1. Can rust be disabled globally via init option the way the economy can? I can see that as helpful to some people, much like disabling invaders or the economy is now.
I don't think it's as catastrophic as invaders or especially the economy, but I guess some people might be bothered by the lack of permanent improvement. There isn't an init right now.
2. I'm under the impression that attributes and rust rates are linked to specific castes, so we can have, say, brutes and brainy/dextrous critters (best suited for manual labor and administration/crafts respectively). Is that true?
Yeah, that's right, at least to the extent that intellectual attributes matter at all yet.
3. Can we determine which castes can mate with which others? In this way, we could give antmen a male breeder caste plus a few rare queens. We might even make pseudo-multiracial forts, where the "male dwarf" caste can mate with the "female dwarf" cast, and the "male human" caste with the "female human" caste (assuming we even need separate castes for each gender, which is probably untrue), but dwarves and humans can't intermingle (and ideally dwarves wouldn't beget humans and viceversa). And this would all be considered a single creature type, so we could build a fort with them.
From what I remember (couldn't find a quote), any castes with the MALE and FEMALE tags will mate, and their offspring's caste will be determined solely by the creature caste ratios, not the parents' castes. So you can't do separate breeding populations with a single creature yet.
Yeah, it's sort of lackluster right now, but that's correct.
In the vein of this, could you link attributes to age, so you can have infants be less intelligent, then they get smarter when they grow up, and when they are really old dementia sets in?
I should eventually yeah. Infant personalities shouldn't come up instantly either, and I might be doing more with att progression whenever I go back and address that. There have been various ideas floated around how they might emerge.
Any ideas to incorporate siege operators in the military, and making siege weapons more useful overall? Well, siege weapons should have a role in the military, at least its what i believe in. Making them more useful and incorporating the new squad system to siege operators and maybe linking them to levers and pressure plates would make them a blast to use.
There's an overall vehicle rewrite thing planned for some point during the overall invader improvements. This'll likely change everything about fortress siege engines and establish some more structure on the associated staff. It's not the farthest away thing in the world anyway, since invader improvements are one of the things on the plate for after this release. The vehicle rewrite is one of the more ambitious parts of that, though, so some other invasion changes might be coming in first.
Hydras won't be growing back heads, according to Toady.
No he said that they won't be growing back more heads then they lost.
There are soo many uses for Regeneration of bodyparts I can't imagine it never making it into the game.
Yeah, I'm all for regeneration or even regenerating more heads than they lost at some point in a controlled fashion. It's just not part of the hydra test.
Has the Hydra 7 souls?
One at this point. The underlying structure is there, partially, to support such a thing, though only one soul can be actively participating at a time right now, which would complicate this.
And a question to the new Bodysystem: Can you use two different skin-layers for a creature? Say the Back of a creature is covered in ahard scaly skin while the belly is rather softand leathery?
Definitely. After defining a second material and tissue type for skin, you use a custom body detail plan. The default vertebrate plan already kinda does this anyway, since tusks, horns etc. have exposed tissue layers that aren't skin.
Yeah, you can do quite a bit, body part by body part.
Will there be any changes to how the Royal Guard functions? Maybe they could do things like following the nobles around, or guarding their rooms.
I don't have anything specific going in this time to differentiate either guard group beyond what they used to do. I suppose it kind of relates back to some of the previous discussions about rebellion and so on. They'd be strongly pressured to take sides, and it might even affect whether you can control them or not. But that's quite a distant consideration.
Will the addition of containers to barracks, or any other such military changes, now make dwarves who lose clothing in wrestling practice pick it up and do something with it, instead of leaving it on the barracks floor? In otherwords, will the barracks now function like an owned room for soldiers, so they store their owned items there?
Clothing are sort of a special case, since you can define uniforms to either replace clothing or be worn over it, so they'll definitely have to use their cabinets for their regular clothing. For their little owned baubles and things, I think, as a militia that isn't active all the time, they might rather have most of them off in their regular rooms, but I don't want to get too far into defining this stuff until everybody's had a chance to play around with it. Clothing torn off during wrestling is an even more special case... they'd have to recognize it as a primary clothing object for it to come under the purview of storing their regular clothes, which they wouldn't be able to do without a little work. It kind of depends on how the uniform clothing replacement gets coded though, and I'll keep it in mind when I get to that (which should be pretty soon).
Of course, given that, have you given any thought to handling when we inevitably want "midnight blue, studded with copper (gold for legendaries), with an image of [squad logo] in [appropriate material]"
yep i want too name tags on every uniform
You know, this really calls for some way of telling crafters to do specific things. For example, grafting the symbol of your empire onto the soldiers' shields and helms, sewing images of your legendary champions onto T-shirts (with optional autographs by them), and so on.
Yeah, I used the same uniform structures that define the adv mode guard uniforms in the currently released version, and you might have noticed the little symbol thingies they wear. It's all kind of place-holderish, but it's there. The obstructions to doing this in dwarf mode are that it would take extra time to code the interface, and you don't have sufficient workshop control to do this. Eventually both should be handled, but it's not clear when that will happen, though most likely once you can order up something specific at the workshops, the interface would be written at that time. It should also probably be possible to order up entire uniforms and all related jobs at the manager, though that runs into some of the problems as similar ambitious manager ideas.
...but what about item quality? Can we also set that -for example- a specific dwarf should only pick up/use exceptional or better items?
