Print

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

Me

16 (22.9%)

Me!

54 (77.1%)

Total Members Voted: 69

[Timeless Bob]

Perhaps, like grasshoppers/locusts, they respond to population/resource pressures instead, turning into "army ant" type swarms when a threshold population limit is breached.  Suddenly, aggression increases dramatically and the hives split/expand during this phase.  The majority of that generation dies violently, making way for new generations to inherit the new territories and begin the peaceful part of the cycle anew.  Come to think of it, humans do much the same thing... 

[Halfling]

Jihad just means "duty". The idea of it as "holy war" is a fairly recent one. But that aside, I don't see ants doing the whole "put the nonbelievers to the sword" thing.

Well... their description states their society is ruled by their religious devotion to the queen, hierarchy comes as naturally to them as breathing, it's commented, they have ultra-low liberalism as a species-wide personality trait, and they consider even their own kin completely expendable in pursuit of the interests of the queen as StL later described it. Allets are notorious for killing those who disobey in the slightest, in player reports. You might expect them to put unbelievers (in the Queen's divine authority) to the sword after all. Although more likely to kill them on the spot.

Nonetheless, the design and final word is StL's. If I include "songs of foreign cultures", I'll try to accommodate them to whatever the person who made it wants that culture to sing, of course.

[Timeless Bob]

That IS odd.  Even with Titans turned off, I'm still seeing the "Age of Myth" past year 500.  What flags determine this in vanilla DF, I wonder?

I've set the site cap to -1, but to keep my RAM from crying too hard, set pop cap to 1.  Doing this in Vanilla doesn't seem to hamper the civ from expanding organically during world-gen.  There are just far fewer "bit players" floating around (the histories become that much more of a heroic read.)

I'm going to turn off megabeasts and see if that affects anything...
Nope - even with Titans, megas and semi-megas turned off, we still get continual Age of Myth.  How very mysterious.

I'll let it run the full course this time, with only the various peoples of the world to contest it.

I let it run all last night as I was sleeping, and until 3PM this afternoon.  It crashed at year 9133... of the Age of Myth.  I'd say that more than likely, (if StLeibowitz is correct), that was the year the last free sentient was consumed by the halfling vampire hordes.

I'll try again tonight using the same seeds but to the year 9132 instead.  Hopefully, we will see the historic trends of each population as the millenia roll past.

[Halfling]

Looking forward to it. I personally expect formic vampires to be quite common because there's hordes of them in adventurer mode. So much that it at least used to be a little unusual to see a halfling vampire hiding in a lair.

Might also be the trolls producing lots of vampires. But probably not, since their numbers stay limited due to not only the population cap, but also getting killed by other trolls some 20-80 years after birth despite having the potential to live forever. The vampire would have to get out of there pretty fast before it's murdered.

Man-eaters are also relatively good at making more, probably due to being the only semimegabeast so there's lots of them to start with.

We'll know...

Maybe 8000 years would be enough if you want to be sure. Or even 5000.

[StLeibowitz]

Well... their description states their society is ruled by their religious devotion to the queen, hierarchy comes as naturally to them as breathing, it's commented, they have ultra-low liberalism as a species-wide personality trait, and they consider even their own kin completely expendable in pursuit of the interests of the queen as StL later described it. Allets are notorious for killing those who disobey in the slightest, in player reports. You might expect them to put unbelievers (in the Queen's divine authority) to the sword after all. Although more likely to kill them on the spot.

It's more when lesser Formics step out of line, not an expansionistic type of religious enforcement and spread like I think when I hear "jihad" (I admit my opinion of that word may be colored slightly by Dune). Members of the Hive that disobey the Queen or their superiors must die as an example and punishment, but outsiders are Outside the Hive and thus not subject to the same punishment, unless they try to harm the Hive in which case they become people-burgers for the nymphs. This also takes into account Formic bandits - they left the Hive, and thus so long as they stay out of the way mostly they won't be killed for their blasphemy.

For an Arab/Islamic equivalent, they enforce the death penalty for apostasy (from the Queen), but not for outsiders, and an apostate that runs away and stays out of the way isn't worth hunting down. Holy War in the name of the Queen, in the sense of a formal declaration of "we kill you now heathen" backed up by pointy metal things, isn't a main point of their culture, but I guess zealous steamrolling of obstacles of the Hive could be seen as a holy war in her name.

[WillowLuman]

More imperialism or nationalism, it seems.

[Xieg]

So, while prepping for my turn in the far flung future, I got to the topic of CREATURE_CLASS, and decided to take a walk through the RAWs accumulated so far to see what we have.  I like how easy it is to target specific groups of creatures thanks to the shear diversity of tags, and it's going to make the fun I have planned that much easier.

However, I'm noticing that we already have different tags that really define the same thing ie. FLYING and FLIER or REPTILE and LIZARD.  I see that as something that could only get worse as different people play at god, which may or may not lead to different kinds of fun.  Any complaints if I collect a list of current tags and stick it on one of the Wikis for easy reference for budding plague bearers?  Or has that already happened and I'm just blind.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

So, while prepping for my turn in the far flung future, I got to the topic of CREATURE_CLASS, and decided to take a walk through the RAWs accumulated so far to see what we have.  I like how easy it is to target specific groups of creatures thanks to the shear diversity of tags, and it's going to make the fun I have planned that much easier.

