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[FantasticDorf]

Thanks for the answers Toady!

Right now you are moving to villain stuff, but I don't know if you are still going to look over the site interactions and since one thing relates to one another, well...

1. As your fort get more integrated in the world, how do hillocks interact with the surrounding biome right now (and in the future)? Will settling in an evil biome cause the hillocks that grow around your fort to have an undead/syndrome problem? Could they be overrun by the undead and end up with an invasion of your fort? Will you be able to send troops there to guard/fend off undead, beasts and such? Do sending troops there right now do anything?

Thanks Toady

Villians were discussed  and necromancers fit the description of a villian but how that pans out with factors like re-animating biomes/necro towers conquering sites you'll have to pick toady's brains over because we have not a lot of clarity of a moment besides the shortlist on the monthly report without a devlog explaining. (See answer to question 3 for clarity about defenders in sites by transferring military dwarves)

Some of your questions, while it is important in principle to probe around the question for detail, wriggling in suggestions isn't recommended since we have a helpful subforum for proposed game additions. (anything that might be a percieved suggestions underlined, just for helpful reference)

2. Tying to the previous question, will we be able to "refuse" hillocks settlements? And if that's the case, I imagine the system would work as charts, with migrants (or citizens of your fort) asking for a chart to settle a land nearby. ((You could deny them because it's too dangerous, for example)). How would the current count/barony system tie with the fact that hillock might not pop up because you denied them/place is too remote?

That's really a 2 and 2a) question but at the given moment with economic sites, dependency on you for safety from "villians" is quite likely so that you're not totally detached from the world, and just to, the current reasoning for infinite distance is that the offerings of wealth you give your caravan initially draws people from your civ to settle near you.

3. Conversely, how do/will hillocks interact with invaders? Could a necromancer rampage through the hillocks to try and raise a larger army to invade you? Would you be able to send patrols to try and intercept the necromancer before it snowballs in a huge army of the undead?

A lot of this pertains to a particular scenario rather than a question, though the scenario is a important one of whether enemies of your site will go attack your holdings first. In the current game its a case of if your holdings site is attacked, then the usual 'defenders' and attackers scenario, so you can already fend off attacks by transferring soldier dwarves (so i believe via conquerers occupying) but nothing professional at the given moment.

4. You are now moving to the "villain role", though I'm not sure this is "individual" (as in adventurer is a bad guy) or generic (goblins, "large scale bad guys"). Tied into that is slavery in the dev page, though only mentioned 3 times. Slaves right now are a rare occasion and only happen during site destruction in world gen. Since we have more assets now (hillocks) than just the fort itself, will that shift the paradigm of invaders to relate to all that? Let me give a few examples. Right now all invaders want your complete destruction, but it would make more sense for them to want your partial destruction just for their own gain.

Goblins already take slaves ingame, if you're connecting the link between expanded villiany options & roles from the devlopment plans, then a more fleshed out system may be possible, but im not saying anything imparticular because that's really for Toady to say and decide. Maybe it'll turn up as a viable development candidate, maybe it wont.

Questions 4.1 - 4.4 answered in enclosed spoiler.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

4.1 It's pretty easy to lock yourself right now and wait for a siege to pass (ignoring future tunneling units), but wouldn't the invading army raid/plunder the hillocks while you hide (which would also make the invasion last longer, since they have supplies)? Could a siege be done for specifically to gather slaves/undead without losing a lot of lives from the invading force while they force the army (you) to be shut in your fort or occasionally harass you if you try to stray too far away from the fort?

Enemy forces over time already do muster up forces, goblin particularly steal children for this purpose to keep population numbers high, as well as conquering any number of weak surrounding enemy sites. Inactivity probably will be punished.

4.2 Tying to 4.1, what kind of problems would this cause for the player? Refugees you can't deny/or deny with consequences? The need to divert resources to reconstruct hillocks? Demotion from duke/barony status (can that even happen?)? Overall anger and sadness in your fort population by the destruction caused in their neighbors or isolation of being locked in the fort?

This is really a lot of questions but the overall theme is (if your holdings get trashed, how are you going to fix it?), Im sure Toady will have to, just wait and see for a response.

4.3 Will invaders ever attack you not only aiming for your total destruction? ((Could it be that they just want to carry off the riches they can and set out? Would some slavers drive by and just take your citizens then go off?))

