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[gamegreen33]

Okay, so I am planning on making a very long-term fortress (100-500 years) inspired by Flarechannels, and I am trying to decide whether to embark on a good or evil region. I am currently leaning towards haunted as I like the idea of building a massive fortress designed to keep out zombies/skeletons, and I also like the idea of capturing said zombies/other insane creatures to unleash on enemies and elves. On the other hand, I'd really like to have merpeople for...purposes. Also I'd really like an army of unicorns, for obvious reasons. What do you guys think?


Update: I am most likely going to go for a terrifying region, unless someone convinces me otherwise. My new question is: should I wait for the new version or should I go ahead and start the project? Either way I'll need a good map for this project.

[ancistrus]

Aside from embarking on area with both biomes, modding merpeople and unicorns to be common pets?

[gamegreen33]

If I embark on a Joyous Wilds and Haunted Wilds, does anyone know if the creatures (merfolk, unicorns, zombies, etc.) will attack each other? It'd be an awful shame if they ended up wiping each other out?

Incidentally, the central mega project will be a gigantic battleship/moving island designed as a Temple to Armok. The endgame will be either dropping the ship into a chasm or into the ocean (probably the ocean as I doubt I can manage dropping it into a chasm.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, good friggin' luck on getting something joyous and terrifying in the same zone with other features like flux and magma.  (Although I don't think there's anything special about joyous that you woulnd't get from the terrifying and any other good biome.)  Of course, if you do have a good aligned ocean, that becomes easier.

There are also problems with the way that mermaids and other ocean creatures spawn/enter the map - they tend to try to enter the map from overland, which doesn't work out very well for them.

You would probably be best off trying to hedge your bets by just throwing out some random cage traps (Make cross-shaped walls leading to a few tiles of cage traps), and hopefully capturing some of the critters before they get killed.  Better yet, then you can tame and/or breed them.  Likewise, setting out cage(aquarium) traps on the beach might preserve creatures who wash up in waves.

[gamegreen33]

I might not need a natural ocean-I can create an artificial one fairly easily. I'll be interested to see what the ship looks like when I come back as an amphibian in adventurer mode.

[gamegreen33]

Update: So I've decided I'm going to go with a terrifying region. I am also probably not going to go with the battleship for the blood god aesthetic as it wasn't really what I was going for in the first place. I've now decided to go with a walled in city aesthetic, with a Temple to the Blood god as the central tower. Does anyone have any ideas as to what you think it should look like? I was thinking a giant red drop of blood, designed so that the base is underground and filled with magma.

[NW_Kohaku]

Hmm... obsidian, cinnibar, and bauxite should definitely be building materials.

I would think of a temple to a dwarven blood god would look like a cluster of giant obsidian spikes bursting from a central point, with the bauxite being "dried blood", and some of the spikes having cinnibar as "fresh blood" on the tips of the spikes (possibly even "dripping" by being little blood drops on the tips of some of the spikes).

They shouldn't all be straight vertical spikes, either, make them angled in either a starburst pattern, or in a chaotic tangle of spikes.

And for a temple of Armok, magma is an absolute necessity, of course.  At the very least, you need a magma moat, and to have magma running through the floor, with worshippers walking on bridges and grates over magma.  Bonus points if you have magmafalls, both inside the temple for ambiance, and coming from spikes, so that the whole temple looks like it's bleeding magma.

[gamegreen33]

I probably won't go for magma falls outside as I am not good at such things and I think it is an invitation for disaster-ordinarily, that would be fine, losing being fun and all, but I think in this case it would be an annoyance as I will probably be devoting several months of time to this project. I was thinking the main structure would be made of bauxite, while the entrance to the temple will be encased in obsidian.

[Chicken Launcher]

Several months? The new (save breaking) version is expected to come in a few weeks, so you might want to consider waiting for it before beginning.

[gamegreen33]

Several months? The new (save breaking) version is expected to come in a few weeks, so you might want to consider waiting for it before beginning.

That was the plan-if I start now, I doubt I could finish it, I would be too busy playing the new version.

[NW_Kohaku]

Several months? The new (save breaking) version is expected to come in a few weeks, so you might want to consider waiting for it before beginning.

... why?

This is a project that can be done now, with this version.  The future version, Toady himself says will probably be fairly buggy, and he expects to have to patch up in the following months.  Plus we don't even know when this new version is going to come out - it's roughly whenever Toady feels the most egregious crashes to desktops have been quashed.  And that could be a month or two in the future.

Inspiration doesn't linger forever.  Strike while the iron's hot.

I probably won't go for magma falls outside as I am not good at such things and I think it is an invitation for disaster-ordinarily, that would be fine, losing being fun and all, but I think in this case it would be an annoyance as I will probably be devoting several months of time to this project. I was thinking the main structure would be made of bauxite, while the entrance to the temple will be encased in obsidian.

Well, if you're too nervous, do it in limited amounts, and make it a learning project.  Keep seasonal backup saves, just in case you need a rollback.

Still, it shouldn't be TOO hard, so long as you keep a nice resevoir.  Magma isn't pressurized, and if the resevoir you pump from has no extra magma feeding it, and you don't put any floors near the waterfall, there is little direct danger.  You basically just need a basic pump stack (see diagram here), which then pours magma out a chute out the side of the spike/spire.

Also, to make the spikes appear "angled", make "circles" of stone, which will get narrower every 3 to 7 floors, depending on how fat or thin you want the spike, but make the center of the spike shift in a given direction every handful of floors up, as well.  Put ramps on everything you can, so that it looks cool in Visual Fortress. 

If you make a spike angled at a convenient angle, you can make that magma pump stack take place inside a spike that is actually vertical along one side.

[gamegreen33]

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Kohaku, I will look into it.

So I guess I need some consensus on whether I should start now or when the new version comes out.

EDIT: I meant to add a poll. What do you guys think?

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, magma will evaporate as it falls, so what you might want to do is pump from the second-to-top floor of the magma resevoir, and have a broader upper floor of the magma resevoir, with a bauxite pressure plate that will open a floodgate to refill the magma resevoir at magma depths of less than 3.  (Remember, this requires "backwards" designation of your pressure plates.)

That also brings up another reason to do this in this version:

We may not be sure what other aspects of the game have been changed by Toady.  This version is fairly well documented, thanks to a couple years of experimentation, so all of this is avaiable on the wiki.

[gamegreen33]

So my newest plan is to make the fortress from a mountain range, where I either use the mountains as walls (probably not) or make my own walls made to look like a foreboding mountain range. I will probably make an entrance similar to Undergrotto. I also will probably have giant cylindrical tubes as towers. I might make a magma pit underneath the fortress to drop it into after 500 years.

[NW_Kohaku]

Do try to make some of those cylinders be "slanted", it would be so much more visually impressive... especially with magma falls.

In fact, making the enterance be carved into a giant rock bridge (not a real bridge, stone that is cut away into the shape of an arch if viewed from the side, or better yet, which appears to be just a very heavily slanted cylinder that just happens to bridge the chasm, with ramps making it passable) over a lake of magma, with magma falls on either side would basically scream, "Mordor" "Bowser's Castle" "Very Definitely Final Dungeon" "All ye who enter this gate, abandon all hope!"