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[Mantonio]

I think the may problem people have with it (now that we're all happy that trading is going to improve somewhat) is that it's, well, not dwarfy.

Dwarfiness is having entire rooms full of gems and precious metals, checkering your floor with gold and silver tiles and still having enough for each person to have their own personal money bath. Now you... can't do that.

Let me put it this way. You think Erebor got all their riches from Dale, or the Iron Hills, or Mirkwood? Hell no, they mined that stuff themselves!

I'm not sure what you mean, who/what's Erebor?

Are you really sure you know that it's going to be completely impossible to do things like that in the future, though?

For starters, keep in mind that the 31.01 absurd overabundance of metals was a very temporary fluke that existed for about 10 months until Toady was done fixing all the bugs introduced in 31.01, and could start working on the actual game functions again, and the absurd overabundance was the first thing to go.  That kind of mineral abundance was never intended for the game. 40d had much less material.  Now, that said, I still think the current method is far too barren, and hope things will move back more towards 40d's mineral concentrations, even if not all the way there, but closer to 40d than it is now. 

Undergrotto was in 40d, and managed to make a huge palace of solid precious metals like gold and platinum.  Retro did that by trading a few blocks of ore and bars of metal at a time over the course of about 10 game years.  A whole palace paved in gold.  Trading.  Back when you aren't even supposed to trade for things you need.

Maybe you could have a little more faith in Toady being willing to cater to multiple types of playstyles?

(If trading for gold is somehow not enough for you for whatever odd reason, in which case, what you seem to be demanding is that the game never change at all from what you have in 31.18, then there's still that init option Toady is going to leave behind to ensure that when you flick that switch, the game never changes at all from what it was in 31.18.  Isn't that exactly what you want?)

Erebor is the fortress set inside The Lonely Mountain, from The Hobbit.

And yes, but Undergrotto traded it all. That's my point. It wasn't about 'Look how wealthy my mountain / fort is, it's covered in gold' it was about 'Look how many useless stone crafts I pumped out, I got bought gold from everyone else to cover my fort with'. It just doesn't ring the same to me.

I wasn't saying it's going to be impossible to do it in the future, but I'm saying that it's not going to be the same. Especially (and I do hate bringing this up again and again) we're not allowed to even know what stone we're embarking on for some utterly arbitrary reason.

While  I do have faith that Toady will cater to different playstyles, I just don't think we should pursue realism so much in regards to geology. Because there's a reason you don't get solid gold fortresses encrusted with diamonds in real life.

[NW_Kohaku]

Erebor is the fortress set inside The Lonely Mountain, from The Hobbit.

And yes, but Undergrotto traded it all. That's my point. It wasn't about 'Look how wealthy my mountain / fort is, it's covered in gold' it was about 'Look how many useless stone crafts I pumped out, I got bought gold from everyone else to cover my fort with'. It just doesn't ring the same to me.

I wasn't saying it's going to be impossible to do it in the future, but I'm saying that it's not going to be the same. Especially (and I do hate bringing this up again and again) we're not allowed to even know what stone we're embarking on for some utterly arbitrary reason.

While  I do have faith that Toady will cater to different playstyles, I just don't think we should pursue realism so much in regards to geology. Because there's a reason you don't get solid gold fortresses encrusted with diamonds in real life.

Ah, I only read the Hobbit once, back when I was 8, so my memory of it is fairly hazy.

Thing is, I have trouble seeing how trading for half a continent's worth of gold just so you can pave your streets with the stuff is an indicators that you aren't rediculously wealthy, especially if the price of it keeps going up the greater the monopoly you have on the world's supply.  Generally speaking, being able to make a diamond-encrusted pyramid out of the entire world's gold supply by completely cornering the market would be seen as a tremendously decadant show of wealth and power.

But it's only even remotely meaningful to make it out of gold if gold is rare.  If gold is as common as granite, then gold has no real relative value, so you might as well be making it out of granite.  As Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation put it, you have to work for your 60-foot golden statue of a cock and balls to really appreciate the value of it.

While Toady is going for realism in geology (and really threw a wild pitch in this release), the point is also to set up a real reason that your fortress shouldn't be a completely air-tight self-contained world unto itself, so as to set up the future expansions to the game involving the army and caravan arcs where you interact with the rest of the world more.  These are things a lot of people have been looking forward to with baited breath for a very long time.

... Of course, I still think the best way to ensure the fortress isn't sealed off completely air-tight is to include some air quality mechanics. 

[agatharchides]

If you want to trade Tolkien quotes 'The wealth of Moria was not in gold and jewels, the toys of the dwarves, nor in iron, their servant. Such things they found here it is true, especially iron. But all things they desired they could obtain by traffic. For here alone in the world was found Moria-silver or True Silver, as some have named it. Mithril is the elvish name.'


 But this isn't the LOTR and it doesn't really matter. But really, it isn't that hard to find a place where you can mine gold and make wherever you want with it, you'll just have to make that your mining industry and not be producing steel, copper, zinc, silver and plantinum at the same time. 

[Maklak]

Between microsoft commercials (I actually kinda liked the first minute or so of songsmith), and discussions of drowning goblins in sewers, this thread is so much win!

