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[SimRobert2001]

I think elves should be the primary exporters of wood and bone, as well as items made from them.  They care so much about the forests and animals within that they collect wood and bone naturally and then use it in order to barter deals with humans and dwarves so that those races don't decimate the wilderness.  They shouldn't bring a ton of it every season, but those woodchopping limitations they want to enforce would be a lot more palatable if they could supply you with some wood in exchange.

yea, i like that idea as well. but really, that logic is why I want them to supply leather as well. They dont' have to kill animals, just when they die, the elves butcher them so none of the animal is wasted.

I would prefer for elves to be actively phytokinetic... they can force trees and other plants to grow any way they damn well please. They use trees as pillars of great airborn cities, their branches knotted together to make floors and walls and huge leaf membranes for windows and skylights. Briarpatches with thorns up to the length of your arm and tremendous, dwarf-eating venus flytraps adorn the bases. The very stuff of life is theirs to command.

Edit: Picture sieging a living castle. That wants to eat you.

ooo... I like this idea... i really really do... *gives cookie*

[Hectonkhyres]

Ok... here are a couple more elf-related thoughts that I have had since I made my last post. This may be a little bit of a bump, and I apologize, but starting a new thread seems horribly asinine.


Elves should have traps just like dwarves do... but they should be different: spinning metal disks and falling rocks just seem a little contrary to the elves we know and love revile. Half of them should actually be alive- the aforementioned venus flytraps/pitcher plants (Om Nom Nom) and briers (basic razorwire) and more I haven't mentioned. I'm sure the resident sadistic minds can come up with dozens of new ways to kill your enterprising dwarven adventurer.

These have some nice bonuses: they don't need to be reloaded (unlike stonefall traps), generally require no expensive construction materials (making something out of metal is problematic when your species doesn't mine), and might have a few odd side benefits. Giant pitcher plants can have their acid tapped to use in tanning or whatnot, your dwarf-eating apple tree produces apples, etc. But they should also have a few penalties... and these should be doozies.

Most plants, particularly the really interesting ones, either die or go dormant in the winter months once you get away from the tropics and subtropics and this leaves you open to siege. If you are lucky your plant-trap is either perennial or a self seeder... otherwise you are going to have to send out your planters in an automatic 'fetch the pigtail sock'-type mission. And the player will have many occasions to either weep or point and laugh.

Elves should also have to grow their fortress rather than build it and the resulting structure should require a certain amount of care afterwards.... but it should return the favor a thousandfold with abilities no other civilization can match. Imagine growing a big cactus-gourd-thing out of some type of wood that lets water seep through one direction but not the other (don't you love osmosis). During a siege you trigger the thing to pop like a grain silo sized zit and flush twenty of the attacking dwarves into a pit filled with venus dwarftraps. The screaming continues for over 72 hours. They rain billions of poisonous bone and wooden arrows into the survivors to soften them up before the war gorillas get there. War. Gorillas.

What you get is a species that rocks oh-so-much in the warm and wet tropics in vast living citadels but have to fight tooth and claw anywhere they can't keep their stuff perpetually alive.


Now its your turn: tell me how horribly retarded my idea is. But,yeah, I always thought of the elves as something akin to the Zerg or the Tyrranids. Om Nom Nom.

[(name here)]

KILL IT WITH FIRE.

Sorry, just had to get that out there.

But anyways, that's the big problem with living fortresses. They burn good. A barrel of greek fire and suddenly you're screwed, to say nothing of lava. Even torches can iginte leaves and transform a fort into a smokey deathtrap, and things just get worse when the dwarves/goblins summon firey magic to their aid, which they should get if the elves have this level of plant manipulation. Even caged fire imps would present a problem, and so would leader demons.

[TettyNullus]

KILL IT WITH FIRE.

Sorry, just had to get that out there.

But anyways, that's the big problem with living fortresses. They burn good. A barrel of greek fire and suddenly you're screwed, to say nothing of lava. Even torches can iginte leaves and transform a fort into a smokey deathtrap, and things just get worse when the dwarves/goblins summon firey magic to their aid, which they should get if the elves have this level of plant manipulation. Even caged fire imps would present a problem, and so would leader demons.

