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[praguepride]

Just browsing through the lists and saw this. I think this could be an easy thing to code in, but the question is WHAT to code in. Here are three ideas:

1. Questions - similar to Liberal Crime Squad, the game will ask a set of quesetions about the journey and your responses will have a known impact. For example:

"Your crew is wandering through mountains when you are attacked by bandits. Do you..."

• Kill the Bandits (every dwarf gains novice wrestling skill)
• Flee (every dwarf gains +1 agility)
• Bribe the Bandits (every dwarf gains novie social skills).

2. Known & Random Effects - again, questions would be asked but the outcome of the answers are variable within a known degree. Taking the same example quesetion about bandits attacking...

• Kill the Bandits (random dwarves pick up injuries but also gain various military skills (armor use, shield use, wrestling, weapons etc.). Gain a random amount of iron gear off of the dead bandits.
• Flee (lower chances of injuries then fighting, but a chance that some items fall off the wagon. Note this would only be stuff like food, extra ammo etc. and not equipment carried like axes & picks. Anvil can never be lost.
• Bribe Bandits: 100% chance that X wealth worth of items are removed, but no injuries and dwarves gain a variable amount of social skills.

3. More Random & More Skill Based: Basically the game would generate random scenarios (probably not unique, but from a list of 100 scenarios, the game randomly picks 10). Then you get your set of options and based upon random chance and the dwarf skills involved, various outcomes could happen. Again, bandit attack.

• Fight back! If you have a lot of military dwarves and/or weapons you can fight it out. Heck, the game might even simulate an actual combat. Your dwarves could win and secure extra XP and loot the bandits for various extra items. Your dwarves could be heavily beaten and thus lose a bunch of items and have severe injuries.
• Flee: If you travel light (i.e. with low weight items and/or more pack animals) then a better chance of fleeing. You can flee successfully (no negatives), get caught (forced to fight, see above), or flee but lose some items in the process.
• Bribe: If you have high negotiations and valuable items you can bribe the bandits easily. Otherwise, you'll lose some items AND be forced to flee or fight depending.

Now obviously, bandits attacking would be a bad thing so the results should be mostly negative. There would also be things like "you find a dead adventurer" and have the option of looting the body or burying it (looting gets you items but lowers morale, possibly even cursing the dwarves), or you could meet a stranger and have the chance of getting an 8th dwarf right off the bat, things like that.

[darkflagrance]

Why not allow the player to take the dwarves to the field screen and then command the fight against the bandits himself? Or, if the leader has social skills, allow a trade screen version of bribing?

[praguepride]

LCS is a big inspiration on this for me, so I think the embarking screen is already a bit lengthy without having to actual trigger combat and trading etc.

Plus, imagine a new player suddenly having to take a bunch of random dwarves into combat. I don't think this should be "travellers" hard where you can die during character creation

[wilsonns]

It would be cool to see something like "Oregon Trail", you choose the dorfs, and then start to travel to the location you like...

[zwei]

OP: I think it is a bit more about deeper background (i.e., King sent you to make woodcutting outpost; in game mechanics terms, bonus is that equipment needed for that (axes) is given for free, but civ expects steady flow of wood.

Basically, something like briefing for mission.

It would be cool to see something like "Oregon Trail", you choose the dorfs, and then start to travel to the location you like...

This is certainly preferable to question-based system of sort, if you are going to have bandits ambush you, let it be because bandits actually exist and you happened to run into them.

I have certain dislike of question-based systems because they are too meta-gamey: eventually, players will eventually know what each answer means and just choose what gives most benefits (1-2, 2-3, 3-1 respectivelly in you example).

[praguepride]

I could see as a "pipedream endgame ideal" being that you'd actually march your 7 dwarves across the countryside, being a combo of adventure mode & fort mode, eventually eliminating the need for the two to be seperate (I.e. your dwarf(ves) never settle, they can either roam around and adventure for awhile (forever?) and then settle down or whatever.

But for thoughts along the lines of "what would be possible to be coded within the year" I think a questions/scenario placeholder system would be the way to go as a short term goal.

Then, once that system is used and played with, it can be evolved deeper and deeper. That's how DF development seems to work. You start with SOMETHING and then slowly refine it instead of not having it and waiting around while you try and hammer out the perfect system on the first try.

So, is this how it should always be? No, of course not. But is this far more reasonable to code in within the lifetime of this project? Definitely.

So I'd say for a short term, placeholder system, no oregon trail, no interacting with the world gen map except in an extremely abstract way (like the farther away the site is from Mountainhome, the more "encounters" you run into).

The opening scenarios would be interesting, but perhaps should be optional? I.e. when starting your game you have the option of doing a "Mission" game or a regular game. A Mission game would give you some random scenario: "Produce 10,000 dwarf bucks in wooden objects within 3 years." Or something like that. Not to go too far off on a tangent (this should be it's own suggestion) but I wouldn't demand a player actually export the wealth as the stickyness with traders could piss players off. "I have 50,000 dwarf bucks in wooden objects but the damn traders never came because I'm on an island!"

[zwei]

The opening scenarios would be interesting, but perhaps should be optional? I.e. when starting your game you have the option of doing a "Mission" game or a regular game. A Mission game would give you some random scenario: "Produce 10,000 dwarf bucks in wooden objects within 3 years." Or something like that. Not to go too far off on a tangent (this should be it's own suggestion) but I wouldn't demand a player actually export the wealth as the stickyness with traders could piss players off. "I have 50,000 dwarf bucks in wooden objects but the damn traders never came because I'm on an island!"

I would not necesarily split those.

