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Author Topic: Faerie Fortress  (Read 4187 times)

Marlowe

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #15 on: December 03, 2008, 11:28:13 am »

Give 'em baby snatcher and minor metals while you're about it. ;D

I solved my bow problem. Just a little matter of scrounging the forum. To get your people to use bows, go to weapon defaults add five letters to the ranged skill needed for them. Those five letters are CROSS-.

You might like to change the name of crossbowman to "bowpixie" or "markspixie" or whatever. The Faerie soldiers are all "wardens". Swordwarden, bowwarden, et cetera.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2008, 06:51:19 pm by Marlowe »
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Marlowe

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #16 on: December 04, 2008, 07:17:03 pm »

I fixed pikes to use the spear skill, changed up the bronze factors (bronze=95% iron, 3 copper+1 tin=4 bronze, bismuth bronze same but with bismuth instead of tin), and gave [METAL_PREF] to humans.

I hadn't realised that it enabled steelmaking. I debated taking it off the Faerie, then realised that it's more fun to have it. Giving it to humans as well kept things level. I didn't give it to goblins, because even without magma, melting down steel chainmails is better than smelting the steel yourself. So, goblins don't get steel because they can't be trusted not to give it to somebody else.

I got migrants in spring as usual, and discovered that although I hadn't permitted the useless professions like cheesemaker, animal dissector et al, these people are still generated, just with no skills. I'm going to see about changing the names of these professions to things like "mooch", "gnomeblight salesperson", "recovering addict" and so on. When I get some time.

I also discovered I'd messed up the tags for chainmail and that I'd have to start a new game to get it to work, so I did.

General observations about Faerie/Elves:

1, They are FAST. Any job that just requires running around gets done lickety-split. Building a wall sends Faerie flying back and forth like 0.45 bullets in a gangster movie. They even seem to drink fast.

2, They also take long, frequent breaks. "I'm a pointy-eared twinkle-toed git and I can get the job done on time easy, so I'm going to wait here in my room until it's urgent"...... :-\

3, Faerie woodcutters often come with Great Axes and Halberds. These work fine for cutting wood, but require both hands. This means they can't do other jobs while holding the axe and leads to odd dithering behaviour where the woodcutter drops the axe when he's done and paces over it until he gets another job. On their breaks, they often visit the axe in the stockpile to make sure it's not murdering trees on it's own time. ;D

4, No indoor farming is rather awkward.

5, Faerie do not appear to take joy in slaughter. This one's a doozy. Stay tuned.

My second game involved a terrifying swamp on chalk. How bad could it be?

The brook has three-and-a-half pages of undead carp, pike and sturgeon. That's how bad. Mostly not zombies either. The BAD undead.

We dug a defensive channel around us Fogcrystal-style and locked ourselves down. We dug and dug and dug......[several pages later]...struck three magnetite pockets, two veins of limonite and one each of butinimous coal and platinum. A wall of chalk was going up behind the ditch and we had a nice cache of chalk crafts awaiting the caravan. The forges were up and working and we had a platinum chain for our future well, plus some goblets for the caravan.

 Then disaster. The caravan arrived.

 Two caravan guards, a swordwarden and a bowwarden, got into a fight with the locals. 5 Zarp and four Zlugmen were dispatched, but both paid for it with their lives.

 You know how equipment autoforbids on death? Well, if they drop it BEFORE they die, it doesn't. We all ran out to reclaim the shiny steel sword, shield, arrows et cetera.

 This led to a horrible situation with Faerie cut off from the bridge by undead fish and unable to get back. I drafted everyone and bit the bullet. My leader (a stoneworker) was the first loss, struck down by a Skurgeon just before the bridge (while the trade liason was talking to him!).The Skarp and Skike and Zarp and Zike went down fairly easily, but my leatherworker got pulled into a pond by a Zarp and drowned. Someone tantrumed, and smashed the trade depot (oops, lots of free stuff.But now we've got lots of explaining to do. And Faerie aren't [BENIGN]). Then someone else tantrumed. Then someone tantrumed again.