As for stuff, I dont want:

Lightning bolt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGoj8yhkc5M

Randomized minerals - I'd rather have DF minerals closely mimicking Earh minerals (with two obvious exceptions, slade and funobtanium). As for minerals, we currently have, some colours and properties are rumored to be off, there are no multilevel veins, etc. Also, materials should have more properties, like (Mohs scale) hardness. Even tough it is ?fun? furniture made of talc (or harder, but brittle material), and magma-safe walls made of wood and ice should not be possible.

[RenoFox]

"Urist McDwarf has been miserable lately. He saw a random nightmare recently."

I dislike magic too, yet some kind of nature skills are really needed for the elves. Nothing obvious, but extracting a breastplate from a living tree must need some kind of process the other species have not mastered. Treating individual trees like very slow workshops needing to be tended once in a while is as mythical as I'd be willing to go, as well as penning and caging animals without needing a worker for the task.

What I'd imagine elven crafts to be like: http://pooktre.com/

As for gunpowder, it would be fitting for the humans as a more book-wise species, but I respect Toady's decision to keep it medieval. Some kind of less dwarven, less hands-on technology would be fitting for them though.

[Jake]

Actually, a 'wizard' noble who turns up if you meet certain conditions, and can perform certain useful services in return for a small chance of completely random side-effects like reanimating all the dead in the graveyard or turning all the booze into GCS venom or just setting himself on fire could be an interesting late-game challenge.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, a 'wizard' noble who turns up if you meet certain conditions, and can perform certain useful services in return for a small chance of completely random side-effects like reanimating all the dead in the graveyard or turning all the booze into GCS venom or just setting himself on fire could be an interesting late-game challenge.

This is exactly sort of magic is the sort I don't want.  A wizard noble who sets things on fire randomly is getting an unfortunate accident.  I don't care what sorts of supposedly useful things he can do, he's getting an unfortunate accident. 

DF is about mitigating your risks and planning ahead for all possible disasters, and a wizard that does things like that is a walking disaster factory.  There's just about nothing I need to do that I can't do with mundane means, so why invite disaster for no reason?

If there isn't some way I can control the risks, it's not welcome.  If I get a magic artifact, and I can't tell what it does or find some way to test out exactly what it does without risking my whole fort, it's getting atom smashed.  To do anything else is idiocy tarted up as fun.

It's not "Losing is Fun", it's "Learning is Fun".  If you mess with water, and find out something you didn't know before about water pressure, then you have a surprise you didn't expect, but can learn from that, and enjoy the game because of it.  If your fortress crumbles because your military can't be bothered to learn how to use their stupid crossbows, and there's nothing you can do but wait for Toady to fix the bug, it's just frustrating.  Losing because of something you screwed up on and learning how not to repeat that mistake again is fun.  Repeatedly losing because the game just rolls a critfail for you, with there being nothing you can do about it, is a reason to find a new game to play.

When I started up the xenosynthesis thread, I was trying to strike a balance on this sort of issue.  Sure, disasterous things can happen, but if you pay attention, it's something you can see coming, and take steps to mitigate.  Much like with the bluemetal, there might be benefits for letting your environment get more magical, like having more magical creatures you can strip apart for resources, but if it gets too magical, the whole system starts to potentially collapse on you for getting too greedy.

It's also something that lets different players choose how much risk they want to expose themselves to.  It doesn't force one player to have to put up with the randomness that a different player would want.  You want the rewards, you have to take the risks with it.  You don't want the risks, that's fine, but you don't get the rewards.

Plus it means the dwarves themselves aren't magic, they just try to play with things that are magical even if they can only vaguely understand how they work.

[GlyphGryph]

I'm not against magic at all. We already have a good deal of magic in the game, and I'd be perfectly fine with more of it.

What I really don't want is spells.

[varnish]

Having read through that thread, NW_Kohaku, (well, some of it. It's long and I'm exhausted), I think it sounds reasonable. It seems it's less about dwarves being magical and more about dwarves manipulating and being influenced by various types of magical enviroments? There's a good deal more to your idea than that, but that's what I'm understanding right now, I think.

If I can take a moment to mention something that I would actually like to see, and it's a very small thing; different colors of sandstone. Sandstone in the game is a rather dull brown. Sandstone in real life comes in a wide range of colors, some of them very striking, visually. And hell, we've already got the different shades of sand itself. Might make for a more visually interesting map.

[Assassinfox]

I don't want realistic cave-in mechanics.

Or rock bursts.

[NobodyPro]

But that would be FUN

[Assassinfox]

In Dwarf Fortress, we don't need the laws of physics to punish us for digging too deep. 

[Max White]

I don't want realistic cave-in mechanics.

Or rock bursts.

But both of those things sound dead sexy! I mean I'm the kind of guy who not only installed the dangerouse mining mod, leading to the death of any dwarf who dares dig through coal, but I also made similar effects for any aspestose based rock, and topped it off with poisen herbs. So one could say I like a hard game...

[Kuppo]

To everyone saying they don't want sewers:

SEWER BREW.

So it's settled, we already have sewers.  They must have snuck in when you weren't looking.

[Assassinfox]

I don't want realistic cave-in mechanics.

Or rock bursts.

But both of those things sound dead sexy! I mean I'm the kind of guy who not only installed the dangerouse mining mod, leading to the death of any dwarf who dares dig through coal, but I also made similar effects for any aspestose based rock, and topped it off with poisen herbs. So one could say I like a hard game...

Well, I am soundly in NW_Kohaku's camp of "Random uncontrollable critical failure is stupid."