You voice some valid concerns. Yes, narhiril, what with all the wonders of current ritual, how can the mechanical tech tree ever compete?
Ritual units are rather difficult to amass with the no-guarantees reactions. Right now, we're only dealing with "lesser" ritual units.... a few abilities here and there and that's that. Yes, they're powerful, and they add a versatility to a dwarven force not previously seen, but they're also very unreliable in practice, taking a massive amount of resources for what they give. If need arises, I can tweak this cost as I see fit, but I haven't yet seen sufficient evidence to believe that the current ritual units are anything but fair. If I had to tweak anything, I might move the "prayer for ritual materials" to the temple of origin when it's finished.
Future, more powerful ritual units will carry other risks associated with them. You might get the powerful juggernaut to crown as your champion that you desire, but you might get something else - maybe turning into a chicken or spreading a plague or accidentally summoning a greater demon. Those things tend to screw up fortresses in a hurry. The ritual tree, particularly the higher end of it, is high risk, high reward.
In contrast, the risks of the tech tree are considerably lower. While some reactions may pose risk to individual dwarves or nearby flammable materials, decent stockpile management and workshop placement makes this relatively safe. The rewards from the tech tree are not always as grand in scale as the ritual units, but are every bit as powerful in practice. It takes a lot of time, patience, investment, trial, error, trial, error, and more trial to finally get something like a hadrine or dart launcher production line going, but once established, production is limited only by your resources. Given a choice between a squad of wavebreakers (which takes a LONG time and a LOT of cobalt and silver to build up) and a squad of normal dwarves with hadrine helms with advanced bayonet dart launchers, I'd probably pick the marksdwarves - simply because when a ritual unit (not counting the currently unfinished paragon) dies, the investment is lost with it. When a marskdwarf dies, someone else can grab his stuff and take over. The system is also set up to encourage player choices... You can pour your resources into one tree or the other to advance faster, or you can build them both up (at considerably greater cost) to get a squad of zephyrs with spring-loaded bayonet crossbows - which, might I add, kick a disproportionate amount of ass.
Admittedly, at the moment, the ritual tree is a lot flashier than the tech tree, but here's a glimpse of what's planned for the next tier or two...
-Mechanical constructs - creating special, friendly creatures from reactions. Yes,
this works. The first of these will be the Elder Scrolls style "dwarven spider prototype" seen in the screenshot a few posts back, but these will build up to more advanced systems. Some of these constructs can be repaired if destroyed (don't ask, I haven't written this massive block of interaction code yet).
-Armor upgrades - pieces of armor to be worn on top of regular armor for added protection. If you want to test one of these out, open up arena and equip someone with a "steel strength field barrier pack." in addition to regular armor and watch.
-Vaccines - abilities granted via syndrome to combat the plagues from the future ritual tree advances.
-Elixirs - alcohol that grants special bonuses (speed boost, etc).
-Silk farms.
once again i dont know if this is possible, but i thought of somthing cool for the void walkers.
a (some what) Necromancer that resurrects nearby voidwalkers ONLY, that could make them even more challenging to fight, also possibly reactive armor???
Voidwalkers don't leave corpses, so this is problematic. I am considering this ability for the shedim, however. I have more sinister plans for the voidwalkers once the dwarves get powerful enough to warrant them.
I cant use therapist with current version of LFR this is what i get
Im sorry but I dont know how to talk to this version of dwarf fortress (checksum:0x4f7592fe)
I haven't touched the executable, so this is probably a DT issue. Try downloading the latest release over on that thread.
I should also note that the unofficial "caste patch" version of DT doesn't quite work right with LFR - it runs, but it gets the castes wrong. Not really sure why, but it's not my project.
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Topic: *=*=* Legends of Forlorn Realms (LFR 2012) v0.21a *=*=* [DF 0.34.11] (Read 403800 times)