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Author Topic: How to avoid Dried up Oceans with a single island? v34  (Read 3815 times)

GavJ

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Re: How to avoid Dried up Oceans with a single island? v34
« Reply #15 on: July 22, 2014, 03:09:42 pm »
Quote
I'm not quite sure how you can argue that adding a large variety of game mechanics by including aligned areas in the world is somehow decreasing the game's variety.
Not THE game's variety.
A game's variety.

I don't really care as much about THE game's variety, because sadly, I can't play every possibly DF game simultaneously, so at any one time, I have one fort, one game. Thus, I care about individual games' variety. If it's in a good or evil biome, then the diversity of plant and animal life is lower than in neutral areas, because all the good animal and plant populations are crammed in there, and they tend to crowd out the much larger pool of different lifeform types. So you get unicorn unicorn unicorn buffalo unicorn, instead of fox, buffalo, kea, whatever.

Same goes for grasses and plants. The feather trees and bubble grasses and whatever choke out available random number slots for other plants, thus they always look fairly the same compared to other biomes (Toady happened to also make plantscapes fairly bland in vanilla with everything being native to everywhere almost, but it's ALSO easier to mod neutral biomes to be more interesting versus good/evil, for the same reasons above).

More subtly, gameplay choices and stories I find are also less varied. Reanimating crap is the threat, and it naturally funnels me into a smaller subset of reasonable fort types and decisions over and over. This is less objective than the statistical issue above. Just my experience. But it's part of what I meant.
« Last Edit: July 22, 2014, 03:11:20 pm by GavJ »
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Cauliflower Labs – Geologically realistic world generator devblog

Dwarf fortress in 50 words: You start with seven alcoholic, manic-depressive dwarves. You build a fortress in the wilderness where EVERYTHING tries to kill you, including your own dwarves. Usually, your chief imports are immigrants, beer, and optimism. Your chief exports are misery, limestone violins, forest fires, elf tallow soap, and carved kitten bone.

GavJ

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Re: How to avoid Dried up Oceans with a single island? v34
« Reply #16 on: July 22, 2014, 03:15:09 pm »
As an extreme analogy, imagine that you have two choices:

1) A complex integrated game like Skyrim.
2) 300 different minigames for all the different minor things you can do in Skyrim (such as just playing a dungeon in isolation out of context), which altogether, add up to actually 50% more content than Skyrim has.

Which is more fun?  The entire game system has more variance in #2, but I don't think anybody really cares about that. You care more about the variance of your specific experience, which is whatever game you're playing. Each minigame has shitty variability, because you have almost no time to branch out and define your own unique experience or character. The whole game, even with less features, has more experienced variability, and is more fun.

So yes, adding different content by definition increases the variance of all of DF in overall list form, but not necessarily of actual playing of dwarf fortress in game form, which is what I think matters much more. In fact, it decreases the variance of those specific games, due to more predictable and constrained strategy, plants, animals.


Edit: In my Opinion:
« Last Edit: July 22, 2014, 03:23:08 pm by GavJ »
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Cauliflower Labs – Geologically realistic world generator devblog

Dwarf fortress in 50 words: You start with seven alcoholic, manic-depressive dwarves. You build a fortress in the wilderness where EVERYTHING tries to kill you, including your own dwarves. Usually, your chief imports are immigrants, beer, and optimism. Your chief exports are misery, limestone violins, forest fires, elf tallow soap, and carved kitten bone.

Hetairos

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Re: How to avoid Dried up Oceans with a single island? v34
« Reply #17 on: July 22, 2014, 04:54:13 pm »
I believe Toady said he's eventually going to replace the good/evil system with sphere-aligned biomes. Not that I remember the source.

For now, there's the option of embarking on the border of two or more different biomes.
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GavJ

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Re: How to avoid Dried up Oceans with a single island? v34
« Reply #18 on: July 22, 2014, 05:08:12 pm »
Quote
For now, there's the option of embarking on the border of two or more different biomes.
For animals and plants, this merely mitigates the lower variability. Compared to the equivalent alternative of embarking across several different types of all-neutral biomes, though, the variety will still always be lower when one or more of them is aligned.

