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More tech tree!

36 (26.1%)

More ritual tree!

8 (5.8%)

More lore!

12 (8.7%)

More mythical weapons/armor!

22 (15.9%)

Plagues!

28 (20.3%)

More secrets!

21 (15.2%)

More mechanical constructs!

11 (8%)

Total Members Voted: 137

[Pan]

Did you get positive feedback from your tests with mischivious ?

This is what I'd like to know, too.

[narhiril]

Did you get positive feedback from your tests with mischivious ?

This is what I'd like to know, too.

Still in progress, but no dice so far.  I might have to scrap the idea of lever pulling (which is unfortunate).  The spies will still be pretty dangerous since they'll go around poisoning your citizens with all sorts of nasty stuff until they get caught, but the mischievous token might only serve as a flag for watchers to expose them and a solemn reminder of what (almost) could have been.

[Imp]

Did you get positive feedback from your tests with mischivious ?

This is what I'd like to know, too.

Still in progress, but no dice so far.  I might have to scrap the idea of lever pulling (which is unfortunate).  The spies will still be pretty dangerous since they'll go around poisoning your citizens with all sorts of nasty stuff until they get caught, but the mischievous token might only serve as a flag for watchers to expose them and a solemn reminder of what (almost) could have been.

Narhiril.... could these spies, um.... let the cat out of the bag, so to speak?

That is... could they have a reaction they can do autonomously, irregularly, and infrequently, that spawns a gremlin or other more-appropriate creature with similar abilities?  Maybe they summon it, maybe they 'sneak it in', maybe they brought a few 'fertile and periodically hatching eggs' of this creature with them hidden in their clothing, or maybe invoke a blessing from their malevolent god to open a gate for it (them!  The horror of a horde sometimes, perhaps!)

And maybe these 'things' would sometimes be spawned inside the fortress right where they need to be to do considerable mischief on their own? (I say sometimes, because if it's happening randomly, it could also happen out in the willywags when you send Alfric Mclizardspy out to do herbalism or something - but sometimes it's going to be in the worst places possible and at the worst time.  Murphy's law and all)

[Vanaheimer]

Reading over the first post, this looks like great fun (of both sorts).

I figure I'll be butchered in about twenty minutes.

[Cyco_Chicken]

I don't know how to make a slab of of accreditation and it's driving me crazy! But other than that great mod

[Imp]

I don't know how to make a slab of of accreditation and it's driving me crazy! But other than that great mod

Try doing some of the things that the level 1 tech buildings let you do - if you have orchalchum and have made your first set of precision tools from that in your alchemy lab, get an advanced mechanics workshop up - this will allow you to make additional precision tools from more metals than just orchalchum - and some advanced mechanisms.

Once you have a slew of those, try building some of the workshops that need a few of them - morgues, mechanical sparring dummies, medical training dummies, and more can produce such slabs.

Have fun!

[narhiril]

I don't know how to make a slab of of accreditation and it's driving me crazy! But other than that great mod

Any training workshop will produce these upon a successful training session.  That means...

Orrery
Mechanical Sparring Partner
Mechanical Obstacle Course
Medical Training Dummy
Morgue

The more you use those workshops, the more slabs you'll have on hand to put towards advancing the tech tree to tier two.  Slabs of accreditation don't have a reagent or even a material (this was done to prevent dwarves from filling your finished goods stockpiles with the damn things) - they exist purely as "proof" of training, which the reaction needs to produce experience.

As you might imagine, these tend to pile up quickly if you have more than one training workshop running full time, which is where the "document alchemical research" reaction comes in at the alchemy lab to get rid of them and produce tier two advances.  You can also get rid of them a bit more efficiently with a trash compactor, but this is really just to give players an option to cut down on the labor overhead for training once everything in tier two is unlocked.


---

I am actually considering a revision to this system to make these slabs obsolete as a means of simplifying an admittedly complex tech tree.  What I would do is replace the slabs with "stones of enlightenment" (which are already defined) which vaporize harmlessly upon creation and then move the tier two advancement reaction to the advanced mechanics workshop under a new premise.  The only two things stopping me from doing this are (1) I don't know what kind of performance hit a bunch of workshops spamming boiling stones would be and (2) the current system has been around for so long and is so ingrained in the documentation and community that attempting to simplify it now might just further complicate it.

---

I'm not ignoring you, Imp, I just don't have time right now for a sufficiently thorough and properly formulated response right now.  I'll get back to you on that.

[Imp]

(this was done to prevent dwarves from filling your finished goods stockpiles with the damn things)...
(2) the current system has been around for so long and is so ingrained in the documentation and community that attempting to simplify it now might just further complicate it.

For me personally, I would not mind a change to this system.  I actualy dislike that I cannot tell my dwarves to move these things around except by dumping (This requires me to keep part of my attention on how long ago/how full up these shops are getting, as clutter appears to slow these workshops just like any other, so I have to directly 'clean them out' over and over again or enjoy the reduced performance if I don't) ;  I would enjoy being able to make a dedicated stockpile that accepted just them - I'd even accept if I couldn't isolate them completely.

I have no idea what the boiling stone FPS affect would be, save that trapping a few dozen voidwalkers and killing them simultaneously in a droptrap works without any problems I can detect; all their stones boil away that instant (it's really pretty too!) and their severed bodyparts fall back down and my dwarves run to clean it all up, just like I want them to.

But I'd not miss these slabs of accumulation, personally  , as long as I could achieve the good they allow (tech advances) in some other way.

[narhiril]

I hate to have to say this, but I've run into a pretty severe issue with spies today that I wasn't anticipating.  The problem seems to be that tokens added or removed with CE_ADD_TAG and CE_REMOVE_TAG are not recognized by IT_REQUIRES or IT_FORBIDDEN tokens.  In other words, if you create an interaction which requires a token (i.e. MISCHIEVOUS) to be present on its target, it won't allow that interaction to target a suitable victim if that token was added them by a syndrome, even if it is currently or even permanently in effect. 

