Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

#1: Put the Alarm Siren in the Military Garrison, it fits and is one buildings less.

#1: Keep the Alarm Siren seperate, I want to have it near my other levers.

#2: I have traded with Gnomes, build Artificer and Weather Control Station.

#2: I have NOT traded with Gnomes, did not have the chance to build their buildings.

[richieelias]

Once Meph gave me the knowledge that CREATURE_MAT:ANIMAL is where all the magic happens, I did a little more searching and I'm seeing the same token in the tissue template default files.

So, would simply changing CREATURE_MAT:ANIMAL under [TISSUE_TEMPLATE:SKIN_TEMPLATE] for instance, turn on creature specific leather while leaving everything else alone?

[Zeebie]

I'm getting erratic behavior with golems that I make.  If I make them militia captains, they will obey station orders, but run away when enemies approach.  Sometimes they will wander off their station for no obvious reason and not return.  If I give them a kill order, about half the time they attack, and half the time they run away.  Anyone have any success in making them work consistently?

[Meph]

Hey, a longer post for once.

Doing the manual gave me a greater overview of what is in the game and what is in the mod. Many things that made sense at the time now appear somewhat... unplanned. I think I will change quite a lot in the end. Everything should be a lot better sorted and balanced. 2 evil/good/savage plants and trees, each with special abilities, a complete rebalance of the underground creatures, and a more specialised megabeasts. Here some few idea I had:

Metalworking
Major overhaul. I want to make it easier, especially the "grind to powder, smelt powder"stuff, and balance everything better. Mithril should be steel-grade, but lighter. I think it is too strong against invaders at the moment. Higher grade alloys can be better then steel, and volcanic a bit harder to make, with a massive damage boost against frostgiants. I dont know yet how I feel about the alternative-metals, like steeloak or bloodsteel. Yes, they have the same value. But different origins. I got rid of steeloak and made it produce steel instead, and people were fine with it. I kept bloodsteel as a seperate metal, and people are fine with it as well. I will also make a poll about "wrought iron/crude iron" that has to be refined first.

Library
Instead of one way to learn, I want to introduce three.
1. Take a book => Read => Small skill increase. Book will stay.
2. Take a book => Take ink/paper => Study a topic. Book might be used up. The dwarf will write several "pages" that go into a container the "textbook" This way I can create a big amount of items, like the skill essence. The full "textbook" is then destroyed by "storing" it in the library, automatically. By placing all items into the book I also avoid the stockpiling problem the essence currently has. All this gives a medium skill increase.
3. Take an "epic" book. These are created with a low chance while writing books or can be traded for or found in archeology. Same system as above, with a high skill increase.

Philosophers Garden & Fountain & potted plant & totem (buildings)
Nice looking, but rather pointless. I think I might remove them, move the learning reactions into the libraries, and make the "decoration-only" buildings optional, and turn them off by default.

Landmines & Turrets
Upgrade systems for those, based on transformation. Each unit can get one upgrade only. Walking mines OR invisible mines. Long-range turrets OR fast-fire turrets. I could use boiling stones, display name changes and syndromes that give interactions, but I think transformations are easier, because you get the definite message when the reaction worked. It also limits it to one upgrade per creature.

Archeology
Should be more of a lottery. You can only find "fossil" in the inorganic mats. Then it is brought to the workshop to be identified and then restored. I think I will do about 100 different outcomes, from ancient masterpiece books, over chests full of gems and coins, special unique weapons, anything you can think of. Currently the system itself works, but people said that they barely get anything useful from it.

Mages & Familiars
I do like the XYZ-bound and XYZ-mancer system, but only for its simplicity. I think I might create more complex and more different mages. They also should get familiars. Familiars are special pets, restricted by number, bound to a mage. A "puppetmaster"-mage could for example transform up to 4 scarecrows into scarecrow-men that do his melee fighting for him. A demonbound could transform one dog into a cerberus or hellhound. A heavily buffed guard dog. These should be assigned to the specific mages, because of a special ability they have: The mages get interactions that make the pet stronger, and the pet gets interaction that make the mage stronger. This way you only profit from them if they are near each other.

