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[monk12]

Have you settled on what these 'secrets' will allow? Would you pretty please be able to post a list (so, immortality, raising and binding undead, rapid healing, etc)?

You mentioned that new secrets will be able to be modded in on release.  What kind of functionality on release are we looking at for that system?  Will secrets be able to change attributes, give new body parts, or anything like that, or will it just be tags like [IMMORTAL] or whatever for now?

I'm not sure what all is going to be available yet.  Partial changes to bodies (new parts etc.) are the most time-consuming and won't be included this time.  Once we are through vampires I should have a better idea.

I believe that this would be the quote you are thinking of, PTTG??

Toady's response indicates that he hasn't figured out what the full extent of secrets will be yet, but he didn't indicate what he intends to have in the next release. That said, I'm pretty sure that we'll hear about any new secret shenanigans. I'm willing to bet that Asmageddon's second query falls under the same heading as the "tech tree" type questions Toady was asked in that same post-

Will we be able to mod secrets to be known/used by appointed noble?

I, for example, would like to make "The Castle" series mod where ruler grants imortality to best-of-best (swordmaster, armorer ..., but also cook, doctor ...).

I've heard a lot of talk about "secrets" lately.  Is the Dungeon Master's ability to tame exotic creatures also going to be one of these "secrets"?

It's possible to get sort of tech-treey with it, but I haven't done anything like that, and it's not set up to point to certain positions or to have positions confer any abilities on their own. The larger questions surrounding knowledge and technology have not been resolved.

I emphasized the relevant bit there.

[nenjin]

The easiest way to prevent these situations it not allow them to arise in the first place. If dwarves (and animals... and caravans...) were disallowed to walk on trapped squares in fortress mode, players would have to have proper trap-free entrances that adventurers could look for.

Just so I have this straight: the best way to deal with traps in adventure mode is to trap your fortresses with adventure mode in mind?

Yeah, that doesn't sound totally broken, or anything.

[tfaal]

The easiest way to prevent these situations it not allow them to arise in the first place. If dwarves (and animals... and caravans...) were disallowed to walk on trapped squares in fortress mode, players would have to have proper trap-free entrances that adventurers could look for.

Just so I have this straight: the best way to deal with traps in adventure mode is to trap your fortresses with adventure mode in mind?

Yeah, that doesn't sound totally broken, or anything.

No, you've got his idea wrong; he's saying that if traps were impassible to dwarves, there would have to be an entrance to the fortress left untrapped.

[nenjin]

That's accessible to an adventurer later on but not to goblin ambushes and seiges?

[tfaal]

Didn't say I liked the idea. Personally, I don't think we should be able to build traps at all, unless they can be made less powerful and more interesting.

[Nihilist]

That's accessible to an adventurer later on but not to goblin ambushes and seiges?

Upright spike traps should still work for an entrance like that. Since they require dwarfpower to operate I doubt they would be made impassable in that kind of scenario.

[nenjin]

It's still just a work around, that strikes me as counter-intuitive. "Make a door other than the front door and make sure it's "open" before your fort collapses."

[Jiri Petru]

Well the point kinda is that dwarves, caravans, animals and other friendlies logically need an utrapped access to the fortress, unless you somehow expect even kids and donkeys and traders' wagons to jump over the traps. Being forced to leave at least one entrance untrapped increases the challenge of the game and also avoids the trouble of unaccessible fortresses in adventurer mode. Double win!

[Footkerchief]

Expanding on this... in an odd sort of way I guess, will dead kings, under certain circumstances, rise up to avenge their tombs being looted? Say, if the king happened to simultaneously manage to be a major priest of the local God of Death, or otherwise be rendered capable of rising up to avenge himself (faithful necromancer subjects, certain burial methods, etc)?

Will an adventurer (in the coming release) be able to see (cage/weapon) traps before setting them off? Will the traps be visible after they have been set off (by the adventurer or otherwise)? Will Observer or any other current skill have any effect on trap detection? Are there plans to handle that with a new skill in a later release instead? I assume some sort of trap disarming skill is intended for a (far?) future release.

I think today's dev log answers all of these.

Will Dwarfs become more sophisticated in how they react to danger?

For example, that classic Dwarf Fortress situation where an unconscious troll several Z levels down manages to scare away everyone. Could that behaviour be altered? Perhaps you could make it even more !!FUN!! than before, by making Dwarfs naturally inclined to cluster around unconscious enemies and gawk. Forcing you to either kill the creature, get the crowds to move along, or accept what happens when an enemy wakes up surrounded by pointing children.