You've already addressed this partially in question 4, and in the more recent releases, while your dwarves might be dead. A better rephrased question may be "Can invaders interact with your site in more than a political way" since the game conditions require all your citizens to be dead normally for you to relinquish your control of the fortress and 'lose the game'. Goblins & other civilizations can already demand artifacts from you.

4.4 With the upcoming villain stuff, will invaders use hillocks citizens to try and get to you? Could they occupy a site and hold it for ransom and convince a citizen to come to your fort to, let's say, pull the bridge lever when they come?

See my answer for 4.3 on more invader/villian interactions.

5. Will the role of "raider" get in this release? (In the sense of temporary forces, either outlaws or enemies, that come to take people or valuables, causing death and destruction but not enough to end the game)

One for Toady, though you could kind of either bend the question any number of ways. Repeating question 4.3 in the spoiler much.

6. Finally, are there respective plans for the stuff I asked in any arc, if it's not coming in the current cycle of hillock/villains?

Plans change, Toady might drop the first release of the villian arc and put it on hold if something better or complications come up in the way of something else (like a different direction for hill arc). Id recommend you re-read some of the FotF replies over the years as they had some pretty detailed explanations about the chronology of features for arcs.

Phew, i need a rest, i hope i could be of help.

[PatrikLundell]

:
1. As your fort get more integrated in the world, how do hillocks interact with the surrounding biome right now (and in the future)? Will settling in an evil biome cause the hillocks that grow around your fort to have an undead/syndrome problem? Could they be overrun by the undead and end up with an invasion of your fort? Will you be able to send troops there to guard/fend off undead, beasts and such? Do sending troops there right now do anything?
:

Not with dwarves, as dwarves (excluding players) don't settle in evil biomes. They can tone down savage biomes to become possible to settle in over the centuries, but there is currently no process in place for pushing away evilness (that will likely change with spheres, although not necessarily in the first arc).
If you play a modded race that settles in evil biomes, well, that's what they do and presumably should suffer the consequences of it (although goblins seem to do fine with it, and I would guess that the reanimation effect isn't modeled yet, so I'd guess you wouldn't have any problems until Toady addresses that issue, which I would expect wouldn't be a priority until vanilla generated playable races can get generated to settle in such spheres).

[voliol]

I have a question about FotF itself. If there was an answer on the question from one of the guys from forum and Toady just adds some thoughts about it but not answering from the beginning can the original answer be posted in FotF along with Toady's answer or at least postlinked?

Ooh, that would be nice. I suppose it's possible to browse the previous pages but still, it'd be nice. Make your text green to make sure Toady sees it.

[Knight Otu]

Thanks for the answers, Toady!

[Mel_Vixen]

1. Will villain level behaviours carry over to more legimate characters? After all Religions are not that much different then cults. Kindoms or Groups of Guards work in a way like gangs on a grander scale too or with different goals.

2. Will Players be an active part of those things. Say a cult officialy wanting to etablish a temple at your fort, Rulers demanding (not just requesting) gear or Warriors. Quests to steal/retrieve certain artefacts where your Adventurer or Fort are approached from a third party (even under false pretenses). Down to a thievesguild using your messhall as meetingplace.

3. Will you be able to enact your own devious plots? Paying people to do "evil" action like assasinating certain people or sending out some of your adventurergroups to recover certain things for you or set stuff in motion.

4. Will there be interaction between the various villian groups and persons? One cult undermining another, certain banditgroups working together and sharing information etc. ?

[Tobihaze]

Creatures are my favorite thing about Dwarf Fortress. In particular, I love the non-procedural ones that you've created yourself. Hungry heads, flesh balls, cave floaters. I love them all. That's why this really stood out to me.

The whole concept of 'demon' will float as the sliders move; we've made some semantic charts for 'demon', 'fairy', 'angel', 'titan', 'god', 'force', 'spirit', etc., and we're trying not to be beholden to English entirely when assigning categories to supernatural creatures, as that can be really limiting.

1. If I'm not mistaken, does this mean that we could generally predict the behavior of a creature based on its tag?

2. Additionally, is the category system intended to generate creatures with certain characteristics based on the tag assigned to the entity? As in, "fairies are generally cute flying things" while "angels are divine entities". That sort of thing.

