There was something I passed over. This ecology modeling being a one time cost. It's a one time cost right now but it may not stay that way. We're going to have more and more history continuing to happen after world gen has ceased. Right now we're looking forward to pulling dwarves with history for migrations but with replenishing populations
You can beat Cthulhu by driving a boat through him, apparently.
Sort of, he can never really die in the same sense well all know it. Just forced to take a nap.
IIRC he got over that almost immediately. Though it did perhaps afford the boat just enough time to make a getaway. It was never specifically explained why Cthulhu wasn't unleashed on the world that day, but my bet is that it had more to do with disrupting whatever the cultists had planned than the damage one little steam yacht could do.
Though I guess if it becomes possible to specifically stab out something's eyes first the stonegaze stuff would probably be a functional alternative there but there's not a defined spot on Cthulu that I know of that you could cripple to be mentally safe.
There's an easy solution, just cut out your eyes.
Blind masters would probably fare pretty well against medusa but I thought basilisks turned things to stone without need for them to look it in the eyes.
Though I guess you might have been saying stabbing out my eyes would save me from knowledge-insanity. Seems like it worked well enough for Oedipus after all.
Would infrared goggles provide protection? I suspect it was tried at least at some point in the books, but have to ask.
In the case that a reflection off of a shield is good enough to not count then yes. In case case where it's not good enough maybe still yes.
If you can be turned to stone through IR goggles then you should also be able to be turned to stone through a photograph of one of these creatures doing it's thing. Probably also a convincing painting or pencil sketch of one of them.
I recall a Monty Python sketch about how they used this kind of information attack in warfare with the soldier on their side just having a tiny piece and having their senses blocked so they wouldn't pick up the parts other soldiers were using. Is was audio rather than visual but you might be able to do the same thing with like a bunch of shields that went together a certain way to make the image. You miight wanna make sure they were all legally blind so they wouldn't have much risk of seeing each other's shields.
Wasn't it an earthquake that precipitated the events? An upheaval raised R'lyeh temporarily and roused Cthulhu slightly. I guess the cultists thought that this would be enough to raise their god, and travelled there to try and wake it fully. My guess is that Cthulhu wasn't properly awake, though. Like when you wake up in the middle of the night and have to go to the bathroom.
Well with sleep most people wake up a lot more than that to fix things like their breathing. I'm not sure if turning over to stop cutting off circulation to your arm or butt or whatever involves mini-waking up though.
Well, while you don't want a Dwarf to lose to such a small animal (unless something horrible happened like it hit an Artery or the wound became infected) you do want a whole herd of small animals to be capable of taking down even a prepared dwarf.
Having Monty Python rabbits isn't absolutely out of the question but even so 100 rats shouldn't be able to realistically kill an armored dwarf with a weapon. They could definitely do some irritating stuff but unless the Dwarf was locked in a small chamber with them it should be able to just leave if the rats proved too much trouble. Infections could get them later but in straight up combat having a bunch of mouse-mouth-depth punctures in your skin would certainly suck but it would be damn hard for them to get to any vital points and they shouldn't be able to cause such extreme damage to skin fast enough that the dwarf couldn't have some self preservation kick in before they got totally exhausted and just go home to take a break before they killed a few dozen more or whatev.
Something like a house cat could realistically inflict significant enough damage that they wouldn't go back into combat without some rest and recuperation but there's some limits to this. Now, something like a locust swarm might actually bite off enough flesh each to eat their way into more vital tissue but actually eating an opponent during combat is not the usual state of affairs.
One part of pack behavior that I think needs distinction is how well the animals make use of it. Fifty vs one is generally pretty bad but if they form a circle around you and try to let you wear yourself out until they can get opportunity strikes in places you weren't able to defend it's not the same as if they all huddle up into a defensive group and do threat actions to signal that they'll counter-attack in some nasty way.
Species versus species interactions are not going to be very diverse. Ecologists out there can correct me if they'd like, but generally a carnivore like a lion is not going to attack a carnivore like a cheetah unless there are some terrifically extenuating circumstances like disease or territoriality, and in the case of conflicts the "fights" are usually going to just be displays of aggression until the smaller animal backs down. If an animal is large, it's not going to be attacked by an animal smaller than it unless it's outnumbered by cooperative hunters. While a carnivore might have adaptations to go after specific prey (see the jaguar's obscenely powerful bite, used to pierce turtle shells) if it's hungry, it will eat anything it can catch . . . there was a documentary years ago about a biologist startled to learn that in the winter wolves on the tundra can subsist solely on mice.
The creature raws should have all of the information necessary to make any new creature abide by these rules.
Well basically most large animals (included among which are insect,) are smart enough and have good enough senses to evaluate their opponents so it's less expensive to just do some posturing to give a good indication of who's bigger... sorta. In situations where you can just go out looking for a mate again tomorrow until you get lucky and are the bigger one then showing off makes sense because if you lose that day it's just one day. It's those times when today means everything that you see animals fighting to the death.
For predator prey situations it's pretty obvious because the one has to eat to not starve to death while the other will die if it gets eaten. With rival carnivores it's usually possible to just claim different territory and try to stay away from each other but when one or both are starving it's better to risk it than just die doing nothing.
And the whole war thing even makes sense in light of this because humans take several years to make basically one batch of children and if they've got one kid up to 15 years old and lose all their kids at that point they may be too old by then to be able to have more children so really every day becomes the only day. Bigger established countries are basically more stable so they go to war less often but obviously the wars tend to get bigger. If they grew in size faster than they decreased in frequency big countries would obviously burn themselves out and collapse but thankfully the whole thing has us killing each other less per person so we can devote our efforts to making games about little groups bashing in skulls instead n_n
But ya, species usually avoid killing members of their group because it's usually risky and it's only very rarely worth the risk. Avoiding fighting elsewhere is also preferable but evaluation skills aren't always balanced between different species so if they misjudge how risky the situation is or they're desperate then there's gonna be a fight.
I knew about the templates but hadn't played with them enough to know how much of the effort it would actually encapsulate. Sounds like it'll do more than I had expected.
I think what I was looking to see is observable creature interaction during the game. I wanted to see the lion look for food on the map. If no prey animals were around, it'd go after other predators (out of desperation) or dwarves. I was hoping to see opportunities were releasing bred prey animals into the wild might serve as a defense mechanism, or where animals would be more or less aggressive toward dwarves, pets, or caravans, but to be selective about that. It need not cover specific adaptations in the broad sense, just general size/damage/defense kinds of stuff. The reason I think it needs to be considered is that small animals, even not in packs, aren't easy prey once you introduce things like poisons. A small poisonous animal eaten by a creature without immunity should show up in the game. This is a specific adaptation, but one that is currently relevant to the game. It'd be a shame to get things like poisons in the game and not see the full benefits of them.
I know we won't see it now, but if the effort to flesh out the creature raws is going to be done, why not start to discuss how to get to that state. I can't imagine that Toady isn't looking to get to that point.
Toady mentioned some of that back in one of the talks leading into the question of if lionmen should eat antelopemen so really even the basic interactions aren't there yet. Maybe we'll see this kind of stuff put into a system in the near future but I'm realizing we've got too little to go off of right now for ecology systems.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3662801 times)