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[Quarterblue]

In order to add more fun and more realism to the game, I suggest we add natural disasters to the game.

- Earthquakes: basically messes with the inside of your fortress. Dwarves are awoken and may sustain minor injuries as they are immobilized on the floor. Buildings such as workshops are destroyed, items are thrown randomly. Areas too large may cave in (which may solve partially the problem of one pillar holding the entire earth crust). But earthquakes can have benefits, such as opening ways to ore veins and caverns - but earthquakes may not occur in the magma sea (so no unfortunate opening to the circus) because of geological reasons.

- Hurricanes: not much to say. Just like a snow storm, but it's very violent and creatures may be thrown away and possibly killed. It also gives a new meaning for the weight of an item.

- Floods: a never ending rain that makes the water level in a river rise, until it reaches the entrance of the fortress and floods everything. The fun part is that a flood should behave just like a normal rainfall (and have the same announcement message), so you never know whether a rainfall is a flooding one, and when you find out it's too late.

- Meteor storms: okay, this one isn't quite realistic, but adds even more fun. A very huge and very hot rock falls in your fortress area, killing everything under it and digging down several z-levels. The result is a valuable ore vein, magnetite or even raw adamantine (the core of your meteorite) surrounded by melted rock, i.e. MAGMA. This partially solves the problem of magma being accessible only at absurdly low z-levels and also the new scarcity of metals.

[NW_Kohaku]

While volcanos, or rather volcanic activity, would probably be a very real concern for anyone literally digging into a magma pipe or into the magma sea to funnel off limited quantities of that magma, I don't think that things like earthquakes or especially meteor strikes are exactly common enough to really be seen by most fortresses.

Hurricanes/typhoons in regions that are near tropical oceans would make a neat trick, though.

[squeakyReaper]

Earthquakes would be incredibly irritating, and make the game rather un-enjoyable for those that go too deep.  Wind Storms and such could be cool, but I just see it being hard to predict and prepare for, and too damaging to have.  Which...  is the point of them being natural disasters, but still.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, on the subject of earthquakes, in order to have "areas that are too large without support" fall over, then you'd need to have a mechanic for determining how little is too little support.  If you had that, then you wouldn't have the "support a mountain on a bar of soap" thing, anyway.

[Jake]

Floods are something I gave some thought to a while back. They shouldn't automatically flood the fortress, mind you, just maybe the z-level above the river, maybe ruining aboveground crops.
Earthquakes should cause every constructed wall to have a chance of collapsing based on its quality of construction, and the player should be warned before embarking in a quake-prone region.

[IT 000]

- Earthquakes: basically messes with the inside of your fortress. Dwarves are awoken and may sustain minor injuries as they are immobilized on the floor. Buildings such as workshops are destroyed, items are thrown randomly. Areas too large may cave in (which may solve partially the problem of one pillar holding the entire earth crust). But earthquakes can have benefits, such as opening ways to ore veins and caverns - but earthquakes may not occur in the magma sea (so no unfortunate opening to the circus) because of geological reasons.

Ehm... no please? I can deal with a pump stack getting tipped by a troll. Or a goblin siege somehow making it through my grinder and into my dining room. But a random damaging and throwing things around would get old very fast, especially if it's a yearly/every other year thing, I barely have time to clean up the outside after an ambush before the next one shows up. How am I supposed to clean up my entire fortress in a reasonable amount of time?

- Hurricanes: not much to say. Just like a snow storm, but it's very violent and creatures may be thrown away and possibly killed. It also gives a new meaning for the weight of an item.

I have given some though to tornadoes/hurricanes. Ultimately I support the idea, you should be warned if your going into a hurricane or tornado prone area. And before a tornado arrives you should get an early warning which pauses the game and states "The weathers getting bad" or something like that. And then after a while (Short enough to be fun, long enough to give you time) a mobile cloud of Deadly Dust type cloud, possibly with a random name, comes out of the edge of the map and moves in a predictable direction, if it's moving towards your base it isn't going to suddenly go 180 and back to the ocean, but it might keep going 20 degrees and miss your fortress. Might make it to your fort, might miss it by a long shot. You never know until it arrives.

 

- Floods: a never ending rain that makes the water level in a river rise, until it reaches the entrance of the fortress and floods everything. The fun part is that a flood should behave just like a normal rainfall (and have the same announcement message), so you never know whether a rainfall is a flooding one, and when you find out it's too late.

I do support cave river type flooding like back in 40d. However once again, you should get a warning if you are embarking on a flood plain. Plus I would suggest that all rivers should have river banks. But that's just me...

- Meteor storms: okay, this one isn't quite realistic, but adds even more fun. A very huge and very hot rock falls in your fortress area, killing everything under it and digging down several z-levels. The result is a valuable ore vein, magnetite or even raw adamantine (the core of your meteorite) surrounded by melted rock, i.e. MAGMA. This partially solves the problem of magma being accessible only at absurdly low z-levels and also the new scarcity of metals.

Not realistic? That's a tad of an understatement. Not only has Earth not had one in a few million years, but if we were to have one the it would be as deadly as three atomic bombs. There wouldn't be anyone to gather whatever metal would be inside.

[Quarterblue]

Not realistic? That's a tad of an understatement. Not only has Earth not had one in a few million years

I beg to differ, kind sir.

but if we were to have one the it would be as deadly as three atomic bombs. There wouldn't be anyone to gather whatever metal would be inside.

The point is to make each disaster rare enough so that players won't count on it (and won't see it coming), but it should definitely add fun to the game.

[Ahra]

hurricanes and floods would be fun but the meteors...it would instakill anything above 20z levels below the earth

[Korgus]

I think we should have tectonic plates, and have earthquakes and volcanoes linked to them.

[NW_Kohaku]

You know, Earth is hit with meteors fairly frequently.  Thing is, they burn up in the atmosphere, and most are smaller than a walnut by the time they hit the Earth, if they haven't burned up completely.  The overwhelming majority of meteors aren't a threat.

Meteors that are large enough to have metal large enough to mine out of them are rare on a scale that is positively outside anything but geologic time.  It would probably be better to just have a few meteor impact sites, and let dwarves embark upon them, and dig up some meteors.

Meteors in the ancient world were known for having meteoric iron, and weapons forged from meteoric iron were strong beyond anything else that was available at that time (that time not having any cotton candy, of course) thanks to the fact that the way meteoric iron was actually an allow of iron and nickel, giving it a hardness that regular iron or steel did not have, and generally gave early humans the only access to metal that they had at that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoric_iron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taenite

[Untelligent]

Yeah, meteors hitting your fort in-game isn't going to happen but digging up wads of ancient meteor in the ground sounds great.

[Demicus]

Yeah, meteors hitting your fort in-game isn't going to happen but digging up wads of ancient meteor in the ground sounds great.

Well although rare, I could see it happening. Would probably be like rolling a 1 on a d1,000,000 or something like that

[NW_Kohaku]

There's a probability formula in one of those links I posted...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Risk_scales

Basically, you can expect meteors the size of sand grains to hit several times a year, but the probability of strikes decreases geometrically as the size increases from there.  Plus, most meteors are stony meteors, not iron meteors, anyway, which cuts down on the number of "minable" meteors significantly on top of the simple unlikelihood of any sort of meteor of significant size hitting.

[IT 000]

Well then I guess I stand corrected on my timescale of meteors and such. I do approve of building forts inside of craters though.

[Granite26]

Someone should dig up the picture of that guy holding the meteorite that hit his house.

Could be a neat world gen thing.  On a worldwide scale major strikes aren't crazy uncommon.  (once every 1000 years something big enough to cause a crator, somewhere?)  On avg of course