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[FantasticDorf]

More of a future-proofing suggestion in regards to adding more capability to non-civilian creatures that aid your military and adventuring party. Creatures that are subserviant your fortress or adventurer (intelligent livestock, wizard constructions, necromancer zombies) and aren't war animals can be attached to squads as normal squad-members so that they can also be more helpfully used.

For instance if you create multiple wizard servants inside a fortress (maybe you just want more helpful hands if they are convenient to create) or a rampant necromancer. Gremlins are a typical vanilla example of this as they are a tamable intelligent and cannot lead by itself, so inserting it as a minon inbetween a crossbow-dwarf military group would be snug & appropriate to its skillset, not dissimilar to a mercenary  in a way of being slightly detached from the full military.

Ad-hoc minons

This applies to 'summons' either created on the spot (like a fire man) by magical ability or more typically through necromancery rather than pernament additions to your party, unless they happen to be co-erced into fighting onto your side by magical ability, such as elf communication with animals to suddenly add local wildlife in the vicinity to your party or thralling a living person into doing your bidding versus their own.

When put in control or part of a militia and a decision to summon is made in response to aggrovation, to the amount of available slots remaining inside the miltia a necromancer may summon zombies which similarly obey militia commands, the zombies won't be de-assigned from this group without player input and no more additional zombies summoned once the cap of militia spots is exceeded.

Putting them within a full militia group would mean that necromancers would not summon zombies until another member dies & frees up a space, with a similar example set for wizards & temporary help including active summoning objects like demon tomes.

Destroying/dismissing minions

The ability to 'dismiss' or otherwise destroy your minions which would be natural ability for necromancers over a certain limit of usable zombies to self limit how many entities are currently under their control or dismiss them, and similarly for magically summoned creatures rather than ones made of tangible flesh & blood which may simply return to livestock animal or civilian life.

A necromancer civilian having raised zombies in response to a wild animal attack satisfied that the local surroundings are safe will dismiss the zombies they raised around them to counter the attack. Leaving the corpses to flop to the ground.

This is a different interaction when they are out in the world such as a necromancer laying siege onto a enemy fortress, as all the large amounts of zombies brought along remain within their control rather than become dismissed for any such reason because the necromancer 'party' extends to the active duty of the entire army.

A lot of this suggestion is in reponse to feedback about how buggy sometimes simpler creatures can be, and sets out to give some of the oddball citizens of the fortress some purpose, even if it is to just lead zombies onto suicide missions as expendable units or to a quiet isolated area of the fortress to forever remain purposed as guards lead by a vampire more than happy to remain stationed.

[GoblinCookie]

intelligent livestock,

Is that not a euphemism for slave?

[FantasticDorf]

intelligent livestock,

Is that not a euphemism for slave?

Are gremlins really free citizens? Its best you draw your own conclusions really.

[GoblinCookie]

Are gremlins really free citizens? Its best you draw your own conclusions really.

Gremlins are wild creatures.

[KittyTac]

Are gremlins really free citizens? Its best you draw your own conclusions really.

Gremlins are wild creatures.

They can be trained and then they're citizens.

[GoblinCookie]

They can be trained and then they're citizens.

Citizens?  Surely we are talking about the situation where we have pets that work, except we cannot control their labour list because of a bug so they only ever do hauling. 

[FantasticDorf]

They automatically hunt by default because they are pre-set to active hunting & hauling labours, whilst this means they will annoyingly go off and poach things using available tools, they can also already be put in the military as crossbow users.

The OP leans more towards recognising supportive units (like mercenaries, follow but not lead) out of these groups, so that i could insert gremlins into the military without it feeling like such a exploit while recognising their rightful place as a non-full citizen amongst other magically summoned help. In my personal opinion im inclined to actually remove the vanilla [PET_EXOTIC] on gremlins entirely because of the lack of feasability & trouble training them creates.

They don't make competent skill-monkeys if the user can't properly configure what they can do, outside of possibly becoming a mayor then having some idle animal trainer neglect to renew their training.

[dragdeler]

In my personal opinion im inclined to actually remove the vanilla [PET_EXOTIC] on gremlins entirely because of the lack of feasability & trouble training them creates.

It is taunting; I've never had the honor to witness somebody accomplish this. But don't remove it because it's hard. These kind of details make this game very loveable (and occasionaly drive OCD people into depression, but they wouldn't have it any other way). That's why I'm not too eager for procedural races, there is allready so much to be done in this world, and so much behaviour where we can only fill the blanks with our own imagination at this point.

