Toady what are views on gods and forces manifesting or rather having physical bodies whether it being their true body, Avatar, or even a avatar tied into their being? Will they ever appear? How powerful will they be?
my question which is more about how gods will manifest in full and how powerful Toady really expects them to be since they can be anywhere from Megabeast strength, which makes sense given that some megabeasts actually were birthed from gods in myth and legends, to even so beyond that to the point where Toady would either make them unstoppable or simply not capable of existing in a real form. Then there is what risks a god actually takes when fighting in their physical form, for example if a god manifests are they even harmed by being defeated?
All that sounds fine. Threetoe says "Gods will be in there and they'll be messing with your life". So, no timeline as usual, but it's the plan. The dwarf mode additions this time around has set up a bit of the framework for historical figures with unusual unit links, though we were hoping to do a bit more than we got to of course.
Do these changes in combat occur in fortress mode too? I mean, dwarves and his enemies will choose strikes based on these new rules?
Will the new combat mechanics make it into Fortress mode as well?
Yeah, everybody everywhere uses them.
In regards to the new AI targeting, will dwarves (or creatures in general) that like to take risks try the harder to hit attacks more often when the payout is good enough? And if you do miss a strike is there a chance of it hitting a nearby bodypart instead before it misses completely?
It doesn't take personality into account at this point. I think I've gotten timid with personality effect additions awaiting the big rewrite there on the dev page. Aimed attacks can miss their intended target and hit parent or nearby parts instead. This is more likely with the smaller target parts.
Well with Aimed attacks in place do you think you could go on into basic "Martial arts" next? It would be nice to do some Akido-like counter attacks or Karate-blows.
Apart from that some questions:
How do the kicker, dodger and related skills influence the fighting opportunities?
Are Kicking, punching considered as valid attacks if you have for example one hand free so you could punch the other guy to knock him out?
Do these aimed attacks work for Ranged weapons too? Will spitting cobras aim for your eyes?
Is Armor taken into account thus will the Ai attack an un-armored part of someones body if the rest is to hard to get through?
I am imagining that weapon skill increases the number and quality of good opportunities you get, while striker is what handles damage etc. and dodge helps reduce opportunities.
Possibly. I would imagine that weapon skill just makes you straight up more likely to hit, regardless of opportunities, though, since that sounds simplest to implement. Am I correct in this assumption?
I want to add the combat styles of course, but I think caravan site resource stuff needs to come in, and we're still planning on starting that later this month.
Right now, fighting opportunities depend on the melee fighter skill and relevant attack skill vs. melee fighter and dodge. That shafts parry (weapon)/block skills -- you still get your skill role bonus, but dodge is emphasized. Not sure if that'll change.
You can't currently aim ranged attacks, though it might get in before the release. In that case the skills used will have to change again, of course, though it might be that there aren't skill influences the same way there, since opportunities and changing chances are supposed to come in part from the positioning from the ongoing fight, which can't be influenced in the same way by a distant shooter.
Punching, kicking, biting and scratching are all available in addition to weapon attacks. As is typical, whether or not hands are full etc. is probably not all that respected. I didn't do anything with the broken two-handed weapons etc.
They consider armor when aiming, but they can't run all of the numbers quickly so they just wing it.
Seeing as the example screenshots showed kicking as an attack of opportunity, does this mean that you could wield multiple weapons and make occasional attacks with your off hand?
Yeah, you can use whichever weapon you like whenever you like, and opportunities come up with either one. If you just press toward the enemy, the wielded weapon will be preferred, but it'll use your offhand item if a good opportunity comes up.
Since creatures are now able to identify an opportunity to deal a decisive blow into whatever they're fighting, how will they behave when there's no special oportunities to say, hack someone's head off? Will they just fight normaly as they did, or they will try certain things, like disarming you or trying to put you off balance to achieve that opportunity for lethal damage?
Making the AI plan multi-stage maneuvers, like disarmament or putting you off balance in preparation for a strike, is probably not the kind of feature that would be implemented in a day, and it's not closely related to any of the features he did implement. He'd have mentioned it.
Yeah, there aren't any special disarm/balance manuevers.
