Print

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

[ZeroMcUrist]

Say that tomorrow Toady announces that in the latest update he will add a new civilized race to the game.

What would you add?
What niches are unfullfilled with the current races and sub-races?
What could be added that would mesh nicely with the others?

[neblime]

A sea race!
give merpeople more intelligence and sites or w/e
think about it, elves and humans have above ground between them, dwarves have mountains/underground, goblins have the evil places in the world, but the sea, swamps and lakes are quite boring!

[PDF urist master]

Ents. This game has essentially all the major races in lord of the rings except for the ents. I kinda want them to be non hostile unless they see a grown tree cut several tiles away from them.

[Furtuka]

There use to be in like the ultra ultra early prerelease version. Back when Toady was doing early tests sieging elves could turn Trees into Treants or something. IIRC

[Matoro]

Ents. This game has essentially all the major races in lord of the rings except for the ents. I kinda want them to be non hostile unless they see a grown tree cut several tiles away from them.

Technically there aren't anything like Tolkien elves in the game right now - only thing DF elves and Tolkien elves have in common is the name.

I don't think we need new races. Too many races and subraces (like many fantasy rpgs have) tend to make the world too crowded for my taste. Right now all DF races are pretty unique and they all have their distinctive traits. Some kind of merfolk could be a good addition, a bit like subterranean animal peoples. Some kind of tree people would fit to the lore similarly, not as full civilization but as smaller entities. Only thing I'd really want is a buff for amount of goblin civilizations - right now one evil sieger civ versus three good (well, two good and one neutral) is pretty unfair in longer histories, which leads quickly to annihilation of goblins.

[alexandertnt]

Dragons!

It would be nice to have something non-humanoid, plus dragons are inherently cool. Should also be playable.

[Manveru Taurënér]

We will be getting procedural beast race civilizations at some point, but I kind of doubt we'll be getting any new stock races on top of that. From what Toady has said in the DFtalks etc he doesn't seem too keen on adding any more of them, that's how I'm interpreting this quote anyway (bolded part in particular):

But there are a lot of interesting questions like that ... it happens any time we have a new mechanic that's related to one of the main creatures we have to go through and ask ourselves five different times what does it do, and we aren't interested, really, in building up our stock universe, but we figure we have five different groups ... they're not incredibly diverse, they're somewhat diverse ... and then as we start adding in things like ant-men, like all the animal peoples are starting to get their own civilizations now.
Capntastic:   Yeah I've noticed that.
Toady:   Especially in this version that's coming up; they're actually going to have them. Because back in 2D you had bat-men riding giant bats and they had blowguns made out of cave spider legs that they shot cave spider chitin - or whatever it's called, darts - through that were poisoned with cave spider venom and so on. So they had a civilization up to the point where they were building objects and they'll have that again for the next release. Then that leads to the question, what are the ethics of a bat-man. We know a lot about Batman's ethics I guess from reading the comic books and stuff but then there's ant-men; what are their ethics? What are the ethics of lizard-men? Are they all the same? And so on. We have all these non-inventive animal peoples races but it should allow us to explore some new ground anyway, especially in terms of geographic determinism, in terms of the different environments they have should change their civilizations a lot. So it's going to be interesting to go through; I don't know what happens when a lizard-man starts drinking.

Threetoe:   Okay, this next question is from James, he asks 'Will you ever begin to include randomized main races, or will the player interactable races always be limited to token dwarves, elves, goblins and humans? And a smattering of chimera tribes' ... the animal people.
Toady:   Is that what he means by the smattering of ... I don't know how to say these words, is it chimera? Yeah, it must be the animal people. Unless you meant something else.
Threetoe:   Yeah, we could always just call the animal people something else, other than turtle man, we could make it some other name and still be a turtle man.
Toady:   I think it's always been in the plan to have randomized main races, it was up on the old dev pages, I don't remember if it made it anywhere on the new dev pages or not? I think it might actually be there. Maybe not. It would be the last one, because doing randomized civilizations is an extra step beyond randomized monsters. Because we've kind of been easing in, we have the forgotten beasts now, we've got the titans, those are randomized. We have some of the underworld creatures randomized and we wanted to ease in to having some of the regular kind of monsters in the woods and stuff, randomizing those with a few extra night creature entries at some point and then kind of ease in to having some randomized regular creatures and then finally adding in randomized civilization creatures. The problem with randomized civilization creatures is there needs to be a lot of exposition or you're just going to be completely confused about what's going on, but it would definitely be an option, I think there would be a slider or something for how strange you want your world to be because we definitely think having dwarves and elves and goblins is cool for a lot of people just to kind of understand what's going on without having to do a lot of extra reading.