[FantasticDorf]

If it substantiated the reward sure, but its buggy and not as functional as you would think it to be.

[GoblinCookie]

They automatically hunt by default because they are pre-set to active hunting & hauling labours, whilst this means they will annoyingly go off and poach things using available tools, they can also already be put in the military as crossbow users.

The OP leans more towards recognising supportive units (like mercenaries, follow but not lead) out of these groups, so that i could insert gremlins into the military without it feeling like such a exploit while recognising their rightful place as a non-full citizen amongst other magically summoned help. In my personal opinion im inclined to actually remove the vanilla [PET_EXOTIC] on gremlins entirely because of the lack of feasability & trouble training them creates.

They don't make competent skill-monkeys if the user can't properly configure what they can do, outside of possibly becoming a mayor then having some idle animal trainer neglect to renew their training.

The thing is we have a whole grey zone between citizens and animals at the moment because of the way that the devs did not clearly define the difference between people and intelligent animals to begin with, that is made the redundant mechanic of defining intelligence at a creature level rather than creating social entities that were defined as intelligent with the default being regular dumb animals.  This thread is therefore sort of confusing because it is directed at a state of affairs which is incomplete and buggy to start with. 

So the gist of this thread is that we have summoned minions and 'temporary' undead creatures.  But why do we need special mechanics for this, we can just surely make them squads of 'regular' folks or 'regular' war animals and then erase them from existence once they have run out of time as it were.  Why do we need special mechanics for such creatures when surely they are better modeled as either war animals *or* sapient soldiery?

[FantasticDorf]

Because the system will become invariably more complex with the addition of magic and though i haven't stated it quite clearly, if as a consequence you can't dispel or limit the amount of summons you have, then it will cause recurrent issues hence why i also mention specific limiting factors like auto-dismissal & squad size limits.

True its accouting for a buggy grey area, but innately if gremlins etc. are neither moving one way or the other, & Minon is already sort of a term adopted for trolls for instance which are partially sentient and also buggy automatically assumed by virtue of [USE_EVIL_CREATURES] by default which has unique behaviour for enrolling local evil semi-intelligents whether they have corresponding [PET] tags or not , not enough really exists to 'freeze' them out of roles or dictate what they can do.

It needs shaping but just acknowledging that "for now X & X can be thrown into the action" is satisfactory for their expendable nature, with proper execution, you would not need to even put [PET_EXOTIC] or [TRAINABLE] on creatures

[GoblinCookie]

Because the system will become invariably more complex with the addition of magic and though i haven't stated it quite clearly, if as a consequence you can't dispel or limit the amount of summons you have, then it will cause recurrent issues hence why i also mention specific limiting factors like auto-dismissal & squad size limits.

True its accouting for a buggy grey area, but innately if gremlins etc. are neither moving one way or the other, & Minon is already sort of a term adopted for trolls for instance which are partially sentient and also buggy automatically assumed by virtue of [USE_EVIL_CREATURES] by default which has unique behaviour for enrolling local evil semi-intelligents whether they have corresponding [PET] tags or not , not enough really exists to 'freeze' them out of roles or dictate what they can do.

It needs shaping but just acknowledging that "for now X & X can be thrown into the action" is satisfactory for their expendable nature, with proper execution, you would not need to even put [PET_EXOTIC] or [TRAINABLE] on creatures

I am not talking about the creatures, I am talking about the squad system.    Summon numbers can easily be controlled by limiting the number of creatures an individual wizard can summon, there is no reason to have the devs spend time inventing a whole new squad type for the summons to specifically use when the creatures themselves can simply be treated as normal members of squads, either added in the empty slots of squads or as new squads which will then potentially vanish into thin air, along with the squad.  The same situation will happen if squads that originally had a mixture of non-summoned members and summoned members loses all it's non-summoned members.  What is it about summons specifically that requires that they have a whole separate type of squad in order to represent their behavior properly? 

Trolls are not 'semi-sentient', because no such thing exists in the game at present.  They are creatures that [CAN_LEARN] but cannot [CAN_SPEAK], a combination that makes no sense at all because if they can learn to do everything else, why can they not learn to write or use sign language; but that is how it.  Either of those tags are treated by the game as defining a sentient creature, there is no special status of semi-sentiant.  The only distinction is between those who are part of entities as full citizens, are part of entities as pets and are not-part of entities, trolls come in the latter two categories. 

