Does anyone here want to tell stories about bugs and unintended features that they actually really enjoyed in previous versions of DF that have since been fixed?
I loved the bug that made towers get into disputes with villages, resulting in towers conquering villages, acquiring way too many corpses and resulting in an orgy of tower building. And not only because it meant that there were a *lot* of necromancers out there; it made the political geography of my worlds occasionally become amazing and provided me with more immersion than I've really gotten out of the game since.
This one time, the only area that discovered necromancy was this long, isolated peninsula jutting down from the top of the map. It was home to two human governments, who I imagined as loose alliances of bickering merchant princes due to both their names having something to do with trade. These states tended to have their major cities on the coast and build their tombs inland, which was a rural area chock full of farming villages. The two civs were roughly divided between the southwest and northeast, but in the inland their villages were chaotically dispersed, meaning that nobody had clear control over the region and that disputes were common.
When the necromancers came, the first necromancer-cult began to take over towns in the inland. When this prompted no response from the bickering lords, their conquests accelerated. Soon, they had a tower built. However, since they would constantly get into disputes with nearby towns, including towns they themselves had conquered, the situation rapidly escalated. Attacking their own occupation governments would cause groups of necromancers to schism, after which they'd go conquer their own towns from someone else. By the end of the century the entirety of the inland had been conquered by necromancers. Towers dotted the landscape, occasionally fighting rebellious underlings and stealing villages from one another, resulting in a series of small kingdoms with shifting borders and frequent internecine conflict. The population of the area had plummeted, unless you count the undead, while the vast numbers of dead law-givers who had found themselves in the wrong places in the wrong time meant that tomb complexes were unusually expansive.
You can imagine the desolation and the despair. To the last free humans, huddled in their tightly-packed coastal cities struggling to cope with the influx of refugees, their breadbasket was gone. Though it's not in the game yet, I imagine that to them it was a time of famine, plague and anarchy in the streets. Those unfortunate enough to have fallen under the necromancers gaze have all wound up toiling for their unfathomably dark designs or sacrificed in their seemingly pointless wars against one another, and not even death is an escape from this slavery. They cower in villages with far too many empty buildings, in the shadow of the towers and the tombs, under the watchful gaze of ambitious apprentice necromancers.
So naturally, I set out to liberate what I'd come to term the Dead Marches by building a band of warriors, slaughtering all the necromancers and taking over all the sites. Since DF handled loyalty funny though, before I conquered my fourth I was tracked down by an army of living humans from the surviving free cities and killed. I don't know the implications of that, though it's probably because somehow the administrators I'd killed were still civ members or the towns I'd declared sovereignty over were still somehow considered theirs even though they'd been taken over by necromancers. Anyway, I'll miss that bug. That was the coolest world I've genned by far.
Anyone else have experiences like this?
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Topic: Bugs & 'Features' you miss (Read 2729 times)