'm not too lazy, making those functional is an upgrade you can buy), a tentacled mouth, large fangs or mandibles depending on the creature, head crests and segmented armor occasionally... but no humanoid features.

[Baffler]

Oh God, and I thought the elves were screwed up! I don't care how dangerous their retaliation might be, the caravans the Zerg send will be killed by my terrified halflings. With fireballs or those defensive gases, preferably. As will their invaders. And diplomats.

I heartily approve of their inclusion, of course, but still. Terrifying.