Megabeasts
I really like some ideas that came to me about megabeasts. One would be an unkillable blob with a syndrome. No way to kill it means that you have to use caveins or trap it. Creativity is needed, and you can weaponize it if you are good enough. Another would be a creature that creates a clone of itself for every bodypart that has been hacked off. This means you should only fight it with blunt weapons, or be overrun. In general megabeasts should feel... bigger, badder and more difficult. They seem too weak currently. I will also increase the reward for killing them. Instead of 1 legendary skill you will get 3 things: 1. a trophy. Be it a mounted head, a bronze-colossus statue or whatever, something to remember the beast by. 2. Items. 50 steel bars for killing a steel colossus ? Sounds fair. 20 menacing spikes made from dragonteeth ? A giants potion to create a giant-dwarf for some time? Check. Each would be specific to the beast that has been killed. 3. The skill essence/soul. You will still get to upgrade a combat skill from it.

Cults
Since I got so much positive feedback about the cult of the carp god (mostly because of the FUN it caused, and because people were not expecting it) I think I will improve on this system and add 2 more. One could be a zombification-curse that is going on, or your archeologist digs up "the marker" from deadspace. Definetly something hidden, horrible, with a lot of rpg-style ingame logs. Ideas welcome. Oh, and I can totally see something Magic-the-Gathering Phyrexian in this... and another fun little thing, but I wont spoil it here. 

Diseases
The current system is really bad, sorry for that. I will trim down on diseases, but do more realistic ones. I want a chicken pox that kills your lifestock, a plaque that is contracted from vermin (should have killed those rats) and rabies that turn your guard animals on yourself. Something that people do know from real life, not too much made up stuff. This way people can identify it more easily and have a guess at what will happen.

Caverns
I want to make the third cavern a lot (and I mean A LOT) more difficult. Just as there is a massive difference between steel and adamantine, there is a massive difference between cavern3 and the HFS. I want it to become progressivly harder, with cavern1, cavern2, cavern3, then flying clowns, then even harder non-flying clowns. Each cavern has some special rewards for conquering them, with special plants, trees (no more fire trees) and item-drops.

Races
15 races in total. 4 allies, 2 thief-races, 3 cave-races, 6 invaders. Each with several different castes/creatures in the race. I dont want to spam too much here, but the races should be more mixed. Instead of goblin,goblin,goblin,goblin you should have goblin,orc,troll,ogre in one army. With different sprites. In general they should have more personality, Antmen for example should arrive with a small number of antmen and a big number of ants. Antmen sheperds walking their vast herds of giant ants through the caverns... I like that mental image. Each race will have a different item-drop that enables one industry.

Music Stage
Music System would be better if the dwarf would be transformed into a bard for a while. Immobile he would stand on the music stage and only leave when his song is done. Makes a lot more sense then the current one. This way people lose the dwarf-power of the bard for as long as he plays, and I could make them play actual songs, with texts in the interaction log. Of course by using transformation mages wouldnt work for this... but I think thats excuseable.

Random stuff
Leatherworking is a bit of a mess currently, I want to make it better. Same goes for the armor and weapons of different races. There is no clear guide on what is what, so I probably will change them a bit, make them simpler, and then add them to the manual. Oh, the manual: Search engine is in progress, and I decided to scrap 2 chapters: Tables and Spoilers. I will just include all the tables and spoilers in the categories.So instead of going to "creatures" and finding a "go to spoilers section" you just go to "creatures" and have the creature-specific spoiler text directly in there. Should make things easier to find. Same for the tables. Why should a table about dwarven castes not be at the caste-explanation, or the table for metals not be in the inorganic mat section ? I also added ALL vanilla creatures to it Finally figured out how to sort that section. I then added a new chapter called "Areas" which explain the difference in vanilla biomes and caverns and the masterwork versions.

tl;dr: I have a pretty clear idea of what I want to do with the mod. And how to do it. Mostly waiting for the python gui, then I can give more info on that.

