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More tech tree!

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Total Members Voted: 137

[ArchAIngel]

Just got a lizardmen siege, what do lizardman mystics do? They all died to my 3 marksdwarfs before they did anything.

[narhiril]

Just got a lizardmen siege, what do lizardman mystics do? They all died to my 3 marksdwarfs before they did anything.

All they do at the moment is protect themselves from ritual unit hexes.

Even with optimized FPS settings, DF inevitably slows down over a period of 12 years, and depending on the size and scope of your fortress, it might simply be too long to wait for reinforcements.  Thoughts?

Regretfully, this might be a useful change for my forts.  I say regretful because dwarves are so long lived; it galls to think that they might have so short a childhood.

It might make dwarven societies more robust in world gen too, as they would start breeding more dwarves sooner, and thus have larger populations by the time trouble finds them?

I'm not sure what effects i will have in worldgen, though I imagine it won't be terribly profound due to site population caps.  Conceptually, I like the twelve year childhood a lot more, but the game just isn't optimized to the point where fortresses can legitimately survive long enough to see more than a few generations.  It's always been a dream of mine to see a fortress last for generations, setting up a royal lineage and megaproject after megaproject without succumbing to the currently inevitable slow and painful FPS death.

[ArchAIngel]

Just got a lizardmen siege, what do lizardman mystics do? They all died to my 3 marksdwarfs before they did anything.

All they do at the moment is protect themselves from ritual unit hexes.

Thanks! Also, when paragons come out, my commander is SO getting made one. He has killed both of the amaroks that attacked, and got the title "the holy larks-counselors of healing." Although, are amaroks supposed to be this common? They appear to be the only megabeasts that I have ever seen.

[narhiril]

Just got a lizardmen siege, what do lizardman mystics do? They all died to my 3 marksdwarfs before they did anything.

All they do at the moment is protect themselves from ritual unit hexes.

Thanks! Also, when paragons come out, my commander is SO getting made one. He has killed both of the amaroks that attacked, and got the title "the holy larks-counselors of healing." Although, are amaroks supposed to be this common? They appear to be the only megabeasts that I have ever seen.

They're semi-megabeasts that reproduce, so they're not terribly uncommon, but it's unusual to see more than one of them in a short span.  Just random, I guess.

[SanDiego]

Another random, possibly noob question - are Lizardmen supposed to be strong, or is it the whips that are hilariously overpowered? My mostly iron/steel armored militia equipped with mostly damascene steel greataxes (also some mithril greataxes, tungsten hammers and random weapons I just made), which already annihilated three voidwalker thieves and several bog troll ones got absolutely massacred by Lizardmen siege that consisted only of copper/bronze equipped lashers and one mystic.

[ArchAIngel]

Another random, possibly noob question - are Lizardmen supposed to be strong, or is it the whips that are hilariously overpowered? My mostly iron/steel armored militia equipped with mostly damascene steel greataxes (also some mithril greataxes, tungsten hammers and random weapons I just made), which already annihilated three voidwalker thieves and several bog troll ones got absolutely massacred by Lizardmen siege that consisted only of copper/bronze equipped lashers and one mystic.

Whips are like lightsabers in DF, very damn dangerous.

[Pan]

Whips are overpowered even in vanilla DF, sorry to say.

[Putnam]

Whips are overpowered even in vanilla DF, sorry to say.

Doesn't mean they can't be fixed or removed entirely, of course.

[ArchAIngel]

What skill does a khopesh use? Just got a artifact one of candy called goremortals.

[narhiril]

What skill does a khopesh use? Just got a artifact one of candy called goremortals.

Swordsmanship.

[ArchAIngel]

Thanks.

[narhiril]

Whips are overpowered even in vanilla DF, sorry to say.

Doesn't mean they can't be fixed or removed entirely, of course.