Then a miner went insane.

Then the mechanic went insane.

Then the bone carver went insane.

They all wound up in the ditch together. I'm trying not to think about it.

Then my armourer/bowyer (moonlighting woodcutter/miner) tantrumed, got elected leader (majority of one), and calmed down. Had to conduct a meeting with the remaining miner. She's a she and he's a he, and they're screaming at each other. It's like a disfunctional marriage in zombie hell.

We get coffins made for what bodies could be recovered but most of them are just bones by the time they're interred. MORE bad thoughts.

The armourer's still unhappy. I'm at the edge of my seat waiting until migrants arrive.

Population after migrants now is at 19. I don't have hands spare for a military yet, and rebuilding the shattered mining sector is going to be a mission.

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Marlowe

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #17 on: December 05, 2008, 05:47:20 am »

OK, so the reason they get sad after fighting is because I forgot to give them [liKES_FIGHTING]. Duh. Well, dwarves don't have it either. Presumably there's another thing they have that gives it to them.

Doesn't look like my profession name-changes are going to work. Seems you can only change weapon-specific profession names. Oh well.

Right. Let's try again. I generated a world to year 300. We got some juicy wars with the Elves and Goblins and wiped at least 2 Elf and 1 goblin civs out before I got tired of reading about "unknown creatures", Let's find a nice spot...
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Marlowe

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #18 on: December 06, 2008, 09:41:10 am »

After some false starts and MORE world gens (it's confirmed. We fight Elves and Goblins all the time, humans and dwarves almost never), we made a serious effort.

We have a wilderness taiga (cold rather than freezing) bordering a haunted glacier. Unfortunately we've got that neutral-trumps-evil thing happening and nothing scary has turned up. It's cold enough that the brook and ponds only unfreeze for a fraction of the summer, so it's a good thing I bought a large selection of seeds. With no water for most of the game so-far (we now have a well as of late summer of the second year) the Faerie are gulping down the sunshine like there's no tomorrow. I've not noticed any health problems from the cold on the (no layering) Faerie.

Our civilisation is one of four Faerie civilisations in the world, and is the smallest. This is because it started on a tiny patch of serene swampland in the extreme south-east (arctic) of the world, henged in by forest to the west and an ocean to the north. The forest was home to a civilisation of Elves, whom we destroyed and occupied (I didn't check legends, it was obvious from the map what had happened). This fortress represents our expanding further out into the world.
 
 Comments so far; Faerie are very efficient hunters. They're so fast that almost nothing gets away. Being able to embark with things like cougars, wolves, tigers and bears, is very cool. This fort ("Chillcovens") started with cougars. I've modded cougars, tigers, jaguars, leopards,cheetahs, wolves, black and grizzly bears (but not lions, they lack the [PET] tag) to be trainable into war animals. My leader and woodcutter now have a war cougar following them about. This may be unbalancing. It's also very cool. We have a lot of cougar cubs frolicking in the dining room, waiting to either grow up and be trained or else turned into leather.

The speed is actually a problem. If there's no resource issues to finishing a job then Faerie tend to complete everything very quickly and leave you wondering what next to do. This, quite frankly, makes me a bit flustered. I need to designate lots of jobs at once to keep them busy.

 As previously mentioned, my attempts at renaming various professions hasn't worked and animal caretakers et al are still theming up. Also, human bowmen are now called crossbowmen in spite of my attempt to rename them. It appears that renaming only works for weapon-users of the players race. This can be lived with.