The whole system is of course a buggy mess and totally redundant as well.  The error was making the actual appearance of the creatures in the game derive directly from the creature file, as opposed to having it simply define the physical traits of the creatures and having the actual appearance of the creature in the game and their biome defined in an entity file.  Then we could have some entity files contain a token that would allow said populations of creature to form settlements and also define the details of social arrangements of the particular creatures in the same manner. 

[FantasticDorf]

Squads are flexible and yes, even in the case of mercenaries if all of the leaders fall, then the squad collapses and that is wholly intentional by Toady's own design with mercenaries already, hence you would pad it out with more than one leading soldier dwarf ideally well armed & trained and all the remaining 'minion' squadmates would still be in a combat situation into close proximity or far away for it to not matter before the player re-assigns them.

Let me rephrase myself* trolls are [SLOW_LEARNERS] to all effective purposes is what i meant, and do not have the intellectual capacity (skill learn rate -50% and can't do unspecified labours) of full trained persons already, therefore are treated as intelligent livestock, calm down as i can see you're getting worked up over it. I don't exactly understand or follow what the physical description of has to do with your complaint about a lack of a detailed entity file as a 'mistake' as details outside of physical body dimensions & tags are completely arbitary.

*[Poor explanation on my part]

Yes a wizard could have a cap on summons, but that is not a concrete rule if you can summon a unlimited amount of minons if magic procedurally and unpredictably generates its rules that way, it also cohesively keeps them all under control and for lack of squad system the personal party system works in its place under much the same rules that you couldn't have a full roster of companions and permanent summoned entities.

Its not a different squad, its the same fortress military squad/party in the original detail, im not sure how you became confused, it deals a critical nerf to potential battle wizards too enrolled or played directly in a adventurer format by the player. A lot of it is also about keeping these beings under control so you don't have maruading units where they shouldn't be, hence the suggestion to pair the undead with a vampire (who needs no sustenance) on permanent duty & loosely attach units.

If you want more unit attachments, just make new militia squads or expand the sizes of miltias in the entity file, or build your charisma in adventure mode.

[GoblinCookie]

Squads are flexible and yes, even in the case of mercenaries if all of the leaders fall, then the squad collapses and that is wholly intentional by Toady's own design with mercenaries already, hence you would pad it out with more than one leading soldier dwarf ideally well armed & trained and all the remaining 'minion' squadmates would still be in a combat situation into close proximity or far away for it to not matter before the player re-assigns them.

Let me rephrase myself* trolls are [SLOW_LEARNERS] to all effective purposes is what i meant, and do not have the intellectual capacity (skill learn rate -50% and can't do unspecified labours) of full trained persons already, therefore are treated as intelligent livestock, calm down as i can see you're getting worked up over it. I don't exactly understand or follow what the physical description of has to do with your complaint about a lack of a detailed entity file as a 'mistake' as details outside of physical body dimensions & tags are completely arbitary.

I don't know how you concluded that I was getting worked up about anything, now I am getting worked up about how people said I was getting worked up. 

[SLOW_LEARNER] is basically a shorthand for the set of tokens that control the speed of learning, all it means is that the default learning rate of all skills is set to 50% of what it normally would be.  There are no special mechanics associated with that token, the situation as far as the AI and the game mechanics are concerned they are identical to other intelligent creatures, the only difference is the rate at which they gain skill points from working. 

The situation as regards [CAN_LEARN] pets is bugged in that while said pets do work using the same AI as everybody else, it is only the work that is on by default which tends to be thinks that have no skills; that is because the interface does not change from pets that cannot learn to pets that do; meaning they have in effect a labour list but one we cannot access.  This situation has nothing to do with the tokens *of* the learning pet, you could make them as seemingly super-clever as you want or as stupid as you like in terms of their raws and it will not change the situation. 

As for the rest, I was simply stating that I don't think that the devs did a very good job of defining animals VS people and a major factor in this happens to be the way that they made regular creatures actual appearance derive directly from the creature file tokens with entity creatures placed separately. I would have been better for them to have had all creatures actual appearance in the game defined by the entity files and having actual civilisations procedurally emerge based upon the tokens found there.

*[Poor explanation on my part]

Yes a wizard could have a cap on summons, but that is not a concrete rule if you can summon a unlimited amount of minons if magic procedurally and unpredictably generates its rules that way, it also cohesively keeps them all under control and for lack of squad system the personal party system works in its place under much the same rules that you couldn't have a full roster of companions and permanent summoned entities.

