Both books were written about 1400AD, so it makes some sense (I guess) that the styles would be similar.
Again, good character dynamics, and really interesting characters, with some seriously madcap abilities, and then they'll fight and like 3000 normal soldiers, without names, will get ganked.
The funniest/quirkiest part is that heroes in the book will quite often be portrayed specifically as being 9 feet tall, 12 feet tall, 15 feet tall, 30 feet tall, etc. And these are often just royal bodyguards and glorified sidekick types. Not the main focus of the book. Even a pair of underling badguys are like 15 feet tall. The heroic types do tend to be taller, though. On top of that, apparently the *real* giants (and demons and ogres etc.) are up North, staging a rebellion.
Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' is a lot better for actual strategy/tactics. It was written in 600 BC, and military personnel-and even businesspeople-still read it today. It's actually a pretty interesting book, if you can deal with the nearly infinite footnotes, or just get a straightforward copy. Lots of actual examples of dynamic combat situations, and Sun himself was a pretty interesting man.
Three Kingdoms had some outlandish stuff, but it wasn't so bizarre, people were almost all normal-sized (a little ill-proportioned, sure, he he he) and mostly bereft of special powers, and there weren't so many unusual situations and they rarely impacted the overall results. Auspicious beasts were sighted in far-flung corners during reign changes and so on but weren't involved in fights. The heroes could fight their way out of being surrounded, but they often didn't, especially when unassisted, and tactics/strategy virtually always prevailed over brute force or individual heroics, especially later on, so it was a good middle ground I think, as a model for a game like DF.
I've read Sun Tzu, and The Art of War put forth many principles, sometimes just in lists, and it's a good reference, but it's cool to see much of it play out many times in myriad forms over a hundred years as they constantly deceive and outsmart each other (it's more useful to me in that way than, say, AoW's spy chapter). It's true that once you get to an actual individual battles themselves, TK falls short, though, and just starts to mess around with weird names of formations that don't amount to much and it rarely discusses particulars of terrain and so on. The two books should complement each other pretty well for the overall Army Arc.
I've read a bit of the Water Margin, and I haven't read the others.
A bit off the subject, but you finished reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms?
Which power-hungry warlord was your favorite? I've always liked Cao Cao. Such a magnificent bastard.
I'm no good at picking favorite people, since I was just enjoying it as I went along. Event-wise, the first thing that pops into my mind is when
Guan Yu's ghost possessed one of the guy's that was responsible for his death, sat in Sun Quan's throne, talked shit to him, then caused the body to bleed out of all of its orifices and die. It was like, well, damn, sometimes things just don't go your way. Regarding what I said above, one of the reasons this was striking is because it was pretty extreme as a rare and sudden supernatural event in the book that wasn't something surrounding a ruler change that was going to happen anyway.
I also like the little poem (originally concerning an earlier kingdom) applied to Sun Hao letting a ~100 year old dynasty fall apart in a short time due to horrible mismanagement and cruelty:
The blue sky has no end, no end;
What kind of a man has done this!
will the Appearance paragraphs cover more than just faces? Like, if a dwarf gets a couple fingers lopped off, or is abnormally fat, will it be described?
For that matter, how does the program know where the face is? If I put facial features on the torso, will it have to describe the whole torso?
It uses the appearance modifiers (and styles/wounds). Right now, it doesn't think it needs to carry the burden of describing a creature, but just describing what distinguishes this individual from other individuals of the same creature/caste. So it would describe the face on the torso bit by bit, and any other features of the torso that stand out compared to the averages, if your creature has any. Writing up general descriptions for creatures can be handled later, but that's more in the category of writing up flavor descriptions for all of the rocks and so on.
The game doesn't currently recognize the concept of the face as a collection of parts, but most of the appearance modifiers concerning the face, so they all kind of hang together anyway.
I cannot remember... Did Toady fix the Phantom wound forever for this release?
I don't think he's fixed it yet, but that IS one of the stated motivations on dev_next for all the wounds/healthcare stuff, so it'll happen.
It's handled now, but it might return briefly and then go away again depending on what happens with healthcare (ie, whether or not there should be a lot of lasting pain -- pain currently dies away never to return).
So Toady, why do you leave one or two items unfinished in one category by the time you move to the next one?
Aside from some of the things people mentioned, there are times when the dependencies run across categories. I won't be able to finish wound descriptions until I've done some of the medical stuff, for example, and I won't be able to do some of the medical stuff until I've done more work on entity positions, so I expect that pattern to continue. I think the underground should be more self-contained, and I think I'm starting that at the beginning of April, assuming I survive Stay Off The Internet Day on the first.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3631131 times)