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[Lestrage]

Are villains mostly meant as an adventurer mode feature? Or will they affect gameplay of fortress mode somehow? If so what sort of real things can they actually do and how will they matter to running of the fort?

[Telgin]

I'm not sure Toady has said much in detail yet, but I do expect that villains will factor into fort mode in some fashion.  Having a backstabbing schemer murder your baron in an attempt to replace them is an example of something that sounds like low hanging fruit, for example.

Seems like a lot of the other low hanging fruit won't work so well without a fort economy though.  It's hard to have someone embezzle funds or accept bribes when there's no money flowing about.

[therahedwig]

They're supossed to become a fort-mode feature too, and they will probably shake up forts that are played carefully(read: turtled up).

The first idea is that there's now more personality to the existing villains. That's the necromancers and demon masters.

The second idea is that you can also have much smaller scale villains, like, mid-tier avarage dudes who can go around and... hire bandits to attack the fort for that one artifact they believe is theirs. Or, and this is what the majority of the weird linking and worldgen stuff has been about, they can try to turn your dwarves(and bards, and scholars, and caravan guards) into their agents.

I think one of the reasons Toady has been focusing so much on them, besides story potential is that improving the strength of goblin armies is one of the candidates for the army improvements, but if that is done, there might be a big gap between early and late game in terms of skill and interesting things, so villains should be a good mechanic to liven up mid to late game for a lot of people.

Villainous plots

* Work existing mechanics into conspiracy chains
 - Bandit groups raid and pillage the hill dwarves and extort from the fortress
 - Steal/demand artifacts
 - Thieves stealing items
 - Assassination of position-holding dwarves and meddling adventurers
* Prisoner interrogations (both modes)
* Receiving tips and rumors (both modes)
* Sending out dwarven agents/investigators
* Improve fort/adv rumor displays to highlight known plot elements

[Loud Whispers]

Can't wait until we can send Dwarven spies all across the world to conduct Dwarfy intrigues.

'Yes hello fellow Elves, I sure like nature and discussing our plans in the open,'

[TD1]

Well, it would be better to send an Elven citizen on said spying missions.

Sending a dwarf might be a tad conspicuous, though it would be amusing if high enough charisma-skills enabled a dwarf to do a better job.

"Why no, I am not an elf, but in the end everyone's flesh tastes the same, does it not? Let us not discriminate. Come, let us discuss our plans against those pernicious dwarves instead."

[Loud Whispers]

Well, it would be better to send an Elven citizen on said spying missions.
Sending a dwarf might be a tad conspicuous, though it would be amusing if high enough charisma-skills enabled a dwarf to do a better job.
"Why no, I am not an elf, but in the end everyone's flesh tastes the same, does it not? Let us not discriminate. Come, let us discuss our plans against those pernicious dwarves instead."

I imagine a Dwarf spy in a goblin city just punches the nearest goblin until they stop questioning their authenticity

[SQman]

I may be just a contrarian asshole, but I don't understand what people are so excited about. I just don't think we have anything in place to make villains work in fort mode at this point. If we had economy and some sort of law system I would be hyped for this arc, but right now it looks like a purely adventure and mostly flavor thing.
My bet is on the villains being integrated into fort mode not even half-assedly, more like quarter-assedly.


-We'll see dastardly schemes featured on fort mode engravings by dwarves who shouldn't know of those schemes.

-Some bards and mercenaries will show up with a profession name of "ringleader" or "mastermind", but those won't do anything.

-Fort mode position holders won't be plotted against unless there was a plot before they came into the fort, at which point all progress stops and nothing ever happens.

-Bandits will be supposed to send ambushes that would work like regular old goblin ambushes, but bandit pops will all die off in year 1 of worldgen with not enough new ones forming, or they will never leave their encampments after worldgen.

-Dwarves will be able to intercept a secret document of some sort (by raiding), but they won't be able to read it, because it won't be a standard book, like with slabs right now.

-We'll be able to send spies, but all info they will bring back is "Smustu Amxudostngosp's real name is Ber Ngosmber" which won't matter in any way, shape or form, since that person would never show up in the fort.

-We'll be able to interrogate captured prisoners, but all they say will be "In 129 Urist Tekkudarban became a shearer in Daggeroil" and "The world is same as ever"


I have absolutely no expectations for the next big update, so I'll either be smug about being correct, or I'll be pleasantly surprised. There's also the third option where the villains will hardly do anything in adventure mode, and will feel like priests in current version, which I hope won't be the case.

[Loud Whispers]

All perfectly valid qualms, I'm excited because in addition to fortress mode I also thoroughly enjoy adventure / legends mode & the emergent narratives created from interacting with a living fantasy world. Thus something which largely affects legends/adventure but not so much fortress is nevertheless cause for celebration from me. Likewise with information gathering, it's as meaningful as DF engravings - which is to say it is of variable importance whether spies discover someone has faked their identity / engraved a wheel of cheese on the wall, or has discovered the location of a kidnapped Dwarven child to be rescued by elite axedwarves / someone has engraved an image of the foe being struck down as a final act of defiance. I'll be most pleased if adventurers can be the dastardly villains manipulating all the nobles

[Shonai_Dweller]

Toady said there's an opportunity to hold off telling us about everything corrupt dorfs might get up to in the fortress as there hasn't been an opportunity for new Hidden Fun in a while.

I imagine it'll be limited mostly to pulling levers and stealing artifacts along with some spying that we may not see anything of directly. Since assassination is a thing, we may see some grudges escalating to secret murder instead of the usual lethal bar fights.

