Since a surprising amount of people voted for the Insect race, which I added as an afterthought without much info, I thought it would be only fair to share my ideas on them. I did not do much before I posted about them, so most of this I crammed together yesterday.
Feel free to discuss and add ideas at your leisure. I want to mention that this race/project has a lower priority for me than the raw clean up, but the community decides.
IndigoFenix, you mentioned some ideas that use COUNTER_TRIGGER in the other thread, would you care to go into detail a bit more? Maybe with Raw examples/mock ups, since I have never used counter triggers before.
Here what I DONT plan to add:
- A single queen that rules you. Warlocks already have "the Overlord" doing the same.
- Endless swarms if tiny insects. FPS feath.
- Starcraft-like creep. Civ members will try to clean it, and lots of contaminants = FPS death.
- Multi-creature civ members. Mostly a graphical problem as graphics depend on profession and noble position. Warlocks have 3 types and thats wonky enough.
My ideas so far:
You start with 7 civ members. Worker or Warrior caste.
Workers learn normal skills and have 2 arms.
Warriors learn military skills and have 4 arms.
Both are male and will not produce kids. But you can buy specific pets at embark: Worker Drones (male/female) and Warrior Drones (male/female). These are NOT civ members, but egg-laying pets. The eggs hatch larvae, your basis for everything.
Larvae can be butchered to produce "biomass", your main building material.
Larvae can be taken to a workshop and mutated (transformed) into new Drones. Which in turn claim more nestboxes, lay more eggs and hatch more larvae.
Larvae do graze... And that is the interesting part. If they graze on the surface grass, you get normal workers/warriors. But if they graze on specific grass, you get specific DNA strains in your workers/warriors.
Strains are:
Good grass: AoE healers, produce good thoughts around them, buffs for allies.
Evil grass: AoE nerfs for enemies, necrosis attack and spawn miasma.
Savage grass: Larger, stronger, faster... Get enraged and are harder to control.
Cavern1: Grow fungi on themselves and produce food.
Cavern2: Grow crystal on themselves, produce gems and have natural armor. Slow.
Cavern3: Nether... Crazy interaction madness... Something thats very good but might backfire.
I can add these strains with interactions, no need for transformation. It would look like this ingame: "Urist McInsect, Worker Jeweler (Fungi strain)"
Of course the civ member would still keep the normal caste it already had. Castes would be very simple, I think of 2-6 castes. Worker and Warrior with possible subgroups of FarmWorker, CraftWorker and MineWorker; MeleeWarrior, RangedWarrior and SupportWarrior.
In addition to caste and strain, they would also get "stages", which are their age. Every two years or so they would get a buff to their size, strength, armor, etc. Hopefully possible without transformation, that way I dont re-roll their stats. This simply means that the older your insects get, the bigger and meaner they grow.
Basing the strains on the grass that the larvae eat, makes different biomes more interesting and leads to players moving into the caverns. At least I hope so. Being rewarded with awesomely mutated civ-members for conquering the third cavern is certainly new.
To sum it up:
You start with drone-pets.
They lay eggs.
Eggs hatch into larvae.
Larvae are either turned into more drones, biomass for buildings, or grow into civ-members.
Civ-Members have a caste (worker/warrior), a stage (automatic, their age) and a strain (what they ate as larvae)
I would probably transform them into a immobile cocoon-creature for a while in between.
Larvae could also manually be mutated into other pet-creatures that fill different roles.
Swarmlords could spawn Swarmlings that are butchered for chitin. War Scythelings, dog-sized, acompany your army, and Weaverbugs are farmed for silk, venomous festerlings make poison for your weapons...
All done from larvae. So keep your drones snd eggs save. Your swarm needs them.
Now to the more normal stuff: Clothing would mostly be chitin, as would be the armor. That should simulate exoskeleton upgrades. I am not sure how to avoid that they wear armor from invaders, but we'll see.
Weapons could be made in similar fashion. Claws, Scythes, differently grown natural weapons. Spore-cannon or needle-spines for ranged combat. A bit tyranid-esque; for those that know Warhammer. Again, I want to go very much Bio here. Not metal like dwarves or tech like gnomes... No, just pure homegrown biological goods.
Materials: No leather, cloth or metals. You use chitin, silk and thats pretty much it. Soil and rocks for misc items, but no good smiths in the insect folk.
I would like them to be mostly independant of wood and coal and ores. Instead you need larvae, which need grass. And your civ members need special fungi that they grow.
This means not much brewing or smelting. Instead farming and butchering.
Migrants: Like the Warlocks you would only get 2 migrant waves. (?)
Caravans: Maybe?
Nobles: I dont know yet, but since their AI is pretty much hardcoded it will be similar to the other races. Just with different names. Nothing fancy planned here.
Unique mutations for special units could be done, like the good/evil mages in dwarf mode. Only one per type, akin to Hero-units. Hive Lord, Queen of Blades, whatever reference you like.
Speaking of Starcraft: I personally would love to add different units or effects from it into this, because it fits perfectly. Infestor... Defiler... Broodlords that shoot projectiles that spawns aggresive vermin.
Workshops: Not many ideas yet. A few for the manual mutation of larvae into pet-insects or drones. Another for castes. One bio-armorsmith, one bio-weaponsmith, a evolution chamber to learn skills, a chitin-worker building... They would NOT get the normal mod buildings and I would try to disable as many vanilla Df features as possible, because they are the first non-humanoid race.
Spawning custom colonies/hives would be interesting, but I have to talk to dfhack coders for that.
Ok, thats pretty much everything. Happy suggestion-posting. Even if I already have so many ideas for Gui, Raws, Humans and Warlocks... Cant hurt to add some more.
PS: Crazy suggestion as the last part: If they somehow get a religion, it could be egyptian themed. Eight-eyed Spider-Mantis Anubis, God of the Dead.
The whole mummy/cocoon thing fits.
PPS: Biological warfare as well. Mutate your own microorganisms and infect invading armies.