I don't have any real answers for this one, but the old dev page has some references to related stuff:

# Req444, FLEEING SOLDIER AI, (Future): Fleeing soldiers don't cope well with not being able to reach their exit location.

# Req569, BETTER TERRAIN ESCAPE, (Future): There is more that dwarves should be able to do while they are attempting to escape dangerous terrain, specifically in relation to running back and forth over squares they've already checked.

Roguelikes have a long history of allowing Players to encounter previous characters. Will the new undead mechanics include risen adventurers/retired adventurer tombs?

I dont think that tombs are going to be built after worldgen anytime soon.

I agree, but today's devlog (link above) definitely indicates that adventurers can get necromanced.  IIRC, in23a (the last 2D version), adventurers killed at zombie-infested ruins would become zombies themselves, so it's nice to get that feature back.

Hi, and thanks for reading

SUMMARY of my question/argument:

Toady and Three Toe, what are your plans (short and longer term) for counter-forces to the whole undead menace? A sort of natural way to balance things out and prevent any necromancer or zombie virus to become semi-world-ruler easily except in extreme cases. Different levels of necromancy, and consequences to dabbling in the darkness stuffs that are difficult to deal with, even to experienced necromancers. Or magic-energy systems that balance things.

And how about forces of life and good and shite like that? I presume they should also play some significant roles.

The fullness of post here:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As I was reading all the new announcements and the surrounding hype about undead, it kind of struck me that no one mentioned overall balancing of undead and other unnatural creatures in some fundamental respects, but rather the discussion tends to center around the less important details of undead.

(I know this is DF and is prone to insanity, but losing isn't fun without being able to give it a decent shot at least).

A bit vague, so let me elaborate: generally in story themes including undead (and in other games) undead may be raised 'naturally' because of evil areas or monoliths or certain kind of deaths, but rarely to be anything more than a small nuisance, not a coordinated menace. It takes a (great) necromancer to really terrify a civilization. But if the power to raise found corpses is unlimited, we have a problem, and undead overtaking the world could become boringly common. Basically, the power to raise undead (and that of viral spreading) I see as a force pushing in a certain direction. There should be plenty forces acting against it for balancing and interestingness' sake.

Some include (which I'd like to see elaborated on):

• The knowledge of (more than just dabbling) necromancy is rare (seems to be covered)
• It takes some sort of energy or mana to perform it (and some individuals or races have a natural affinity with certain kinds of magic) which can be developed but must essentially be limited by some (preferrably natural-seeming) effect (like that an individual can channel only so much power w/out damaging themselves etc). This may cause some necromancers to grow greater than others as they discover deeper secrets.
• Along this vein, it should require 'energy' to sustain 'unnatural' undead somehow (so a necromancer or lich has a reach limited by his or her power for eg.)
• There are 'forces of light' at work. Priests and stuff doing holeh magicx0rz. Dieties of light intervening. Amulets. Hey how about plain sunlight being deadly to any undead creature not imbued with enough magic?

Specifically, I'm curious about your short-term/placeholder plans for things like these. Certainly, undead can't be allowed to run unbridled armok?

So generally, my rant is just that zombie apocalypse should be decidedly not the default state of things, and given the different forces and counter-forces at work to naturally balance things, rarely result from world gen. Cause after all, it's usually the living that do the interesting stuff like trading and mining and creating useless artifact scepters that weigh 53 kilograms.

Of course we still absolutely need these dangers to play a role in the game, but I think it would be less monotonous if they would for example be an almost non-existant threat in some regions of the world, and play a dangerous role in some others (instead of as with The Omnipresent Killer Bogeymen at the moment).

And of course, we all have that desire deep down; we all want to at least once try to survive in a zombie apocalypse world. So it would make a killer world-gen option!! 

It's planned not only to have regions linked to undeath, blight, decay, but also to have regions linked to more positive spheres like nature, beauty, etc., which have counterbalancing or complementary effects.  Many of ThreeToe's stories discuss forest spirits:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/story/tt_forest_befouled.html
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/story/tt_animal_justice.html
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/story/tt_snatcher.html
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/story/tt_root.html
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/story/tt_summon.html

[monk12]

I can see from the latest devlog update I'll need to be making a Were-Beast killing uniform to load up on silver weaponry when appropriate. Weaponizing water in a way that doesn't involve massive flooding might be a bit tricky as things stand, however.

