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[Vester]

You know, that's actually pretty true. I mean, I'm sure Toady knew what he was doing when he updated creatures. I mean, something made out of, say, Slade or Adamantium would be unkillable by any normal means anyway.

I think the problem Jiri Petru has with the unkillable FB's isn't that they're in the game at all, but in how often they appear (which is, very often).

[Jiri Petru]

Thank you, Urist, for a demonstration how you can disagree while staying polite.

I wish people stopped using Aplha as an argument - Dwarf Fortress is likely to stay Alpha for another decade or two and even then won't ever be "complete". The Alpha argument would make sense if the final version were half a year in the future, but here it really has no merit.

Anyway, as for the combat. There much, much more than archery broken. Sure the combat works if by "works" you mean "people kill each other". But when you look at it closely, the new material system brought severe imbalances. Blunt weapons are useless, creatures happily use mangled limbs, to kill anyone you usually have to convert him to a bloody mess, some creatures can't be killed at all, all materials are terribly, terribly wrong and if you download a mod that fixes the raw values, it only reveals the system has a severe flaw where a stronger material always penetrates a weaker one, and a weaker material never penetrates a stonger one. There's no workaround for this, even if you mod like hell. Sure, you could argue these are all details, but Dwarf Fortress is all about details and I'd say that details of combat are much more important than the issue of miners destroying too much ore because they are thirsty.

---

Creatures unkillable by normal means would actually be a nice gameplay element if the game gave you tools to handle it. Right now, you can't really order individual dwarves to eg. lure the creature into a trap. You can't kill it by catapults. You can't organize a group of vigilantes with a giant net, and even if you can build a structure above the creature to kill it with cave-in, the game fights back against you with job cancellations. In other words, to kill an unkillable beast you must micromanage the hell out of the game, be prepared in advance, hope for the best, and even there's a huge chance you won't succeed and that the beast will ruin a game. If you are not a very experienced player, you can only watch how the creature kills your dwarves one by one. That fulfills my definition of a bug, not a feature.

But see above - unkillable beast are just one part of the horrible unbalanced mess called combat.


EDIT: I have the same gripe against "poisonous vapours". There's absolutelly no way to protect oneself against these. Anyone you send against a creature with poisonous vapours is as good as dead, and there's absolutelly no tools to handle it. This is what I call a bug... or a horrible, horrible design decision.

[MrWiggles]

Creatures unkillable by normal means would actually be a nice gameplay element if the game gave you tools to handle it. Right now, you can't really order individual dwarves to eg. lure the creature into a trap. You can't kill it by catapults. You can't organize a group of vigilantes with a giant net, and even if you can build a structure above the creature to kill it with cave-in, the game fights back against you with job cancellations. In other words, to kill an unkillable beast you must micromanage the hell out of the game, be prepared in advance, hope for the best, and even there's a huge chance you won't succeed and that the beast will ruin a game. If you are not a very experienced player, you can only watch how the creature kills your dwarves one by one. That fulfills my definition of a bug, not a feature.

But see above - unkillable beast are just one part of the horrible unbalanced mess called combat.

Ah! Because the in game tools aren't verbose enough that game aspect is broken. I also don't see how any of your proposed expanded tool selection wouldn't require luck preparation or micromanagement.

Although you could use some dwarfs through the use of burrows as bait in order to lure an FB into an area.

EDIT: I have the same gripe against "poisonous vapours". There's absolutelly no way to protect oneself against these. Anyone you send against a creature with poisonous vapours is as good as dead, and there's absolutelly no tools to handle it. This is what I call a bug... or a horrible, horrible design decision.

No, there no way you can protect yourself from deadly vapors. Air tightness wasn't very common for c1400 europe. I also don't see this as an any more of an obstacle then other unkillable FB. Similar in game tools would still need to be applied. Be it so when the trap is sprung there as little #s dorf in the trap room.

[Jiri Petru]

No, there no way you can protect yourself from deadly vapors. Air tightness wasn't very common for c1400 europe.

You mean adding towering, poison-spewing beasts is OK, while adding ways to deal with them would be unrealistic?

