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[Splint]

I think the metals in MDF were overpowered

Not really. It's just enemies typically lack A. The armor, and/or B. The skill, to match player controlled dwarves directly. Even if an orc is wearing steel armor, if he's an invader then his limbs are almost always wide open and can be taken off by even a silver sword or axe if used by a skilled and strong dwarf. It's just in 34.11 player controlled professional soldiers were often too damn good  at thier job. In 40.xx I've lost a few legendary soldiers because they wore themselves out and got thier heads smashed with maces or hammers.

The good stuff tends to take a long time to mass up (mithril requires luck with embark, enemy gear, and imports, volcanic is expensive and requires mithril in its production, bifrost comes from killing frosties, and deep bronze may as well be nonexistent it's so rare.) Often times, depending on the area, a player of any race may find himself stuck with using copper and a trickle of other things until they get an alchemy lab set up, or not even look at most metals because they got lucky and can burp up steel by the cartload.

As to the orcs themselves, I've personally not seen much wrong with them. Personally I could do without the squigs though.

[Meph]

Maybe kick the merged double weapons out (like pistol + sword) etc.

[Boltgun]

Honestly we had quite a lot of unbalanced metals.

Originally we judged a metal usefulness as low (copper), medium (iron, bronze), high (steel) and extraordinary (adamantine).

It seems that we somehow ended with 'why bother' (copper), bad (iron, bronze), average (steel), good (volcanic and orichalcum) and 'why risk my fort for that' (adamantine).

Cutting every intruder with special metals is good enough to not risk going for adamantine. Orichalcum is okay in the sense that it is a 'critical hit' but perhaps we're better off by not making metals that are better all around and instead making more specialized ones. A denser steel is already a powerful blunt metal and a lighter one makes great armor that does not slow down its wearer.

Plus we could limit ourselves to natural metals, plus a high tech one for each, plus an esoteric one for each power level. ie, steel, damascus steel (higher shear), weird magic steel (very light). That way, players can simply look at a 4*3 table to see all of them.

In addition, it's okay to have signature weapons for a race but we had so many variants of flails, bows, spring loaded stuff and upgrades it was hard to wrap your head around. After all, why bother with thrown axes when crossbows do the job? It also made strange moods very frustrating.

(and lets not make gold weapons again, invaders with gold armor are a waste)

[smakemupagus]

Squigs are supposed to be inconvenient, that's why they're cheap. I think that's working pretty well, since there's a mix of players who like em or not.  As long as there are enough other options.

The orcish special metals actually really are fairly specialized already (weight, brittleness, orichalcum is great against impact).  I would go further and make the biological metals distinct (lower strength, less brittle) from iron and steel if it was up to me ... I like emergent complexity more than things falling neatly into tiers.  Essentially I made my own warglass and high end metals that had diversity in features and complex to craft but use unique resources, in a way that I found more satisfying or interesting than the pure "uber" metals or the strict iron- or steel-tiered warglass.  So, yeah, guess it's redundant.  I appreciate that now that there are so many different modes, redundancy is more of a problem.  (Note they were originally balanced against welded mithril, which was removed, so rebalancing now against steel is totally reasonable, except perhaps that steel and especially bloodsteel are so easy by comparison)

Sometimes i think we have some fairly divergent design principles actually.  Orc mode is all about sword/pistol kit being fun, and tomahawks having different effects than bows, macuahuitls different effects than katana.  Yes, in some sense they're redundant, but so is basically everything that's not a pick or a plump helmet .  I'm not sure what the best way to progress is honestly.  As discussed I don't have time any more to redesign the whole thing from scratch, at least, not to keep on any particular schedule.  Raiding and techtree are intertwined with weapon and materials progression pretty comprehensively.  My plan at this point is to work with Meph to get something bare bones in place and then re-implement the rest at my own pace, and possibly in a way such that there is a core that fits streamlined MDF design and extension module(s) for folks that want the original orc fortress.  I dunno.

[Boltgun]

It is nice to pick from different weapons sometimes and orcs have a nice selection that let you have a themed fort.  Dwarves was a different experience with so many weapons, upgrades and upgrades to upgrades. The most important player comment I had on this matter was "why should I bother making Stygian pitchfork when I can have a succubus throw fireballs with her hands?".

I'm a fan of keeping it simple. But still there's a lot of dilemmas, clean vs flavor, fps vs complete, choices vs straightforward... I don't really know the best course either. I'd vote for fps and less bugs, otherwise I guess it is for the best if we take different approaches to contents.

Anyway working from a clean base, at your own pace, and releasing regularly is quite motivating.
Edit: And the most important is that you make what you want to make, there is no point otherwise.

[Meph]

Smake, do as you like. People always liked Orc mode the way you designed it.

[smakemupagus]

Anyway working from a clean base, at your own pace, and releasing regularly is quite motivating.
Edit: And the most important is that you make what you want to make, there is no point otherwise.

Yeah I'm looking forward to it, for the most part.  Once i get over the hump and there's a playable base to work from, it will be fun

As for keeping some of the comp!icated bits modular, I think its not a bad idea. Will see how easy that turns out to be.

[Zuzu Reish]

What I actually meant to ask, and this I suppose to Smakemupagus directly: I'm making my way through the embark scenarios right now, and am on the 'Steppe Clan/Old Ways.' When you wrote that a bonus would be embarking on an aquifer, did you intend for the player to confine themselves to an above-ground fort along the lines of the Forest Clan scenario?

It's meant to get you started with a surface fort, but I purposely left it up to the player to choose whether to breach the aquifer eventually.

Also even in Forest Clan/Vale of Tears it's on purpose open to interpretation whether the Druidic Temple is your entire base, or just one structure within a larger town that might also include stone or underground buildings.

