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Author Topic: Hydra Overhaul  (Read 1373 times)

Mr.Hobosworth

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Hydra Overhaul
« on: November 01, 2009, 11:25:42 am »
So lets face it, when a hydra appears in your fortress you start laughing.

By my books, any creature with [MEGABEAST] Deserves to have dwarves crying themselves to sleep at the thought of them.

As we all know, the huge problem with hydras is that even though they have seven heads, once one is killed the other six flop down dead and the beast is killed. I myself find the hydra to be an awesome creature, and consider it my favourite mythological creature. In Greek legends, the hydra regenerated heads (which you cant do in DF) and had a deadly venom.

so i decided to try and fix the hydra problem by creating a body that resembles a hydra better, and to try and get past the one head lop = death problem.

what i have so far:

The hydra creature
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

and the new hydra body:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As you can see with the body, I made the upper body have to [HEAD] tag, rather than each head. in theory, this makes it so that any head can be lopped off and as long as the upper body isn't pierced through or anything, the hydra should live.

now the problem with the [HEAD] being the upperbody is that the mouth, eyes, brain and all of that is attached to the upperbody, and so the seven heads are useless limbs floating around a creature with a bunch of eyes and a mouth on its chest. so i had to designate 2 eyes and a mouth to each head

I genned a new world with them as a common pet, and they seemed to work just fine. But my worries are that now a single hit against the upperbody will cause the hydra to die.

Thoughts? suggestions?
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Lancensis

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #1 on: November 01, 2009, 11:55:32 am »
I believe the [NOTHOUGHT] tag means it doesn't require a body part with a [HEAD] token at all. I suppose that means that lopping the heads off would be ultimately ineffective, a bit like in the mythology of the Hydra - the greek one anyway.
 Another possibility might be to make the hydra body object have NO heads by default and create a separate "MULTI_HEAD" object, that doesn't contain a brain, or the [HEAD] token. That way you could wrangle it so you could create different Hydra creatures with varying numbers of heads, or stick a few extra heads onto other creatures, if you were in a diabolical scientist type mood.
I'll take a crack at it after, y'know, coffee
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Shade-o

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #2 on: November 01, 2009, 04:36:19 pm »
I believe that [HEAD] means that lopping-off is a certain death, much like the upper/lower body. [NOTHOUGHT] means that the brain, neck and spine are not required and the monster cannot be disabled by nerve damage.

I think upper/lower body are unavoidable, as without those tags the monster counts as already being cut in half.

Code: [Select]
[BODY:BASIC_1PARTBODY]
[BP:UB:body][UPPERBODY][LOWERBODY]
looks like the best bet for a more invulnerable critter, as there is only one vulnerable body part. Add in [NOTHOUGHT], [NOBLEED], [NOSTUN] etc and you'll have something to be feared. As a bonus, make each head do different damages.
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Quote from: Koji on July 30, 2009, 09:12:34 pm
Apparently having a redundant creature entry causes the game to say, "Oh, look, it's crazy world now. Nothing makes sense! Alligators live in houses!"

guale

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #3 on: November 01, 2009, 07:10:38 pm »
I believe some mods have made it so they count as headless in order to make them more fearsome. Really, waht are the odds of chopping off all seven heads?
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Lancensis

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #4 on: November 02, 2009, 01:00:40 am »
The problem is that whenever any bodypart with [HEAD] is removed, or smashed into a bloody pulp or incinerated, the creature instantly dies. It's not a case of the creature needs at least one head to live, it's that if any head is destroyed, that's fatal. Although not with undead, oddly enough.

You can remove the tags from the 7_HEADNECKS bodypart, but then you have to manually add eyes and mouths (since the 2_EYES and MOUTH parts are usually only added to bodyparts with [HEAD]). The [HEAD] token is required for breathing, for some reason, as I've slowly discovered over the last few wasted hours of trying to get a headless creature to survive ingame. I don't think there is a better way of doing it than what the OP did, unless you want to give the hydra [NOBREATH]
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Deon

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #5 on: November 02, 2009, 12:14:32 pm »
Yeah, I did a similar trick. Just make special "HEAD_HYDRA" with the set of eyes, a mouth etc. and assign each to a neck. The trick is as you said that these heads are just limbs Hydra uses for attacks, so their removal is not a problem (I made it NOBLEED so cut off heads do nothing bad) so you have to actually destroy it.
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sunshaker

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #6 on: November 02, 2009, 01:06:34 pm »
Would it not be possible to have one "real" head and six "fake" heads? Think of it as camouflage, real animals have fake eyes and what not, this would just be taking it to extremes.