Here's the entity default code, complete with stuff that doesn't work.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
There's more to the mod than this of course. [liKES_FIGHTING] has to go into creature standard, there's the change to bows and pikes to make them usable, the changes to bronze and bronze smelting, the removal of [BENIGN] from the dwarves and the addition of trainable tags to the animals I've mentioned. There may be fine-tuning yet to come. It bothers me that the names are still a bit sissy (although the fortress names: Screamedravens, Goreglistened, they were kind of cool) and that the Faerie caravan is exactly the same as the dwarven one and vice-versa. There's only so many templates to work with. I've also yet to see how the engravings turn out.

EDIT: I didn't get a dwarven caravan, even though I know they're neighbours. I've had plenty of occasions when neighbours didn't contact until third year, so I don't know if this is normal piece of random behaviour or a bug from me duplicating their trading tags for the Faerie.

EDIT2: Did I say "efficient" hunters? The deer corpses are piling up faster than the butcher's shops can deal with it and it's causing miasma problem. Still I'm using hunting more as a way of training bow skill than a needed source of anything right now.

Steel making. It's a curse. We're always out of pig iron. Or iron. Or coal. At least I have a legendary bonecrafter to fill the gaps in the armour.
 
« Last Edit: December 06, 2008, 12:50:33 pm by Marlowe »
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JoshuaFH

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #19 on: December 06, 2008, 12:52:05 pm »

whats the speed of your faeries? My pixies are devilishly fast with 450 speed, but i'm pretty good at giving them jobs that either never end or take eons to finish. I wish their was a way to slow down how much experience they recieve though, so they don't make all the other civs look bad.

also, do your faeries still tend to reliably wipe out other civs during world gen war?
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Marlowe

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #20 on: December 06, 2008, 12:55:06 pm »

Nah, they only start in swamps and marshes. Tends to restrict the places they can get to. Also as previously stated they only tend to fight Elves and Goblins.
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Neonivek

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #21 on: December 06, 2008, 12:58:08 pm »

Nah, they only start in swamps and marshes. Tends to restrict the places they can get to. Also as previously stated they only tend to fight Elves and Goblins.

And Swamp monsters!
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Marlowe

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #22 on: December 07, 2008, 05:48:33 am »

If the dwarven caravan isn't coming, then I don't see how to fix it.

In any event I did some more fine tuning of the language options and gave them the tabs to let them settle in evil areas. I sort of see these guys as trying to strike a balance.

Then I realised that currently this "balance" consists of having pretty much everything, so I took [METAL_PREF] off them. The Humans can keep it.
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JoshuaFH

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #23 on: December 07, 2008, 07:29:03 am »

Not to sound like a complete dolt, but are you sure that the dwarves survived world gen? it might not be apparent from the world map.
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Marlowe

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #24 on: December 07, 2008, 11:47:43 am »

They were listed as neighbours, so yes. It's quite frequent that a civ doesn't contact until 3rd year when you're on an evil map, so I don't know if my code is messing up their caravan or they're just being lazy. If I'd continued with that game I would have found out, but there were other things to tweak and try.

I only wanted them for the dimple cups. ::)

Current game is a terrifying swamp on shale. Unfortunately the "terror" consists of the trees being dead and a few snailmen/slugmen about. We're actually at WAR with the goblins, as opposed to redlined. I've become incredible bored checking legends so I don't know what happened, but there's a whole mountain range loaded with ruins. I don't know if they're dead goblin forts or dead dwarf forts. All civs were listed, however.

The big problem with this map is no coal (so far, summer year two). First time I ever embarked on sedimentry without heaps of it. Tends to put a bit of a bind on metalworking. I would never have been able to make steel here even with flux and [METAL_PREF].

No useful local animals also means leather is at a premium. For some reason we couldn't get cougars or the other big cats (I think I chose a really small civ) so we embarked with wolves. They haven't quite reached useful numbers yet, but my leader has a war wolf.

I have a small military (4 wrestlers, one an ex-hunter) in iron chain. Rather than build an archery range I am sending them out with iron bows and bone bolts to put the bite into the snailmen.

I have a migrant herbalist that I send out in the hope of getting some sliver barb. No luck so-far.

