Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[qoonpooka]

Didn't see this in my search so...

So I just dealt with a two-wave ambush, three snatchers, and two thieves while escorting a caravan in.  It's the second round of ambushes for this fort.

Not including the items I sent to the smelter, the loot went to the Caravan to the tune of 120,000 dwarfbucks.  At this point my fort has only created 200k, itself.

So let me get this straight... a scraggly band of goblin raiders has, on hand, enough material wealth to buy half of a 3-year old dwarven fortress?!?!!

Ignoring the sheer agony involved in disposing of all that gear, there's just a simple balance issue here.  I mean, yeah the human caravan was real happy to have it in trade, but the sheer amount of masterwork GCS clothing boggles the mind.

Whatever happened to goblins' "quantity over quality" slogan?  Perhaps looted gear should spawn in various states of being worn-out, and perhaps the hyper-expensive luxury items should be left out of loot tables altogether.  There's just no challenge in the game once the gobbos show up.

[Shurhaian]

The biggest problem with the goblins is not so much the quality of their wares as in the material. You alluded to it in your post.

If goblins stop having access to giant cave spider silk and the like(except for maybe local leaders and such), this will be made much less unbalanced.

In general, civs use materials at random when it really ought to be weighted by value. Such weighting would, I think, be fairly easy and straightforward to implement, and would make it far less annoying to buy, say, bags of seed, flour, or dye.

[GoldenH]

Even removing the GCS clothing won't help things out. I'd taken to storing the GCS items deep inside my fortress and only selling their other clothing to the merchants, and there is still more than enough.

Although it's mostly pointless, as I find a weaver/clothier combination to be enormously profitable.

[o_O[WTFace]]

Goblins running around with masterpiece clothes is part of it, not having those clothes damaged in combat is part of it, and not having all that much to buy from the caravans is most of it.  Really, most of what you need from the caravans is raw materials your site lacks and animals for breeding.  To pay for it all, you have one craftsdorf make stone crafts until the end of time and have all the money you will ever need, not even counting all the silk pants and goblinite. 

[KenboCalrissian]

It's been mentioned time and again that the goblins drop too much stuff.  Everything's been suggested, from restricting goblins from GCS to making 'narrow' a negative multiplier to having battle damage to clothing calculated and affect price to having the goblins arrive stark naked.

It's getting fixed, just give it time.

[Amalgam]

That's just how the spoils of war are! Finders keepers, losers weepers!

On one hand Foa has the right idea, but on the other hand armor can be expensive too and you don't want to deck out a bunch of new recruits in high-quality armor if you think they're going to die - you either give them cheaper armor, in which case you're still wasting your time, or send some good soldiers who won't give in to pain from a pinch. The good soldiers protect the expensive armor, and the expensive armor protects the good soldiers, see? You always give the expensive armor to your best soldiers and the cheaper armor to recruits, and spend as little money and soldiers as possible when attacking a place while still being confident you'll win, according to one school of thought. On the other hand, if they die you could lose valuable recruits and equipment - not as valuable as your elite soldiers, but still valuable, so if you have the resources you can also ensure the battle isn't lost by sending more highly-trained soldiers and eliminating the possibility of waste. I foresee some kind of scalable difficulty in sieges/ambushes sometime in the future (we already have that in a way) and more dynamics to sieges, so this might balance things. GCS silk should probably be used less on all creatures unless they're rich or are in a position of power, like nobles.

[silhouette]

Quantity over quality should be for the goblins...
Serriously why would low class goblin snatchers wear giant cave spider silk, makes no sense.
Unless the goblins are secretly super wealthy and are only stealing from other civs for kicks...

[LegoLord]

They only steal children, not goods.  You're thinking of kobolds, which don't have valuable loot.

[Geb]

A partial fix for this is easy via modding. You can cut out the entries in the goblin civ that list what clothing types they will wear, leaving only armour. My version of goblins turn up wearing only iron and leather.

In my games I was atomsmashing or melting most of the goblin equipment, I wasn't really concerned with value, instead caring only about the time taken to clean up a battlefield. It does work to lower loot values significantly though.

[Cheeetar]

Hey, this isn't one of those pansy-assed games where you kill a god, wearing god equipment, and all you can get is a pound of grapes.

YOU GET WHATEVER IS ON THEM!
And since iron/copper is expensive shit, and they have like a full set of iron full-plate, do you fucking think it wouldn't be expensive?
Oh, and goblins, they are the only evil force, and they are lead by demons that want to go all out, SO DO YOU FUCKING THINK THEY'D SPAM WEAK MOTHER FUCKERS WITHOUT GIVING THEM BIG TOYS?
I mean troops are harder to get than weapons, and armor.

Perhaps you should tone yourself down. Swearing and using all caps for no reason isn't good.

[Grendus]

Part of the problem is that items have static values. There's no real reason why the humans would want narrow clothing outside of trophies or possibly for oddly sized humans (childrens clothing or something). If they bought it, it would be for scrap cloth or just for the eccentric humans who like items of that material or size.

Other problems include clothing not being damaged by combat, clothing not rotting quickly when it's wearer is dead and it's soaked through with mud, blood, and vomit, and goblins using overly valuable clothing and having absurdly high quality clothing at that. These are all placeholders, and will be fixed eventually.

[stuntedkind]

Hi first post on here! As mentioned above it looks just like a case of balancing the value inputs and outputs in the game. It's probabaly something that'll only be fully resolved once the caravan arc is finished and the dwarven economy is fixed.

At the moment prepared meals, clothing and goblinite are all huge money faucets that don't have anything to provide a sink (They also don't require many dwarf jobs, which is doubly bad for the dwarf economy, but I digress).

The goblin item issue could be addressed partly through changing traders so they have more developed preferences (for example not buying undecorated goblin sourced items and undervaluing them even if have been decorated*), and removing GCS item drops from the grunts. Some sort of inflation for trader prices would be a good thing to have also, if the number of items the traders bring is static.

If you were going to make goblin items unsellable, or low value even when decorated, you'd be best to allow clothes to be recycled- allow them to be 'melted' at a loom back into thread at a % chance of recovery. Otherwise you're forcing people to atom smash 'em to save their frame rate.  Making wear on items repairable with thread, and allowing eventual item destruction through wear & tear, would tie into this nicely. Jobs for all those non-legendary clothiers/weavers. Of course, now you're starting on modyfiying how clothing works, and that goblinite rebalance has created another few months of work...



*Why a dwarf would want a soiled goblin loincloth that doesn't fit him/her I'm not quite sure, even if there was a masterful image of dwarfs slapped on it.

[Shurhaian]

There's been talk in numerous threads about reclaiming wrong-sized or worn clothing. Another common notion that comes up is tearing it down into rags, for cleaning and the like; this may make more sense than using worn, bloodstained cloth and producing something brand new out of it.

[stuntedkind]

Another common notion that comes up is tearing it down into rags, for cleaning and the like; this may make more sense than using worn, bloodstained cloth and producing something brand new out of it.

Come to think of it, irl paper can be made from old plant fiber cloth, so there's another possible use for 'cloth rag' items there, if paper makes it into the game at some point.

[Michael]

On another note, scraps of blood/vomit-soaked goblin clothing would be a far more realistic fertilizer for fungus farms, than the potassium carbonate used at present....