(*) Stopped "fighting" skill from increasing from trap/projectile attacks
Ah. I just noticed this one. This means danger rooms are less effective. Same with coinstars.
I'm not upset about this because I never got a working danger room set up anyways, but I think there are some who would be.
That's the problem with getting attached to exploits.
1. Danger rooms are still effective
2. Using exploits does not mean getting attached to them
3. For a lot of players, including myself, the bugs and irregularities of the game are part of the gameplay itself. Personally, I feel it goes hand-in-hand with the "losing is fun" mantra. Just like we have bugs that make the game a pain sometimes, we use the bugs as part of our arsenal in playing it. This isn't like hacking, where you change the rules - danger rooms where part of the rules by virtue of not being impossible.
Nothing personal, but while I don't look down on players who like to play the game as "intended" (in their own view), it's hardly reasonable to consider danger rooms an unfair exploit when this isn't a competitive game and there are so many deviations from "reasonable" and "realistic" in the game as it is now (which is changing of course).
I used danger rooms every time since I discovered them. I also save-scummed when I was first getting used to the game. When I first play a game with so much content, but with sandbox gameplay, I feel the need to get myself acquainted with every gameplay object as fast as possible, hence save-scumming (which I don't feel the need to do anymore). Danger rooms where part of that, but later became a means of focusing my fortresses on construction and mechanics, which I was more interested in.
Exploits such as danger rooms are much like exploits that are left over in games by the time they reach a popularity high enough for competitive speed runs, challenges and the like.
I'm putting this here as a statement in defense of players who don't draw an arbitrary line of fairness. This isn't a refutation of playing the game as "intended", just a reminder that expecting those arbitrary lines to be followed by everyone, whether they agree with them or not, can only reduce the richness of gameplay across the player base.
(*) Stopped "fighting" skill from increasing from trap/projectile attacks
Ah. I just noticed this one. This means danger rooms are less effective. Same with coinstars.
I'm not upset about this because I never got a working danger room set up anyways, but I think there are some who would be.
Woah, that is huge. It probably is for the best but yeah...
Hey, the parrying increases weapon skill, and science proved Fighting skill is important, but weapon skills are far more important.
Someone did an arena test - Grand Master Axemen vs Grand Master Fighters, equal numbers, no skill in anything else, Iron Great (or Battle, I forgot) Axes, no armor.
In both tests, the Axemen killed all the Fighters with some losses.
So it reduces the power of danger rooms, but with soldiers with prior fighting experience, you won't really notice things.
As the one who did those tests, I can confirm this (it was battle-axe btw).
Also, training is now so effective (legendary fighter/weapon skill within one year) that danger rooms are unnecessary. I feel that exp from training should be capped; slowing it down wouldn't hurt either, but then you would expect soldiers to gain some level of competence (say, up to proficient) if they train non-stop for a whole year. But they shouldn't be able to train themselves to legendary proportions (not without a legendary teacher anyway). Hopefully the danger room nullification will be followed soon with a training rework (maybe after the tavern update?), I'd love to see the teaching skill come into prominence for reaching higher levels of skills through training
I think that a possibly satisfactory change would be to have training (in a barracks) and repeat experiences (such as those with traps) accumulate a sum of experience that then gets spent when dwarves engage in actual combat. In other words, you can train and use danger rooms, but you see little or no skill improvement (or very slow improvement) until the dwarf attempts an actual fight, at which point those who have trained a lot will improve a lot faster than those who haven't.
Since what is combat may be arbitrary (except training in barracks I guess), for traps and trapped goblins and the like, there could be a danger metric - the lower it is (or if it is below a threshold), the more the experience goes into the pool for a skill rather than the skill rating directly.
A vague arithmetic way to express that might be:
danger factor = (damage that an attack can do) * (chance of getting hit)
experience pool for skill += (1 - danger factor) * (experience gained total for skill)
experience immediately added to skill = (danger factor) * (experience gained total for skill)
experience bonus for skill, immediately added = ((danger factor) / 2) * (experience pool for skill)
experience pool for skill -= (experience bonus for skill, immediately added)
the experience total can be reduced for repetitions, slowly:
experience total = (base experience) * (repetition factor)
repetition factor = 1/(number of repetitions) + 0.1where the number of repetitions is of course, a positive integer at least 1 or higher. Each attack that doesn't repeat, deducts 1 from the number of repetitions (or resets the counter). These apply to each skill per dwarf. This is just off the top of my head and there may be logical errors, but I feel the point comes across. I'm not recommending that this becomes the actual game's behavior, just demonstrating a possible way it could be done. In my opinion, this would legitimize danger rooms by presenting a benefit to having them, but offsetting the ease by reducing their effectiveness (so you don't get a legendary dwarven army that has never seen a fight) and presenting incentives to create more varied and dangerous rooms (which would be more interesting from a storytelling perspective as well).
In any case, from my own
old science and experience, the most valuable skill for a dwarf is the shield skill. If you give a dwarf a wooden buckler and train them all the way up to "skilled" or higher, they become so competent in blocking attacks that it's just a matter of time for them to become extremely skilled through real fights, just by virtue of being so hard to hit or kill. Shields don't break (at least back then in .34 they didn't - I haven't read of any changes to this but I could be wrong) so it doesn't cost much. Despite this change, I still think danger rooms are practically just as good as they used to be.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress 0.40.24 Released (Read 108710 times)