I think I'm happier without the steelworking. When I talked about "balance", I have this little theory about a 2-d "alignment" in DF, a little like this:

...........Nature.........
..............I..............
Good-----I-------Evil
..............I..............
........Mechanical......

and that the races fit into it like this;

Elves......................
................Kobolds...
..........Humans...Goblins
.............................
..........Dwarves........
So the Elves are Naturalist Good, to the point where they're naturalist stupid. The Dwarves, with their ruthlessness and steelworking, are Mechanistic Neutral. The Humans pure Neutral, the goblins Neutral Evil (no particular mechanistic/naturalisic bias) and the kobolds, with their thievery and limited technology, are in between Neutral and Naturalist Evil.

With my changes, it looks more like this:
Elves.......................
.................Kobolds...
.........Faerie.....Goblins
........Humans............
........Dwarves...........
So the humans are bumped up one rung by their ability to use steel, and become closer to mechanistic neutral (they don't go the whole way, no mechanisms). And the Faerie sit right in the middle. However the Faerie good/evil neutrality is based not on avoiding good/evil areas but rather dwelling in both.

All this means nothing to anyone else, and is a little D&D for my liking. But still, it's a design philosophy and I feel better using it, rather than trying to create a race that does everything.




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Neonivek

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #25 on: December 07, 2008, 12:24:07 pm »

Actually Id put humans a bit closer to evil unless you intend to use them as the "Standard"

They are afterall the militaristic opportunists who would push over your grandmother to steal her house.

Id put Kobolds further away from Evil... They are annoying but compared to every other race largely beneign.

Also Dwarves are a lot closer to nature then Elves are away from technology. Id put them a bit further up...
« Last Edit: December 07, 2008, 12:35:25 pm by Neonivek »
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Marlowe

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #26 on: December 07, 2008, 01:31:41 pm »

Ah! ALIGNMENT DISCUSSIONS! Here's where sanity ends.

I agree with most of what you say actually, especially the bit about dwarves being closer to nature than elves are away from technology. I didn't do the table to scale.

Would you be happier with this?
               
                   NATURE
       ELVES.............................
       .............KOBOLDS............
    G .................................... E
    O .............FAERIE..GOBLINS V
    O ...................HUMANS...... I
    D .............DWARVES.......... L
       ....................................
      .....................................
             MECHANISTIC

As far as Kobolds being "benign" and Humans "opportunists"...well, aren't they both opportunistic? Their benignity is more like impotence. I'll agree though, that slavery is worse than thievery, so I moved them into neutral. I also moved humans closer to evil.

What fun! Morally judging alien civilisations on wholly inadequate information!

PS, we got a lignite vein. Thank god.
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Neonivek

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #27 on: December 07, 2008, 05:26:21 pm »

When Toady adds in other reasons for races to have war (such as land and relationship between individuals) Humans were supposed to potentially be the Military race.

It is good for what it is. (As in sane)

So I give my thumbs up
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KaelGotDwarves

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #28 on: December 07, 2008, 05:32:20 pm »

When Toady adds in other reasons for races to have war (such as land and relationship between individuals) Humans were supposed to potentially be the Military race.

It is good for what it is. (As in sane)

So I give my thumbs up
Just Mod the humans to hate everyone else's religion spheres. Easiest way to guarantee wars other than the no [CAN_SPEAK] and EAT SAPIENT BEINGS hacks.

Marlowe

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Re: Faerie Fortress
« Reply #29 on: December 07, 2008, 07:01:52 pm »

Most of what Faerie/Human wars I've seen have been caused by religion. However there's other reasons for them to go to war ([SLAVERY_ACCEPTABLE] vs [SLAVERY_UNTHINKABLE]) that don't seem to be working. There's been a couple of cases of wars caused by differing attitudes toward truth as well-Faerie have the Elvish prejudice against lying.
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