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Author Topic: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death  (Read 94200 times)

darkflagrance

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #60 on: December 16, 2009, 06:36:16 am »

(Mechanically: no migration ever means no immigrant nobles, ever, although with rigorous breeding and a lot of patience you could get the full run of appointed nobles.)

Minor nitpick: Considering that no migrants might actually be caused by no caravan from the dead fortress to report that your fortress exists to the dead fortress, it might be better to note that the direct cause is the lack of a caravan.
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Timst

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #61 on: December 16, 2009, 10:56:05 am »

And if you only kill off dwarven civilizations, but let humans, elves and goblins live successfully, will you get migrants and stuff ? (I guess no, but since that technically won't be the Age of Death...)

Draco18s

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #62 on: December 16, 2009, 11:40:54 am »

All phases related to fortress mode have been completed.  I favor the idea of a succession game as a bit of a send-off for our beloved 40d (even if the moddable entity positions mean that this concept may work much better in the next edition) but as it would be a community game, I won't set it all up alone.  To keep in theme I'd like it to be the Age of Death, but to make it a challenge despite the absence of invaders some adjustments are needed.

I'd suggest including large numbers of immortal megabeasts.

Wait, that doesn't get us the Age of Death (does it?).

Hmm...an animal species that mimics megabeasts?  Something that makes skelephants look tame.
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darkflagrance

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #63 on: December 16, 2009, 12:10:34 pm »

All phases related to fortress mode have been completed.  I favor the idea of a succession game as a bit of a send-off for our beloved 40d (even if the moddable entity positions mean that this concept may work much better in the next edition) but as it would be a community game, I won't set it all up alone.  To keep in theme I'd like it to be the Age of Death, but to make it a challenge despite the absence of invaders some adjustments are needed.

I'd suggest including large numbers of immortal megabeasts.

Wait, that doesn't get us the Age of Death (does it?).

Hmm...an animal species that mimics megabeasts?  Something that makes skelephants look tame.

Yes; large amounts of powerful megabeast-like normal animals results in things like the 727th Monster Rampage at Brokentower.

Just clone dragons over mountain goats and groundhogs, and give them [BIOME:ANY_LAND] and large population numbers/cluster numbers/litter sizes.
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Puzzlemaker

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #64 on: December 16, 2009, 01:14:02 pm »

This is really, really interesting.  Hmm.

So it does track wild population.  A few questions about that...

Like someone mentioned, does it track wild population in areas?  Can you have two small forests with a small amount of wolves, separated by desert or water or something?  See if extinction in one area affects the whole area, or if the wolf data is actually localized.

It could be that the false alarms you where getting while trying to kill that last wolf was simply being ambushed in tiles that all the other wolves died from.  Might be worth checking out.
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Sir Iryn

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #65 on: December 16, 2009, 01:54:56 pm »

Another interesting thing to check would be if the population is only generated if there is a viable biome for it. So if a pocket world has only two biomes, a glacier and a forest, we shouldn't see any Camels or Scorpions.
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Nobody1225

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #66 on: December 16, 2009, 02:28:53 pm »

(Mechanically: no migration ever means no immigrant nobles, ever, although with rigorous breeding and a lot of patience you could get the full run of appointed nobles.)

Minor nitpick: Considering that no migrants might actually be caused by no caravan from the dead fortress to report that your fortress exists to the dead fortress, it might be better to note that the direct cause is the lack of a caravan.

The thing is, in cases where I've managed to produce a lot of wealth very quickly (finding gold and magma in the initial digging with a skilled metalcrafter handy being a common cause) I have gotten migrants in the first summer, before a caravan ever showed up.  While the caravan clearly has a very strong influence on migration, it doesn't seem to have 100% control over it.

Like someone mentioned, does it track wild population in areas?  Can you have two small forests with a small amount of wolves, separated by desert or water or something?  See if extinction in one area affects the whole area, or if the wolf data is actually localized.
We can look into this, but anecdotal evidence says the answer is yes--people have mentioned in this thread and others hunting heavily in one biome, even for things like wolves (which can show up in loads of different biomes), and without raw modifications to cull wolf populations like I did it's unlikely they would have been taking out the whole world of wolves.

Another interesting thing to check would be if the population is only generated if there is a viable biome for it. So if a pocket world has only two biomes, a glacier and a forest, we shouldn't see any Camels or Scorpions.