I had changed these from blunt to edged attacks, but it seems that they suffer from the same issue as bolts and arrows - namely, that a tiny contact area seems to completely ignore armor more often than not.  I'll probably return them to blunt and instead raise the contact area for the next release and see if that helps.

[Pan]

So, what's up now, Narhiril?

[narhiril]

So, what's up now, Narhiril?

A lot of tweaking percentages for the new ritual unit reactions.  I want to strike some sort of balance between success and failure that keeps people from trying to convert everyone to paragons, while at the same time not making them nigh impossible to get.  It's been difficult to balance, as paragons are functionally immortal, so I can't have a lot of determined people with full squads of them running around like you can do with the earlier ritual units. 

One solution was to give them a "per-reaction" cost, but due to the way inhaled syndromes work somewhat unreliably, I disliked the idea of asking players to throw their resources into another sink that may or may not pay off - similar to how constructs work - because I know that can be frustrating to some and I want to give several different options to players when they reach the higher levels of the tech trees on how to spend their time and efforts.  Ideally, a flat cost seems to be the most balanced approach, but it remains tantalizingly out of reach without a way for me to place a syndrome on a dwarf from a reaction at a 100% success rate.

What I've come up with instead, at least until the more idealistic options become possible, is a system somewhat like this.  You create an "idol of Visthel" out of a variety of materials at the temple component foundry, which serves as the unlock trigger for the reaction, and can be re-used as many times as you like.  A dwarf then takes the idol to the temple and attempts to channel the ritual energies to become a paragon.  This reaction should be set on repeat (it doesn't use a skill, so it takes place almost instantly) until something happens to the dwarf, at which point you'll have one of a few possible outcomes...

1) The dwarf will be temporarily incapacitated.  This varies from a temporary debilitating syndrome effect to a benign transformation that lasts for a month of in-game time.
2) The dwarf will become a paragon.
3) The dwarf will become a temporary danger to nearby dwarves, attacking them at random for a short duration until slain, exorcised (by a radiant priest), or the duration expires.
4) The dwarf will be consumed by the ritual, allowing a malicious creature to take over their body until slain.  Dwarves in this state cannot be recovered.
5) The dwarf will contract a plague, which can be passed on to any nearby dwarves that have not been immunized.  As I haven't had time to thoroughly test and balance this effect, it probably won't make it into the first iteration of this reaction.

The threat of unleashing horrors on your fortress from a ritual gone wrong needs to be the discouraging factor.  I just need to get the relative percentages of these outcomes into place so that players will still be tempted to try the ritual to get a paragon every now and then, but such that it is impractical and unrealistic to attempt to assemble a large number of them.  What this means is a lot of trial and error on my part.  If the reaction is too generous, the substantial power of paragons will unbalance the game.  If it's too dangerous, no one will bother trying.  This development will set the precedent for the next series of ritual units, so once I get something I'm happy with, it won't take very long to copy the parameters while making lacerators, eyes of Pel, etc.


In the meantime, happy holidays to everyone.  I want to take this opportunity, in the season of giving, to give thanks for all of your continued support of LFR.  I know that the DF community is not very large, and the modding community is even smaller, but it's you guys and girls that I keep this project going for.  From the fine lines of balancing to the harsh realities of technical limitations, from my first forays into writing lore and pixel art to the universe that LFR has become, this project has been and continues to be a learning experience far beyond the scope of my original vision for it, and I look forward to continuing to grow with it in the coming year.

[Imp]

is it possible and/or reasonable for the reaction to check how many paragons there currently (or possibly ever, if they're not -that- immortal) are in the fortress, and shift the probability of the various outcomes based on that number?

So a fortress that's never-ever had a paragon is greatly safer trying to do this ritual than one which somehow has three?  And at some point the odds of a successful transformation becomes 'effectively impossible' at some point, whatever you consider is the limit of reasonable?

Of course, if this works and you use it, a player possibly could create and abandon many fortresses, creating a few paragons in each, then in future fortresses just wait and hope that these previous paragons eventually emmigrate.