EDIT: Dont get overexcited yet. Still 3 weeks to travel, then start modding. So minimum 1 month till anything of this sees the light of day.

[Volon8]

Hey all. First off I love the mod.

Secondly I also love Glacier Worlds...Volcanoes make this so much better. And the Alter, shrine , and magma temple of Armok help out greatly in surviving while adding in a new element.

Third I'm finding all sorts of creatures in the Glacier worlds I take on. Which I'm not loving. I don't think that the various creatures I've seen should be in a glacier. I enjoyed having a lot of sport to hunt with a while ago, but right now it is just ridiculous. I'm mostly just a little mad that some gargoyles came in and killed everybody that was in the top of my base. Right before I had water available too.

I'm looking at some of the RAWS and I think I see why. A lot of the Creatures I'm seeing have this token: [BIOME:ANY_LAND]. Would changing that to [BIOME:NOT_FREEZING] fix the problem of all these creatures traveling into my Glacier world? I've done only minor Raw edits, and I don't understand them completely so please correct me.

Fourth. Concubines I must say look like they would help a lot. I don't think of them as child-bearing slaves for my Dwarfs, but instead of female prisoners that have opted to start a new life where nobody wants to.

[Shingy]

These are great ideas Meph. Can't wait for the next version! 
I'm looking forward to the changes, as they'll rebalance everything.

[smakemupagus]

Hi Meph,

As always everything sounds great!  All those refined systems like Library, Archaeology, Golems are going to be great, and can't wait to see what you do with the overhaul of mages.

The Cult of Carp God is a cool idea, and playing with the feature was very fun exactly once   Sort of like Toady's vampires although I wish Cultists were also caught by the sheriff rather than by me looking at the game logs, I know this isn't possible.  Have to admit I generally turn it off now.

Metalworking:  Keep steeloak and bloodsteel separate, but then also use them for things differently than steel (e.g. bloodsteel for special evil weapons, runes, syndrome ammos, etc.; steeloak for natural golems, druidic weapons, special barrels for storing elf blood, etc.)  Maybe materials-wise they should be not quite even as good as steel as a trade off.  If they just become steel, for me, it kind of just doesn't feel right and breaks immersion.  I can accept maybe a wizard turning ash and bone into a steel bar, but not Urist McPotashmaker. ... Mithril, indeed, like steel but lighter, I assume welded mithril will still be better than either.  That sounds perfect.  ... For some reason I really don't care for slademantine, either, I can't quite explain why properly though.  Makes siegers too powerful, you get it too early yourself and then you're too powerful, the name is strange, I don't really know what it is supposed to be exactly, etc.  Slade metal itself, too heavy and have to micromanage your soldiers/haulers to ignore it.  I much prefer the way Volcanic is implemented.  Maybe move the adamantine alloy to that system?  Please don't call it Volcanimantium?

Megabeasts:  Really like the way you're thinking in general, although, i don't know about "impossible to kill without a cave in", that actually seems to limit player creativity.  (why not magma, or ballistae, or hand cannons?  will the player have hints that these other things won't work, otherwise it might be frustrating)

[Firehawk45]

Unkillable Megabeasts seems a bit hard, i for myself never tinkered with the more creative solutions to solve those problems, so one of these blobs could easily kill me.... An i know for a fact i would never change that behaviour Maybe really hard to kill, only with a certain kind of weapons, yeah, i can see that and i like it

[Wrex]

I would keep the steel-analogues the way they are. Yes, you CAN get them early. But only in limited quantities, wheras steel just pours out of the forges when you have them done. Mithril needs to be better than steel if you are going to justify it's current rarity. The Archaeolgist is pretty useless because fossils have such a low chance of dropping anything useful. If they dropped stuff even half the time many of us would consider it too little.


Slademantine bugs me because by all rights you should end up with a metal mediocre in every way. The two lightest and heaviest metals together? medium weight. Sharpest and bluntest? Ordinary edge. Also, I should mention that Native metals ARE pure metals, so finding two seperate ores considered pure made me twinge a bit.

