Print

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

[Bronze Dog]

Well, the Wizards of the Coast are getting ready to release yet another expansion of cardboard crack (Magic: The Gathering) and a certain type of critter from the setting has caught my eye: A diverse group of mechanical beings called Myrs. Here's an article that gives a good overview, with pictures. (Some text can be moused over for more card images.)

I like the idea of being some unseen artificer commanding these beings to make megastructures in my name. A while back I contemplated the idea of having some sort of mechanical golem race, but I think Myrs would be more interesting to design, since they could be broken up into many castes, if I understand the creature tokens correctly.

Anyway, I'd like to do a bit of brainstorming and hopefully get a bit of help from some of you modders who know what you're doing.

Stuff to address:

1. Inorganic perks: It seems pretty natural that Myrs wouldn't need food, water/booze, sleep, and so on. Of course, not needing to provide any of those things would make playing them a lot easier. Too easy without some sort of balancing disadvantage, such as no natural healing. An alternative that comes to mind is making them require some exotic kind of food/fuel/mana/whatever to keep them running.

2. Making more: A while back, I posted a short lived thread about the idea of building a robot scout creature in a custom workshop. It quickly got shot down because custom workshops can't make creatures. So, how could DF Myrs make more Myrs? Simply birthing more like organic creatures (Queen Myr?) or relying on migrants is probably the easiest answer, but if you can think of other ways to increase a Myr hive's population, I'd like to know about it. (...Could caravans trade new Myrs to you?)

3. Castes: I'm not going to insist on making a caste for every Myr card (especially since it'd be impossible to translate most Magic mechanics into something for DF), though something like small workers, big soldiers, smart overseers and such would probably be the most realistic option.

4. Thick skin?: I'm not familiar with the fine details of DF combat, but being made of metal has to have some pretty good advantages... Though Myrs seem to often be made of lower quality metals given the cycle of mana producers: gold, silver, lead, iron, copper, palladium. I don't want things to be too easy, so this sort of thing might need testing and balancing in some fashion.

5. Myr culture: Since they'd technically be a civilization instead of a bunch of mindless automatons carrying out my whims, I suppose there'd be some need to define things like their ethics (or lack thereof) and what makes them happy or unhappy. For relations with other civs, Elves seem like a natural enemy since Myrs would view wood as just a convenient source of combustion for the forges.

I'll be looking over the wiki for inspiration and better ideas about what's possible.

[forsaken1111]

A while back I had considered remaking the DF world in Mirrodin's image. A vast expanse of metal with mechanical life.

It is a lot of work. I had gotten the game to generate the world with nothing but metal ores, but new version came out and I kind of scrapped it for a while.

[wierdoom]

This sounds like an awesome idea! I thought of something similar a few months back except with Clockwork Horrors rather then the Myr.

As for the construction of other Myrs, the best way to do it would probably be to use Darius's "Friendship" Enhancer, which allows you to use intelligent/tame creatures for work. You could then use an 'animal' type creature to represent a pile of raw materials, which could then work after it has been tamed.

[Funk]

if thay have metal skins then thay will be stupidy hard to kill.
try killing a iron man in the arena,no normal creatures can do it.

[Knight Otu]

There is an automaton fortress mod that could act as a basis if the author agrees.

Most myr should be fairly small, I think. That would definitely help with combat balance. The ability to bleed some sort of fluid is probably essential as well. That said, giant tigers can take down iron men (who are human-sized and hollow) in 31.12, and normal lions can wound them, so with clever tissue use, better balance should be possible.

[Impending Doom]

if thay have metal skins then thay will be stupidy hard to kill.
try killing a iron man in the arena,no normal creatures can do it.

Iron men don't just have metal skin, they're a hollow metal statue. I would assume these Myr would have a metallic skin covering a number of vital mechanical 'organs'. Sure, they'd be a bit more difficult to kill than Average McJoe dwarf, but not anywhere near as hard as the iron man.

[sjaakwortel]

You can give them organs like engine parts and make em bleed oil or something, so they have a hardent exoskeleton with a relative weak inside. In that way a lucky shot could kill em, but most thing should glance off.

[Bronze Dog]

Glad to hear some input. I'll do some thread searching this weekend for other people's mods. If you've got suggestions you'd like me to look at, please provide a link if you can. I'd really appreciate it.

"Oil for blood": Yeah, I thought one of the appropriate combat weaknesses would be to give them some kind of vital fluid and internal organs. Myrs most definitely strike me as being more like robots with interdependent moving parts than golems made of uniform materials that move by magic alone. This could also provide some basis for them needing food/drink of some exotic kind grown on an energon farm or whatever.

The Iron Man: I was reading the wiki's entry on tokens and creature designs, which mentioned the Iron Man's physiology. Apparently Iron Men aren't just hollow, but also filled with poison gas, like D&D iron golems. Those of you interested in running arena tests would probably want to control for that sort of thing.

Making Mirrodin: The same thought occurred to me, Forsaken, but I'm not quite that ambitious, yet. Especially since the setting is new to me. Let me know if/when you make it.

Darius's "Friendship" Enhancer: I'm certainly curious to know more about that. I'll probably search for it a bit later.

[sjaakwortel]

If there pure metal, you could make the metal soft and bendable, so its easy to severe it(methamorphic blobs ftw)

[forsaken1111]

If only we could output creatures from smelter reactions!

Anyway, in Mirrodin lore IIRC all life on mirrodin were mechanical imitations of real life. Myr should indeed have functional organs, still need to eat and drink, etc.

[kilakan]

Anyway, in Mirrodin lore IIRC all life on mirrodin were mechanical imitations of real life. Myr should indeed have functional organs, still need to eat and drink, etc.

Except for the giant slug, no one really knows where that came from.

[forsaken1111]

Anyway, in Mirrodin lore IIRC all life on mirrodin were mechanical imitations of real life. Myr should indeed have functional organs, still need to eat and drink, etc.

Except for the giant slug, no one really knows where that came from.

Yes, well.. true that. The slug was cool.