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[Felblood]

I dunno. Violence really needs to work on these guys in a satisfying way.

They serve a function as the ultimate military challenge, and they need to feel right in that role.

That said, powerful demons might be very easy to resurrect, or each one killed might spawn another, wandering somewhere in the world, unless special conditions are met.

If every demon in the horde needs special treatment it either needs to be automated, or very simple, like assigning graves for your own dead. The really elaborate stuff should be reserved for the boss demons.

Any remaining cultists should actively try to resurrect the boss, and there should be enough different ways to do this that the player is never certain that he has eliminated the possibility, a la Dracula in Castlevania.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Fellblood: Yes, violence should work, but not ordinary, everyday violence. Something special should be required to put an end to them.

[Felblood]

Fellblood: Yes, violence should work, but not ordinary, everyday violence. Something special should be required to put an end to them.

Why?

[SirHoneyBadger]

Why?

Why bother with HFS at all if they aren't special?

It's like Pilsu said: We aren't talking about antmen here. We're talking about something so awful that the gods themselves locked it up inside of a rather extraordinary box. These are the same gods that left bronze colossi, dragons, hydras, etc. running wild and free.

[Felblood]

No. Why do they have to be fundamentally different from other challenges in any way other than that they are more challenging?

It would be nice to have baddies that fulfil that sort of role, so that adventurers could go on quests to collect the items needed to defeat them, but the glowing pits are a fundamentally fortress mode concern, and they need to test the player at every aspect of fortress mode to the absolute maximum. That includes his ability to defend his fortress with military arms.

I am more than ready to see additional challenges added to this plot arc, but I refuse to believe that it would be better if the military challenge were replaced with something else.

We need a reason to founder 400 tons of steel platemail and obsidian swords. If those don't work on the ultimate military challenge, then their meaning as a game piece has been severely undercut.

A mere nest of antmen clearly isn't going to suffice as the ultimate martial challenge. Look at the derisive way it's used in this thread. It simply can't stack up to the drama of confronting the HFS.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Outside threats should in time provide more than enough use for tons of steel and obsidian. The Army arc I would think should solve that one quite nicely.

Armies on Earth had those kinds of challenges, so I don't see why the HFS should be replacing things we can readily and easily draw out of history?

HFS should, in my opinion, test your Fortress in new and different ways that simply can't be replicated in any fashion by any other type of threat.

[mendonca]

(apologies if I am repeating something said earlier, I might have missed a few pages of chat)

Having the HFS linked to sphere (in whatever form) could (would?) be very interesting. The game will soon have 'souls' (which as I understand it aren't used quite fully yet) so this could lead to various HFS challenges.

In one instance, you have to fight back a physical embodiment of evil. You kill it, it dies. The soul dies, without the physical tie to a body. (Normal, or material sphere?)

In another, you open the gateway to hell, and ... well ... nothing. (Sphere of deceipt, or mystery?)

Until a noble gets possessed, starts talking in long-forgotten tongues, and walks round poisoning the food supply, stealing people's eyes etc. (might not be obvious unless the player carries out a bit of detective work)

Kill the noble, the soul escapes, inhabits somebody else.

If you are unlucky, he will inhabit the Human Liaison. 2 in-game years later, the liaison (with his new found lust for power, and legendary persuasion skills) gets promoted to king.

The Humans return, unannounced and en-masse, led by the pallid, sunken-eyed king, to take back the Liaison's home. By now the Dwarves may have been able to rape the Adamantine and might be able to put up a fight, if they have managed to deal with the ensuing carnage the other three escaped souls did ..

It does seem that it should be deeper and more interesting than SOLELY 'fight the demons until you win or lose'.

[Pilsu]

Fighting the demons with symbols and rites is pretty boring though. What I was saying was that hitting the demons in the face with a hammer shouldn't be the end of it. A demonic invasion should probably do terrible things to your fort, even if you win for the time being. The local sphere being affected, turning the landscape corrupt and your dwarves macabre over time just seems appropriate. The old "YOU LOSE!" mechanic was shit but just having to deal with a few critters doesn't have the desired impact. At the very least they should keep coming randomly with the king, driven mad by his fancy new cloak or just plain greed, demanding that you keep the path open and send in teams to extract more metal, making the situation even worse.

