I've finished bringing Revised up to speed with its fork. I thought of sending long emails to Warlord255 about this but I'd rather get community feedback. Please respond with your thoughts, whoever is reading this!
Before I continue: none of this is intended to be a slight against Warlord255. We just have different visions for the future of Revised. I'm posting this in large part because I want to give people a chance to disagree with me, and because I thought Warlord255's work deserved a thorough look. Everything I list below is a feature of Vanilla-Spice Revised that I didn't include. There's plenty I
did include, and I'll discuss that when I finish the new version.
I uploaded a cleaned version of Vanilla-Spice Revised for Warlord255
here. It should be identical to Revised, except for the changes I didn't integrate. It doesn't contain every file of the original mod, either. It's literally meant as a basis for the next version of Vanilla-Spice Revised, because the fewer the differences between the two mods the more we can lean on each other.
VSR gives animal people grasping tailsThis adds a lot of changes to the base files and I'm concerned about side effects, such as mittens going on tails and such. I also have a bit of trouble seeing how legless animal people can use their tails to attack or hold things, seeing as they're currently using it for balance.
VSR gives many creatures (mainly snakes) mischievous tagsThe effect is great "A copperhead snake! Drive it away!", but I'm concerned about side effects, as above. Not every fort has its levers buried away somewhere, I've built above-ground forts in the past.
VSR makes animal people dwarf sizedI actually prefer the flavor of vanilla, to be honest. I see Revised as being about look and feel first of all, bug-fixing second, and gameplay tweaks a distant third. This leaned a little too far into "gameplay tweaks" territory for my comfort.
VSR gives many creatures classes that it doesn't use, like PORCINE or ANIMAL_PERSONI think this is laying the groundwork for a big update. Not adding to Revised until I see where it's going.
VSR adds new, deadlier attacks for some creaturesAs I stated earlier, I'm wary of gameplay tweaks. Especially when I already gave up on Revised once already. As with everything on the list I'm open to persuasion. I'm especially reconsidering adding this: I might have been too harsh on the extra attacks.
VSR gives worm people utterances and buffs themSee the comments about gameplay tweaks. I did integrate the skill improvements Warlord255 added for all(?) animal people, but worm people were buffed above and beyond this. I'm on the fence, so I didn't add it. I'm not sure off-hand what all the UTTERANCES tag does, so I erred on the side of caution.
VSR rework crows and magpies as proper creatures, not verminWhy can't they be vermin? I can see why it's inconsistent with other creatures, though. The new Modest Mod thread has at least one person suggesting that
more creatures be made vermin. It means quite a few changes from vanilla either way though, so I'm wary of it.
mosquito males were made consistent with female mosquitosI kind of like the flavor, where mosquito women are deadly and mosquito men kind of aren't.
VSR makes gnomes talk as SOUND tagsThis is interesting, and many of the quips are well written. These are the only SOUND tags that I didn't add, however, because gnomes are described as mute in my descriptions (including VSR's descriptions), and considered such in gameplay. I may as well mention here that I'll probably go back and remove a few of the vocalizations I added (like creatures flicking their tongues), because a few don't make sense to me as loud noises.
VSR makes evil gnomes not benignI don't mind evil gnomes actually being kind of benign. I'll defer to Toady here.
VSR makes sharks and carp crazedI'm concerned I've already gone too far in the "make the game arbitrarily harder" direction, with all the CURIOUS item stealing tags everywhere and the new harder farming changes I integrated. This doesn't seem particularly realistic either, to be honest.
VSR gives cave_adapted to underground creaturesInteresting change. I was on the fence about it. I ended up not adding this because it needed quite a few changes and I didn't think it would come out in gameplay enough. I also want to do proper gameplay testing for this release and to be honest I didn't feel like adding this to my testing to-do list.
VSR increases the frequency of elemental humanoids undergroundI'm happy with the vanilla frequency. I'm not much of a fan of the elemental humanoids anyway.
VSR ravens steal thingsThere's already some concern about this, so I opted not to add more stealing creatures to the current pile.
VSR removes vermin attacks because they don't attack correctlyI've never noticed this coming out in-game as a bug? I'm wary of including fixes for things that don't actually affect my gameplay, but I might be wrong about this one.
VSR dwarves don't stress as easilyI'm reasonably confident that Toady will look at fixing stress 'soonish', so I don't want to worry about fixing it now. Will revisit if it bothers me in gameplay and it's not fixed when Toady starts working on the Myths and Magic release.
VSR humans aren't benign, and they're a little smallerI'm happy to defer to Toady here.
VSR kobolds aren't as tiny, they spit fireballs, and they mature faster (10 instead of 12)I don't mind kobolds being weak. I stated earlier that I'm wary of including too many gameplay tweaks and I'm not really trying to rebalance the game, to be honest.
VSR yetis and sasquatches are a little more frequentI like them being rare, to be honest.
VSR makes some changes to snake people - color changes, names, cluster_number, descriptions are different (from an older version of revised?)There were some mistakes here, like how copperhead snake people are partly renamed to rattlesnake people, which already exist. It also removes the bit of flavor I gave copperhead snake people (copper heads) and uses (I think) an older version of snake people descriptions. All in all I decided to keep things as I have them, but I avoided changing this back. There were a few other VSR bugs here or there that I fixed in the upload I left for Warlord255, but I left these changes alone.
VSR adds wooden training maces and hammersI'll see what Sver uploaded and defer to that mod if I need them.
From the VSR description: 'Dwarf civs have fewer domestic animals by default to reduce migrant pet clutter'I'd prefer to leave this as vanilla.
VSR removes the expanded dictionaryI'm in the middle of cleaning it up a little, so for now I'm still going to use the expanded dictionary.
VSR adds new food interactions, like raw meat euphoria for carnivores, plant euphoria for herbivores, blood sucking euphoria, cheese euphoria, and a special raw plump helmet syndromeI thought this stuff was damn interesting and (with reference to the cheese) kind of funny, but I decided against keeping this. Surely if all you eat is meat, then eating meat would seem mundane to you. Mostly I just didn't want the extensive CREATURE_CLASS modifications needed to get this to work properly. VSR also changes alcohol's CE_FEEL_EMOTION:EMOTION:EUPHORIA from :75 to :50, but I left things as default.
VSR adds stone and wax ammoSee the many previous statements about gameplay additions.
VSR adds an automatic quarry bush processing interactionOf all the things I didn't merge this one was the one I regretted most. Maybe I'll change my mind. But I already had to remove Microreduce because it caused non-obvious bugs, I'm wary of repeating that.
VSR adds mining and forging sicknessesThis isn't just gameplay additions, it's gameplay additions with somewhat extensive balancing and raw tags required. While I think the idea is a great one, I don't want the burden of maintaining it, to be honest.
VSR adds flint and bog ironI'm just repeating myself at this point. More gameplay features means more things to balance and debug. My personal focus for Revised is harmless lore changes (what you read, how things look).
VSR changes bauxite and periclase display tilesI'm not sure why, to be honest. I left things as vanilla.
VSR gives non-grey/brown/white stones a higher valueI just didn't see this as affecting gameplay enough to justify its inclusion.
Thank you, Warlord255.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress Revised (v3.1.1 for v0.47.04) (Read 154355 times)