Some biological materials aren't flammable, like shells (IIRC, it can break down into calcium-based mineral if heated too much ) or are hard to light up. Not to mention, it's actually hard to burn non-plant creatures up other than hair/fur/feathers due to how much water they holds internally. On other hand... some woods burns up pretty damn good, those tend to have oils and flammable resins and hair/fur/feathers as mentioned above have historically been used as tinders. So, it's more dependant on the creature, their composition, and how they're applied 

[(name here)]

Greek Fire always works, as does lava. Well, except on shells, but nothing is pure shell even externally.

Also, firey magic generally works too.

[LegoLord]

It would be extremely difficult to light up moist plants in a humid, tropical environment.  That said, I like Hectonkhyres' ideas.  The would make elves significantly less stupid.

[(name here)]

It would be extremely difficult to light up moist plants in a humid, tropical environment.  That said, I like Hectonkhyres' ideas.  The would make elves significantly less stupid.

How hard it is depends on the quality of your incendiaries.

I kinda like the idea, but it still leaves them rather weak against the player when the army arc hits. You'll probably attack them during the winter exclusively, and thus totally beat them up unless they're in a coniferous fortress*.

Also, plenty of other stories have godlike elves already. DF is one of the sole bastions for people who are not lovers of elves who are better than everyone else in the setting.

*I can't believe i used that phrase in a serious sentence.

[LegoLord]

Coniferous fortress wouldn't be the only ones not vulnerable during the winter.  There are forests that are active year-round in warmer areas.  Elves would probably live in those almost exclusively.

[Hectonkhyres]

But anyways, that's the big problem with living fortresses. They burn good.

You call that a problem, I call that a feature. And in response:

1) Fire is going to be massively redone by Toady at some unnamed date. I expect we will have a good dozen ways to fight fires from whipping out axes and chopping firebreaks to bucket brigades to having archers with flaming arrows ordered to take shots at any strange barrels being loaded into catapults. Even having a dire-bear trained to attack any non-elf bearing flaming implements or reeking of naphtha. You can name him smoky.

I also expect that flame won't spread quite as easily: At the moment you can drop a cigar (or you could if cigars actually existed) on a solid oak table and the table would turn into a raging inferno in moments. And that, while hilarious, shouldn't happen.

And an obligatory Aqua Teen Hunger Force quote: 'Are those clouds on fire??'

2) The threat of fire, which while (slightly) nerfed should remain an everpresent threat, should help determine how an elf builds his fortress. But besides the glorious engineering tasks I am sure you guys are already thinking up for extinguishing flame, I have a couple thoughts on how to make fire something other than an unstoppable, implacable executioner. The first is that in relatively moist conditions building materials, including elven living wood, will become coated in moss after a few seasons. This turns the normally brown wood green and massively reduces its flammability. Hell, living wood should be less flammable anyways as long as you make sure it has easy access to some source of water.

Coniferous fortress wouldn't be the only ones not vulnerable during the winter.  There are forests that are active year-round in warmer areas.  Elves would probably live in those almost exclusively.

I kinda like the idea, but it still leaves them rather weak against the player when the army arc hits. You'll probably attack them during the winter exclusively, and thus totally beat them up unless they're in a coniferous fortress*.

The nice thing is that the tropics have no such thing as winter. There the elves stand as practically untouchable juggernauts there but, due to the unavoidable population pressures caused by being a race of immortals with the pelvic sections of cockroaches, they send wave after wave of emigrants into the less hospitable corners of the world. Once you get to the continental polar climates the poor bastards should be in constant fear. The only reason you should find elves north of Florida should be because they are migrating there assembly line fashion.

For god sakes, the ones at the north pole were enslaved as toymakers by a legendary fat man and a team of trained reindeer that acquired the ability to fly due to somebody's screwing with the raws.

*I can't believe i used that phrase in a serious sentence.

I can't believe it either. And that alone makes this thread worthwhile.

How hard it is depends on the quality of your incendiaries.

DF is supposed to have its player accessible level of technology cap at about the early renaissance so, again, you should have access to very crude black powder, naphtha, un-jellied alcohol, some types of tar, whale oil, and maybe unrefined petroleum for the dwarves considering where they are living. And most of that probably won't be something particularly easy to get in large quantities.

