Print

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

[Urist McShire]

I just take my time doing it. Some things I live with, some I live without, and if you change them in the raws in the core folder then they're changed for every world you gen, so you do the work once and it's done.

[Repseki]

I've recently started using WinMerge, a free program that lets you see the differences between text files/folders do some changes easier.

You still have to make the changes you want, but it makes things a lot easier to bring your edits over to a new version or see what changes to the raws a mod has made.

[Mimodo]

I'm thinking of removing the FLIER tag, is it possible to do that after world gen, or do I have to gen a new world for it to take effect?

[McDwarf]

Removing [FLIER] after world gen does work.
Beware birds flying overhead.

You have to remove the tag from the raw files in your save folder.

[Lasander]

I make elves less fanatical about plants.  It's rather ridiculous that killing plants is unthinkable by default.  What do they eat? Do they scavenge decaying plant matter like vultures? Photosynthesis?

I give them access to all the jobs the other civs have except for anything meat related.  I also remove the wood weapons tag so they can use real weapons to defend themselves from the goblins.

All aquifers are removed because I can't deal with them. 


Thanks to this thread I will be making lead a candidate for ammo and fixing the grazers tag.

[Bumber]

I make elves less fanatical about plants.  It's rather ridiculous that killing plants is unthinkable by default.  What do they eat? Do they scavenge decaying plant matter like vultures? Photosynthesis?

I give them access to all the jobs the other civs have except for anything meat related.  I also remove the wood weapons tag so they can use real weapons to defend themselves from the goblins.

From the raws:

Code: [Select]

[CREATURE:ELF]
...
[ETHIC:KILL_ENTITY_MEMBER:JUSTIFIED_IF_EXTREME_REASON]
[ETHIC:KILL_NEUTRAL:ACCEPTABLE]
[ETHIC:KILL_ENEMY:ACCEPTABLE]
[ETHIC:KILL_ANIMAL:JUSTIFIED_IF_SELF_DEFENSE]
...
[ETHIC:EAT_SAPIENT_KILL:ACCEPTABLE]Does that answer your question?

I wouldn't have thought they had anything against killing non-trees, though. They do sell fruit and stuff. That's practically plant babies.

[Agent_Irons]

They have some kind of deal with the plants. The plants provide sacrificial babies and wooden crafts and the elves provide... idk what. Ears? Singing? Defenses? Something.

I put a healing rate on all the tissues that don't have one, bump pain for organs up and bone down (bone at 20, most organs at 20 or more also), add [HORN] to nail tissue and [SHELL] to chitin and scale. There's a small tweak that changes the butchery products of skin layers to drop globs instead of hides, and makes those globs tannable into leather. I like that one because it means I can actually make leather clothes for more than one dwarf.

I also usually add Lucelle weapons and armor(sans firearms) because battle saris are hilarious and awesome, and the SAUR FORTRESS mod because war velociraptors are The Best Thing. Oh, there's also a mineralman extension which replaces amethyst men with <all gems>men and gabbro men with <all stones> men. I fear obsidian men. Also diamond men. Also the fortress defense races I put in. The putrid blendecs or whatever that drop cassiterite when killed? So neat. So fun. So handy for glazing and bronze! I've never managed to catch anything awesome and untameable, but if I did I wouldn't hesitate to pop [trainable] on there.

I never put natural_skill discipline on anything because people running in fear is invariably hilarious. Everyone is a wuss, because nobody wants to die or be pecked to death by keas. It makes people running in fear while being divebombed by annoying birds happen kind of emergently, which is nice. It also makes your battlehardened dwarves that much more battlehardened. Urist McScary stands around in five layers of steel armor like an onion holding an executioner's greatsword, and drives off the goblin attack by simply bisecting one and pointing at the others.

It is kind of weird that markdwarves currently fire at a rate that can only be described as 'obscene', but apparently that's fixed for .40.10. Seriously, they can fire a bolt every other tick, which makes five bolts per average dwarf step. It's like a hose.

[Trouserman]

how do you guys manage all these tweaks?

I use kdiff3 for a 3-way merge of the entire df folder, so I get my changes to the raws, settings, and tiles in one easy step.
df_40_08 + df_my_40_08 + df_40_09 => df_my_40_09

I play a mostly vanilla game, with changes to the keybindings to be more consistent and laptop-friendly, and a custom tileset with distinct symbols for different categories of stones and ores. Using a merge tool makes it almost trivial to carry these customizations forward.

[Saiko Kila]

No, it won't. Doing this will only improve blunt weapons. Steel and Iron are the 2nd and 3rd best materials for weapons and armour, period (Excluding divine materials). No other metal is anywhere near as good as them, with the exception of blunt weapons.

Nope. Bronze is better than iron also as armour, not only as blunt and ranged weapons. There's no point in making iron warfare items, go straight to steel if you have a source of iron.

I forgot about bronze. It is not better than iron though, in fact it has very similar properties to the point where if it is better, it's only a very slight difference. It's generally used as a substitute for iron, not to replace it as a superior material.

