Print

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

[Rethi-Eli]

I have a short history, a medium number of beasts, and a medium sized world. What are the chances that I might encounter a megabeast?

[PatrikLundell]

Rather to very low, I would say. I've encountered a total of 2 in over 2 RL years. It seems they tend to stick to their caves or whatever they took up as lairs.
If you create "monster island" worlds you supposedly can get a lot of them, though.

[Fleeting Frames]

Anecdotally, recently ran a fort for 19 years above 80 pop, in a small world with 5 megabeasts. In that time, only two - dragon and hydra - appeared.

Titans and Forgotten Beasts are far more common - that fort got 48 uninvited guest during 39 years.

[Melting Sky]

If you would like to run into mega beasts just spawn more of them during world generation.

[Fleeting Frames]

Works, with the caveat of them attacking civs and possibly having one of the two die. Possibly several times. 'tis why I usually don't include megabeasts in worldgen - sucks to lose your only human civ.

[PatrikLundell]

I have as many megabeast I can to get all races to survive 1 time out of 4 (and the races are blocked from wiping each other out), but they still don't visit my fortresses.

[King Kitteh]

I'm not such an avid player. But I've only been attacked by two megabeasts in my time. A roc and a Dragon.

[FakerFangirl]

I started playing in year five of my world. I've had a solid streak of megabeast attacks ever since I became a barony.

[Melting Sky]

Works, with the caveat of them attacking civs and possibly having one of the two die. Possibly several times. 'tis why I usually don't include megabeasts in worldgen - sucks to lose your only human civ.

I don't recommend really cranking up any of the advanced settings in pocket worlds. The smaller the world, the less stable and more dangerously imbalanced they tend to be. Even with the default settings I often see things like all the mega beasts getting killed off, or races going extinct far more often and far sooner in smaller worlds. A smaller world with a shorter history may save your FPS a bit, but it does come with some serious draw backs as well. I usually create medium sized worlds and crank up the numbers of mega beasts, semi-mega beasts, secrets, night creatures, demons and titans to about two and half times their normal numbers and run the world for a few hundred years without it being an issue as far as races going extinct. One thing I do recommend if you do this is you increase the number of caves proportionally or kobolds could have some issues.

Both pocket and "smaller" worlds are very similiar when it comes to imbalance issues so if I am looking to avoid those problems I take the size up to at least small. A small world has roughly twice as many civs and quadruple the max number of sites and mega fauna even before you start tinkering with the settings. Medium sized worlds are absolutely massive in comparison with fifty time the number of sites and ten times as many civs, but that's about where I start to actually notice an FPS hit. I personally find the it more than worth the trade off, but it all comes down to personal preferences.

[Fleeting Frames]

Sure, you can have more civs - and you don't need to pay FPS to increase world size to do this.

I've put 206 civs in pocket world, and that's far from maximum.

However, I think it is a meh solution, because you'll likely not get elves, humans and goblins all coming from a big major site with that as closest location (at least 3k sentient pop for humans and elves and 10k for goblins) at the same time, while also being their only available target.

Simple worldgens are not that good for this because the smaller retreats, halmets and pits tend to get placed in a ring around the major site. Pre-embark two week crawling FPS aside, I cringe whenever I see a medium worldgen and see no sites I'd consider properly filling anyone's request in worldgen thread.

However, if you're not painting I suppose they can enable larger geographical distance - the snaking patterns required otherwise don't really appear unless forced.

That said, of course medium worldgens have bigger chances of RNG not eating given civs - that's kinda given with medium worldgen being 55,8 pocket worlds - for an accurate comparison, should look through as many pocket worlds with proportional settings for each medium world.


However, I think there might be something of a RNG solution:

One thing I recently found in Succession World is that megabeasts can cross the ocean to come to your fortress. I'll have to ask, do you have them also cross from other side of the world, i.e. from artics while you're in tropics?

Anyway - in worldgen, they cannot do this. Tested it with single elven island separated by 1-wide sea gap VS without sea gap.

So if you're not so picky about available biomes you can do triangle like PatrickLundall's PALU2, expect looking something like this instead:

π~VVVVV¶~
~~~~~~~~~
~V~ " " " " " " . . .
~V~ " Here be dragons
~V~ "
~V~ "             .
~V~ .             .
~+~ .             .
~~~ .      . . . Ω

The main issue here is the required 7-tile separation for building new major sites - human town and elven retreat, thus leaving 13 undesired squares VS 240 desired (in pocket world) onto which megabeasts can spawn - an unattractive ratio of 18 to 1. Well, increasing the world size to 33x33 will more than quadruple the ratio, so there's that.

[Flintfakeer]

megabeasts are somewhat rare. forgotten beasts are not. check out the cookbook thread if you want to know more about making worlds to your specifications.

[Melting Sky]

It's not the size of the world that eats your FPS nearly so much as the number of civs, sites, inhabitants and the length of the world's history. In other words you will get FAR worse FPS from a pocket world crowded with two hundred civs, a load of cites and a long history than a medium world with less sites, shorter history and a lower population. It's entities inhabiting the world that produce the lion share of the FPS load on a global scale. The reason I recommended scaling up the world size is simply because it is the easiest way to scale up everything in a balanced manner and allows you to pour a bunch of mega beasts into the world without it leading to civilized races going extinct. You certainly can go in micro-manage and and tweak all the settings to produce pocket worlds with loads of extra civs in them etc. to balance out increasing the number of mega beasts, but it is far simpler to just scale up the world a bit.

Everyone has their own preferences in how they do things. I personally find pocket worlds lacking in variety, a bit unstable and cramped, but for others this fits what they are looking for perfectly. I also personally hate world painter and think it leads to unnatural looking maps, but I know there are others who absolutely love it and will micro manage world creation down to the placement of individual civs which they set up not to war with each other until a player fort is built as a specific embark square which is at an engineered choke point in the map with 9 different biomes intersecting etc. To each their own. There is no wrong way to play the game.