However, I'm noticing that we already have different tags that really define the same thing ie. FLYING and FLIER or REPTILE and LIZARD.  I see that as something that could only get worse as different people play at god, which may or may not lead to different kinds of fun.  Any complaints if I collect a list of current tags and stick it on one of the Wikis for easy reference for budding plague bearers?  Or has that already happened and I'm just blind.

Go for it on the shoutwiki.  It should prove useful.

[Putnam]

I've made a giant. It's basically a halfling, but 12 times as tall, giving it a body size of 70,000,000 cm³.

I've also made an element of order. It's much simpler in design, but also 12 times as tall, giving it a body size of 829,440,000 cm⁴.

EDIT: I've revised it from a tesseract to a 4-sphere. It is now 1,728,182,899 cm⁴, 8 times as tall as a halfling. Don't know how that made it bigger. Of course, now I need a material that exists in 4 dimensions.

EDIT 2: Eh, Lunanium works well enough.

[Timeless Bob]

I've often wondered whether wormholes were merely the surfaces of spinning 4-spheres or even rotating 4-toroids, but naturally there aren't many who can visualize these physics who are interested in discussing them with someone who has no bearing on their thesis papers or next books.  Ah well.

For a 3-brane material, how about an ice that sublimes into an explosion of gas when it is dug out called "dark matter"?  Basically, a strike of the pick pushes it into n-space rather than along any of it's 3-dimensional surfaces.  The sudden vacuum concussion blows the dwarf away slightly.  (It would make objects composed of dark matter quite rare, if not impossible)

[Halfling]

I'm reminded of Lugonu's abyss (Crawl) with these newest additions and ideas. A twisted, broken dimension that shifts and warps, full of paradoxes and malicious spatial vortices, with foul stars shining mutagenic radiation in the darkness, alien creatures from unknown realms, inscrutable globes of pure darkness at the edge if your vision, and even the black, shifting remains of once bright stars of the sky stalking you, trying to absorb.

Most people wouldn't want to live there

Read also the description for "Book of the Warp" from that game's wiki.

[WillowLuman]

So, while prepping for my turn in the far flung future, I got to the topic of CREATURE_CLASS, and decided to take a walk through the RAWs accumulated so far to see what we have.  I like how easy it is to target specific groups of creatures thanks to the shear diversity of tags, and it's going to make the fun I have planned that much easier.

However, I'm noticing that we already have different tags that really define the same thing ie. FLYING and FLIER or REPTILE and LIZARD.  I see that as something that could only get worse as different people play at god, which may or may not lead to different kinds of fun.  Any complaints if I collect a list of current tags and stick it on one of the Wikis for easy reference for budding plague bearers?  Or has that already happened and I'm just blind.

Feel free to change all instances of [CREATURE_CLASS:FLIER] to [CREATURE_CLASS:FLYING]. [FLIER] on its own is just a token that lets creatures fly, so make sure not to change that.

I think [CREATURE_CLASS:LIZARD] is a good addition to reptiles, so we can further distinguish between them, snakes, and dragons.

Which reminds me, I think the only vertebrate taxa not represented so far is fish. We've got mammalian people, dogs, and mamaphints; we've got reptilian lizards and dragons; we've got land and ocean birds; and I think there's salamanders somewhere.

[Xieg]

Alright, list is up on the shout wiki.  I believe I got them all.  You are right, we currently have no fish.  Also have no amphibians and a distinct lack of crustaceans.  Pretty sure the most common creature type is arthropod or cehpalopod.

[WillowLuman]

Crustaceans are arthropods. I was listing vertebrate taxa. As for invertebrates, we have no crustaceans (i think), no worms of any of the 4 kinds, no sponges, no cnidarians, etc. Animalia is very diverse.

But personally, I'd prefer if we didn't remake every extant genera. We could turn to extinct ones, like Hallucinogenia, or make up our own. I created "ocean birds", for instance, which are to normal birds kind of like what cetaceans are to ungulates (well, more like if an entire offshoot order evolved from penguins).

[Timeless Bob]

That IS odd.  Even with Titans turned off, I'm still seeing the "Age of Myth" past year 500.  What flags determine this in vanilla DF, I wonder?

I've set the site cap to -1, but to keep my RAM from crying too hard, set pop cap to 1.  Doing this in Vanilla doesn't seem to hamper the civ from expanding organically during world-gen.  There are just far fewer "bit players" floating around (the histories become that much more of a heroic read.)

I'm going to turn off megabeasts and see if that affects anything...
Nope - even with Titans, megas and semi-megas turned off, we still get continual Age of Myth.  How very mysterious.

I'll let it run the full course this time, with only the various peoples of the world to contest it.

I let it run all last night as I was sleeping, and until 3PM this afternoon.  It crashed at year 9133... of the Age of Myth.  I'd say that more than likely, (if StLeibowitz is correct), that was the year the last free sentient was consumed by the halfling vampire hordes.

I'll try again tonight using the same seeds but to the year 9132 instead.  Hopefully, we will see the historic trends of each population as the millenia roll past.

And here we go: 8,000 years of history using the "HugoLuman's bugfix pack for reemer30" game file.
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=8004