If we go by preset events, they could be tied to your "mission". i.e. if your mission is to produce 10 000¤ in wood, natural encounter you could run into are Elves who are going to be curious about axes and saws (and want you gone from forest) you carry or competing human lumberjack party.

Worldgen information should play major role in this. At it simplest, game can plot straight line from mountainhome to your destination to get set of possible encounters based on crossed biomes and countries (no elven land crossed = no pointyeared questions about axes).

[praguepride]

I think they should be split. Some people just want to play a sandbox game. Others might want the more focused approach of a mission.

The important difference is that if I don't like missions or have another goal in mind (i.e. build the world's largest pump tower) I don't want to constantly be nagged by reminders that I'm failing my mission.

edit: Here's the core in all it's texty glory

Core76, EMBARK SCENARIOS, (Future): Embarking in dwarf mode is one of the more sterile, gameish parts of the... game, and it can afford to be spruced up. Though a full take-your-wagons-from-here-to-there style embark is probably beyond the scope of version 1, at least giving the backstory for the journey and adding various game effects and alterations to starting conditions based on it would help with immersion.

As you can see, Toady hinted that a full on adventure/oregon trail style opening would probably be out of scope for version one.

The backstory & game effects & starting conditions do not sound like scenarios or missions, it sounds more like the "question" events that I proposed.

"You beat up some bandits so you start with some free weapons."
"You picked up a hitchhiker adn so you have a completely unskilled 8th dwarf."
"The party leader got drunk and fell down a gorge. Your expedition leader is dead."

Things like that rather then "The king demands you chop down trees!".

[Loyal]

It's entirely probable that one of the "missions" would be simply "build a fort in this area to expand our influence." I don't see the problem.

[praguepride]

It's entirely probable that one of the "missions" would be simply "build a fort in this area to expand our influence." I don't see the problem.

That would imply that you would get to choose your "scenario."

But PLEASE take this discussion into a new thread. We're getting dragged off topic. I think the idea of missions is worthy enough of a suggestion for it's own thread. If you don't create it, I will!

[o_O[WTFace]]

It might be neat to sortof choose your path.  Like either draw it out on the world map or choose from a couple auto generated ways to get to a certain place (like the easy but long way, the short but gobliney way, or the sketchy and expensive sea route). 

Anyway, I like the Oregon Trail stuff.  It would give much more of the embark crap a potential use.  I think it would be much better done in-game like fallout (I imagine adventure mode to someday be like procedurally generated Fallout).  While traveling on the world map you would encounter stuff periodically and like the rest of the game you could do more or less anything.  So say, while traveling near a cave you encounter a couple of Kobolds fishing in a river, who seem happy enough to ignore you.  You could go and try to trade with them for supplies (they would like crafts I expect), rob them (weapons would be handy for that), offer their king a shiney in exchange for safe passage (negotiations etc, could backfire with hilarious results), or do whatever.  Preset or randomized choices tend to be gamey and don't really seem necessary given DF's level of detail and features.

Anyway regardless of implementation it would be a good way to make embark site choices more strategic and risky.  Embarking from one side of the map to the other should make you wish you brought more food instead of a metric ton of coal.  Embarking in the middle of a goblin nation should come with some goblin issues.

[praguepride]

As mentioned, while neat, the dev item basically says that Oregon Trail/walking the map to get to your base won't be in version one, and I'd rather not debate something that might not come into play for decades as this thread will be long buried by then. And we'll be using a much cooler internet then

[Capntastic]

From the podcast:

Toady:  There are downsides to that sort of stuff, like if you have a Q and A process like the Ultima games or even our own Liberal Crime Squad, the main downside to that I think is that it's a cumbersome way to create a character when you know the questions are just building stats and giving you items, so it just gets really annoying and you have to game the system just to get where you want to get, and it's the same every time. The key difference here is that it really can't be the same every time in Dwarf Fortress because the worlds are all different; it can picks two parent for you and say 'you were born to these two people and you're living in this kind of situation' and then it can have things arise based on just running world generation, just continue world gen from whatever point the game's at. So if goblins were attacking that village that would be the scenario event it throws at you, how do you deal with this? Depending on how old you are you might just be forced to run away, but there might be choices to make in any case. So it can give you a past in this way, and it will let you interact with it. Ideally you'd be presented with a situation and you'd either have some options for resolving that and then continuing to the next situation, or a little more difficult would be allowing you to jump into any situation that you wanted to, so if you were nineteen years old in some village as a farmer in the beginning and the goblins attacked, maybe you'd want to just jump in right there, and that's where you start playing. And at that point you certainly wouldn't have an accessibility problem in the sense of not knowing what to do, or at least having a situation that you'd be confronted with because there'd be something going on, and you'd also have your parents and friends and things; that's the main point, you'd have relationships to begin with, and you should be able to punch up a screen that says what's going on there, and if during the early scenarios you had a situation where your parents were killed by somebody or something then you'd have a Conan relationship screen or something, where it's like 'Thulsa Doom killed your mom' or whatever, and that can be something that drives your life if you want. That's the scenario situation, running through that, being able to break out when you want, or just finishing a number of them, and that would start from wherever your last game ended. The downside here is that if you're starting from that year and it takes a certain time to grow up, then whatever was going on in the world is going to be spent by twelve, thirteen, sixteen, twenty more years by the time you jump in. It's more difficult to retcon you into the world and start you where you want to start off but using past events. We've talked about that a bit before with the fake populations and saving their historical events and how you can use that to retcon things in, including your own character. So it's possible, but ...




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Essentially, you can't have fake non-existent bandits running around just during embarks.   Likewise, limiting how the player can deal with them is antithetical to the game's purposes.

[praguepride]

Interesting, thanks for that podcast transcript. Which one is that from?