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Different injuries don't affect gameplay? I belive Lightning would beg to differ.
There's a neat example of rampant simulationism mixed with a sudden amusing lack of sense. We know he's blind, but nowhere does that discourage him from using a crossbow.
To say nothing of goblins who have been shot in the leg hobbling slowly toward the edge of the map while their brother who had his left hand severed has already fled.
Either one's a mission kill. Sure, you might get the stuff from the former, but again a straight up "some flee, some die" model would give you that.
I understand your point from a min-max kind of gamer perspective, but if all you want are statistics you might as well be playing Battle Champs. The main "selling point" of Dwarf Fortress is its individuality, as least as far as I'm concerned.
I think this has been a bit misunderstood. I'm not saying it's bad to represent distinct states of temporary or permanent incapacitation - as long as they _are_ distinct - but that the existing model is far too complex given that the number of really distinguishable outcomes is small. It's like modelling the exact state of someone's digestive bacteria when all you care about is whether they are hungry. Sure, if your game is about 18th century navies, add scurvy - but don't try and get scurvy as an emergent effect of the digestive bacteria simulator. It can be done but it's a waste of time.
Nitpick: I think scurvy is an effect of vitamin deficiency, not technically a disease. But yeah. It comes down to gamer types. You like statistics - X casualties, Y fatalities, Z gold pieces. I like personality. *This* dwarf saw his lover killed in battle and went into a fit of rage, flung himself at the oncoming horde and killed the Master Lasher, demoralizing them. Sadly, after the battle his leg had to be amputated. But that still wasn't enough to save him, internal bleeding and organ damage caused his lungs to slowly fill with fluid until he drowned. He and his lover were given a joint tomb with platinum sarcophagi.
Being able to grab the sutures on a recently injured and treated combatant and rip them out isn't a useful gameplay effect?
It's not a distinct gameplay effect. The real effect from the fortress command POV is that someone who has not healed up fully is easier to defeat. A hitpoint system could do _that_.
Not in adventure mode (which is what I was talking about). Fortress mode and Adventure mode use the same system for combat (and everything else). This is a GOOD THING. 1) Development time - get the world to work correctly once and it works for all gameplay modes. 2) Individualism/Detail - It would be less interesting if the dwarves in fortress mode COULDN'T do everything you can do as an adventurer. It would make it more of a "game" where you have scripted elements that ruin the fun (for me, at least) because they make it obvious that "somebody designed this, the team was only given six months to get it out the door by Christmas, you have awesome special moves but everybody else is a generic enemy with a palette-swapped costume, and you can't walk any further down this road because the designer said so."
Having a poorly thought-out floor plan which ends up with you evacuating the dining hall because it's filling with water from the lake you accidentally tapped into isn't exciting?
Hang on, I _don't_ regard the water flow and pressure system as unnecessary detail. It's quite important for a grand-scale terraforming game like DF.
Sorry, that part was really responding to:
There's a complete model of hydrostatic pressure, but tap into a river below a waterfall and comedy ensues.
I guess I didn't understand what you meant there, so feel free to correct me.
You can't walk from place to place in a continuous world and see volcanos, rivers, marble, magnetite, sand, and trees all within one square mile of each other, EVERY square mile.
Nor can I see a place where dwarves are digging into the earth. When realism trumps gameplay, something's gone wrong - and it's always a danger with an overly simulationist approach. People confuse realism with ability to suspend disbelief; but, of course, no-one seriously worried about the convenient juxtaposition of features in 2D. In that respect the generated world may be doing us a disservice by making us think harder about the plausibility of the embark site.
I know *I'm* not worried about the juxtaposition of features in 2d... that's because I don't play 2d.
But seriously -- you sort of glossed over my point -- you can walk from place to place. If every step you take you trip over a volcano, that doesn't ruin the effect of them being interesting? How do you explain a deciduous forest growing out of sand? Because deserts are convenient to make glass from and trees are convenient for beds and charcoal? I wish my life had everything I ever wanted available to me within a few yards of my house.
It's different because the 2d version didn't have a WORLD to wander. You couldn't walk from the edge of your abandoned fortress to the human town 8 miles away. The 2d version really is more comparable to Warcraft 2 in that sense. Individual maps with no coherency. That's one reason 3d was such a huge improvement.
If you "fix" that by making fortresses standalone pocket dimensions then your actions in the fortress can't ever affect the rest of the world.
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Right now, the effect is very limited either way. Once I embark the game consists of my embark site and some numerical properties of the adjacent civilisations. If you didn't know, how could you ever tell that the whole world had been generated in detail and then effectively thrown away?
You never play more than one game in the same world, do you? Nor do you ever play adventure mode. Even if you only play dwarf mode and make a second fort in the same world, you'll find that the engravers in your second fort will know about the artifacts made in your first fort - they are now part of the world's history, and can be referred to in art and in conversation ("My mother was Urist so-and-so. In the year 282 Urist made AwesomeArtifact the Dawn of Reckoning.").
You can speak to a man and find that his great-grandfather was a legendary warrior who slew a hydra.
Et cetera. But with the current limitations of procedural content, it's just the same blocks stacked in a different order every time. Real historical figures are interesting because they did different and memorable things; in the DF history the names of who killed who may change but the nature of the interactions does not. It's cute enough to produce an image of Urist HomicidalManiac striking down Bob McOrc, but reading one page of it is just like reading every other page.
Well, sure, but the same would be true if you had access to knowledge about myriad alternate histories of Earth. "Oh, Roger Krugenfeld was this world's version of Einstein. Yawn." Again, if all you're looking for is statistics, OF COURSE the personal histories won't be interesting. But that certainly doesn't mean they shouldn't be there.
EDIT: I do however see an obvious improvement to Legends mode now that you've got me thinking about it - make notable characters stand out in the list so you know who to look at to find interesting things. It would suck to learn about World War II by going through a list of 8000 notable, semi-notable, and not-so-notable Germans and their life stories until you finally found Hitler.
EDIT 2: The above suggestion will be more useful once diplomacy and rulers are more detailed. Then wars may be said to be caused by the policies of the leaders, rather than merely "a conflict over the mutilation of dead bodies," which makes it sound like the entire society is to blame.