Definitely the case.  One version of the Phase 5 test I left horses in for a few gens--horses, unlike wolves, are a lot pickier about their biome.  One map had that biome (temperate grasslands, I think) and a lot of horses were generated.  One map did not (only forests, badlands, mountains, ocean) and while horses were still in the raws none were generated.  Plus, it appears to be that the populations are generated in a per-square basis--something like (number of squares with supporting biome * population number (randomly chosen from range) * cluster size (randomly chosen from range) to yield a total world population.

Incidentally, it seems to track individual clusters rather than individuals, for wild animals, although it records it as a total of wild animals.  After genning a world with 13 wolves, I went back into the raws, changed their cluster size to 50:70, cleared the data/objects folder and reloaded the save.  Legends mode said there were now many hundreds of wolves, and the horrific attacks in adventure mode bore them out.
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Yagrum Bagarn

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #67 on: December 16, 2009, 04:31:58 pm »

Quote
The thing is, in cases where I've managed to produce a lot of wealth very quickly (finding gold and magma in the initial digging with a skilled metalcrafter handy being a common cause) I have gotten migrants in the first summer, before a caravan ever showed up.  While the caravan clearly has a very strong influence on migration, it doesn't seem to have 100% control over it.

If you embark on a town or goblin tower, the architecture wealth often attracts immigrants during the first summer.
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Ieb

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #68 on: December 16, 2009, 05:10:30 pm »

Just saying because a megabeast caused mass death was mentioned.

Insane statsed megabeast, sized up the wazoo, give it a pack number of about 40 and I guarantee they'll trample all civilization in a few years.

Next, give them a lifespan of about 50 years. So they'll all suddenly drop dead of natural causes. At least I recall that one megabeast in a mod had a set age, and it always went dead in 10 years or so from old age. And megabeasts don't produce offspring in worldgen apparently.
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Blargityblarg

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #69 on: December 16, 2009, 06:46:00 pm »

Ieb: you may be referring to my 'Giant Battle Kobold', aka Boldimus Prime. It had a maxage of about 5, and always died off early in legends. I think I made it that because their arms got tired.
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Nobody1225

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #70 on: December 16, 2009, 06:59:26 pm »

Well, we could've just had dragons running around like wolves, but I thought a little more diversity might be nice.  So I plucked out my copies of "The Future is Wild" and "After Man: A Zoology of the Future" and chose a couple of entries of some people's vision of how life will continue after all sapient beings are removed.  And then made them dwarfy.

In this case, the premise would be that some strange burst of energy from the sky shortly after the creation of the mortal races wreaked havoc on the genes and reproductive systems of all animal life, causing catastrophic damage and the collapse of civilization.  However, water diffused the energy, so that things in water could escape with just mutation, and things both underground and underwater (or underground and in magma) escaped without alteration.  The only original land animals that survived were tough scavengers (or very fast breeders) with strong resistances to toxins and disease, and even they were...changed.  With biomes like these, who needs evil?

Spoiler: New Critters (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Critters who Remain (click to show/hide)

Obviously, not all of these will actually show up on the same fortress for a succession game, but I got a little carried away with adding more horrible things to kill you (I might make it into a stand-alone mod eventually, and I definitely will in the next version).  I've genned a large world with these, gotten the Age of Death satisfactorily, and found a site with magma, flux, forest, river, underground river, underground pool, a chasm, and HFS.  It's a large embark, 8x8, but the very low number of dwarves will keep the FPS down for quite a long time...
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Puzzlemaker

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #71 on: December 16, 2009, 07:04:53 pm »

Hmm... about that idea you had...

if you modded in a megabeast that would be capable of destroying civilizations, and made them very numerous... like, extremely numerous...

Could you cause an age of death that way?  Run world gen for a long time, make sure all the megabeasts have CAN_LEARN and all that...

Until civilization is destroyed.

That would be a cool community fortress.

EDIT:  Someone has posted already blah blah blah, I'll just post this, it's still probably relevant!  Oh wait.
« Last Edit: December 16, 2009, 07:06:30 pm by Puzzlemaker »
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The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

LegoLord

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #72 on: December 16, 2009, 08:44:38 pm »

< horrible critters>
Holy carp . . . or not so holy carp, I should say.  Dang.
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DeKaFu

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Re: Experiment: The Ages of Emptiness and Death
« Reply #73 on: December 16, 2009, 10:09:48 pm »

"The Future is Wild" and "After Man: A Zoology of the Future"
Badass.

[Horrifying animals]
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