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[Sergius]

I gave all my megabeasts damblock:500 and on year 1050 only 2 or 3 from the starting 18 (why always 18?) were killed by some nonamed farmer or kobold, they all killed 80-200 or so adventurers. I suppose whatever algorithm is used to determine their death is always susceptible to getting a "natural 20" or whatever number it means for success regardless of armor/resistance/weapon.

Later I did the same with the semi-megabeasts, now I have a 1050 year old world with nearly all starting MB's on it and a big overpopulation of minotaurs, cyclops, etc. So I can confirm this works.

Note: I tried damblock:100 - nearly every beast was still killed by year 400 or so.
Of course, I'm restoring the original raws for actual play.

[umiman]

Sergius: Apparently semimegabeasts reproduce, or worldgen likes to ignore them, or adventurers don't care about semimegabeasts. It's pretty common to see them survive.

p.s: Damblock is virtually useless. Size matters much, much more. A size 50 creature is far more intimidating than a damblock 200. Dunno why.

[Deathworks]

Greetings!

Actually, as far as I know, semimegas don't reproduce. However, I think that semimegas respond more favorably to having more sites available (increasing the number of caves seems to increase their population tremendously).

The bad reputation they have is mainly due to giants and if you look into the raws, you will find the giants with a CLUSTER tag. Remove or reduce that CLUSTER tag, and suddenly all those giants rampaging thousands of times throw the villages disappear.

So, more powerful than the physical statistics seem to be the power of sheer numbers (^_^;;

Deathworks

[umiman]

Deathworks: Your calm rationality is curiously at odds with your presentation. It's pretty interesting and fresh.

[Sergius]

p.s: Damblock is virtually useless.

As I just said, a value of damblock:500 works. So it's not virtually useless.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

I am not quite sure about what you are referring to in the first sentence, but it seems that your second sentence is positive about me. Thank you.

Anyhow, I am definitely aboard with those saying that current megabeasts are in dire need of an overhaul concerning world generation. Some of the entries in the legends just seem absurd and seriously undermine the flair of the megabeasts.

And I also think that reducing the cluster size of giants is actually improving balance.

Anyhow, tomorrow Toady is planning to release the next version, so we will see how the changes to various aspects of world generation may in the end effect megabeast survival rates (I haven't seen any direct mention in the dev logs, but given the complexity of the game, they may benefit indirectly).

If we still have no chance for megabeasts, maybe we should try to find a good balance for clustering dragons, titans, hydras and the like - assuming that the observations I have made before are correct (^_^;;

Deathworks

[muwahahaha]

On an earlier discussion, I've noticed that there seems to be a distinct pattern in megabeast deaths in worldgen. I decided to do a few (10) worldgens on a medium world with 70% deaths and every time i did it I found that:

Dragons live the most - In all but 1 of the gens, there were at least a couple of dragons left and the ones that died normally lasted at least 100 - 150 years

Hydras and Titans were about even survival rates - Although far below dragons, both hydras and titans still managed to scrape through for a while, normally there was at least 1 left.

Bronze Collosi are useless - The moving bronze statues were, in every single gen, eradicated by year 70 at the latest, often before and normally by a nameless random. They also had the least kills unsurprisingly.

Giants are extremely numerous - Most often there was at least one cave with 5 or more giants in it, and there were normally some around on their own as well, however, despite having more numbers at the end of worldgen, they most often had the highest casualties as well, as such dragons are still the winner on survivability.

Just to see what happened, I ran a worldgen till year 5000 and checked the deaths of the megabeasts. I noticed that:

All of the bronze collosi were gone, again, by year 70.

The last giant died about 150 years in.

There was a hydra who lasted until about 200

Titans were nonexistant by 180.

But there were 2 dragons who lasted for a while. One died in 382, the other in 430(ish).

Its hard to imagine that this is all coincidence, there is clearly a set path for worldgen megabeast deaths. I'm gouing to try and mod dragons now and see if I can make them last for 500 years, or maybe 1000.

[Deathworks]

Hello!

As I mentioned before, my experience with experimenting and multiple world generations roughly confirm your observations, although there are differences as well.

Dragons and titans are definitely the megabeasts with the highest survival rate. Dragons seem to have a very slim lead on survival while titans seem to be a bit more murderous.

Concerning colossi and hydras, my observations were just the other way around: If one of these survived, it was usually a colossus. Therefore, I think that the difference between hydras and colossi in world gen is relatively slim, allowing the RNG to override it. However, the difference between dragons and titans on the one hand and colossi and hydras on the other hand seems to be consistent and significant.

