HOLY CRAP 195478262101 REPLIES AT ONCE
The first priority will probably just be dealing with walled-off hallways and stuff like that though -- things that are really easy to do that kill off entire sieges. I guess it's entirely possible that they wouldn't be able to find you if you hid behind 10 meter thick walls hidden off in random places, but then it should be possible for them to live in your upper levels for years while you work away tradeless on mushrooms down below (although there are major obstacles to that that make it non-practical for the dev page). They'd probably just leave after looting all your exposed items and slaughtering anybody left outside (including any entity pop infrastructure you've got out there). Although once they can get through a single wall, they can just dig ambitious tunnels for you at random I suppose. As long as walling yourself in has reasonable results, I'll be happy with however they handle it. Right now it's too much of an exploit (of course, the whole "digging invaders" is enough of a touchy subject that it's explictly stated as optional on the dev page, and how you handle exploits is up to you at that point).
I would propose 2 systems to distinguish normal invaders from game ending HFS. It's realistic that if you hole up behind really really thick walls and never trade, then normal invaders don't have a way to realise there's dwarves hiding so they should leave you alone. At the same time, HFS shouldn't be stopped by walling it off no matter how thick the walls are.
Actually the HFS can have an alternative to digging to get around the current "wall off" exploit: what if they could pass through walls and floors? That is, they swim through rock just like they swim through magma? Then HFS would truly be the game enders and the existing infinite spawning of them would ensure forts die no matter what.
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What would prevent the clowns from coming straight from the H.F.S. Clown Car to your wagon at embark? If they really want to Entertain (i.e., bring Fun
TM to) the world's children, and they can swim through rock...
Just a thought on the auto-reloading of weapon traps: what about making it a use of power. Run a bunch of axles and gear assemblies behind or above all the weapon traps. When one needs reloading, it causes a temporary use of power. So 10 excess power in the system could power reloading everything as long as they don't all go at once. ...
I <3 this idea. It causes traps to not
magically reset themselves AND it forces
insanely complicated SUPER-DWARFY constructions in your traphalls.
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Are there plans to get constructed (wooden, Bituminous coal, Platinum) balls for rolling traps?
We didn't have specific plans, but since we have trap components, including a spiked ball, it would certainly be a reasonable and pretty easy thing to do. It would just need to know that it can roll (which is simple if it's just a tag or something). If that extended to... like rolling cylinders or something, as flavor it would be fine, but I haven't thought about how to implement a more complicated rolling profile.
This would be exceedingly awesome.
A 3-tile axle dropping from a gear assembly onto some ramps, and thundering into a squad of goblinses. OOOH Even better -
This is a Lignite rolling stone pillar. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of chalk and adorned with hanging rings of tower-cap. The object menaces with spikes of microcline and awesome. On the object is an image of a Birch axle and goblins. The axle is rolling. The goblins are running. The axle is killing the goblins.The only thing better than an automated goblin mangling trap is an automated goblin mangling trap THAT IS ON FIRE. You know, a +
!!trap!!+
blah blah shapeshifting
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The trick, of course, would be working out a set of tags that would give best behaviour under most circumstances.
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Example: Let's say we've got Fred, a shape-shifting creature of awesomesauce. He starts off with the 4-armed biped as above, and gets a massive gash on his left lower arm - "limb2l". He shifts to a human form, which doesn't have any limbs with the "limb2l" (you can confirm this yourself - do you have four arms? If so, see a doctor!), and hence has no wound. Perhaps he has phantom pain, but that's a decision for another time. Anyway, he then decides to go to an armed-winged-biped, where the wings have the "limb2l" and "limb2r" tags appropriately. To his dismay, his left wing is suddenly bleedin'.
If you shift from (a six-limbed creature with a wound to the middle left limb) to a human, I'd expect you actually shift to (a human with a significant wound on the of your lower abdomen/back). Bleeding is bleeding - you can't shift to a human and mosey off to the dang hospital.