I've been working on my first major modding project: making the game harder! Most of it is just number changes to stuff that should be buffed/nerfed, but I've made a few stylistic changes as well as done my best to prevent the standard ways of cheesing the game.
List of changes:
- I've made dwarves more vulnerable to stress in general, through a combo of several traits
- Dwarves now learn slower, especially skills like mining and combat skills
- Metal is now quite rare, and ores are expensive, making them more difficult to buy and more difficult to bring at embark
- Goblins are far stronger. They have trapavoid, martial trances, feel no pain, and have exclusive access to titanium, a steel-level metal.
They also have an ability to increase the stress of dwarves over long periods of time, making walling out sieges quite dangerous for larger forces. - Weaponry of goblins and dwarves have been changed up to make them more goblin-y and dwarf-y respectively. Dwarves have two new weapons, the bluntsword (imagine one of those big anime swords, but with the top two thirds lopped off), and the axehammer (exactly what it sounds like).
- Beasts are far more terrifying. Semimegabeasts have been removed, and megabeasts have been demoted. The new megabeasts are all terrifyin constructs of metal, which I'm working on now. Currently they're a bronze dragon stolen from MW, a fuck-you version of the bronze colossus (literally just that, but steel), and a golden roc, which has been giving me trouble since the darn thing actually has jibbly bits. Might also make some kind of metal GCS that spews something absurd. Oh yeah, also I gave everything trapavoid, no more catching megabeasts in cages.
- Cavern creatures are changed as well, though only mildly. I made GCS and cave dragons much more common, and made the latter trapavoid.
- Farming is also heavily nerfed; crop grow times are greatly increased and crop max yields are decreased.
I plan to buff elves to make them less funny/annoying and more cultural oppressors and tyrants under the guise of peace, probably with some elf-only metal and the revoking of their wood weapons and armor, because that's dumb. I might also make them less in numbers civ-wise but make them have natural combat prowess and the likes.
Other than the metal beasts, the one thing I've yet to fully hammer out is the goblin stress-inducing interaction, which I don't think works through walls in spite of goblins having extravision. I suspect it's something to do with my USAGE_HINT, but if I remove the usage hint then I might get stuck with a goblin performance troupe stressing all my dwarves out. Then again, that would be pretty funny, and shouldn't be a huge issue; I only intend for the stress to be harsh with large numbers of goblins camping outside my gates for a few seasons.