Like so many other things, I'm not sure if this is a bug or intended behavior, but it throws a pretty big wrench into both paragon healing interactions and lizardman spy interactions which I'm not sure I'm clever enough to work around.

I'm going to go ahead and ask around to see what kind of response I get from the powers that be, but lizardman spies might have to be shelved for a little while if my workaround causes too many problems.  I have a workaround for the spies at least, but it's very, very messy, and I'd really prefer not to have to use it.

Hopefully I'll be back with some better news next time.

[Meph]

You can always do the lizard men spies and the paragons by caste definition, not by syndrome effects/curses, as I do.

Or the watcher can only affect creatures with a certain syndrome active, and your lizardman spy curse would also give the creature this syndrome. Like: Speed percentage 100, with start 0 and no end. This way the watcher will only target the spies.

[narhiril]

You can always do the lizard men spies and the paragons by caste definition, not by syndrome effects/curses, as I do.

Or the watcher can only affect creatures with a certain syndrome active, and your lizardman spy curse would also give the creature this syndrome. Like: Speed percentage 100, with start 0 and no end. This way the watcher will only target the spies.

As far as I know, you can't do that, though.  You can use syndrome classes as forbid conditions for interactions, but not as requirements, unless there is some token that I am not aware of that allows this.  If you've gotten that to work, can you send me an example?

\
Hopefully I'll be back with some better news next time.

I figured out why spirit binders weren't building towers in worldgen, so that will be fixed for this next release.  Most of you probably haven't even heard of spirit binders (they're a custom secret), but I've been silently fiddling with them for weeks now and they're getting pretty exciting.  Also, I learned how to add custom speech to interactions, so brace yourselves - LFR adventure mode is about to get a lot more FUN. 

Yay for good news. 

Some of you might appreciate this.  I'm actually writing from a class, at the moment, but I can't understand a word my professor is saying (really, really thick accent) and I can't see a damn thing out of my right eye, so this is probably the most productive thing I could reasonably be doing at the moment.  Don't worry, I read the book.  ^_^

[Meph]

You can use it in reverse. Give it [IT_IMMUNE_CLASS:GENERAL_POISON] , or any other tag that every creatures has (or restrict it to dwarves with syn_affected_class on the syndrome) and then DONT give the spy the general_poison class. Or whatever you choose to use as class.

In short:
give all creatures but the spy a specific class
make the class immune to the interaction
This way only the spy can be targeted.

[narhiril]

You can use it in reverse. Give it [IT_IMMUNE_CLASS:GENERAL_POISON] , or any other tag that every creatures has (or restrict it to dwarves with syn_affected_class on the syndrome) and then DONT give the spy the general_poison class. Or whatever you choose to use as class.

In short:
give all creatures but the spy a specific class
make the class immune to the interaction
This way only the spy can be targeted.

IT_AFFECTED_CLASS accomplishes the same thing with less mucking about in other creature files.

The problem lies in actually giving the spy that specific class since the spy has to initially receive the class through the curse interaction's syndrome - as far as I know, this can only be done with a body transformation, and this would muck up the body transformation portion of the exposure interaction since body transformations don't play well with each other.

I could work around this using castes and a body transformation, but it will result in the transformation into an actual lizardman (the removal of the "disguise") not working, and you'll simply get a crazed spy (still in his disguise) with the "spy" suffix appended to his job title.  Unfortunately, I might have to go that route.  Using a token as a flag was a much more elegant solution, if only it worked properly.

The best solution would be for there to a be another token that was the reverse of IT_CANNOT_HAVE_SYNDROME_CLASS, but there isn't, even though I've been lobbying for one.

[Meph]

yeah, IT_MUST_HAVE_SYNROME_CLASS would be nice.

I spend yesterday evening trying to make creatures in workshops, everything from creating eggs (unfertilized, dont hatch), to direct pets/vermin version of creatures (crashes the game after you deconstruct the workshop) over transforming vermin (cant get rid of the vermin tag)... nothing did work.

Anyway, now I understand what you mean. But you still can go the way with the transformation to an actual lizard, since you can restrict to only work on a special caste. The syndrome, not sure about the interaction. Watcher "scans nearest dwarf" will work on all of them, but only the lizardman spy reacts upon it by transforming. I am fairly certain of that, since it would work on my secret castes as well. Still not as elegant as a curse, but hidden caste works. The therapist patch reads out the caste name btw, so you could just name them dwarves, to not give them away in the therapist.

[narhiril]

yeah, IT_MUST_HAVE_SYNROME_CLASS would be nice.

I spend yesterday evening trying to make creatures in workshops, everything from creating eggs (unfertilized, dont hatch), to direct pets/vermin version of creatures (crashes the game after you deconstruct the workshop) over transforming vermin (cant get rid of the vermin tag)... nothing did work.

Anyway, now I understand what you mean. But you still can go the way with the transformation to an actual lizard, since you can restrict to only work on a special caste. The syndrome, not sure about the interaction. Watcher "scans nearest dwarf" will work on all of them, but only the lizardman spy reacts upon it by transforming. I am fairly certain of that, since it would work on my secret castes as well. Still not as elegant as a curse, but hidden caste works. The therapist patch reads out the caste name btw, so you could just name them dwarves, to not give them away in the therapist.

Well, if I use a curse, I get assumed identities at the expense of no lizardman transformation on "reveal."  If I use a rare caste, I get lizardman transformations, but also immigrants and babies born as spies which cause loyalty cascades when killed.  I don't really like either of those options, but that's unfortunately the way it's turning out.