Will aimed attacks and wrestling attacks be organized with submenus? Scrolling through 8 pages of possible wrestling moves (only 2 of which I ever use) becomes tiring.
Yeah, you go through two screens for each one to break things up.
Will all this aimed attack stuff be optional (i.e. toggled via a menu in-game)? It's great for tough battles, but when I'm fighting a horde of crundles it might be more efficient to turn off tactical combat for a few minutes.
You can still just press toward an enemy. It uses the process the enemies and your companions use in that case.
With the implementation of aimed attacks, will the previously mentioned aimed defending be far behind?
I'm not sure when the next opportunity to work on combat will be. I imagine the guard/defense stuff will be one of the next combat things, along with the combat/move split, but I dunno when it'll happen.
My assumption is that the attacks have a tendency to strike at [HEAD], [UPPERBODY] and [LOWERBODY] tagged body parts, and possibly throats as well (though this might fall under [HEAD] with the vanilla body constructs).
I presume in this case that the tendency to strike these tags will flow on into your non-aimed attacks in adventurer mode.
Since everything already has a relative size, I further assume that this also impacts the likelihood of attacks hitting.
How accurate is this?
Yeah, that's right. The head and body tags add some weight to the strike, which is balanced with the chance to strike, the chance to strike squarely and armor.
I'll also ask, are you planning to use creature variations to help with the stock night creature type creatures?
To clarify, let me give an example - the werewolf.
Werewolves may possess a syndrome that allows them to infect on a bite.
This syndrome would trigger a creature variation (possibly even delayed by time), which would add, remove or change tags on the base creature.
This would of course cause them to gain the syndrome causing bite as well.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to use something as broad as a creature variation, at least for things beyond the body. The ability to have a custom body has been partially supported and unused for a long time, but allowing any tag to be replaced is difficult without creating a new creature definition.
Is the difficulty of hitting the head hardcoded, defined in the raws, or the result of something else entirely?
What it does now is to take head and body parts and making them hard to hit but it doesn't alter the squareness of the strike. For other parts, it doesn't alter the hit chance but it makes them harder to hit squarely. Then it is all jiggled for each attack.
Now that there is a rudimentary AI for aimed attacking: Will it be long before we can order dwarves to capture enemies rather than kill them? i.e have dwarves attempt blunt strikes to the head and then cart off the unconcious foe to an empty cage?
I have no idea on the timetable. There are several angles on this, between dwarf mode, adv mode justice and adv mode villain interrogations, but I'll probably be doing more simple things first.
If I'm understanding correctly, it seems like unless you specifically choose an aimed shot against an unconscious opponent, it will take just as long to kill them as before. It would be a useful option to let us use the same automatic target selection for vulnerable opponents that the AI does; if I want to do the same headshot every time, why should I have to go digging through menus to do it
You always use the AI selection whenever you attack the enemy without aiming, so vulnerable opponents are generally dispatched quickly. If for whatever reason you find it making a poor decision or it's just taking a long time with a fully armored opponent, you can use grappling tricks to remove their armor.
One of my big issues with caravans is that there really isn't a lot that a caravan can bring that you can't produce yourself, and better.
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Item values are also pretty crazy; are you planning on rebalancing any of this?
The forts are set up to be pretty self-sufficient now. I think they sometimes bring more impressive food and diverse animals, but I think as the trade stuff takes off starting this month, the situation might change a bit. I'm not sure how it'll play out though.
Fixed item values will probably disappear entirely this month or soon after.
How have fistfights been affected by this change, now that we can box people in the head?
It's a bit more violent and quick, I think. They need to be tweaked a bit, but I doubt I'll get to it.
Now that we have true type support, is there any chance we could get the default tileset swapped out for a square one?
The true type support isn't complete, so it's not the default setting at this point. You can always use whatever set you want.
Do the minotaurs ever come out and kill the helpless peasants? Will there ever be civ relationships between them and neighboring villages (ie, offer up a child every year or something to stop the minotaur from rampaging though town.) Etc.
