Thanks to Putnam, Shonai_Dweller, FantasticDorf, TheFlame52, Valtam, MrWiggles, PatrikLundell, Mr S, Eric Blank, and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions!
Will we be able to send squads out after night creatures and megabeasts? Ask them to bring back things from their lairs?
If there are artifacts. I don't currently have an "explore" option for lairs, since those night creatures don't interact with the fort yet, and there are no fort prisoners there. It probably wouldn't hurt though to throw it in if people want to mess around.
If it is at all possible, could dwarves find discarded items out in the field upon their path of a expedition and pick it up for the journey? I vaguely remember yourself mentioning something somewhere in response to what happens when keas fly objects off map that somebody travelling over the exact tile where it was dumped could find a object in the wilderness, a response something along those lines.
The only things like that are the artifacts and non-artifact stuff left during adventure mode. Battlefields aren't properly respected, as that's been rotting in the notes for a long time now, and caravan objects don't get dropped in the wilds, and non-artifact stolen items aren't placed in particular places very well. So the only thing they might find are artifacts lost in fights in the wilderness, and artifacts stolen by animals.
The way the libraries works with how dwarfs do jobs there how much longer can workshops last before being replace?
With the Civ screen being removed from Fort mode will the 10 world tile range for towers and 40 for civs also be changed?
Boats might be far away but will fluids be reworked to something more ideal or will the current system work?
World size seems to be a large issue will they be increased with the magical land masses or will it just be too complex for anything larger?
Been avoiding large worlds mainly due to them taking so long to reach any age, what are the main events that happen post world gen?
Dunno when workshops will be replaced. Haven't yet changed the "nearby" flag for civs, but if you attack somebody, they become "nearby". We're almost to the point where we can get rid of the flag, but I didn't feel like I could do it this time. Not sure how fluids will change with boats -- as I've described boats, they don't need to change. I don't think world size will need to be increased, though I didn't understand that one. Lots of things happen post world gen, not sure how to answer that one either.
-Has the cave adaption status been taken into the combat rolls for off-site groups?
-Dwarves getting stunned from sunlight move slightly slower, would this impact travel times?
-Is it possible for the cave adaption timer to still count down the time the dwarf spends "outside" while they're on their adventure? If the dwarves are somehow on a year-long adventure, could they lose their 4-month cave adaption part way through and become more effective?
- Does the Ambusher skill come into effect for the sneaky parts of the adventure? Is it all the dwarves trying to sneak, or just the sneakiest?
It hasn't yet been moved to the abstract historical figures, so it doesn't matter yet. I think the counter will just resume where it left off when they return.
The ambush skill is used by everybody. They aren't very tactical about their decisions there. Not sure if that'll change or not by the time it comes out.
Will we get to see critters with prejudices about groups of individuals in the future? One of Threetoe's stories indicates that we'll be seeing prejudice based on a critter's species, but how are these prejudices going to be decided? Will we get to see them develop and change over time? Will prejudices also be able to develop around cast, membership of a group/entity, place of birth or visually identifiable characteristics? Will we be able to see prejudices that aren't purely discriminatory, such as 'critters of culture A believe people with brown eyes to be especially lucky'?
I have no idea what's going to happen here. The first time we'd look at it is possibly with the status part of the law/property release, since there's some distinction implicit in that, and the various dev goals have required these kind of mechanics broadly speaking. It's possible to screw up the game variously and badly if it's implemented poorly though.
Are we going to need to provide our armies with coinage for booze and bribes? Or will that wait for the economy?
There's nothing like that yet.
1. Will animal men on the surface ever form tribes that live in huts, have their own myths, etc?
2. In the future, say that these animal men surface tribes are a thing. Would it be possible for a first contact to happen, like a tribe and a civilization meet, then the humans/dwarves/goblins/etc want the land and start commiting genocide to the tribe like the US did to the Native Americans back in our early days?
3. When boats come, could it be possible for an "Age of Discovery" to occur? (As in the dwarves find a new continent or something.)
We'd like to do more with them, but I'm not sure when it'll happen.
We have a first contact section on our dev page under the explorer role, and I'm sure it'll be able to end horribly, but I don't know exactly what that'll be like. Demon civs (and others) are already kind of genocidal, but we aren't handling the issues very deftly, and I have no idea how clumsy we'd end up being if we tried to handle it more explicitly.
