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[Barakahzai]

Actually I think an interesting balance to change the magma forges and such would be to institute period lava surges, which would cause the magma forge to explode, killing any dwarf inside it and killing/injuring more within a certain radius.

[Sutremaine]

You think it would be interesting for a fort's only skilled smiths to exist for an indeterminate amount of time after a mood?

[NecroRebel]

Yeah, magma surges also wouldn't make much sense for pumped magma, either. I mean, how would the magma "surge" 100 z-levels up from the magma sea, in a clearly-limited pool, especially if the pumps were off? It might make sense to have the magma flow tiles produce periodic magma surges or at in volcanoes, and if you allowed magma pressure that might even make it dangerous to have magma tunnels at the magma sea levels, but having magma workshops randomly explode? That's just dumb.

Magma would probably be more balanced if it would slowly cool when away from its source (or just in general) so you would have to have your magma works be an open system that has magma actually flowing through it instead of just sitting stagnant within, especially if you would occasionally have to remove cooled-magma plugs from the piping, but that would A) require more temperature recalculations and thus would lower FPS and B) would require a complete reworking of how magma actually functions.

[Skelodwarf]

Embark Points: Totally OP, they let you get almost anything.

[jimi12]

I only would call something overpowered when it feels more like a cheat than logical gameplay. For example:

Cage Traps - Pine cage trap can capture both a bonobo and a hydra.
Infinite Sand - Magic sand tile never runs out = infinite glass w/ magma
Quantum Stockpiling - You should not be able to put 1000's of items in the space a cat occupies.
Walls - A wooden wall that is titan-proof and even magma-proof?? Doesn't make sense.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Quantum Stockpiling - You should not be able to put 1000's of items in the space a cat occupies.

To be fair, a thousand dragons can also fit in the same space, so long as 999 of them are lying down.

[Brian]

I never thought about how overpowered basic walls are.
For what you're doing, they sure do construct quickly
For how quickly they are made, they sure do last.

I'd be cool if Toady could give them a path finding value of 20 or something for enemy civs of the civ that created the wall, which then provoked them to attack the wall if they wanted to enter that square. I don't think buildings have hit points and constructions don't have civs at the moment, however.

Then we could start getting into materials' strengths as building materials, rock walls vs block walls vs wooden walls, etc.

I would be stoked if this kind of thing was implemented.

[Mickey Blue]

Yea, I think people are misunderstanding the concept of overpowered (either that or my sarcasm meter is off, which certainly could be).  It refers to things that are basically game breaking, things that allow you to simply dominate with little or no effort on your part.  Walls/draw bridges, cage traps, danger rooms and arguably magma certainly fit, other things could use balancing out a bit but are hardly overpowered or they are overpowered but too easily obtained due to other overpowered things (such as steel armor, if you didn't have magma as free unlimited easy to find and harness fuel then it wouldn't be so rapid to produce and thus less of an issue).  I don't have as big an issue with wooden axes because even though its absurd to have a wooden axe we don't have stone axes which clearly exist and were used to chop down trees, that said I don't use wooden axes as a personal limitation).



Some things to help fix these problems without resorting to just not using them would be if there were monsters that could break down walls (really, IMO, the strength of barriers should be door, floodgate, drawbridge, wall, and if we wanted to be even more complex and awesome there could be different strengths based on material, so a metal door/floodgate/drawbridge/wall would be stronger then a stone one which in turn would be stronger then a wooden one, and all of the above would be stronger then just natural dirt walls.  Also if cages had strength linked to the materials they were built with that determined what they could catch and what would break out (so a pine cage could hold a tiger perhaps, but not an elephant and certainly not a giant or a dragon).

That would help solve two of the biggest overpowered abilities in the game, as for magma there are a few ways to fix it in my mine aside from what has been mentioned here.  You could make it so only a higher level smith could use a magma forge (after all it would be more dangerous), or require that magma be moved from the magma sea/volcano to utilize without risking an eruption into the forge (mentioned above) and that moved magma would eventually harden up rendering it useless for a forge (I could see this as something toggleable in the init files so you can turn 'magma hardens' on or off).

Danger rooms aren't a bad idea in themselves, but to make them more 'fair' they need to reduce the experience gain and increase the risk of getting injured/killed.


Ultimately its hardly the end of the world, I have no problem providing my own limitations in the game and just not using things I find too powerful which really leaves the option for others to use them if they want to so we can all have the game we want.

-MB

[ext0l]

I find elf caravans to be overpowered.
Cost: 1 trade depot.
Reward: Near infinite cloth.
Think of all the socks you can make with those! 

[Xenos]

i dont think we should make dwarf fortress require an engineering degree to build an effective wall.  I mean I would love it (after I takes strengths of materials next semester *cough*) but its hard enough.

[RedWick]

Back in the day, before you could make use of any of the magma buildings, you had to get access to steel, as it was the only magma safe material you could build magma smelters and forges out of (and the forges themselves required steel anvils). 

[Sutremaine]

The ease of finding building materials for magma buildings is... odd. I could not figure out the 40d anvil-and-a-lump-of-copper embark at all because it never occured to me that you could build a forge out of ashes.

It would be fine to see that back. It's no worse than needing a unit of fuel to kickstart (magmaless) fuel production.

[fervor]

A lot of these problems have fairly easy fixes.  It's just a matter of Toady getting around to doing them.  I'm curious what he thinks about these issues.  Some of these overpowered 'tricks' are so obvious that I can't help think that he wants them to be in the game.

Easy fixes:

1.  Quantum dumps - Limit the number of items per square.
2.  Steel - Make steel more available to enemies.
3.  Danger room - Less experience from danger rooms and more experience from training.
4.  Atom smashing - Bridge breaks after one use and does a certain amount of damage.
5.  Cage traps - More immune mobs.  Make quality of cage matter.  Needs a % change of failure.
6.  Serrated discs - Just needs some numbers tweaked (value, etc.)
etc...etc...

Anyways, you get the general idea.

Until they get fixed (if ever), just don't use them if you don't like them.

[Owlbread]

5.  Cage traps - More immune mobs.  Make quality of cage matter.  Needs a % change of failure.

Perhaps the prisoners could break out of the cages depending on the material used, or indeed the quality. What if a goblin soldier might be able to break out of a normal-quality wooden cage, but not a masterwork one? A bronze colossus or

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

demon of some sort

might be able to break out of just about any cages besides masterwork adamantine.

[shadowform]

In order to be game breaking in the first place, you have to be able to define how the game can be broken.  This is the problem with an open-ended game like DF - with no real goal, you can't say that anything really makes it too easy to reach that goal.  There IS no goal to reach, aside from the ones you set for yourself.  If all the more you want from the game is a mostly non-violent, fantasy version of The Sims, you're going to play the game entirely different from someone who plays with Dig Deeper and refuses to use bridges, quantum stockpiles, or traps.

Give us your definition of what means something has broken the game.