[smakemupagus]

Mithril needs to be better than steel if you are going to justify it's current rarity.

Maybe too, the elves should have not quite so much mithril, seems out of place since it's rare elsewhere.  Could their gear be 1/3 mithril, 1/3 ironoak, 1/3 steeloak or something like that. 

[Ishar]

I was originally a fan of the Fortress Defense races, but now, I really think you should remove them, they are broken. Badgermen grow too big sometimes (known bug), dark stranglers arrive with weapons when they should be unarmed, serpentmen are sometimes WAY too effective with their swords and spears... problematic, and with all your included races, not needed at all now.

[smakemupagus]

Yeah, Badgermen are simply a typo, should be 90000 adult size not 900000.

Do you have a list of other things you've noticed are broken?  I agree they're a bit redundant in regular MWDF but the FD races are still pretty needed as extra enemies in Orc Fortress, so I might tinker.  (Meph's races are not generally hostile to Orcs.)

[Ishar]

Serpentmen sent a metric fuckton to my latest fortress, and while they are not immensely powerful, 50-80 of them EVERY season was really annoying. White tigermen are good, they use copper weapons, and die as intended.

[smakemupagus]

Yeah, sounds like you use the same FD races that I do, and similar outcomes.  Still remember the first time a whole naga invasion swim up through my moat & well

[Panopticon]

I think the fortress defense races are unneeded with the other options we have, especially if you keep the evil versions of the good races.

I like the alternate steel options, they seem fairly well balanced to me and make you pay attention to industries you might normally overlook.

I also like the decorative buildings, especially in succession games they give a lot of fun ideas for making tombs or what have you more excessive than the previous overseer's.

Totally in favor of disease revamp as you have described it.

I am not a fan of unkillable megabeasts, too much risk of a fort dying no matter what you do.

The metalworking changes I mostly like the idea of, but Mithril should still be better than steel, not just lighter, perhaps not as good as it currently is though, I often just skip steel right now and go straight to Mithril since it is only a two step process to make and is so much better, which leads to the other request to make steel easier to make, even if it still requires the same total amount of materials, having a building with a single reaction that can make it out of Coarse Iron and Flux would make it a lot more usable to me.

The music stage reworking is kinda neat, but how about taking it further? Make a new "mage" option that is actually a bard! The reaction could take an instrument to do, and the type of instrument used determines what songs he plays?

[Riun]

First off, everything posted sounds GREAT. Really looking forward to it.

Steel - imho, there is no point in having bloodsteel/etc. if it does not have different purpose. Using bloodsteel to make special weapons is great, having "ordinary steel weapon" and "ordinary bloodsteel weapon" is just the same as different leather types to me. But i am sure you will find great uses with the rehaul to justify different stuff.

On steel making - i like it being more complex then copper, on the other hand it is still too easy. There is absolutely no reason to make any copper or iron stuff unless you have very limited coal (never happened to me). Therefore, there is no ingame reason for steel to be at this mediocre complexity level - either make it easier (reducing iron to one step, making steel process 3 instead of 4) or make it more complex (add a different ingredient to make pig iron then flux for example). I fear that this will prolly have troubles with hardcoded changes and that steel making is very much like in real life as it is now, but balance wise the design is flawed. If complexitiy gets raised though, we might actually make some iron stuff, so more "tiers" of armory as the game progresses.

On Megabeasts - i love the your ideas, but i see one problem with the unkillable blob - when it arrives you might not be prepared to have a cave in or something, but when it's there you cant build/dig the trap needed. So I either prepare for it and then it is a nobrainer, or i am not prepared and it is gameover/wall in.
Megabeasts requiring specialisedweapons (maybe even materials?) sounds absolutely great though. This could also work very well with your magic system, as there could be some megabeasts only killable by some magecastes and alike.

The rest of your list just sounds good - could praise your ideas for pages as well, guess a 10/10 rating is sufficient.