And in terms of gameplay, the mitigation is less so. Because super strong undead things can, you know, walk. So in terms of gameplay strategies they force me into, having half my map evil is effectively the same as 100% evil. Or very close to it.

If you like undead stuff more than you care about variability in a game, then by all means, go for it and have a blast. I'm just pointing out that straddling biomes doesn't really change the above issues much. If you like evil, they will be something you'd consider. If you don't, they won't be. The groups of players remain the same either way.
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Cauliflower Labs – Geologically realistic world generator devblog

Dwarf fortress in 50 words: You start with seven alcoholic, manic-depressive dwarves. You build a fortress in the wilderness where EVERYTHING tries to kill you, including your own dwarves. Usually, your chief imports are immigrants, beer, and optimism. Your chief exports are misery, limestone violins, forest fires, elf tallow soap, and carved kitten bone.

therahedwig

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Re: How to avoid Dried up Oceans with a single island? v34
« Reply #19 on: July 22, 2014, 05:49:47 pm »
Quote from: Hetairos on July 22, 2014, 04:54:13 pm
I believe Toady said he's eventually going to replace the good/evil system with sphere-aligned biomes. Not that I remember the source.

For now, there's the option of embarking on the border of two or more different biomes.

Yeah, he has said that a long time ago, I think he first wants to get in religion though, because that's where spheres are the most used currently.

The new vault materials are a good sneak-peak into what we're likely going to see as result: Most adjectives are associated with a sphere, so we might get things like an exploding pear tree in a highly volcanic area where the magicness is high.

Hopefully he'll also make plant-tracking maps during worldgen. They are currently more or less generated upon map creation, resulting in all temperate biomes being the same.
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Stonesense Grim Dark 0.2 Alternate detailed and darker tiles for stonesense. Now with all ores!

JoeJoe

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Re: How to avoid Dried up Oceans with a single island? v34
« Reply #20 on: July 23, 2014, 11:03:21 am »
you can use the weighted ranges to make more of a super continent and less of an archipelago.

Here is one large and one small world, where there are only a few very small islands out in the ocean.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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Dirst

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Re: How to avoid Dried up Oceans with a single island? v34
« Reply #21 on: July 23, 2014, 11:31:28 am »
Quote from: therahedwig on July 22, 2014, 05:49:47 pm
Quote from: Hetairos on July 22, 2014, 04:54:13 pm
I believe Toady said he's eventually going to replace the good/evil system with sphere-aligned biomes. Not that I remember the source.

For now, there's the option of embarking on the border of two or more different biomes.

Yeah, he has said that a long time ago, I think he first wants to get in religion though, because that's where spheres are the most used currently.

The new vault materials are a good sneak-peak into what we're likely going to see as result: Most adjectives are associated with a sphere, so we might get things like an exploding pear tree in a highly volcanic area where the magicness is high.

Hopefully he'll also make plant-tracking maps during worldgen. They are currently more or less generated upon map creation, resulting in all temperate biomes being the same.
My guess is that each creature/plant will get some type of SPHERE tags, hopefully with some varying level of attachment to each.

For right now, the determined modder can make creature variations that populate the good and evil regions with tweaks of neutral creatures.  This should up the variability a bit by increasing the list of aligned things.

For example [CREATURE_VARIATION:GOOD_MISCHIEVOUS] or [CREATURE_VARIATION:EVIL_CARNIVOROUS].  I don't think plant variations exist, so those would need to be copy-and-pasted.

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Just got back, updating:
(0.42 & 0.43) The Earth Strikes Back! v2.15 - Pay attention...  It's a mine!  It's-a not yours!
(0.42 & 0.43) Appearance Tweaks v1.03 - Tease those hippies about their pointy ears.
(0.42 & 0.43) Accessibility Utility v1.04 - Console tools to navigate the map

Art

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Re: How to avoid Dried up Oceans with a single island? v34
« Reply #22 on: July 23, 2014, 01:28:05 pm »
Thanks JoeJoe!

I think my entire Ocean is neutral now. I'll have to inspect it more closely.
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