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[uttaku]

I did a quick search and nothing came up so I'm sorry if this has been mentioned before.

I was thinking that a way to make mega beasts more interesting would be to have diffrent types of dragon rather than the standard fire breathing type.
These other types could have completly diffrent powers and alinments, so if you were in a good zone a healing dragon would appear while in an evil zone it could be a necromatic dragon.

This would give the game far more flavour and make capturing a dragon all the more fun, as you could use it to heal your dwarfs or raise an undead army of goblins.

The difrent types could include:
Fire breathing (or red): pretty much the standard dragon we have atm.
Healing (or blue): a good zone only dragon that wouldn't attack unless provoked and who's breath would heal rather than hurt, and thus could be used as a hospital.
Life (or Green) : could appear anywhere, its breath would cause plant life to grow much quicker and larger, possible uses include improving farm yeild or growing trees for timber.
Death (or black): evil zones only, its breath would turn corpses into undead, this could be used to creat a zombie army, although dwarfs may get a negative thought from seeing a loved one stumbling around.
Neutral (or gray): no breath weapon at all

so what does everyone think, also any more ideas for dragon types?

[Silverionmox]

Personally I don't like dragon-cloning (it seems like a cheap trick, like selling the same product under different packages), but I think there should be enough tags sooner or later to be able to mod in any of the variations.

[Starver]

Elementally, fire (red/traditional dragon), air (sky blue/coldness), earth (brown?/burrowing) and water (aqua/somewhere adjacent to seamonster) and possibly fifth/sixth/seventh/etc elemental variants (spirit, time, fate, life and death) would be what I'd be looking at if creating a 'dragonable' universe.  Not sure if these could fit in with DF, though.

I don't know if the 'healing' dragon, as mentioned would merely be a tamed one that was capable of also removing life-force (prior to training, or to Dwarven enemies after they have been) as part of its raison d'etre, but a megabeast wandering round healing anything that it met (unless recognised as a 'nursemaid fish' by everything it could ever encounter, or perhaps being a natural denizen of undead plains, being 'anti-deadly' to those undead and converting them to non-animated corpses by its powers of life-control) wouldn't really get very far in the world.

It really goes for them all.  For a given environment, their 'flavour' should make sense.  A dragon that turns cretures to gold with a glare from its eyes?  It's a metallic creature that has developed the trick to process organic material into something that it can imbibe.  A sleep-inducing dragon?  Possibly one that is itself intrinsicly sloth-like and it's a skill it has to level the playing field in an environment where there's not much to eat, but what it can find is usually too quick for its low-metabolism movements to let it catch.

Something like that.  As a principle, while probably not an example, at least.

[Whitney]

Starver's ideas are too much. But I do believe uttaku has the right idea.

[Vattic]

There are a few mods that add different dragon variants and we already sort of have two types of dragon with the hydra. I like the idea of different types of dragon but rather than looking to the elements for inspiration it might be interesting to have the spheres add more flavour to things.

Personally I'd like to see dragons have more personality in game. Often in myths they are at least as intelligent as humans and our interactions with them are not always straightforward. Some do nothing but torment, steal and eat us while others defend us and in some folklaw they take human form and get married.

I think dragons will get more interesting when Toady gets around to it and I think there is lots of potential there.

[Granite26]

Dragons are neat because they stack special attacks into a single class of monster.  Specifically, you could create the 'dragon' body, and then each dragon type would only need to overwrite the 'special attack' category and the 'color' category.  This is especially useful for modders as an example.  Plus, it forces all the special attacks to be coded so that you can give unicorn horns a healing 'attack' and whatnot.

[SniHjen]

Why not just skip all that and align them to *SPHERE* ?

[Lordinquisitor]

Personally I don't like dragon-cloning (it seems like a cheap trick, like selling the same product under different packages), but I think there should be enough tags sooner or later to be able to mod in any of the variations.

This!

It bugs me like hell to see such "dragon clones"- Time dragons? Healing dragons? Really?

Dragons, hydras and maybe wyvern and lindwurms are enough dragons for the core game.

[Bricks]

Games bloated with dragons are kind of cheap and annoying.  A land dragon and a sea dragon are probably more than enough.  I'd much rather see more original beasts, even if they had the same effects, for the sake of originality.  For example:  would you prefer a green dragon with a "poison breath attack" or a giant land snail that coats enemies with poisonous slime?  The former can basically be handled in the same way as any dragon (unless you create an annoying chart of elemental interactions - ghost-type dragons against psychic-type dragons!), and even then, it's going to be roughly the same fight every time.  Fighting a different sort of creature, with different motion, behavior, defense, offense, and body parts, leads to more interesting and frightening megabeasts.

Basically, the more dragons you add, the less the player cares about dragons.  I'm not against variation (especially if the variation is not hardcoded, and instead tied somehow to world and region generation), but singling out dragons is just overdone.

[Apegrape]

IMO dragons should be entirely unique and have different combinations of powers and appearances depending on their parents and so on. The generic red/blue/green dragons are boring, so why not mix up all the powers (and some more).

[Fieari]

You could always make different castes of dragons with different breath weapons.  So they'd all be the same species, just with different "breeds".

But I agree, more types of monsters in general is preferable to more types of dragons.  Just so long as the dragons we have remaining are still terrifying giant brutes of legend.  In the words of the Brunching Shuttlecocks, I want to see "Chapter 14: Smaug eats another well-armored and well-trained adventurer who never had a Smurf's chance in a blender."

[tsen]

Someone just played that "How to Raise a Dragon" flash game, eh?

[Bricks]

In the words of the Brunching Shuttlecocks, I want to see "Chapter 14: Smaug eats another well-armored and well-trained adventurer who never had a Smurf's chance in a blender."

Oh man, that website is great.  Thank you.

[penguinofhonor]

I find multiple types of dragons a good thing, because it's realistic. Well, not really realistic, but as realistic as dragons can get. Why? Because a species of dragon raised in a different area would have different characteristics. That's how it's like in real life, you know.

I don't like crazy things like healing dragons or time dragons, but a few types of dragons is great. Poisonous dragons in swamps and stuff like that. As long as they're area-specific.

[Duke 2.0]

Why not just skip all that and align them to *SPHERE* ?

This.

 This is what is going to happen.