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[FantasticDorf]

The arena 'workshops' themselves are pretty nice but there doesn't need to be so many of them in my own opinion when you could just open up the options and narrow it down to about three.

> Wild creature pits - assorted leathers needed for slave pit (lending itself to testing each reaction spawning the enemies atleast once), otherwise a source of food/leather even in glaciers given that you can leave farming roles out/modify no evil plants besides silver barbs and gutter cruor - Re-capturing the beasts basically equates to free animals (exploitatively speaking you could just slaughter them after you've trained and bred them)

> Slave Pits - assorted corpses & dug out stone/loot objects required for monster pits accrued here - Loot could pay for mercenaries and cavavan trade

> Monster/Demon pits (demon pits could be offered a seperate pit if this gets too cluttered) 

[Meph]

its ONE workshop.

You finish battle one, it upgrades to the next stage. This way I have a clear progression through a combat-based tech-tree.

[Meph]

Interesting. Vanilla goblins cant do:
Alchemy
Strand Extraction
Pottery
Glazing
Wax Working
Papermaking
Bookbinding
Farming (Fields)
Soap Making
Potash Making
Milling
Plant Processing
Cheese Making
Milking
Pressing
Beekeeping

Anything that has to do with farming animals or plants is out, as is academic stuff like books or writing.

Goblins seem to pay the iron price for their food... they do not sow.

[daisha]

the champions should get some special interactions and skills. A bronze colossus is big and dumb, but a kobold with shuriken, poison and level 15 in dodging?

I mean yeah, that's murder, I was just thinking that maybe the arena should have lower low levels...  like the first ten levels populated by nothing stronger than a trio of fit dwarven slaves, then you could start adding the truly fantastic things.  I mean, how long should you have to maintain a powerful goblin fortress before you can unlock the friendly demons?  As you have it, you have to be very competent and maybe a little lucky for over a dozen levels of arena progression, and as you note there's the elevated risk of tantrum spiraling for goblins and the arena risks being destroyed.  How long would that actually take to do in game without cheats?

[Nahere]

Anything that has to do with farming animals or plants is out, as is academic stuff like books or writing.

Goblins seem to pay the iron price for their food... they do not sow.

I think that's more because goblins do not eat or drink in vanilla. Why would they farm for food they don't need?

[Meph]

daisha: Several years I hope. Its their tech advancement with the friendly demons being the equivalent of the nuke/superweapon in any strategy game. I cant make units spawn with equipment either, so 3 dwarven slaves = 3 nude dwarves without weapons. (the champions would be custom units with interactions)

Nahere: Good point. They'd lack plant fiber for clothing, but I guess they make up for that with leather.

[FantasticDorf]

its ONE workshop.

You finish battle one, it upgrades to the next stage. This way I have a clear progression through a combat-based tech-tree.

You could probably separate them without much fuss is what i am getting at, even just for theming purposes. A wild animal pit (about lvl 3) looks pretty thematic by itself, somewhere on the soil layer or even above-ground it'd look nice. Then things start to get heavier and more fortified look as you move your arena indoors when your base is establised, start fighting slaves and sentients and finally when you're really digging down (or up in your tower) and its chock full of traps for the end game to compensate for a lost arena fight you could construct the end-tiers.

It'd still progress in the terms that you need the proceeds of fighting those creatures (again, loot) to build the next tier.

Maybe you could go fifty fifty and have the 3/4 subcategories improve individually instead? They all each have purpose but they dont need to all be bunched together and make more work for yourself.

Cut 1 - about 5 off for animal pits, then 9 - 13 for slaves (the function-less arena transformations dont achieve very much) etc etc.

If its constantly evolving, wouldn't that negate the fact you might want to grind lucrative loot from it? Rather than have to rebuild every time to get some cheap loot (unless its fights were repeatable at any stage)

[Meph]

If its constantly evolving, wouldn't that negate the fact you might want to grind lucrative loot from it? Rather than have to rebuild every time to get some cheap loot (unless its fights were repeatable at any stage)

Thats the point. I want each fight to be only fought once per fortress. If you set up 50 archer-goblins on ramparts and spawn unlimited animals to fight, the entire game becomes trivial.

[daisha]

daisha: Several years I hope. Its their tech advancement with the friendly demons being the equivalent of the nuke/superweapon in any strategy game. I cant make units spawn with equipment either, so 3 dwarven slaves = 3 nude dwarves without weapons. (the champions would be custom units with interactions)

Several years is a good target for a mean time to friendly demons, but if the risk of arena destruction is as high as I'm imagining it may push the mean time to friendly demons out to several decades or beyond, and effectively no one will ever see them without cheating.  Then again, if you aim for a progression that should take 3 years if not reset and arenas can be expected to be destroyed by a tantruming goblin on average every 3 years, you'd be pretty close to your target in final summation.  But I may be grossly overestimating the risk of arena destruction.  I'm imagining goblins tantruming as often as Americans.

