Messages

5671

Development / Re: Special Forces, underpowered?

« on: April 15, 2011, 05:13:43 PM »

I think people need to remember that special forces have unique modifiers for certain damage outputs and for what they take.  For instance, Fontan's Close Combat Fighters are known to be really giant pincushions (steep reduction in ranged hits/casualty ratio, but able to soak up huge amounts of melee hits from infantry. 

Really?  Fascinating.

5672

BM General Discussion / Re: Titan System Revalation

« on: April 15, 2011, 05:04:38 PM »

I do not want a pool of random players to have access to my messages, if that's what you mean. Some players would abuse of this knowledge, and some players would abuse of this fact to spam reports on people they want to spy upon.

Such abuse would be painfully obvious to all the other players involved, and would certainly result in the culprit being not only banned from ever being a judge again, but probably from the game as well.

5673

BM General Discussion / Re: Titan System Revalation

« on: April 15, 2011, 04:10:18 PM »

I have already made my views known to Tom, but I will summarize them again here:

I believe that a system such as Tom proposes would not, ultimately, be significantly more effective than the Titan system, provided the Titan system makes a few changes.  Some of these changes are already underway—for instance, the Titans can now request feedback/ask questions of either the reporter or the reportee.

Ultimately, I think what is needed is some sort of system whereby a "Titan pool" is maintained, with "potential Titans" selected based on some criterion (perhaps trust medals, for instance, though not necessarily that) and added to the pool.  A certain number of "potential Titans" would be active each month (or quarter, or whatever).  These would be determined based on a rating system that allows players to state whether they feel a particular Titan decision was fair—active Titans rated low would be returned to the pool, replaced by higher-rated or new members of the pool.

This would allow a much greater fraction of the playerbase to understand the Titan system, and thereby give them greater investment in both the Titan system and the game itself.

5674

BM General Discussion / Re: Medals what whatnot

« on: April 15, 2011, 02:40:23 PM »

Huh? What do you mean? I've never had any problem giving medals to realm-mates.

You need more medals-to-give to be able to give them to realm-mates than you do to be able to give them to people of other realms.

5675

Helpline / Re: Pick up volounteers

« on: April 15, 2011, 02:29:39 PM »

well I said "a region in a bad shape", and with that I mean all those region freshly taken and looted like hell, where lords can't hold court at all but can just sit there and help as they can, waiting for the peasants to cool down. That's exactly when a hero lord twiddle his thumbs. As I said, it's not a tragedy, but sometimes it can still lead to problems.

That's exactly the kind of situation where it doesn't matter much who you appoint as lord, because what you need to do is sit half your army in that region doing (normal!) police and civil work, and your bureaucrats doing survey administration, until it recovers enough loyalty to hold court.

5676

Dwilight / Re: Averoth OOC conflicts with GM

« on: April 15, 2011, 02:27:38 PM »

Not all of them were banned. About 5 remain, and they are all priests, wandering around the continent (which remains suspicious to me: 5 brand new characters all playing priests?).

No, that lot got locked too.  The religion went belly-up yesterday due to either lack of priests or lack of temples.

5677

Development / Re: Feature Request: Transfer Gold to Nobles in the Same Region

« on: April 15, 2011, 03:28:52 AM »

Ah...Loren, are you trying to make a really lame joke here?

5678

Feature Requests / Re: More realistic long-distance travel

« on: April 14, 2011, 07:30:03 PM »

It's difficult to train on board a ship.  We're not talking a nice modern cruise ship here; there might be room for 2-3 people to spar at a time on deck, but only when nothing important is going on.

5679

Dwilight / Re: Barca

« on: April 14, 2011, 07:11:41 PM »

Then Garret came back as a daimon or something and Arden thought that was probably punishment enough. 

He has quite consistently maintained that he is human.  Indeed, no character played by a regular player is anything but human. 

(Except in Sirion, or Outer Tilog. But they're another story.)

5680

Dwilight / Re: Averoth OOC conflicts with GM

« on: April 14, 2011, 06:46:37 PM »

Hold on there. The only way you would know about Titan reports for sure is if you were a Titan or you made the report yourself.

Or if he was told by someone who knew for one of those reasons.

Nor is it right to link using family gold with getting locked as multi-accounting by implying that was the reason half the realm got locked.

As far as I know using family gold was not against the rules. As far as I know the effects of how family gold requests was or was not intended to happen is none of the players' concern.

This bears noting, with all the recent kefuffle about family gold.

There is nothing wrong with using family gold.  However, it is not, and was never, meant to be possible to drain your family coffers dry.  It was certainly never meant for family gold to be, essentially, an endlessly renewing source of money for people willing to use it as such.  Moreover, it was never intended for family gold to be a regular source of gold. It's meant for emergencies only.

I should also say, all that is intended to apply to requesting family assistance, and visiting your family home and having your aunt give you gold.  Options available to wealthier families, such as investments, are not and should not be subject to the same limits—because they are limited by the fact that you do have to be rather wealthy to use them.  If you have someone in your realm who's willing to drain his family's 10K family gold down to 2K by investing in every region multiple times, that's completely different than using a dozen relatively new accounts to drain their family coffers completely dry by visiting their family 6 times a day.