Maybe writing a couple new scenarios would get me in the spirit of updating the manual.  That is one of the actually fun parts of doing it

Hey, sorry for the delayed response to this (travel and such).

I really like philosophy behind Orc Fortress' embark scenarios, of ratcheting up difficulty on the player; I was in particular drawn to the Steppe clan because of the 80 pop cap... I hate migrants . Recently I've tried doing the embark on a tundra biome, modifying the loadout to take more barrels and prepared drinks over non-boreal plants and their respective seeds. After about one year things are working pretty well, though I've had the worst luck getting an elf captive; as you can imagine, an above-ground tundra fort has a shortage of wood, fuel, and even lamellar armor. Thematically-wise, in this case I've imagined the corsairs/raiders as being vikings rather than swashbuckling pirates... that wield Macuahuitls and Katanas.

I mention all of this, because it occurred to me that the embarks currently in place all deal with a specific 'aspect' of the orcs, of which they have many: the Steppe clan with tribal weapaonry; the Mountain clan with guns/explosives; the Crashed Longboat with raiding/pirates/mercantilism; and the Forest clan with magic, and general animosity toward elves. I'm not sure how to build on that at the moment, but it's food for thought, if writing embarks/scenarios still strikes a chord with you.

[smakemupagus]

Yeah, I agree, a tundra/tiaga scenario is a nice idea
What do you like to embark with there?  Do you bring boreal plant seeds or just gather them?

[Zuzu Reish]

Tundra experiment #1 failed spectacularly: right after I wrote that post I was the victim of a massive drow ambush. The shielddancers themselves are a joke, but they brought along all kinds of terribly baddies, especially drowspiders. !FUN!

Yeah, I agree, a tundra/tiaga scenario is a nice idea
What do you like to embark with there?  Do you bring boreal plant seeds or just gather them?

With above-ground forts I typically prefer to gather biome-specific plants; this holds doubly true for an orc tundra embark, because not all civilizations originate with access to boreal plants, and strawberry/rope reeds/etc. are just wasted points since they can't grow. Subterranean crops work just fine, of course; I'm playing with the Steppe-clan embark, though, so I figure they wouldn't embark with them; so far I've only bought some plump helmet seeds from the caravanserai, since I haven't yet breached the aquifer/caverns to find anything else. That's all player preference, though.

Beyond that I bring wood (20-30), barrels (10-20), yarn (20), booze (30-50), and a pick. Keep in mind that this embarking on an aquifer; yeah they're a pain, but it's also an infinite, safe source of water near the surface. I won't be breaching the caverns yet until I feel good about my bloodberry-dyed castle on top, so I don't bring along any axes for chopping. Icicle mints aren't available on the tundra (though they can be farmed), but the other three are typically very plentiful and I've never had a shortage of booze or food.  I typically don't bring along any animals, but if I were I would bring along a cat or other vermin-catching creature, to serve as an alternative way to make lamellar leather. I generally don't invest in skill points with my starting seven, I like to see them level up. Yes, that leaves many points available, but to quote Meph: "Easy is for elves."

Bones and tough leather can get the player through quite a bit, and it can all be made substantially easier if the player chooses to equip a squad with scimitar from the Freelancers guild. If you're lucky you'll catch an elf right away; if you lose your ship and don't have enough wood to build another one, then you'll have to deal with caravans. Once you get an elf you'll have all the lamellar to get everything you want from the tribal wargear shop for everyone who needs it, and plenty of fuel.

... and that's where I'm at so far, I'm working on traps and making a vast amount of rusty iron arrows for my archers, waiting for those damn drow again.

***EDIT***: Icicle Mints can be farmed in tundra, but can't be gathered wildly. I know they have the [wet] tag, which just means that they need to be by water, correct? Does ice count?

[smakemupagus]

Yeah, I guess it is [WET] making it hard to find.  No idea if ice counts.  I think, since you can get it from Farmer's Market or regular trade, it's probably OK, right?  (unless you really need the light blue bricks )

[Zuzu Reish]

I have no problem with getting it from the Farmer's market, it's the most valuable of the four plants and it's pretty cool rolling the dice to see whether or not I actually get it with purchase; same with the cave seed packet. Also speaking of the caravanserai, I realize now that it's possible to buy fungiwood from the market, which is arguably more versatile than the elf farm.

What would you think of a warrior society codex that used wrestling as a primary skill?

[Gamerlord]

That sounds awesome and totally needs to called the Pankrationist's wargear or something similar.

[smakemupagus]

Hmmm .... I'm not sure how quite to implement it as society gear.  Even if it uses a physical combat skill it will not have a grappling attack, only edge or blunt damage (and for that we have already knuckledusters or orcish claws using Strike skill currently, I think).  There could be a mask or gloves or something that boosts your wrestling learn rate, probably.

[Zuzu Reish]

I like the Pankration idea, greco-roman wrestling was what I had in mind and I didn't know the actual term for it.

I know that the grappling aspect of wrestling in general doesn't quite work as well in fortress mode compared to its counterpart; however, what if the gear were to somehow train make use of, or train directly, the biting skill? Of the wrestling-related skills (by which I mean wrestling, striking, kicking, biting, and I suppose misc object) it seems to be the most reliable/deadly in fortress mode, and I'm wondering what kind of damage a creature the size of an orc could do.

Additionally - and not to conflate the two races - but perhaps the society gear could give the wearer a syndrome attack like the Kobold Vipers? Even a mild stun debuff can be deadly in melee. Flavor-wise, the weapon could represent a kind of mask; implementation-wise, maybe there would be a reaction transforming the orc into a caste that used biting as its preferred melee attack?