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[Walkaboutout]

So, my own little personal mod consists of breaking the Dragon megabeast into three subspecies of dragon instead. I've played with their skill levels a little (upped them a bit), given them wings, made them fliers, added child tags, and tweaked size. Speaking of which, I'd love to give them the Can Learn token, but the fact that this has additional affects beyond allowing skill learning (ethics, etc.) has kept me from going that route.

Anyways, the point of my post. I'd now like to harden up their scales a little bit, but I'm not 100% sure about how to go about that. Is it a change that I can make that would relate to all creatures with scales everywhere? Can I adjust it just for the dragons? Looking at the raws, seems like I have full control over the dragons themselves but I'm not sure. My thought was to make their scales as hard or strong as, perhaps, iron, or maybe steel. If I make it all work out I've even considered the thought of making custom reactions to allow for say, scale armor, but that's way down the road.

So, any advice on what numbers would best emulate making their scales more like iron or steel?

[Uristsonsonson]

Sounds cool. Kinda like a draconic Fear the Night mod. Are you including Cave Dragons too?

[golemgunk]

I think all you have to do is make your own scale material template and replace the one under the dragon's USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE token. the info in the material templates is the same as what's in the inorganic raws, so you can easily copy/paste from whatever metal tokens and tweak it however you want.

[Zammer990]

Code: [Select]

[SELECT_MATERIAL:SCALE]
[PLUS_MATERIAL:BONE]
[PLUS_MATERIAL:CLAW]
[IMPACT_YIELD:400500]
[IMPACT_FRACTURE:1200000]
[IMPACT_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:250]
[COMPRESSIVE_YIELD:450500]
[COMPRESSIVE_FRACTURE:1200000]
[COMPRESSIVE_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:250]
[TENSILE_YIELD:200000]
[TENSILE_FRACTURE:350000]
[TENSILE_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:50]
[TORSION_YIELD:200000]
[TORSION_FRACTURE:350000]
[TORSION_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:50]
[SHEAR_YIELD:200000]
[SHEAR_FRACTURE:310000]
[SHEAR_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:50]
[BENDING_YIELD:200000]
[BENDING_FRACTURE:350000]
[BENDING_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:50]
[MAX_EDGE:15000]
[SELECT_MATERIAL:ALL]
[MULTIPLY_VALUE:50]
[COLDDAM_POINT:NONE]
[HEATDAM_POINT:NONE]
[IGNITE_POINT:NONE]
[IF_EXISTS_SET_MELTING_POINT:55000]
[IF_EXISTS_SET_BOILING_POINT:57000]
[SPEC_HEAT:30000]
[SELECT_TISSUE_LAYER:BY_CATEGORY:ALL]
[TL_HEALING_RATE:1]
[SELECT_TISSUE_LAYER:BY_CATEGORY:SCALE]
[TL_RELATIVE_THICKNESS:50]
Put that into the dragon RAWs and you have an iron proof, steel resistant dragon. 50x multiplier for value might be a bit much, but this dragon can bite or scratch limbs off of a steel armoured dwarf, so they're not easy to beat

As a side not, if you're not using the "broken arrow" mod or some other arrow nerf, this dragon will still fall to copper or silver bolts, but if you have the mod, it'll have iron bolts glance off or bruise it.

[Walkaboutout]

Wow Zammer, thanks a ton! Definitely more than I bargained for when I asked my question. I appreciate it a ton! Thank you also Twenty, I was thinking that was probably all I had to do but I hadn't gotten a chance to inspect the raws closely enough for tissue and materials of that nature to know for sure. I'll give the above raw a shot and see if that works. Sounds like two ways it can be done then; either by defining it on the dragon raw itself, as Zammer has done there, or by altering the tissue template with a new one called Dragon_Scale to use on them, in place of standard Scale tokens. If I had like 9 million new creatures I suppose that would be much easier, but at the moment we're only talking about 5 or 6 in total. Plus, copy and paste is always easy .

Yep Urist, I'm including cave dragons in this too. So far I have three subspecies of dragon, a fourth one that is sort of a twisted experiment dragon who can't be tamed, trapped, or bred (they're basically there to cause you invasion trouble, like a Titan or something would), the cave dragons, hydras, and I tweaked rocs around a little bit too with a couple feather colors and some growth tweaks. Most of the growth tweaks consist of making it take around 3 to 5 years for a baby to mature because breeding these guys if you manage to capture a breeding pair confers so much advantage to your dorfs and all. I use Ironhand's graphics set and I even managed to make a couple seperate colors for the different species of dragon out of the dragon icons available. Hardly a professional job but I thought it was good for a rank amatuer haha. Just my own little take on things, turned into a mod, is all .

[Zammer990]

Are you going to try and balance the megabeasts, or just improve hydras, dragons and rocs?

[Walkaboutout]

For now I was just playing around with the dragons, hydras and rocs. That said, it has definitely occurred to me that if I can get them working satisfactorily in both a difficulty, and usefullness to your dorfs if captured sort of way (PLUS not ending up with them being just overpowered in one aspect, which may be impossible from those two standpoints), then I would like to go through and make changes to the other megabeasts to improve them, and perhaps keep them in line with the above groups. I suppose that would be far easier on creatures I'm not thinking to make capturable and breedable, because then the only factor is how terrible a number they do on the player when they show up on the map to torment you.

[Walkaboutout]

(EDIT: What I said about bones in the first paragraph may be incorrect. I may need to define the TOOTH material rather than the BONE material in order to upgrade their bite in line with their claws?)