Just during world gen. No armies move around yet. We want to do weird megabeast relationships with communities, but I'm not sure when it'll come up.
at what point is the trader arc planned to come in? As in something non-violent to do for the town -- buying low and selling high on site resources, leading a trader caravan, etc
I don't have a timeline for anything other than what has been announced. We're doing the backing for the trading arc this month, so we're starting that stuff, but I'm not sure how much impact it'll have on your adventurer. Certainly the trading values will change based on what's around and what's desired, but you wouldn't likely be doing anything on behalf of anybody.
Are dwarf civ fortresses going to connect up to both underground roads and overground roads? Will they access the cave systems, maybe with guards posted, or even farm in them?
I'm hoping I can handle that when it comes up, yeah. There used to be crappy tunnel connections and there are still crappy roads, and those will be revisited at some point.
Will there be a raw tag to make a civ able to be wandering raiders, as the goblins are now?
Do bands of bandits and patrols actualy travel the world map, are they like the encounters in the current version, o do they settle in certain places? Since site leaders are sending you after some, I would assume the first or the latter.
Does every civilisation get them? Is it possible to encounter one that is not hostile?
With the new travel map, how long until we should expect migrating goblin bandits and such, not just direct ambushers but potentially people just passing through like the residual HFS?
Yeah, you have a raw tag to say how many people proportionally get dumped out into bandit groups, and you have a tag to say if local sites will have bandit style patrols. When we have site resources it might end up a little more based on the situation, but we don't have that information yet. There are no armies traveling the map yet (except for your abandoned fortress people and a few other weird cases). These will start with the merchants traveling around this month hopefully, and then continue into December with more army stuff. The attacks during travel all come from proximity to sites -- it'll pull out some of the regular populations and historical figures (in the case of bandit leaders or night creatures), and then they magically get put back in their sites if they survive.
After reading that story, I'm really curious what elements were "problems" that deserved being "fixed". It wasn't Skinnyrends the Alligator of Ambition was it?
There's the being able to use the great axe with one hand (not fixed), a problem with the display of the labyrinth symbol (fixed), the alligator thinking that it should start in the keep because it was a site resident (not fixed)... probably something with the wounds healing that weren't fixed, like my hips, which were really really messed up. Taking away the guy's knife was clunky, since you still have to grab it and then step away instead of getting an explicit option to fight over it, and that hasn't changed. I think I fixed a few other minor text things.
It's probably been asked a million times before: Now that individual groups can give up their entity associations, and elven prisoners can hang around castles, it sounds like those connections are a lot more malleable. How close does that bring the program to multi-species player forts?
Yeah, it's more an interface and random issues thing. I remember with that elven dwarf queen, it was something like they were treated like a pet part of the time and several other problems. There are portions of the code that look for speaking people, places that look for learning people, places that look for learning and speaking people, which are all probably sort of reasonable, but then there are the parts that look for your site civ's race, which are where we get into trouble.
Will there ever be a time when world gen NPC's and/or adventurers start naming their weapons?
It'll probably start in world gen with the treasure hunter section, though there really isn't a reason why you shouldn't be able to name any of your items at any time.
Regarding the quests - does the quest giver only take into account if the target is a (semi)megabeast to determine if you're ready to face it, or also, say, the difficulty tag?
The mega/titan/semi/night creature tags are used for those creatures to sort them into tiers, but it also uses the difficulty tags. A difficulty greater than 10 means it won't be used for quests, 10 is the top tier, then there is the 5-9 semi megabeast tier, the 2-4 tier for your first castle quest, and the lowest for peasants. Mega/semi beasts in the raws always go into their proper tier, but it respects the >10 part. These come up for wilderness predators and underground predators, which come up for burrow quests currently (the burrow thing can be improved later). The difficulty is also used to determine the hero reputation increase for all creatures. The mega/semi tags should probably be split into a bunch of things, but I'm not sure when I'll get a good chance.
Toady while Adamantine originally started with some sort of purpose and reason for existance, it has more and more become a generic "really amazing material". Is there any plan to rectify this?
If you are referring to the demon prison, it kind of falls into the mythology/creation story generator we talked about before, or the magic arc, so that you can actually have a meaningful amazing material.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1607660 times)