I'm not sure about the value of such a setting, since the dwarf might end up not using anything, which is dangerous. You can set the priority settings for squads now, so that when an exceptional item is produced, it'll go to the squad that you want, going through the positions from top to bottom. So if the dwarf in question commands your top priority squad, they'll get all the best stuff, provided it matches their uniform specs and you don't specifically assign the items to somebody else. We'll have to see what other controls we need most when we've done more playing.
with all the updates to training, can we specify less-lethal weapons as training weapons now?
I haven't done it yet, but this is the idea, yeah. Depending on the instructor, sparring might also be restricted until they've done some practice drills. We'll have to see how it plays out though.
am I the only one to think that all theses new features, although great, seems very complicated ? Some of these even seem pretty redundant (burrows and squad buildings for instance). I hope it won't turn into a mess of menus and sub-menus with awkward interfaces and controls... It's nice to be able to micro-manage your fort, but it won't be that great if the final interface look like a NASA flight simulator.
I had my brother mess around with it yesterday, and he was able to figure it out (after having been away from planning this particular part of the game for a while, it was essentially a good test). It is pretty involved though, and we're still thinking about a few ways to make the more simple options more apparent. The current system is pretty obtuse even if it's not that complicated, so hopefully this will be an improvement even if it's not that good.
I had mentioned previously that there are several redundancies between all of the different types of work-related areas (stockpiles, burrows, workshops, zones, rooms, etc.), but that it'd be a major project to sort them out. We already had barracks in the previously released version so I went with those for squads. Burrows themselves didn't fit with any of the existing critters as they stood, so I put them in. We'll have to see how the merges play out as that comes up, but it might be a while.
Will you be able to assign to your dwarves weapons that are not typical to them? For example, allowing one of your dwarves to use that artifact whip.
Yeah, you can do that now.
Will there be an easy way to tell if squadmembers are fully equipped with their uniform gear?
Right now you can see all their actual item assignments and all of their idealized item assignments, but it's not as immediate as a giant check box or something. I have to get through the actual equipment allocations before I can do more with this, but we were going to mess with it a little more. Hopefully it'll be clear enough what the state of a given squad is by the time I'm done.
I was just thinking about the controls we have over the dwarves and the control they have of themselves and thought:
Will dwarves that are either left to thier own will, left alone for extended periods of time, or when under extreme coercion by thier happy/sad thoughts; start an act that can only be initiated by the player?
Ahh.. green. Aside from the coding difficulties, there's the question of angering the player by messing with crucial things. I like having autonomous dwarves, but I'm not sure how far they should be able to go.
Will dwarves always have a favored weapon? If not, how does it determine the weapon they use?
Right now, one out of three dwarves has a favorite weapon. If they don't have any skills and they don't have any favorites, they'll likely just pick at random from the available weapons. Perhaps melee vs. ranged could have a personality component.
I don't think we know what they are yet.
Dressing wounds, diagnosis, surgery, setting bones, suturing and walking with crutches.
There are several place-holder skills that I put in and some might relate to training, while others might wither away in the code until they are replaced by what actually ends up being used. We'll have to see on that.
1)Are we able to choose the category for Noble mandates in the raws? Like armor/crafts/etc?
2)Can we choose the skills they can come with? Like how the DM has Metalcrafter and Animal skills when he comes?
Edit: 3)Will Legendary Soldiers be Elite now that there is one Champion?
Edit Edit:4)Since we have more control over armor in military, will we be able to have them wear leather/plate, or leather/chain? Some soldiers in past times would wear leather underneath plate and chain.
1) I don't have anything for that at this point.
2) It's eventually supposed to be geared toward not generating people from scratch, so it doesn't add any skills. Responsibilities have associated skills though, and that should end up working out the same way more or less.
3) Elite... what? You mean, say, an axe lord, when he or she becomes legendary with the axe, will still be an axe lord? This is the case. I haven't added new unit types.
4) Yeah, they even do that in the current version, I think, in some haphazard way, and it comes up more often in adv mode, but now you can specifically tell them to wear a breastplate (breastplate, not plate mail, which is gone) over a mail shirt, and then to wear a green tunic over that or something. I haven't added all the little odds and ends of plate mail items as those would be entirely new item types and I didn't want to get bogged down defining shoulder/etc. items and what that means in terms of creature raw bps flags and all that. I was thinking of adding a padded shirt item thingy that you'd often want under your breastplates, as bludgeoning damage should be fairly brutal now regardless of the breastplate, but we'll have to see how that plays out.
Will creatures secrete materials or project undirected clouds only as an attack, or can they do it "passively," i.e. constantly breathe/secrete the material?
Right now all secretions are passive. It'll periodically add contaminants to all body parts associated to the secretion up to a certain level over time -- if it's a gas, it just puffs out at times. If somebody is wrestling with such a creature, then aside from whatever contaminant are passed over initially, during the secretion phase, goo is added to the wrestler's wrestling parts respecting their inventory (so gloves should protect you from contact poison, for example, though I haven't tested that -- items don't have an "outside" so it could very well pass from your glove to your hand if you ever put the glove on later or something, I don't know).
Will human civilizations have a lasher now to compliment the dwarves' hammerer? I seem to recall a discussion about how Dragslay had a hammerer for dwarves, a lasher for humans, and a quarterstaff-wielding guy for elves, and Toady implemented the hammerer for dwarves because of it. I'm not sure about elves, but humans should definitely have a lasher now.
I didn't put one in since it wouldn't be used as it stands. Whenever we get to proper justice in adv mode, there will likely be several positions added.
Will other races be able to use any weapon?
Will races have moddable native weapons?
Probably stupd question, Is there a penalty for using non-native weapons?
Footkerchief on this one.