So, a thought occurred to me. As a side effect of redefining the material properties of their scales, claws and bones (bones is done of course so that their bite, for example, carries the same cutting power and material properties as their claws do and would be as durable as their scales, which is to say a strong metal-like material at that point)...those properties carry over to those materials when butchered right? So bone armor, made of the bones as defined above, would be bone armor with properties equivalent to a metal with those stats too right (scale would make more sense, but that's something for the future)? I'm totally okay with this side effect by the way. I mean, why the heck not, right?

Also, should an edged weapon artifact be made from the bone, say an artifact dragon bone spear, it would also use the edge number listed above right? 15000 is better than the 10000 edge most all metals except addy has, so it would be a superior weapon right? Again, totally okay with that, especially because bone weapons would only be artifacts. Super neat, if you ask me .

Now, considering the fact that bone weight wasn't altered, it would also be...relatively light I guess right? Is all bone weighed in at the same weight, or does it get determined by the creature I wonder? I think it's probably all just the same weight per bone piece but I'm not sure, as I've never thought about it at all. Anyways. Very interesting results from defining those properties on these upgraded dragons, assuming of course the butchered materials retain those defined numbers.

In Summary:
Question 1: What happens to the material properties of items from butchering these creatures, particularly their bones? The bones retain the defined property characteristics right?
Question 2: When upgrading bites, would they take their characteristics from the BONE definition, or from the TOOTH definition? (does DF know that the teeth are made from bone?)

[MODcrazy]

Well I (I) do not know about the tooth/bone stuff, but i think, if I am not wrong, that, adding the raw file chunk from above ONLY changes the properties of the materials you get from butchering, NOT the materials of the dragon itself. I could, however, be very WRONG.
(To change the material of the dragon I think you have to use [SELECT_TISSUE:EXAMPLETISSUE])

[Zammer990]

My addition does indeed alter the dragon's living abilities.
Teeth use a different material than bone, so to alter that as well you need [PLUS_MATERIAL:TOOTH]
Weapons and armour should be between steel and iron, and very light. I haven't tested this yet though. Additionally if you made the bones very heavy it would make the claw strikes throw opponents very far.

[Deon]

So, my own little personal mod consists of breaking the Dragon megabeast into three subspecies of dragon instead. I've played with their skill levels a little (upped them a bit), given them wings, made them fliers, added child tags, and tweaked size. Speaking of which, I'd love to give them the Can Learn token, but the fact that this has additional affects beyond allowing skill learning (ethics, etc.) has kept me from going that route.

Anyways, the point of my post. I'd now like to harden up their scales a little bit, but I'm not 100% sure about how to go about that. Is it a change that I can make that would relate to all creatures with scales everywhere? Can I adjust it just for the dragons? Looking at the raws, seems like I have full control over the dragons themselves but I'm not sure. My thought was to make their scales as hard or strong as, perhaps, iron, or maybe steel. If I make it all work out I've even considered the thought of making custom reactions to allow for say, scale armor, but that's way down the road.

So, any advice on what numbers would best emulate making their scales more like iron or steel?

What stops you from making them CAN_LEARN and POWER? In Genesis dragons are split in colors and serve as demigods, and they write books about secrets which is pretty dope. If you mean "cannot butcher sentients", then just go my route and make them drop a "dragon carcass" item which can be butchered into components.

[Walkaboutout]

Thank you all again for the continued input. It's very helpful to my understanding of tokens available and their possible usages. At the moment I've decided to define tooth and claw material separately from bone and scale. I did this because dragons vs. dwarves (depending on what your dwarves were equipped with of course) was working as desired overall.

However, when dragons got to fighting dragons, it ended up being quite the marathon of combat. Essentially they would bruise, dent and fracture (just scales, not bone) each other all day long (except for toes; toes were susceptible to destruction). While at first I thought it was awesome that it resulted in such epic long combat, I eventually decided it was a bit silly. Really the only way they would kill each other was by latching on, and shaking. Shakes would result in non-superficial wounds and eventually one would kill the other (or if one managed to choke hold and strangle the other, LOL).

My solution was to define tooth and claw as slightly better in property and statistics than bone and scale. So they have steel-like bone and scale, but just barely better tooth and claw material, which resulted in them once again being able to rip each other to shreds. They pretty much maintained the same combat power against smaller creatures, like our dwarves, without issue.

As for the can_learn tag Deon, you're right. I didn't like the loss of butcherable resources from a dragon that was slain. I didn't want to edit, change, or remove ethics on the civs either. That said, it never occurred to me to drop a special item that mimics a butcherable corpse (much in the style that a bronze colossus drops a masterwork statue for a corpse of course). Brilliant idea! If I get that part right, then my dragons will be capable of learning and training skills up, the way I had initially wanted them to be able to. There's drawbacks off the top of my head, such as the corpse not corresponding exactly to the size of the creature, etc, but perhaps there's ways around that too?

As for the power tag, if I get can_learn in there, yeah, I would probably add that in too for the added shenanigans of dragons potentially taking over a civ and all. Would be neat. Thanks again all!

[Zammer990]

dragon leads a siege
breathes fire
1/3 of the siege is dead from fire or lack of shield

[Walkaboutout]

dragon leads a siege
breathes fire
1/3 of the siege is dead from fire or lack of shield

Haha, good point; definitely a point against using the power tag. The very same reason why  any tamed dragons I ever had in a fortress were used very carefully. They would toast your own military, even with shields, when say one of your guys got stunned or something. Also, they would have devastating effects on any civilians that happened to be around if they got into a fight with something, of course. I found that as "assign and forget" combat companions, things like a hydra or a roc (or a cave dragon, in theory, but I could never catch one), were far better, because they lacked the supremely dangerous dragonfire ability.

[Deon]

I've never had dragons leading sieges as powers. As powers they pretend to be gods and sit in their temples for your adventurers to find them (and there fire/death/whatever secrets written in books).