Evil biomes are going to be hardcore, even by DF standards.

[counting]

Yeah this update seems to be bloating over the borders of caravan arc, and I love it!
The caravan stuff never sounded too interesting, but this sounds like lots of fun!

Well the Caravan Arc gets us  more realistic supply/demand economic activity, and all sorts of economic activity happening in-game post worldgen that we can see and interact with in Adventure mode(plus Fort Mode of course). This means lots of Fun! "economic" sounds boring...until you remember that "economic activity" basically means "all activity". Its the reasons that stuff happens in a real world. So with a dynamic in-game economy post-worldgen we go from a static world with a few canned quests and fake trade activity to a dynamic world that you can interact with and impact dynamically, while still being able to do the canned quests if you want. (though eventually I assume the goal is to not have any canned quests at all, ideally things to do should just arise automatically from out of the simulated game world without needing to be canned)

In Adventure Mode terms, when the Caravan Arc is done we get caravan raiding or protecting, trading(everything from running your own caravan to building up a world-spanning trade empire, big interesting towns/cities with tons of stuff to do in them, seeing NPC's actually do stuff as you move around in Adventure mode, buying and selling property(build up a real estate empire?), building your own locations, more sophisticated companions and hirelings etc. All the stuff from the Caravan Arc dev page.
  Then later the 'Army Arc' gets the political entities in the game to actually start struggling for control over all of this, with we players getting to play a larger role in that stuff. I shiver at the possibilities.

Anyway I'm rambling, preaching to the choir here mostly I suppose This was supposed to be a couple sentences and it grew out of control. I do get excited about the possibilities.

If it did implementing on dynamic trade route, I presume that it will be a hybrid simulation with statistic simulation on large scale. There is only so much active-NPCs you can simulate at a giving time without FPS lagging.

Also, if purchasing cottages, and hirelings are implemented, does it must mean the come back of some kind of currency system. Does that means we will have a local currency system and world currency exchange rate? Or the purchase is done by fulfilling certain tasks, or paid by real commodities, rather than commodity money like coins? But with a face value 10 times of it's metal value (whatever what the "value" really means anyway), I wonder if anyone would think owning a real state be that hard. And without a proper "coins generating-removable" mechanism, the inflation or deflation will happen very quickly, and currency system won't be stable. (one good "coins removal system" is using dragons to "devour" excessive coins, or a general way using local government industries to sell general goods and recycle these coins. Provide that enough NPCs carried and used them, or it's just a specialized usage by players only. and as useless as before.)

[James.Denholm]

Sorry to drag back, however:

Angels!

YES

WINGED SEXY FERTILE FEMALES!

What are you talking about? angels are neuter.

close enough

YES

SLAYING SKELETONS MADE OF BONE!

[Mechanoid]

In either Adventurer or Fortress mode, can necromancers re-animate dead on-the-go? What's the expected range of a necromancer's influence to reanimate the dead, is it simply unlimited range, line-of-sight limited, or trigger-based like that story with the figurine?

In fortress mode, will dwarves get thoughts about having to deal with undead creatures they knew in another lifetime?

[Urist McDepravity]

And without a proper "coins generating-removable" mechanism, the inflation or deflation will happen very quickly, and currency system won't be stable.

Sure you cannot have truly 'stable' systems (and even current sophisticated system does not work, as indicated by 2008), but back in old days of silver/gold standards it was 'stable enough' without such recycle mechanisms, as amount of currency was limited by amount of silver/gold, which were value by itself.

[Roflcopter5000]

And without a proper "coins generating-removable" mechanism, the inflation or deflation will happen very quickly, and currency system won't be stable.

Sure you cannot have truly 'stable' systems (and even current sophisticated system does not work, as indicated by 2008), but back in old days of silver/gold standards it was 'stable enough' without such recycle mechanisms, as amount of currency was limited by amount of silver/gold, which were value by itself.

Since the game has an absolute value tracking mechanism, I don't think we're going to need to worry too much about real-world style economic problems... Essentially, 'dwarfbucks' -are- the gold standard. And dedication to realism is awesome, but frankly, in order to get the system to function, Toady will almost certainly have to throw in some kind of meta-gameworld controls. Dragons/other invaders interested in wealth but unlikely to trade are certainly an excellent sort of control... But that could be too limited to rely on exclusively. It makes sense for controlling gold or mineral wealth, but what about the market being flooded with high-quality roasts? Or cabinets?