Yeah, the exploration release is supposed to involve this sort of thing.
If you send a raiding party out to attack a retired player fort, and then immediately retire and assume control of the fort you ordered to be attacked, will the dwarves you sent arrive and siege you?
We haven't handled the fort receiving artifact raids yet -- hopefully we'll get to that this month! Depending on how that turns out, you might end up with something more diplomatic, or the dwarven band trying to sneak in. A generic fort-sent raid often ends up being sneaky, due to the numeric differences, and we haven't handled that sort of thinking for attacks on player forts yet.
I guess the larger questions are: what do sites revolve around besides being gathering spots for NPCs? Any location with a market of sorts, or a tavern has a reason for being as there's clearly either industry present/a focal point. Will NPCs be seen "at work"? Hunters never hunt, farmers are never in the fields, etc.
I'm probably misreading this, but similar to the movement speed/attack speed split of DF2014, it seems ambusher skill has become separate from visual stealth. Will NPCs like hunters and other archers occasionally display behavior where they path according to tiles that benefit visual stealth? If so, will this conceal their vision arc from the player?
Are there any plans to diversify the human seat of power in a hamlet? Instead of just meadhalls, will there be manors, or other structures? Tangentially related, will we be able to mod the term of description for such structures?
In world generation, there are tons of industries and specifically tracked item resource piles etc., but that doesn't yet carry over much to post w.g. play. You can see a bit of it in the store types (the types reflect the actual industries) and the market items. But then everything is in stasis. We have to wait for the economy stuff for more to happen. Then we should see NPCs doing things, but it is way more complicated than movement scheduling or work "animations" -- it'll be a hard problem when we get there, since there are numbers/items to be tracked. I'm not even sure it'll be possible to do it all properly, but it's one of our goals to try.
Ambusher matters in all the visual rolls, but yeah, sometimes it doesn't matter how good you are, if your placement is awful. They should think about it more, but it's a difficult problem.
We'd like to have a lot more, but we never really tackled architecture properly. I'm not sure what'll happen there. We should be taking a big step toward societal diversity with the law/customs stuff, since they'll be different between human etc. civs, but I don't know when that'll be reflected in the buildings or whatever else.
When the myth update deals with the origins of the races, will there be any sort of like potentially semi-divine "first dwarves" or "golden age humans" like sort of the primogenitors of the particular races, who could get sung about for their role in history/cosmogony in songs and depicted in art and stuff?
It's hard to say exactly what's going to happen on the first pass -- the magic system generator currently adds properties that only apply to some dwarves/etc., and that'll require new data structures to manage, along the lines of what you're talking about. However, the "status" section of the major release after the myth update might be necessary for people to think about them as a group different from themselves. It depends on how they're differentiated, if they are more like a new creature or more like a new "entity" subgroup.
With implementation of dwarven raids, will we see humans, goblins and elves sending their small raids to player's fortress?
That's part of the "fort mode artifact diplomacy" we'll be diving into beginning now in May. The player's fort hasn't been exempted from their decisions, but everything needs a specific implementation there.
Since it's now possible to provoke wars just by having squads cause trouble, can an adventurer and his friends now provoke a war too by indulging in adventurer-like shenanigans?
I guess squads following artifact trails will get there eventually, but will we also be able to select adventurer camps as targets of raids?
This hasn't actually changed, since the war-starting part was a necessary side effect and applied only to the abstract post w.g. site raids, rather than whatever the player is doing in adventure mode. It's still kind of a hard question there, probably made even harder with the identity stuff, in terms of assigning blame.
Yeah, adventurer camps can be targeted, if your adventurer's site does not belong to your fort's civ (you still can't attack your own civ from dwarf mode, since we don't have time to handle all the implications there -- we're going to specifically handle that once we understand embark situations better).
If at a time where personal mounts are added to the game will you refactor how armies & expeditions travel around, given that horseback & flying in mean terms is significantly faster and less tiring than little dwarf legs running at the same pace
In the current format, do expeditions have 'leaders' akin to military captains or do they just function as co-operative party?
Yeah, that would be one of the first things to happen.