And I imagine there will be much laughter when the dwarves get a couple flaming arrows in their ammo cart and suffer horrible flaming deaths. A feature I say, not a flaw!

[Grek]

So elves should be like the Telvanni from TES: Morrowind? Isolationist nutcases ruled by magical elven lords (druids), live in strongholds made out of a single overgrown plant grown in the middle of a large body of water, mistreat all the other races, and wear hollowed out beetles on their heads?

[LegoLord]

Not exactly.  They wouldn't wear the beetles because that would be disrespectful towards nature.  Their forts would also be multiple plants, not just one.  Lines of thorny vines for fortifications, little pairs of trees with branches that intertwine as they grow for bridges, that kind of stuff.

[CobaltKobold]

DF is supposed to have its player accessible level of technology cap at about the early renaissance so, again, you should have access to very crude black powder, naphtha, un-jellied alcohol, some types of tar, whale oil, and maybe unrefined petroleum for the dwarves considering where they are living. And most of that probably won't be something particularly easy to get in large quantities.

I'd argue something about access to others, but any bootstrap process requires knowledge.

"This is a superiorly-prepared Dwarven Thermite Biscuit. It is made of superiorly-minced aluminum and superiorly-minced hematite."

[xadism]

I would prefer for elves to be actively phytokinetic... they can force trees and other plants to grow any way they damn well please.

Yes, I was just about to start a thread about what it might be like, in some distant-future version, to play the elves.   But this suggestion is exactly what I was thinking.   I searched and found this thread, so I'll post here instead of starting a new one.

I think it would need to start with multi-z-level trees made of a new class of material: living wood.   Then you'd have a profession of "tree trainer" or something.   You'd designate squares for:
   

• Grow wall
• Grow floor
• Grow ladder/stairway
• etc..

And if there were adjacent living wood, a tree trainer would go to that square, do something with the plant, and wood would grow into that region to create the needed structure.   A bit like a dwarven mason, but slower and requiring no materials.

To get lumber, another specialist more like a dwarven farmer would induce trees to grow extra branches that spontaneously fall off, producing logs without killing the tree.  The logs would fall to the ground (keep your elves out of the way!) and haulers would have to collect them.

Elves could cut trees if necessary, but doing so would generate severely unhappy thoughts when doing so, maybe in the -30 range.   Even the elves not doing the cutting would get (smaller) unhappy thoughts.

Elves could still have masonry and dig stone, but it would be much slower process than for dwarves.   They could not go underground - the reverse of dark adaptation, but it would likely be fatal.  So mines would either have to be surface/strip mines, or stone could be purchased from dwarven merchants.   If you're in a forest and have to cut trees to do it, well, then that just sucks for you.

But you could use the little stone you have for making walls around the trunks of your city, making them harder to set on fire.

Defending a fortress would consist of climbing up the trees ("order: Elves stay off the ground") and pulling up the rope ladders.  (You'd start with ladders of living wood grown up the trunks, but remove them once you had a cloth/fiber industry and use rope ladders the way dwarves use drawbridges.)  Since goblins or dwarves might try to chop at the trees or even set them on fire, plenty of archers would be necessary - elves can't simply close the door and ride out sieges the same way.

You could also dig moats around your trees, or even the whole forest.

Farming could include regular above-ground farming, just like dwarves.  In addition there would be tree-farming, which could only occur on plots of living wood, in which arboreal farmers induce branches to grow fruit.  This would give elves a new option to parallel dwarves' underground farming. 

Rooms probably wouldn't usually have walls, instead they'd generally be branch-floors surrounded by empty space.  Hmm, that could make sparring hazardous.  "Fimbreth, champion wrestler, dodges strike.   Fimbreth falls to his death!"  :-)

[QuakeIV]

"Your main trunk is overstressed, the fortress collapses."
"Your fortress has crumbled to its end."

[LegoLord]

I just had another idea.  Elves could provide surgery for damaged trees.
Also, instead of making one tree that eventually gets so big that it collapses, a lot of smaller trees with branches forming floors and loosely woven walls (largely composed of leaves) could compose the fort.  There could even be walls of trees, perhaps, that normally have flowers.  Designate them with some type of job, and the flowers are replaced with thorns.