First off, the very slight amount of antagonism developing in the thread needs to cool off. I know a lot more happens on other threads here, and I don't often come in to clamp things down until I receive reports, but as this is a stickied dev thread, I'd like to keep it reasonably clean. Please be polite.
Supposedly-from the DWiki-I understand that werewolves recover damage from wounds really, really quickly, but I haven't seen any evidence of this from the Tags, and I also haven't noticed it happening in the game.
Yeah, there's nothing like that in the currently released version.
Ofcourse lower orders of animals, like a worm, could even grow into two worms, if cut in half.
That could become a real challenge, if you're facing off a megabeast-sized worm, and it runs into a sawblade trap, and now there's two of them.
It'd be interesting to see how the souls play out when that happens, if any future mega worms get souls.
I am sure that the healthcare will provide amputation?
Whatever they need to do -- if there are infections, and there could very well be (it's a "consider" right now), it'll be required. I wonder if the ancient peoples stumbled upon fasciotomies as a remedy for compartment syndrome from swollen parts. It seems like the sort of "bleed 'em!" thing they'd happen upon. I'm going to need some more historical surgery info before I get started. I dunno where the history of surgery book I borrowed from my mom is, but I'm sure there's a lot floating around online, and we have some related forum topics here I should probably pick through.
If: currently, a hammer does damage because it's a steel hammer, but in the next release a hammer does damage because it's a weapon with a weight and density rating of x and y, then the simulation has changed, but the gameplay has not. My dwarf is still swinging the hammer, and dealing damage. That I might now select to manufacture hammers of different materials (or whatever) does not change the gameplay in any meaningful way.
Many (not all, many) of the changes seem to be the same sort of thing. They alter the mechanics, but wont improve the gameplay in any way that appears significant to me.
I was wondering what Toady's opinion was.
When I add more complications to the underlying simulation, the development at that time will focus on getting the existing code up to speed so that the game still functions, and there are often complaints during these times, as, indeed, it's more or less refactoring sometimes without significant visible changes (as in your hammer example). However, these changes build potential, with an eye on keeping important future additions in the same framework, with all of the pieces working together. The reason we have what we have now or even what we had prior to the Z-axis is because of similar efforts in the past.
Some of the changes are focused more toward immersion than adding additional play options, but I think that's fine as a matter of taste, and most of the information geared toward immersion in the short term will have an impact on options-oriented play later. Many of the novel situations that need to be tackled by an options-oriented player are the result of the interplay between basic elements that were added previously.
The 2D/3D issue is a different matter, where something I needed to do for many of my long-term goals to work out, the addition of the Z-axis, caused some harm to a variety of challenge-oriented play styles (military, food production, etc.). As some people mentioned, I'm hoping that the underground changes will bring some of that back, though it'll still have a Z-axis, which is enough to put some people off entirely. I'm planning on farming revisions for later (I think that's up on dev). In any case, the idea for the release *after* this next release is going to be to tackle one of the main army issues (improved sieges or sending out armies) as well as to take honest stabs at the top 10 or so entries from eternal suggestions (farming is currently among them), and there will probably be another item or two from dev_next that isn't from the Army Arc, though what we want to do from among those constantly shifts.