Expeditions have designated leaders, but it doesn't often come up once they already have a mission.
How will our dwarves treat rescued children? Will they be adopted as fort citizens, or be treated more as visitors? If the rescued child is still an infant, will anyone care for them?
When they arrive back, they get an active petition. Rejecting a child causes negative emotions in your citizens among many personality types, but the child would then be on their own. I don't know that there are babies as prisoners from w.g., but if so, dwarven childcare principles such as they are would still be in effect.
I probably misunderstood this one, but will this somehow improve current post-world gen battles that happen in different sites? The game currently treats a 3 goblin skirmish and a full fledged 1500 goblin invasion like kind of the same deal in offloaded sites, and they usually end when just one of the attackers dies (which is funny in thousand-goblin cases). Also, will these interventions on foreign sites appear like invasions in Legends Mode, regardless of intention and outcome? Such as "this is part of the Conflicts of Scratching", and so on.
Tangentially related (but not quite), what essential differences exist between visitor (performer/scholar/mercenary) and invader code, besides hostility and intent? Can our exploits be considered "visits" at some point?
There is something weird with post-worldgen visits and it is the clutter generated in the Legends Mode site entry, I don't know if this has been acknowledged (or is currently a bug) and this might sound a bit suggestion-y, but is there a possibility to get more detailed entries regarding visitors (such as what where they doing, what was their initial intention and/or if they were able to make a residence agreement)? If there's no room for those details in Legends Mode, how hard would it be to implement a cull feature, similar to what we currently have for lesser brown events within the Age sub-menu?
It seems that sort of flight should come from the "light attack" flag being set, but it wasn't set, so 1500 attackers running away post w.g. is probably buggy. I haven't noticed a problem yet in the raids I've debugged, but there's still time for something to come up. There are historical event collections prepared for dwarf mode raids.
Intent is just determined by the "army controller" guiding the army or group of armies when they arrive at the site. There are various auxiliary structures that also go into it with visitors, to determine what happens when they arrive. We'll see some peaceful dwarf behavior with your squads off-site even in this release, if you send them on a recovery mission and they don't have an immediate raid target -- then they'll go to towns and ask around, reporting back what happened even if they didn't get the artifact, and hopefully giving you a clue as to what to do next (though that can be rare for an artifact that is lost without a lot of leads).
Yeah, I agree the site legends have gotten a bit out of control. It has more information but it doesn't yet save it to the historical record (or I haven't written up the strings in a few cases). I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to clean it up.
1. Will it be possible for gods to disguise themselves as mortals and test real mortals and bless/curse them depending on how they do?
2. Would it be possible for magic in some worlds to be affected by a person's emotions? Like more strong/unstable when in an intense emotional state?
3. Would it be possible through magical means for a mortal to acquire godlike power?
It's unclear what's going to be in on the first pass -- we'd like to do as much as possible, and we certainly have a lot of the building blocks in place to make some interesting and unusual things happen. There are just too many possibilities to get great coverage the first time, compared to what people can imagine.
If our fortress were to somehow discover the location of a vault, could we send a squad to steal its slab? Would the corresponding demon of the slab become quite fixated on destroying our fortress if word spread that we had their slab?
The demons don't have a claim on their slabs, so they wouldn't care. They should care. It would take a good squad to overcome the guards, but it's possible. It wouldn't be of much use in fort mode, since the dwarves don't know how to use it, but it would make it easier for an adv to get at, as things stand. We don't have a great set of criteria at this time for which sites should be visible, so we just made them all visible. At some point, we'll have a proper exploration game, but not yet.
Is there anything in this next release that's kind of trivial but you're really looking forward to see live? Like a small addition or bug-fix that you wanted to do for a while and finally had the chance to?
The prophets and agents are a little larger than trivial, but that was sort of the random side branch this time. I can't think of anything super small that wasn't just part of the broad strokes of the release this time, though I'm probably forgetting something.
As far as the discoveries and scholarship system goes: Are there any plans for actively harmful discoveries? E.g. bloodletting which can end up harming your Dwarves, or a philosophy of nihilism which ends up making them morose if they think about it? Or even Lovecraft-style Forbidden Knowledge which drives the reader insane?