If the multi-a/cs were locked it was because they were multi-a/cs. Not because of family gold. As for this "Cult of Orden" religion, I've never heard of it. Nor can you create a religion in secret. My character was there from the beginning and was the longest remaining in Ordenstaat. I would probably be the one to know the fullest details of Ordenstaat.

The religion was founded on the last day Ordenstaat held Rettleville, by its ruler/duke.  I know through purely OOC means that it had no RP basis, nothing written on any of its boards, and no intention of actually attempting to convert any nobles to its worship—or even talk to them if they tried to join.  Its sole purpose was to be a vehicle for the recreation of Ordenstaat by a group that was plainly either OOC friends or one multicheater.  They were eventually all locked as multis.

To call it a loophole after the fact is WRONG as it implies players should know how game mechanics are intended to be applied when players would simply just work within the game mechanics. A bug is a different thing.

That's true, but not complete.  It should be pretty obvious to anyone who actually sits down and thinks about it for more than a second that family gold was never intended to be a bottomless source of gold, and that the limits put on it originally (you can only ask for family assistance when you're low on gold, your aunt will only give you gold when you're low on gold) were never intended to be easily bypassable by sending the gold away or dropping it in a guild so you could just go get more.

It has occurred to me that you may be talking about the period when my character had already left. The salient points would still remain.

As I noted, I believe this was, in fact, the case.

5681

Feature Requests / Re: More realistic long-distance travel

« on: April 14, 2011, 05:28:10 PM »

This is referring to travel that takes more than 2 turns to complete, primarily sea routes on Dwilight. The last few hours/miles and the first/few hours/miles of each journey would occur using the current system.

I find it strange that one has full access to guild/temple treasuries while traveling. Wouldn't it be more realistic to remove these options?
I would like to see something like a tournament-return page, where options are fairly limited.

For most traveling, the idea is that you stop at the guildhouse/temple on your way out of town.

If we were to restrict it, it wouldn't be with a tournament-return type page, but rather a simple "You cannot do this while traveling"-style error message.

And on the other side of things, I would like for sea travel to be faster. At the very least, I would like the option to purchase passage on a faster ship. Also, it seems less realistic to me for sea travel to be slower for larger units. A unit of 10 men should travel at the same speed as one containing 50, and a trader with 2 caravans should travel close to the same speed as a trader with 12 caravans.

Allowing additional options for noble travel is something I (at least) have been considering for a while, and sea travel is the place where it seems to make the most sense.

However, it's probably another thing that's going to have to wait until more of the stuff further up on the TODO list is done, since it's a relatively minor change for realism's sake, that will actually require quite a bit of extra code.

5682

Feature Requests / Re: Terrain type training

« on: April 14, 2011, 05:22:58 PM »

This is not a bad idea, but I'm afraid that the payoff for the effort involved is almost certainly not worth it at this point in time.  Once some of the more important things have been done, it might be worth revisiting.

5683

Helpline / Re: Retirement

« on: April 14, 2011, 12:42:42 PM »

"Retire" is the IG way of saying "delete character."

When you've deleted something, can you usually get it back?

5684

Other Games / Re: Dwarf Fortress Succession Fort—Angnomal, "Redstaff"

« on: April 13, 2011, 09:56:43 PM »

1 Limestone, 1051
Autumn has come.

The end of summer was a hot, lazy time.  Not that we didn't get a lot done, but I suppose the initial stages where every little thing is an accomplishment, simply because it's the first, are past now.  We've got all our major stockpiles laid out now.  The workshop level is about half dug, and most of the magma channels are prepared, though still only the first one is filled.  I have ordered the collection of sand for a magma furnace that is now ready and waiting at the western end of the channel.

Telrunya is back out hunting again, now that he's got some more bolts (it's apparently fiendishly difficult for Kivish, the carpenter and bone carver, to get his work done while trying to manhandle the huge stack of giant moose cow bones in his workshop...I suggested that he only bring one bone to the workshop at a time, and I swear, the guy looked at me like I'd grown pointy ears).

The dining room now has a dozen tables and chairs in it, and the dormitory will shortly have a dozen beds (once Kivish is done with the bones and can finish making them...).

We did have a little trouble with one of the yak bulls getting upset that the llama was crowding it.  Both the yak bulls have now been moved to their own separate pastures, and we've had no more trouble from them.

I'm looking forward to the arrival of the caravan from the Mountainhome, and our liaison, later in the fall.  I hope we will be able to produce enough goods here by the time they arrive to trade for all that we need.

5685

Other Games / Re: Dwarf Fortress Succession Fort—Angnomal, "Redstaff"

« on: April 13, 2011, 09:20:38 PM »

1st Galena, 1051
The remainder of the month of Malachite was relatively uneventful.  There have been no more pandaman sightings.  Medtob, the miller, was able to smelt two iron bars from the hematite we mined.  We finished mining out the rest of the initially-designated storage area (though I strongly suspect we will need to dig out more to the west as our storage needs increase).  You can see the results of our work in this sketch.  I have also included the crafts that Bembul "Alpha", our bookkeeper, made, in their stockpile there on the right.



We have begun digging out the rest of the main workshop level directly below.  You can also see here the iron bars that have been smelted thus far.



Nothing much else to report just now.  I will update this journal no later than the beginning of Limestone.