Taking all that into account and also the fact that we will be having parts of the current races/civs splinter off and form their own groups at some point, possibly even including changes to their appearance, there wouldn't really be that much point to adding new standard races as well. Not to mention when all that is done creating your own custom civ through modding should be easy.

[Orange Wizard]

I'm inclined to agree with the merpeople suggestion. Once Toady adds things like ships and ocean travel, passing over sunken cities and the like would be amazingly cool. Other than that, I don't think the game needs any more races. If a new one were to be added, I would probably dislike it, unless it had its own niche to fill (hence the merperson entity).
Ents are just elves that have taken the next step and become trees.
Orcs are just fatter, taller goblins.
Other types of elf (high elf, wood ef...) are all redundant - we already have elves.

Also this.

Taking all that into account and also the fact that we will be having parts of the current races/civs splinter off and form their own groups at some point, possibly even including changes to their appearance, there wouldn't really be that much point to adding new standard races as well.

[Spish]

A race that lives high up in the mountain peaks and frozen wastes? Skypeople, so to speak? I think a pseudo-Olympian civilization of towering giants that occasionally involve themselves with worldly affairs would be very cool, with their very own special brand of [GIANT] furniture, weapons, and armor. They could be balanced by giving them small armies, low birthrates and very long lifecycles. Could even be jerks and come down from the mountains to demand tribute.

Yeah I would love to see an underwater civilization, if only to add a sense of purpose to the seas.  Oceans are scary, I think a malicious, Lovecraftian underwater race could be interesting. Perhaps amphibious beastfolk could also take advantage of an underwater city framework. However, the ocean would have to be developed into something quite a bit more interesting than the barren wasteland it is now.

DF could use another problematic race; on one side you've got Humans, Dwarves, and Elves, and on the other you have Goblins and Kobolds. Evil human leaders? Anything else I could see just being modded in.

[Knight Otu]

Some sort of merfolk-type race certainly would top my list, since it would add aquatic sites to the game. Similar to wholly subterranean sites, which would need a wholly subterranean race to come into the game (next version's deep sites are in the first cavern layer only, and likely linked to dwarven site structure only). Beyond that... mountaintop sites, perhaps. In any case, a new race for the vanilla game needs to add something to the game that couldn't be modded before, and the major thing right now that can't be modded yet are site types. Other types of entity that aren't possible yet... entities that perform interactions on a certain group of people come to mind (vampires converting certain captives, rulers receiving divine blessings, and the like, not that I want a vampire civilization). That could be a very flexible modding tool.

[Enemy post]

I added a race of sentient great white sharks once.

[Mipe]

I added a race of sentient great white sharks once.

[Trickman]

As alexandertnt said, I'm in for the intelligent, talking dragons who act as separate entities in the World. Get them to dwell in huge caves or ruins of towns, and make them fully sentient, to the point of having dialogue lines in adventure mode or even giving quests to the player. Getting them to actually fly would be a good start, too Ents could also fit well, I guess.

Other than that, I'm not missing any race at the moment. Sure, you could add orcs and whatnot, but then again, they're just a rehash of the standard goblin. Even kobolds seem un-needed in the game, given that normally they have little impact on gameplay. You could easily have unarmored goblin thieves stealing from stockpiles or slightly more intelligent rhesus sons of bitches mackaques filling in for what kobolds do, anyway.

As it stands, we have the mainland/farmer civ (Humans), the forest/naturalistic civ and the mountain/industrious civ. Aside from the merfolk, I see no more "big" spots to cover, and interaction with the merfolk would be scarce, anyway (I guess?).

[Mel_Vixen]

Would the undead count? As it stands now necromancers, vamps and Were-people could form theyr own more active "factions" in the future. Not a civ perse although a determined Vamp might turn an entire city or so.

Animal-people being more inteeligent? Sure, that has some "natives" vibe going while the elves are more like a sect of eco-facists.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Demons might get theyr own sites in the upcomming release.

Apart from that i am against merfolk right now. As dwarf you dont get to visit them, except you mod the game with a secret that gives you waterbreathing abilty. Another problem with merfolk is that you dont have any conflict. As long they stay in there underwater cities they dont have to fear invasion and they cant attack landdwellers.

More civilized dragons would be nice but more the sake of theyr intelligence and ability to learn. ... i would like to see a Dragon necromancer XD

Hobbits would be essentialy hilldwarfs.

[Enemy post]

I added a race of sentient great white sharks once.

Here they are
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=134169.msg5116834#msg5116834