As people mentioned, we've been over this a bit. There should be room for it, but we have to be careful of blatant RNG fort death. I don't have a problem with players having to roll with some punches though, especially if they optionally start the process and the outcomes are more interesting than 100% negative.
Will there be any changes to "highest moodable skills" when creating artifacts regarding dwarves with no skills, such as children? So to prevent them from growing up into lowly craftsdwarves?
Will workshops presently not eligible for artifact creation, i.e. kiln, be available as well in the future?
I don't have any particular plans for this -- I'm not even sure what artifact moods will look like going forward, or if everything will sort of be blown apart by the magic update. All those years ago, the artifact mood jobs were unfortunately set aside as their own jobs, rather than just being modifiers on existing jobs, so stuff like kiln support requires a lot of work.
Can we choose specifically how our squad will approach a mission? 'Sneak in, sneak out', 'Make friends, nick their stuff', 'all-out attack', etc? Or will dorfs decide for themselves?
Also,
Can we choose what we want dorfs to aim for (besides artifacts)? Not so important for vanilla, but I imagine stealing steel weapons from nearby dorfs could be part of a modded human civ play strategy.
And,
While working through the coding of leaving and returning squads, did you come across the reason for any recent bugs? "Sieges" that dissapear instantly, sieges that don't end, disappearing caravans, etc?
They choose themselves right now, once you give them the basic goal. Certainly there's a lot of room for improvement here, and doing things like "steel weapon raids" would be cool. Or food raids.
I haven't gotten to any fort mode errors with sieges or caravans, though I'm going to be messing with sieges now that fort mode is going to be on the receiving end this month, and some sieges will be preceded by talks now.
Going back to the fake identities mechanic, if we visit a retired player fortress and claim to be someone we're not, if I then join the fortress and retire which identity will I see on the retired adventurer if I play that fortress? Does he get the full vampire fake name and background? Just a fake name? Nothing at all?
It should keep using your active identity's basic data. I have no idea how the profession stuff will react (with prophets etc), since we'll only now be getting to handling fortress visitors etc. this month, and none of my test forts with the squad stuff have had taverns or lasted long enough to get the new visitors.
Will adventure mode eventually include options for the player to live a more peaceful life if they so choose such as taking up a profession?
Dev notes. Settle down, build a farm/run an inn, raise a family.
That and 'bard' is pretty peaceful right now. More so when you can convince enemy civs you're on their side in the next release. (Requires festivals to move out of worldgen into 'real life' to be a bit more feature complete though).
Yeah, there are peaceful options that are sort of unsatisfying right now, but the same could be said of the non-peaceful adventure options. It's all growing up together. Probably of particular note in this regard will be the planned "slider" with the myth/magic release to set the violence/grimness of the world. Having low settings there will encourage continued work on peaceful paths, though the timeline of any specific feature is as up in the air as ever.
The latest development report, 04/27/2017, described the post mission report, but it's a bit confusing. It seems to be a report viewable only post mission (and thus not during the mission), but on the other hand it talks about viewing things in real time. Does this means we bring up the report after the mission and a "video" is played out where a line grows with events appearing on it as the playback rolls on? If so, would you have to sit through it several times if you wanted to look up details later, or is it played out once and you then can access the various notes?
Yeah, I mentioned those old flight sim games, but I guess they are old, he he he. It shows a "flight path", which is being recounted by the squad members that survived, and they tell you the interesting things that happened on the way as each point of interest is reached. It plays on the world map like a little movie. That doesn't mean it is super interesting -- just a path moving with a date and some unfolding event text. You can rewatch it any time from the 'r'eport screen. When you replay it (or the first time), you can just press enter and it skips to the end with all the notes listed, or you can watch the movie again if you want to. You can also pause. I don't yet have a rewind feature, but it would be feasible.
Would dwarves on a mission outside the fortress can getcurses from defiling temples or being bitten by vampires and werebeasts?
Stealing artifacts from temples doesn't currently count as defilement. I'm not sure if it should, at least while the curses are as severe as they are, since it would be sort of a story-killer. I guess it's possible to be injured by a werebeast post w.g., in the duel code, though I don't know how well it keeps track of their transformations post w.g. abstractly away from the fort.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1444287 times)