Personally I think rites should do absolutely nothing beyond slight morale bonus. Naive superstition and faith in their worthless symbols just makes the situation more delightfully grim. I don't much care for demons causing undeath though. They just don't mesh.


Who's the say the demonic influence would have to just drive people mad randomly? Birth defects, dwarves being pulled into wells, fires mysteriously erupting and other shenanigans would work too. Demons are tied to spheres, their effects should probably reflect that

[Bauglir]

-snip-

[Julien Brightside]

HFS:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I came to think of a thing. Imagine that when you hit evil stuff, there would be a lot of trouble.

Adventurers will show up on your door, claiming to kill the HFS.
Goblins allover the world will unite to free the demon from your prison (or eventually free it).
Elves will siege your fort because the demon is bound to be a treeburner (unless your dwarves already got that covered.)
Humans will go on a crusade towards you because they believe your dwarves are corrupted.

Or, if you guys have beaten the HFS, Goblins will take revenge, humans will come for the treasure, elves would perhaps not give a damn.

[SirHoneyBadger]

A few things:

If you think about it, releasing the HFS/removing the HFM might be a bit like draining an abscess or excising a cyst.

Suppose HFS left visible signs on the environment. Cursed the land, poisoned the waters, created deserts, wastelands, glaciers, fetid swamps, was the cause of undead and other nastiness, what have you.

The clowns might be like those asshole neighbors that are always yelling at each other and turning their sterio up way too loud and leaving their dogs outside all night long.

By confronting them, or even distracting them to a large enough degree, you might end up actually healing the land, since the badness they inflict on everything might require most or all of their attention.

Ofcourse, that means they're now concentrating on *YOU*. And even if you defeat them totally, that still leaves you with the problem of what to do with all the HFM just waiting to bite you in the ass...


As far as a military solution goes, that never really seems to work in the movies. Not the way you want it to. Heroes battling clowns on an individual basis would be great (which is one reason why I'm in favor of limiting the weapons that can harm clowns). Building massive inner defenses and sending the troops down into your Fortress, rather than out, just seems very tacky to me.

Haunted Tragic Fortress = Good/Stylish.

Doughnut Fortress With Evilberry Filling = Shoehorned/Silly. 


I agree with Bauglir: There should also either be good (atleast short term good) reasons to simply let the clowns escape, or the clowns should have abilities (flying, phasing through solid rock, swimming through magma, etc.) that make it difficult to contain them, or else all this epicness will just boil down to the magma solution.

[Bauglir]

-snip-

[Pilsu]

The dwarfy scenario would be uncovering something they shouldn't have, discovering that it's valuable and the leadership demanding that you get more at any cost, paying no attention to the inevitable consequences. That's how it was in the old versions at any rate

[SirHoneyBadger]

Maybe make the military a partial "bandaid" solution? Like you can keep the clowns at bay, but never really finish them off with *just* steel and force of arms.

Considering the many directions this thread has been going in, does it seem to anyone else that maybe the Philosopher Noble should get involved somehow? Like you've got this mysterious little old wisedwarf that just putters around your Fortress, seemingly doing nothing, but then one day, at your darkest hour of need, he reveals himself, and you have to make a choice between listening to the advise of this dusty old nobody you've been supporting for years, and the direct orders of your King.



Maybe the clowns can possess rock itself, and maybe such possessed rock could then spawn critters, cause bad effects (staring, moods, etc.), or even transform into an image of the clown that possessed it (which would then function independently of the possessor, until you slay the clown possessing it--which would allow them to slowly "mine" their way out to the surface, with each mined out square yielding a clown homonculus) until you engrave the evil stone, rendering it harmless, so you have to protect your craftsdwarfs while they go down there and fix the evil leaky pipe.

Engraving as a solution would seem to offer an easily understood, readily available remedy, while at the same time giving the task itself considerably more import.

By the time HFS is breached, how many people *don't* have a small to large team of highly skilled engravers running around, anyway? This might be a nifty way of giving them a little respect.

This also helps assure that you won't lose the body of your Fortress, either, since it's reasonable that late in the game most surfaces will have been atleast smoothed.

Perhaps smoothing the stone by itself would be enough to prevent this sort of clown "infection", with the extra step of engraving only necessary to render possessed stone inert.

[Julien Brightside]

Why are we saying clowns?