[Vester]

No, there no way you can protect yourself from deadly vapors. Air tightness wasn't very common for c1400 europe. I also don't see this as an any more of an obstacle then other unkillable FB. Similar in game tools would still need to be applied. Be it so when the trap is sprung there as little #s dorf in the trap room.

You know, Dragons, dwarves, Cyclopes, and Elves weren't very common for 13th Century Europe either.

Seriously, realism can be taken a little too far. The game has unicorns, whose existence is tied primarily to areas marked "good", as if to say they have some weird metaphysical biome restriction going on there, yet air-tight seals are unrealistic?

And don't get me started on how flushing lava with water creates obsidian. It's one of the more fun things in the game; it's not by any metric realistic at all.

[Mandaril]

The absolutely best feature of this build?

FPS counter is no longer blocking other things! 

[Deathworks]

Hi!

First of all, thank you to Toady One for releasing the new version and then doing a quick fix for a crash bug (I hadn't experienced it myself since I downloaded the .07 version before going to bed and when I woke, the .08 was already up, underscoring for me the lightning speed of the fix).

General: Please, everyone, try to calm down a little bit. It is doing no one good if you quarrel and attack each other. For if you get overtly aggressive the only thing you achieve is that Toady One has to police the forums, costing time and nerve and thus slowing down any improvement you may have in mind. And even worse, if you keep on quibbling, he may wonder whether this is really worth it at all and consider stopping this project seeing how it does more harm than good.

Jiri Petru: As far as I can tell, a lot of the bugs concerning military have also been fixed. Balance problems are not really bugs per se, so I am not surprised that they have been put on the back burner. You are right that they need to be addressed some time soon, but they are definitely not as urgent as crashes and basic functionality (after all, if your military spends all day on the armor stockpile while enemies they could defeat if they ever started fighting slaughter your populace, the game is just as frustrating).

And I can also understand somewhat that people point out that there are ways to deal with the unbalanced forgotten beasts - except for the monstrous diplomats, forgotten beasts are a toggable feature (they are restricted by the invader tag), so you can decide whether you are experienced enough to deal with them or not. And at least the theory behind their defeat is not that difficult as to be incomprehensible for experienced players. And for new players, I always suggest to start out with invaders turned off anyway, regardless of balance problems, as they need a bit of extra time to learn how to control the game before the goblins start messing up things. So, it is not completely unreasonable to point out that the beasts can be dealt with via non-combat means.

Deathworks

[MrWiggles]

No, there no way you can protect yourself from deadly vapors. Air tightness wasn't very common for c1400 europe.

You mean adding towering, poison-spewing beasts is OK, while adding ways to deal with them would be unrealistic?

The argument fails, as there ways to deal with it. Just not your preferred ways.

[izraqthedark]

Funny story about forgotten beasts.

I was playing last night trying to figure out how to kill my forgotten beast in my caverns.  It was a steam monster with 3 horns.  Either way I activated my military and sent it to kill the bastard and one of my lowly recruits killed the beast just by punching it according to the battle report.  I thought that was kinda funny and strange so I had to share .

[G-Flex]

You know, that's actually pretty true. I mean, I'm sure Toady knew what he was doing when he updated creatures. I mean, something made out of, say, Slade or Adamantium would be unkillable by any normal means anyway.

I think the problem Jiri Petru has with the unkillable FB's isn't that they're in the game at all, but in how often they appear (which is, very often).

You are ignoring the actual reason why certain things are unkillable.

Things like Bronze Colossi are unkillable because of issues with how the game handles damage. That's it. We aren't dealing with giant untouchable demons made out of pure adamantine, we're dealing with things you can ostensibly harm.

You can sever parts off a bronze colossus (or presumably, many of the FBs that aren't "killable"), and even shatter parts of it. The issue is that the game does not deal with stacking damage very well, if at all, so it's seemingly impossible to sever (or otherwise utterly destroy) a part of any creature unless you manage to do it in a single blow. By analogy, if woodcutting worked like that in DF, you'd never be able to chop down a tree unless you somehow forged an axe that could do it in one strike.