The giants problem is caused by the big parameter values in their CLUSTER tag. Reducing the parameters by about 2 makes for much more interesting worlds as the giants no longer drown out everything else (provided you have a lot of caves, of course).

Personally, I think that research into balancing and modding is something we can do as a community, and once we have come up with results we could then suggest them to Toady. You know, like the reduction of the CLUSTER tag of giants - it does not destroy them completely, but it makes semimegabeast distribution more balanced, resulting in a greater quest diversity.

Deathworks

[muwahahaha]

I think that some proper research into megabeasts would be a good idea. In my opinion, megabeasts need a bit of an overhaul. I personally believe that the megabeasts should be something to be really feared, rather than jsut being a statistic in the legends for you to skim over.

Regarding titans and dragons, I've yet to see a single titan outlast dragons, in fact, as I said earlier, all my world gens have seen dragons live far longer, but it does seems that titans have a higher kill to lifetime ratio, perhaps this contributes to their earlier deaths?

As far as collosi go, I just genned a new world and found that there were a total of 5 collosi, 4 hydras. When i looked at the legends, collosi deaths were in the years 2, 3, 8, 11 and 27 which was amazingly low, and only the last two actually got any kills, but I guess there are some variations which cause my results to differ from yours.

Correct me if I have gotten this wrong but here are my general observations:

Dragons and titans live the longest, whiel dragons tend to outlive titans, the titans normally kill more in their lifespan.

Hydras and collosi live comparitively shorter lives, and it seems to be variable how long each live, sometimes the collosi will die out early, while hydras live for a long time, sometimes the other way around.

The semimegabeasts are generally dominated by giants due to their CLUSTER habits, while I havent actually studied the legends for the SMBs, a skim over the few worlds I have and their world gen population distribution files seems to suggest that there are a greater number of giants than other SMBs, but as I said, I havent studied them.

[RebelZhouYuWu]

[FIREBREATH] is counted in world gen so dragons tend to last longer.

[Paul]

Speed has an affect on megabeast survivability too, apparently. I generated the same world (same 3 seeds) twice, one with standard and one with all the megabeasts modded to have 0 speed (super fast). They seemed to fare better, and all the deaths were moved back by at least a few years. They still didn't make it that far, though.

The effect is reversed if you set all the sentient species to 0 speed, the megabeasts die off significantly sooner.

I then tried setting all the sentient species to a very high speed (so they'd be mega slow), but oddly enough this also decreased the megabeasts survivability - so I'm not sure what happened there. I guess I might have set it above some limit or something, I used 5000 for the test.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Muwahahaha: Yep, you have described the results we seem to have found thus far quite correctly.

And I fully agree with all your thoughts on what megabeasts should be like and so on.

It seems that each cave has at least one named inhabitant initially, so more caves seem to lead to more semimegabeasts. I did most of my testing with 800+800 caves on medium map and I had a lot of towns which seem to have been devastated by giant rampages.

Currently, I am not that active here because for one, I have to get a file conversion fixed by today afternoon (well, that is now just occupying my private computer).

In addition, a special erotic RPG released its new alpha/beta version (it is not as professional a setup as DF), and besides enjoying the game and finding bugs, I also have some rather odd obligations concerning that game (^_^;;

So, I have not even installed 39d yet (T_T) - and because of some nasty bugs reported, the creator is planning to release a new versio of the RPG this afternoon (my time, that is), so time will be a bit short (^_^;;

Deathworks

[Draco18s]

In addition, a special erotic RPG released its new alpha/beta version (it is not as professional a setup as DF), and besides enjoying the game and finding bugs, I also have some rather odd obligations concerning that game (^_^;;

What game?

[Tormy]

a special erotic RPG released (^_^;;

Deathworks

OT:
Wait..what? 

PS. what is this (^_^;; what I see in your posts most of the time? 

..back to the topic.

Yes it seems like that megabeasts are dying quite easily in world gen. It wouldnt be such a big problem imho if some other megabeasts would kill them or mighty heroes / armies. However, some peasant is killing a dragon etc....eh?

[Teldin]

The thing is, I think a lot of the time, megabeasts die to nonames because they're attacking like 40 humans at once in a town. It doesn't really show those kinds of battles, just "duels". I somehow doubt it makes dragons/megabeasts fight people 1 on 1 all the time.