Historically bronze was preferable to iron because it was easier to extract from the ores. Iron required a higher heat to smelt and so consumed more energy to produce. There's no analogue in DF to account for this, that I'm aware of (haven't played for at least a year but just about ready to get back into it now DF2014 looks solid) so iron is "better". Similarly, making steel was hit and miss for centuries and once someone lucked into the formula they kept it a trade secret. eg:

http://io9.com/ancient-roman-tech-cache-shows-how-horror-movies-would-1623375040

Iron was easier to produce and cheaper than bronze, it still is. The only early problem was temperature, but that was quickly resolved, yet there was no way to find a good source of tin for bronze. Bronze is densier than iron, and after cold hammering it is more resistant to damage from weapons, thus it's better for armour. As for weapons, blunt weapons are also better because of density. Of course I'm well aware that there's no single bronze (changing proportion of tin changes it's properties quite dramatically, but that's also true for amount of carbon in steel), and that there's no single "iron" and "steel".

But I'm talking about historical times, some quite recent, with metallurgy already developed. There's a reason that Roman or Chinese^*officers had bronze armours and sometimes weapons while their subordinates had iron. Also there's a reason that bronze cannons for ships were 10x more expensive at the end of XVIII century than iron cannons, though this reason doesn't apply to DF, because of lack of guns. As for DF, high density of bronze and some other properties make it better for blunt weapons and armour - which is how it would be in real life (though to a different degree and for slightly different reasons).

*)Chinese used very high percentage of tin, so their bronze was very hard; bronze in DF, based on amount of tin used, should be even harder - and also very brittle.  But brittleness doesn't matter in DF at all, because of lack of wear or damage to weapons.

[martinuzz]

After long internal debate, I found out what I am missing in my fort, which can be fixed by some raw editing next time.

My magma moat lacks crocodiles.

- will add fire immunity to cave croc species

[GavJ]

The only early problem was temperature, but that was quickly resolved

Not sure I'd call 1,500-2,500 years (depending on region) "quickly resolved"

Iron was easier to produce and cheaper than bronze

Absolutely not in the 14th century, on average/most places. As hinted at above, the heating continued to be an issue well into the middle ages. they could heat iron hot enough to work, but not to melt it with any sort of efficiency or scale (in Europe at least). You had to very painstakingly heat iron to a spongey state, hammer the impurities out manually, reheat, hammer, reheat, hammer, reheat hammer, exhaustively. Which is definitely more expensive.

Bronze you could just melt, skim stuff off, and cast to get to the same point as above.

Only with blast furnaces and puddling furnaces and powered finery forges and things did it start to compete in easiness. Blast furnaces only just starting to become known/popular on the very late end of DF's time period, and the other things much later.

yet there was no way to find a good source of tin for bronze.

Totally depends where you are. Britain had/has tons of tin. However, if you didn't have tin nearby, then iron wares might indeed be cheaper than bronze ones. But in DF times in Europe (which seems to be the culture based on in game items and the fantasy stories it is obviously based on), this would be due to the higher cost of raw materials overwhelming the lower cost of labor to equal an overall cheaper product.




(Edit: Actually, due to bronze being superior for most things, I guess it would also have a higher demand, which might make it more expensive even in places with tin, separate from the raw material + labor considerations. But that's getting way too complicated for a discussion about RAWs to change, especially in a game with no real economy...)

[Button]

I wonder if there's a way to have them take food off a stockpile (plants). I'm pretty sure the Tigerman I bought from the elves took food from my stockpile when he was hungry.

Yes, you can add this ability. The tag you are looking for is [CAN_SPEAK] (don't know if there's actually an underscore, double check.)

I have not tested it in conjunction with GRAZER, one might override the other. Or they might work together. But if for instance you put [CAN_SPEAK] on a dog, it will go get its own meat from barrels.

Last time I had an INTELLIGENT GRAZER, it wouldn't eat from a stockpile. This was in .34 though.

Incidentally, HUNTS_VERMIN and DIVE_HUNTS_VERMIN also disabled eating from stockpiles in .34. INTELLIGENT creatures with those tokens can reduce hunger only by catching and eating vermin.

[Urist McShire]

Forgot to mention that I also remove [CAVEADAPTS] from the dwarves. Yeah, I know, it takes away some of their dwarfiness, but I'd rather not have them barfing every time they go out into the sun to grab all of those logs I just had my woodcutters hack down.

[kiwiphoenix]

A little surprised nobody's mentioned plate armour that covers the upper arms - the only body part without any rigid protection option in vanilla. Make chausses, skirts, and gloves chain-able, leggings get made leather-only. Add coifs, like Deepblade.

Main thing, though - change COVERAGE to 98 for flexible items and 96 for rigid ones, so attacks can find a joint/weak link for massive damage. This makes combat more harrowing, makes layering a serious consideration, gives poorly-armed troops a shadow of a chance, and most importantly, allows AI units to properly execute unconscious troops regardless of how good their helmets may be.