The issue isn't that a beast you can't kill through normal means is a bad idea - that's a whole other debate. It also isn't, strictly speaking, a "balance" issue. The issue is that currently, the beasts are like that through unintended quirks and problems within the damage/wound model, and ones that result in problems in other, slightly less-obvious areas of combat as well.


It's helpful to consider why the game is exhibiting certain behavior instead of jumping to conclusions about whether or not it's good or intended - and, in fact, before arguing about it at all.

[Meanmelter]

No, there no way you can protect yourself from deadly vapors. Air tightness wasn't very common for c1400 europe.

You mean adding towering, poison-spewing beasts is OK, while adding ways to deal with them would be unrealistic?

The argument fails, as there ways to deal with it. Just not your preferred ways.

Dump some magma on it.

[Vester]

You know, that's actually pretty true. I mean, I'm sure Toady knew what he was doing when he updated creatures. I mean, something made out of, say, Slade or Adamantium would be unkillable by any normal means anyway.

I think the problem Jiri Petru has with the unkillable FB's isn't that they're in the game at all, but in how often they appear (which is, very often).

You are ignoring the actual reason why certain things are unkillable.

Things like Bronze Colossi are unkillable because of issues with how the game handles damage. That's it. We aren't dealing with giant untouchable demons made out of pure adamantine, we're dealing with things you can ostensibly harm.

You can sever parts off a bronze colossus (or presumably, many of the FBs that aren't "killable"), and even shatter parts of it. The issue is that the game does not deal with stacking damage very well, if at all, so it's seemingly impossible to sever (or otherwise utterly destroy) a part of any creature unless you manage to do it in a single blow. By analogy, if woodcutting worked like that in DF, you'd never be able to chop down a tree unless you somehow forged an axe that could do it in one strike.


The issue isn't that a beast you can't kill through normal means is a bad idea - that's a whole other debate. It also isn't, strictly speaking, a "balance" issue. The issue is that currently, the beasts are like that through unintended quirks and problems within the damage/wound model, and ones that result in problems in other, slightly less-obvious areas of combat as well.


It's helpful to consider why the game is exhibiting certain behavior instead of jumping to conclusions about whether or not it's good or intended - and, in fact, before arguing about it at all.

Actually, I thought the game didn't compound damage at all, which I accept is an overlooked problem (so far, which is the reason why an "inorganic" can end up with multiple red body parts, while not actually being any closer to dying than it was when it started the fight). I just wanted to say that certain things would be literally unkillable by normal means.

[Meanmelter]

You know, that's actually pretty true. I mean, I'm sure Toady knew what he was doing when he updated creatures. I mean, something made out of, say, Slade or Adamantium would be unkillable by any normal means anyway.

I think the problem Jiri Petru has with the unkillable FB's isn't that they're in the game at all, but in how often they appear (which is, very often).

You are ignoring the actual reason why certain things are unkillable.

Things like Bronze Colossi are unkillable because of issues with how the game handles damage. That's it. We aren't dealing with giant untouchable demons made out of pure adamantine, we're dealing with things you can ostensibly harm.

You can sever parts off a bronze colossus (or presumably, many of the FBs that aren't "killable"), and even shatter parts of it. The issue is that the game does not deal with stacking damage very well, if at all, so it's seemingly impossible to sever (or otherwise utterly destroy) a part of any creature unless you manage to do it in a single blow. By analogy, if woodcutting worked like that in DF, you'd never be able to chop down a tree unless you somehow forged an axe that could do it in one strike.


The issue isn't that a beast you can't kill through normal means is a bad idea - that's a whole other debate. It also isn't, strictly speaking, a "balance" issue. The issue is that currently, the beasts are like that through unintended quirks and problems within the damage/wound model, and ones that result in problems in other, slightly less-obvious areas of combat as well.


It's helpful to consider why the game is exhibiting certain behavior instead of jumping to conclusions about whether or not it's good or intended - and, in fact, before arguing about it at all.