Of course it might also tie in with the tunneling invaders when the next set of additions get added, which would be scary. Keep an eye on your miners!

--edit
Oh, handily confirmed by Toady in fotf today:

3) So, as I said before, I didn't want to spoil too much about villainous plots in the fort, as it would spoil some of my fun in torturing the players with things they don't know about. 

[Mort Stroodle]

Fort mode plot musings:

Villain could release things from cages, bonus points if they surruptitiously link a cage to a commonly-pulled lever so you release it yourself.

When a bridge lowers, causing siegers that could previously enter your fort to become unable to path in, a villain could pull whatever lever triggers that bridge again. Alternatively, villains in your fort pop could start digging a path for siegers to enter, without you designating it.

A villain could rig existing traps to trigger on citizens, and not on siegers. Dorfs caged this way could be kidnapping targets.

A villain could hang around the well, and kick your chief medical dwarf in when they show up. Now you're down a noble and you've got a contaminated well. Alternatively, throw some forgotten beasts extract in there. Hell, imagine if they coated the well bucket in THEIR OWN vampire blood. Poisoning booze stockpiles or food would be cool but I think that was confirmed not to be in the first pass.

My point is that there's a lot of very interesting and amusing ways the actual villainous attacks could go down, and that's the appeal to villains for me. The world gen stuff and investigations doesn't interest me as much.

[mikekchar]

I'm mostly looking forward to what happens in legends mode.  But I'm also hoping against hope that things like friendships and grudges in fortress mode will be improved.  At least it seems like it will be more likely that you can get friends immigrating to the fortress, which will help some things.

I have mixed feelings about the possibility of intrigue in the fortress.  If done well, it could be quite amusing.  I'm quite worried that even if we have  dwarfs who open up all the gates when a siege comes, that we won't actually have any in game way of diving why they did it.  We'll have to resort to legends mode, which will end up being difficult to filter for spoilers.  I suspect that any attempts at sabotage will simply be met with liberal applications of magma and people will complain about how broken it is to play fortress mode when the dwarfs no longer do what you say.  I'm somewhat with SQman in that as much as I think Toady wants to add some significant functionality here, he'll be severely limited in what he can reasonably do before the big wait.

In the end, I'll accept it because I think it's another one of those things that is necessary for the vision of the game -- not an RTS game, or a crafting game, but a fantasy world simulator where one doesn't have control of everything.  I think the fun comes from interacting in that world, not by micromanaging it (as much as I paradoxically like micro managing in DF -- you practically have to).  I'm really just hoping that Toady doesn't make such a big wait as he is planning and decides to find a way to break up the functionality he wants to add into smaller chunks (say 6 month intervals).  But I suspect that isn't really in the cards ;-)

[PatrikLundell]

@mikekchar: I don't think breaking the breaking of DF up would be useful. You'd get a map rewrite release that's partially broken and breaks save game compatibility, followed by another infrastructure renovation that breaks save compatibility and is partially broken, followed by ... followed by a Myth&Magic release that's bare bones and partially broken over the span of 4-6 years instead of a long silence of 3-4 years (followed by a release with bare bones Myth&Magic that's partially broken).

I think it's better to replace all the load bearing parts of the renovation in one big change. Myth&Magic could be a later step, but I understand that going through a big renovation and then have a release with essentially no new functionality (and worse balance and stability) isn't appealing.

As long as DF is in a good playable state (i.e. no game crashes due to weapon trap components breaking type bugs, reasonable balance when it comes to need satisfaction [I can live with the current one, but would prefer it to be tweaked further], and villainy that's possible to live and deal with), a long wait is preferable to a longer period of largely unplayable versions. The only upside I can see from chopping it up is that DFHack would be able to be adapted piecemeal rather than tackling it all in one big crunch.

[Death Dragon]

It's probably gonna be flavor for the most part, which is still pretty nice if it ends up giving context to stuff like sieges, but Toady did mention that he wanted to have some actual fort mode interactions for villains. He posted this huge design note a while ago:

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html#2018-07-21
Especially this part is interesting:
"Individual plot goals might involve the villain's core objectives: acquire artifacts, positions, and pets, and punishing their enemies through assassination, imprisonment, kidnapping, theft, insurrection, or invasion. But plots can also be aimed toward adding another layer to the network. If a visiting agent has turned a fortress bookkeeper, the bookkeeper can attempt to compromise their friends, family and other position holders. If your mayor, nobility, sheriff or guard captain is compromised, we won't end the game, but we'll make it increasingly interesting for you."

He also said that he doesn't want to go into details because he doesn't want to spoil exactly what villains can do to your fort and in the last couple FotF replies he mentioned stuff like having the player clear up crimes by picking suspects and potentially using the fortress guard for investigations.

But of course, none of this stuff has been implemented yet besides the world gen things he's been working on the last weeks, so speculating doesn't mean much.

[Grand Sage]

Not that that has stopped us from speculating before

I personally hope for a lot of villain options for my fort and adventurers. I mean, tracking down villains is gonna be fun to, but if we can send agents out to spie, kidnap, assassinate and compromise the enemy, that would be way better, right? not to mention torture (hehehe)

[Lozzymandias]

Tbh I'm hoping for Urist Bond style intrigues. Plots to destroy the fort from within. Heists for the pride artifact adamantine axe. Coups with new factions created from dwarves you used to own...