So the real head would have the real eyes, real mouth and the [HEAD] token, the fake heads would have fake (or real) eyes and a fake (or real) mouth (if fake think of it like a big crab claw). Sure a lucky shot to the real head will bring it down, but a shot to the fake head will just do some damage. Now I'm not sure how the location of a hit is determined, if it is by random chance then this is a decent way to go, if it is by skill (legendary +X has a better chance of hitting something vital) then that is ok too (as the skilled dwarf or whatever will have picked up on the clues as to which head was real). Just a thought.

[Edit] And it would really suck if every "head" generated an attack
   [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTYPE:MOUTH:bite:bites:1:6:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
   [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTYPE:FAKE_MOUTH:bite:bites:1:6:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
   [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTYPE:FAKE_MOUTH:bite:bites:1:6:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
   [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTYPE:FAKE_MOUTH:bite:bites:1:6:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
   [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTYPE:FAKE_MOUTH:bite:bites:1:6:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
   [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTYPE:FAKE_MOUTH:bite:bites:1:6:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
   [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTYPE:FAKE_MOUTH:bite:bites:1:6:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
« Last Edit: November 02, 2009, 01:20:35 pm by sunshaker »
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Lancensis

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #7 on: November 02, 2009, 02:08:14 pm »
Heh. Well the Lernaean hydra's middle head was immortal, and Heracles had to bury it under a rock to be rid of it. So I guess if you picked one head, gave it the [UPPERBODY] tag, connected the body to that, the other heads/limbs to the "body" and gave it a load of [NOBREATH][NOBLEED] type tags and a huge damblock, you might wind up with the head staying alive after the rest of the body was hewed off.
I think things without limbs can still crawl about, so you'd end up with a bloody head thrashing around, futilely trying to get at your dwarves. Would go great in a zoo, or you could update the myth and crush it under a drawbridge. Although I'm not sure if that works on creatures above a certain size, so you'd either have to get a critical hit on it, or just divert traffic around it.
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Deon

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #8 on: November 02, 2009, 02:50:04 pm »
Sunshaker: you don't have to make thus many attacks,  you can make one and the game will pick a random "fake mouth". Also there's only 1 attack per round possible, no matter how many bodyparts the creature has.

Lancensis: this sounds fun and it's quite possible, I may try it. Also the ability not to be crashed comes from some tokens put on a demon, I think it's a "buildingdestroyer:2".
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Mr.Hobosworth

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #9 on: November 02, 2009, 07:25:00 pm »
Quote from: Deon on November 02, 2009, 02:50:04 pm
Lancensis: this sounds fun and it's quite possible, I may try it. Also the ability not to be crashed comes from some tokens put on a demon, I think it's a "buildingdestroyer:2".

Thats true, Buildingdestroyer:2 makes the bridge deconstruct rather than kill the creature. I think a large size also plays into it, around 20 i think.

And thanks for all the suggestions. I think the single head with as many tokens as possible coupled with a lot of the [NO___] tags and damblock should create a pretty decent hydra.

I was actually also working on making each head do damage too, so you can really stop it from attacking until its truly dead.
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i2amroy

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #10 on: November 02, 2009, 11:00:46 pm »
One way that you can easily designate what is a head is to use some tag that is not used often, such as [SMELL] that is not being used by any other body part on the Hydra. If you then place this tag on each of the fake heads, you can create one left and right eye and other head attaching body parts and then say [CONTYPE:HEAR] on them. They will then attach to all of the fake heads. By the way, if you just add a simple [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTYPE:MOUTH:bite:bites:1:6:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH] then it would work for all of the heads. Also you can run into problems with spines and brains being destroyed along with heads causing instant crippling pain, for that reason I suggest you add the [NO_SPIN] tag.

Just as an example, here is my hydra and the body parts. I decided to add the [THOUGHT] and [HEAD] tags to the Hydra's heart because if that is destroyed then it would die anyway. The only drawback is that it is possible for the Hydra to keep fighting after you sever all seven necks, but hey what is that chance of that happening anyway. As for the neck and spine thing, I prefer to be able to tell which spine or brain that I damaged, so I added custom Hydra parts there.

Hydra Creature
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Custom Body Parts
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The [JOINT] tag on the necks is just because I think you should be able to snap necks if you want to.
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Neruz

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Re: Hydra Overhaul
« Reply #11 on: November 03, 2009, 07:34:46 am »
Technically severing a head should cause 2 to grow back in it's place, so the hydra fighting on with all 7 heads severed is perfectly acceptible.
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