3. Lastly, if the semantic charts do influence the creature's generation, does "trying not to be beholden to English" mean new creature types? Basically, if you were to create a tag for hellenic creatures, would they conform to what we'd expect from Greek mythology? Would a youkai sit in the mountains yelling at people rather than attacking like a normal night creature? Does this create the possibility for a world to generate with sub-classes of specific creature types? For example, dividing the fairies (or anything, really) into two "courts" that don't get along and have certain traits associated with the type.

Again, I love your monsters. Some of them are downright bizarre, and I love what they do for the atmosphere in the game.

[FantasticDorf]

:
1. As your fort get more integrated in the world, how do hillocks interact with the surrounding biome right now (and in the future)? Will settling in an evil biome cause the hillocks that grow around your fort to have an undead/syndrome problem? Could they be overrun by the undead and end up with an invasion of your fort? Will you be able to send troops there to guard/fend off undead, beasts and such? Do sending troops there right now do anything?
:

Not with dwarves, as dwarves (excluding players) don't settle in evil biomes.

They can start in evil (or good) mountains though, as a concious choice i dont know whether Toady would enable the option for economic sites to. There are no entity.txt controls for telling a civilisation to not settle in a specific biome, such as elves settling in evil jungles or humans on good plains & rivers.

Savage biomes are still off-limits, but where they start is irrelevant to any particular rules as long as its the right biome.

[Vivalas]

It's not worth playing with the Flaming Obsidian Mug of Lebesnóton if there's a chance it might fill your fortress with magma because you don't know what it does in advance.

I don't know, that sort of thing sounds exciting to me-- I would love to play SCP Fortress and lock a random dwarf in an isolated chamber with an unknown artifact to see what happens. I think I even flavored my first fortress as a "dwarven research facility", and magical research is quite interesting.


Anyways, I read that bit about the FAQ, but it's somewhat hard to go and find answers from previous FotF unless you've been reading them all, and the forum search seems very useless sometimes. Apologies if this has been asked:

With improvements to sieges include some sort of look at balancing the cage trap. Right now it's a very icky thing that pops up when I play, whether or not to use them or not. While of course players can just use restraint, it's nicer to have mechanical reasons. The dev page mentioned somewhere about multi-tile traps, but is there perhaps a few short-term tweaks that could make cage traps a bit less powerful? Right now if you build enough of them to match the invader cap, you really don't have to do much but open the gates and capture everyone.

Granted, I noticed in an older fort after 34.11 that invaders seem more cautious towards traps, and I can't tell if this is noted anywhere, but I noticed that attacking goblins very slowly creeped down my main trap hallway, as if suspiciously, and immediately ran out and refused to enter my fort once one got trapped. I don't know if this is a feature or bug or some other behavior, but it's in the same realm of trap balance improvements.

[arcaneArtist]

A question that i thought of today: are there any plans to expand gender within the game?

currently, all characters seem to be cisgender and dyadic, with some inherently genderless beings like sponge men mixed in, so expanding on this would add in more representation and variety to the game. i could also see it slotting in with the laws and customs expansion mentioned in the Fortress Starting Scenarios framework, since some of the customs and laws (not necessarily ones added in the initial update, but maybe sometime later) could revolve around the roles and definitions of genders within a society, stuff like what it means in this society to "be a man/woman/whatever other genders this society has"

[Random_Dragon]

A question that i thought of today: are there any plans to expand gender within the game?

currently, all characters seem to be cisgender and dyadic, with some inherently genderless beings like sponge men mixed in, so expanding on this would add in more representation and variety to the game. i could also see it slotting in with the laws and customs expansion mentioned in the Fortress Starting Scenarios framework, since some of the customs and laws (not necessarily ones added in the initial update, but maybe sometime later) could revolve around the roles and definitions of genders within a society, stuff like what it means in this society to "be a man/woman/whatever other genders this society has"

You'll want lime green for questions.

That said, I don't recall if Toady has actually said anything about his plans regarding that. My guess is that, if it gets added, and even if in-universe attitudes are ever added (procedural-generated or fixed), more likely the player will still have final say over anything that's actually relevant to a dwarf's functioning in the fortress itself.

[Shonai_Dweller]

It's not worth playing with the Flaming Obsidian Mug of Lebesnóton if there's a chance it might fill your fortress with magma because you don't know what it does in advance.