Its not a different squad, its the same fortress military squad/party in the original detail, im not sure how you became confused, it deals a critical nerf to potential battle wizards too enrolled or played directly in a adventurer format by the player. A lot of it is also about keeping these beings under control so you don't have maruading units where they shouldn't be, hence the suggestion to pair the undead with a vampire (who needs no sustenance) on permanent duty & loosely attach units.

If you want more unit attachments, just make new militia squads or expand the sizes of miltias in the entity file, or build your charisma in adventure mode.

Procedural generation does not have magical powers FantasticDorf, I cannot produce anything that is not programmed deliberately or otherwise to produce.  Being able to summon an unlimited amount of minions is not something that should be allowed to happen, as a rule there must some limitation on the number of creatures that can be summoned whatever it's exact nature.  It is also something that cannot mechanically be allowed to happen for obvious reasons related to memory. 

There are two ways we can handle summons in relation.  One is we can ignore squads altogether and have the summons operate in an individual relationship to their summoner, or some other character.  They will follow about and defend that character, ignoring his squad status since it does not matter.  The second option is to have the summoned creature join the squad of the summoner as an extra member, potentially going over the squad limit.  The third option is to have summons form new squads, this creates a problem in that we end up with a clutter of small squads running about.

I favour the second option, making the summons extra members of the squad in a special case, so the squad can go over the maximum size through summoning but the player can make it go over that limit otherwise.  We can however assign existing summons to empty slots in existing regular squads like they were anyone else.  Other things that aren't summoned in the thick of action (wizard constructs, regular undead) should just start off as normal creatures and be assigned to squads normally. 

[FantasticDorf]

[SLOW_LEARNER] is basically a shorthand for the set of tokens that control the speed of learning, all it means is that the default learning rate of all skills is set to 50% of what it normally would be.  There are no special mechanics associated with that token, the situation as far as the AI and the game mechanics are concerned they are identical to other intelligent creatures, the only difference is the rate at which they gain skill points from working. 

The situation as regards [CAN_LEARN] pets is bugged in that while said pets do work using the same AI as everybody else, it is only the work that is on by default which tends to be thinks that have no skills; that is because the interface does not change from pets that cannot learn to pets that do; meaning they have in effect a labour list but one we cannot access.  This situation has nothing to do with the tokens *of* the learning pet, you could make them as seemingly super-clever as you want or as stupid as you like in terms of their raws and it will not change the situation. 

As for the rest, I was simply stating that I don't think that the devs did a very good job of defining animals VS people and a major factor in this happens to be the way that they made regular creatures actual appearance derive directly from the creature file tokens with entity creatures placed separately. I would have been better for them to have had all creatures actual appearance in the game defined by the entity files and having actual civilisations procedurally emerge based upon the tokens found there.

There are some actual mechanics attached to that token actually, slow learners not only have a decline in skill learning rate as you describe, but are innately by game design, unable to work jobs without third party exploitative programs like dwarf therapist, have animal-like commitment rituals that do not require marriage and in previous versions posess no sentient emotions, with only such given later on part of what looks like a accident with recessive code.

• Giving a race a particular level of skill like a gremlin's [NATURAL_SKILL:SNEAK:3] will let you enable it from your labour selection list for reference being more towards what i meant, which is especially useful if you want to tip a specially made race towards a role, as sneaking is synonymous with the hunting job.

Blind cave ogres lost much of their luster as a threat when they became passive around the beginning of the tavern arc, as per code regressions adding onto their state and pacifying previously brualistic [LARGE_PREDATOR] semi-intelligents like them. Terrifying animal like predators who were intelligent "enough" to get better at combat skills the more notoriously proficient they became if not just threatening with size & aggression anyway.

Procedural generation does not have magical powers FantasticDorf, I cannot produce anything that is not programmed deliberately or otherwise to produce.  Being able to summon an unlimited amount of minions is not something that should be allowed to happen, as a rule there must some limitation on the number of creatures that can be summoned whatever it's exact nature.  It is also something that cannot mechanically be allowed to happen for obvious reasons related to memory.

Id argue its never such stopped a development in DF similarly to date with other things that can slow the program down like a cap on the amount of objects in the game besides certain fixed DF elements like population (you're free to make enough stone bracelets until your computer breaks), and it would be assumptive to speculate a fixed resolution rather than remain open minded. Toady can code the parameters as much as they could probably easy code a unlimited amount of effects tied to the cost of the action which is a resuming theme of "cast until you drop dead or X consequence" we see in both press talks & mentioned in the FoTF.