Actually, I thought the game didn't compound damage at all, which I accept is an overlooked problem (so far, which is the reason why an "inorganic" can end up with multiple red body parts, while not actually being any closer to dying than it was when it started the fight). I just wanted to say that certain things would be literally unkillable by normal means.

Encasing in ice/magma Always works. I think

[Vester]

You know, that's actually pretty true. I mean, I'm sure Toady knew what he was doing when he updated creatures. I mean, something made out of, say, Slade or Adamantium would be unkillable by any normal means anyway.

I think the problem Jiri Petru has with the unkillable FB's isn't that they're in the game at all, but in how often they appear (which is, very often).

You are ignoring the actual reason why certain things are unkillable.

Things like Bronze Colossi are unkillable because of issues with how the game handles damage. That's it. We aren't dealing with giant untouchable demons made out of pure adamantine, we're dealing with things you can ostensibly harm.

You can sever parts off a bronze colossus (or presumably, many of the FBs that aren't "killable"), and even shatter parts of it. The issue is that the game does not deal with stacking damage very well, if at all, so it's seemingly impossible to sever (or otherwise utterly destroy) a part of any creature unless you manage to do it in a single blow. By analogy, if woodcutting worked like that in DF, you'd never be able to chop down a tree unless you somehow forged an axe that could do it in one strike.


The issue isn't that a beast you can't kill through normal means is a bad idea - that's a whole other debate. It also isn't, strictly speaking, a "balance" issue. The issue is that currently, the beasts are like that through unintended quirks and problems within the damage/wound model, and ones that result in problems in other, slightly less-obvious areas of combat as well.


It's helpful to consider why the game is exhibiting certain behavior instead of jumping to conclusions about whether or not it's good or intended - and, in fact, before arguing about it at all.

Actually, I thought the game didn't compound damage at all, which I accept is an overlooked problem (so far, which is the reason why an "inorganic" can end up with multiple red body parts, while not actually being any closer to dying than it was when it started the fight). I just wanted to say that certain things would be literally unkillable by normal means.

Encasing in ice/magma Always works. I think

Yeah, thankfully.

"The Obsidian Solution. Even works on giant untouchable demons made out of pure adamantine."

[forsaken1111]

You know, that's actually pretty true. I mean, I'm sure Toady knew what he was doing when he updated creatures. I mean, something made out of, say, Slade or Adamantium would be unkillable by any normal means anyway.

I think the problem Jiri Petru has with the unkillable FB's isn't that they're in the game at all, but in how often they appear (which is, very often).

You are ignoring the actual reason why certain things are unkillable.

Things like Bronze Colossi are unkillable because of issues with how the game handles damage. That's it. We aren't dealing with giant untouchable demons made out of pure adamantine, we're dealing with things you can ostensibly harm.

You can sever parts off a bronze colossus (or presumably, many of the FBs that aren't "killable"), and even shatter parts of it. The issue is that the game does not deal with stacking damage very well, if at all, so it's seemingly impossible to sever (or otherwise utterly destroy) a part of any creature unless you manage to do it in a single blow. By analogy, if woodcutting worked like that in DF, you'd never be able to chop down a tree unless you somehow forged an axe that could do it in one strike.


The issue isn't that a beast you can't kill through normal means is a bad idea - that's a whole other debate. It also isn't, strictly speaking, a "balance" issue. The issue is that currently, the beasts are like that through unintended quirks and problems within the damage/wound model, and ones that result in problems in other, slightly less-obvious areas of combat as well.


It's helpful to consider why the game is exhibiting certain behavior instead of jumping to conclusions about whether or not it's good or intended - and, in fact, before arguing about it at all.

Actually, I thought the game didn't compound damage at all, which I accept is an overlooked problem (so far, which is the reason why an "inorganic" can end up with multiple red body parts, while not actually being any closer to dying than it was when it started the fight). I just wanted to say that certain things would be literally unkillable by normal means.

Encasing in ice/magma Always works. I think

Yeah, thankfully.

"The Obsidian Solution. Even works on giant untouchable demons made out of pure adamantine."

I thought the demons evaporated all water within a few tiles of them, making it impossible to actually do magma+water=obsidian.