I don't know, that sort of thing sounds exciting to me-- I would love to play SCP Fortress and lock a random dwarf in an isolated chamber with an unknown artifact to see what happens. I think I even flavored my first fortress as a "dwarven research facility", and magical research is quite interesting.


Anyways, I read that bit about the FAQ, but it's somewhat hard to go and find answers from previous FotF unless you've been reading them all, and the forum search seems very useless sometimes. Apologies if this has been asked:

With improvements to sieges include some sort of look at balancing the cage trap. Right now it's a very icky thing that pops up when I play, whether or not to use them or not. While of course players can just use restraint, it's nicer to have mechanical reasons. The dev page mentioned somewhere about multi-tile traps, but is there perhaps a few short-term tweaks that could make cage traps a bit less powerful? Right now if you build enough of them to match the invader cap, you really don't have to do much but open the gates and capture everyone.

Granted, I noticed in an older fort after 34.11 that invaders seem more cautious towards traps, and I can't tell if this is noted anywhere, but I noticed that attacking goblins very slowly creeped down my main trap hallway, as if suspiciously, and immediately ran out and refused to enter my fort once one got trapped. I don't know if this is a feature or bug or some other behavior, but it's in the same realm of trap balance improvements.

Planned for traps during this update phase is possible invader intelligence (they'll avoid areas where there were traps). That's only if development gets that far before the cut-off date.

Planned for the future, won't be included in this release (confirmed in previous fotf), is the complete trap update, which you can find on the dev notes. That'll be about the same time as ships and moving fortress parts. So cages respecting size, complex traps made of many moving parts, rocks positioned to fall from other areas, etc. The "wooden cage traps dragon" slight unbalance that we have now is just a placeholder.

[KittyTac]

fairies are generally cute flying things

The original Celtic Fair Folk were monstrous creatures.

[Rose]

fairies are cute flying things.

faeries will rip your guts out, for fun.

[Random_Dragon]

And sometimes they're trash-tier monsters in anime bullet hell games.

[PatrikLundell]

It's not worth playing with the Flaming Obsidian Mug of Lebesnóton if there's a chance it might fill your fortress with magma because you don't know what it does in advance.

I don't know, that sort of thing sounds exciting to me-- I would love to play SCP Fortress and lock a random dwarf in an isolated chamber with an unknown artifact to see what happens. I think I even flavored my first fortress as a "dwarven research facility", and magical research is quite interesting.


Anyways, I read that bit about the FAQ, but it's somewhat hard to go and find answers from previous FotF unless you've been reading them all, and the forum search seems very useless sometimes. Apologies if this has been asked:

With improvements to sieges include some sort of look at balancing the cage trap. Right now it's a very icky thing that pops up when I play, whether or not to use them or not. While of course players can just use restraint, it's nicer to have mechanical reasons. The dev page mentioned somewhere about multi-tile traps, but is there perhaps a few short-term tweaks that could make cage traps a bit less powerful? Right now if you build enough of them to match the invader cap, you really don't have to do much but open the gates and capture everyone.

Granted, I noticed in an older fort after 34.11 that invaders seem more cautious towards traps, and I can't tell if this is noted anywhere, but I noticed that attacking goblins very slowly creeped down my main trap hallway, as if suspiciously, and immediately ran out and refused to enter my fort once one got trapped. I don't know if this is a feature or bug or some other behavior, but it's in the same realm of trap balance improvements.

Planned for traps during this update phase is possible invader intelligence (they'll avoid areas where there were traps). That's only if development gets that far before the cut-off date.

Planned for the future, won't be included in this release (confirmed in previous fotf), is the complete trap update, which you can find on the dev notes. That'll be about the same time as ships and moving fortress parts. So cages respecting size, complex traps made of many moving parts, rocks positioned to fall from other areas, etc. The "wooden cage traps dragon" slight unbalance that we have now is just a placeholder.

It can also be mentioned that there is a slight balancing of traps: spies blend in with visitors and report traps back to their civ, so invaders can just bypass those traps. I've personally seen that in my fortress, but I have yet to actually find a spy (I want to investigate what they look like with DFHack to possibly find out how to identify them properly). I've removed and rebuilt cage traps, and that has worked to some extent. As far as I can tell, every visitor is actually a spy for their own civ, so relying on traps when you raid a settlement of a civ many of your visitors come from can have an interesting side effect...