The no equipment spawning is a real pain in the butt, though.  I totally get your inclination to only spend time making special interactions for badasses.

[Meph]

Depends on the player if things get toppled or not. With the new stress system, people barely get tantrums at all. It should be easy enough to lock the doors to the arena.

[FantasticDorf]

If its constantly evolving, wouldn't that negate the fact you might want to grind lucrative loot from it? Rather than have to rebuild every time to get some cheap loot (unless its fights were repeatable at any stage)

Thats the point. I want each fight to be only fought once per fortress. If you set up 50 archer-goblins on ramparts and spawn unlimited animals to fight, the entire game becomes trivial.

Its a fair point but the logistics of that are a bit wonky with the amount of arrows required is going to be high for some creatures based of penetration. You could already in the setup just prepare traps around the arena and a puppy/equivilent on a chain and watch the traps do all the work for you.

Friendly demons when you get to that point and mercenaries are just there to buffet yourself up too militarily, whats to say that that's just there to exploit future arena fights when you're not busy with anything else? Grind that stuff, get sick cash and loot is what i'd endorse to keep the fighting never-ending rather than a progression slog to practically insta-win units that can basically discard all your current military bands.

Bunch of dumb animals of course are going to get slaughtered either-way, and its just cheap leather & meat for outfitting goblins (you might want to remove the cook profession to stop gobbies roasting meals for money exploits) and bones for bolts and trade along with cheap combat training experience for the odd price of a injury or death.

Again, such a excess of meat, leather and bones might be appealing to other workshops (trolls are bone carnivores, they wont survive without food & drink so a water substitute is still going to be needed if you're not using gutter cruor)

[Meph]

the setup just prepare traps around the arena and a puppy/equivilent on a chain and watch the traps do all the work for you.

yeah, as if I wouldnt make EVERYTHING that spawns there trap-immune.  (and immune to temperature, drowning, magma, etc)

Grind that stuff, get sick cash and loot is what i'd endorse to keep the fighting never-ending rather than a progression slog to practically insta-win units that can basically discard all your current military bands.

No grinding, thats the point of the progression system. You shouldnt spawn enemies to get material like leather and meat, that would make the game trivial. You spawn difficult challenges that you have to win to unlock more parts of the mode.

Its like the human guild system. It costs 19000 gold to max out one guild. There are 12 guilds. Thats 228000 gold coins or 456 gold bars. And thats just for the guild permits. It should take time. People need something to do; otherwise you max out quickly, like you do in dwarf mode with steel/adamantine-clad warriors in year 1 or 2.

[FantasticDorf]

As of the latest edition of the game, armor falls apart extremely quickly to strong hits from superior metals, leather/bone is extremely cheap and multiple workshops in masterwork (notably from the kobold side of things) make use of these materials to great effect. Lots of cheap shoddy armor & goods was listed as a core suggestion point by yourself in the OP, this would help to address that.

How would we even be able to equip our large functionally immortal armies individually with precious metal armor if there are by chance no base metals within reach progression wise for the first year and enemies on our doorstep? Something is better than nothing. Especially out in the harsh wilds where goblins tend to encamp wheres there is usually a lack of one thing or another.

Also worth noting, that people will exploit the arena system to farm leather anyway once they realise how to do it as per the lower levels via deconstructing and re-constructing the arena separately.

Its not like people will get very far wearing bone and leather anyway. Though equipping our citizens with bone and leather goods (shields will probably not be that great post-new development build but decrease much slower like weapons, and leather cloaks are usually a good choice) does have some benefits.

Spawning giant demons as a reward and therefore 'instawinning' is pretty trivial by itself to counterargue, though i can't account for everyone, people will feel good for about 10 minutes then get bored that there is nothing challenging to fight with demons and practically no industry to promote extended building projects since the arena mode was the hypest thing about it. Thinking you've exploited the game makes players feel confident in themselves, which is why DF engineering projects gain such momentum like slade adamantium duping for instance, the guy (or someone else) went on to build a solid adamantium sphinx out of the stuff.

I have no objection to you drawing it out for the purposes of gameplay, but it does seem limiting of what you could do with it to make it so linear.

[SharpKris]

we could make goblin castes and added spawning pits to make more goblins. as to the costs of spawning goblins i am not entirely sure

[LMeire]

Poisoning idea, intentionally rust weapons and ammo to inflict tetanus at the cost of having to wear the weapon down a little to do this. Tetanus can kill in a little under a week so it should work fine for the weird time in Fortress mode.