@Seravy, just a question.  I see that Slitherine has continued to work on MoM and has released a 'modern' version that includes a lot of graphical updates as well as hex maps and a few other things.  Just wondered if you were involved with that at all, and if they'd included your improvements to the mechanics?  Because if they just did a graphical update to the original game, it's just going to be prettier but have all of the old game-breaking mechanical issues.

Edited: See signup post below or here: https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid830432

Original post below.

-------

I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about how I’m sort of not crazy about the range of PB games that get launched lately. They almost exclusively fall into one of two buckets:

1. Semi-mirrored ancient starts with a balance mod
2. Pure random ancient starts with a balance mod


It’s sort of a shame that more elaborate setups have gone by the wayside  - either later era or variants. So I’m going to toss one out there and sort of gauge interest. This isn’t necessarily a signup thread (yet) as I don’t really have the bandwidth yet to play one of these solo, although I would happily team with someone. But I’m curious if there’s interest in a Variant Pitboss - either now or in a few months when another game or two ends. It can still be somewhat competitive, but with some sort of special ruleset borrowed from a previous RB Adventure/Epic/SG. The goal here would be a serious attempt to play out and showcase the variant first and winning second, but by all means try to win.

As it happens, I have a wild one in mind.

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/civ/c4tourney/adv19.html

Mao’s Muse

This was an extremely cool Adventure from ages ago with a very seemingly simple premise.

Quote:Scenario Rules: You may select one extra starting tech. You may choose any technology; however, you will not receive any "first to" bonus as the tech is NOT discovered. (For example, Liberalism will not grant an additional free technology.)

I've been casually watching the World Chess Championship, though I'm several games behind the current result (I've alread been spoiled on results so no worries there), so I'm going to use Ding Liren being invited to play due to Magnus Carlsen backing out as a close enough analogy to me getting to play here due to mackoti finding himself unable to play.  Though I mean no insult to Mr. Liren by my self comparison.  So I think something chess-related for a naming theme.  Top FIDE ranking individuals, or past World Champions, or something along those lines.  Named openings perhaps?

As for the game itself, lately I'm less about "playing to win" and more about exploring different ways of playing.  Not blazing any new ground or looking for anything radically different, but just stretching my own limitations and looking for new ways to think about the game.  I think random games fit in nicely with that since they force you to adapt to a new situation and less into the well-treaded ground of the usual RB opener.

In any case, I'm looking forward to a new challenge.

*insert game commentary*

Blue & Green, a tutorial/puzzle/challenge map (Minimal, Phantasm)

(current CoM version as of today is 1.04.07)

       

You are Long Wang, a disciple of the archmage Sapher. You have studied your master's ways,
(https://www.youtube.com/@IMSapher)
but before you are unleashed upon the Planes, you must pass a series of tests in a simulator.

The difficulty setting is Phantasm, and the world size is Minimal.
Expect to see your opponents' doom stacks as early as turn 15.
It will be very hard to compete economically, and military rush strategies will find that
most enemy cities are protected with the deadly Fortress Lightning.

However, the map allegedly contains all the resources necessary for you to succeed.

* * *

You are furnished with the unremarkable race of Orcs.

Your magical knowledge is broad but shallow. You have a basic understanding of
four Magical Schools: Blue, Red, Black, and Green; but you have not progressed very far in any of them.

You start with the spells of Confusion, Warp Creature, and Life Drain, making you good at
attacking the enemy's Resistance.

You hold an impressive array of Retorts: Alchemy, Archmage, Astrologer, and Channeler.


   

It is turn 1, and your officers have gathered to discuss the plan for that all-important initial phase.

The captain of the 1st Swordsmen wants to escort the settler south;
but the captain of the 2nd Swordsmen argues they should instead scout east.

To the north and west lays the great swamp of Bong Dang. Exploring
efficiently in that direction will take units that can traverse swamps better than foot soldiers.

The officers turn to you for a decision.

* * *

Hints (spoilerish)

1

With AI survivor going on and maybe some people wanting to play some civ 4 was seeing if there is any interest from people who have played either no multiplayer or only a couple of games and have never done well. Experienced players feel free to sign up as dedicated lurkers!

I've had success making sure everyone gets a dedicated lurker in the past so you will have someone to help you out.

Mod will be CtH, which is designed to be "Close to Home". IE fixes a lot of major issues, but is pretty easy to transition from base.
https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...?tid=10893

Please note this is a long term commitment of multiple months requiring you to play a turn every day. We all realize life happens and when it does we just ask you post and ask for an extension.

Signups:
Xist10
Aetryn
Greenline
Bing

Ded Lurkers:
SD
Mjmd
Tarkeel

Map Maker:
Krill


Voting Spreadsheet
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...edit#gid=0

Etiquette thread:
http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=7311

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress, a game that has been widely regarded as an impenetrable complex mess that requires reading doorstopper thick technical manuals to even get started in, and to learn to read a language of ascii graphics. A game where winning is impossible, so losing in a big messy way is the only way to have fun.

Now, that was a couple of years ago, now with the premium version offering sprite graphics, and the ability to retire a fortress rather than abandoning it to ruin added quite a few years ago, the game has become a lot more approachable. In fact, the basics - building a trap corridor, some walls, some agriculture and food processing - are very easy to learn.

So what is this game, you might wonder, beyond the old legends and the "losing is fun" motto? It's a sandbox. Sure there is a "goal", or rather possibility, of elevating a tiny expedition's hamlet into a mighty mountainhome, but that doesn't need to be. Not every dwarven city has to become the capital of the civilization after all. Some can be industrial hubs, military outposts to launch raids at the nearby goblins from, agricultural enterprises, fishing villages, and so on.

This is reinforced by the settings menu added in v50. Previously you had to deal with .ini files to customize your game. Now it's out there, explicitly in the menu, changeable even mid-game. And even before, there were ways to customize the world generation to be either more scary, tough, and "fun", or serene and peaceful, or just less of a hassle in general.

And that's what I have been doing. Just over 250 hours on the steam clock, and I don't know how much in the previous 0.47 version, and I haven't seen a single necromancer, vampire, werebeast, or night creature. They just don't interest me, and the worlds had plenty to offer to keep me entertained. And yeah, some mods, mostly to prevent sterile animals. and make leather scale better with creature size. After all the game is a little odd, rough, and buggy in places.

But enough introduction, let's get to the fortress proper, my "current" fortress. See, I've been reading on industries before, and did pre-steam some glass, some ceramic industries, enough to buy out whole caravans even, train legendary glassmakers, potters, gem cutters, but it wasn't quite as tantalizing as the prospect of taming wild beasts that can be used both in fortress defense and meat/bone industries.

This is the purpose of my fortress, "Beastprison". Quite an explicit fortress name right? Just for history's sake here it is in ASCII:


Annoyingly, the square ascii tileset isn't cooperating with the UI, so we have this stretched mess to work out, but the basics are quite visible.

We settled in a tropical freshwater swamp, at the intersection of two rivers. Here we founded a fort, protected by a moat to the west with a trap-filled corridor guarding the only access, and the other two approaches sealable with bridges, one just above a waterfall.. The northern approach has a long corridor because that's where the goblins tend to come from, as well as the undead. We had quite the mess on our hands in the first two years.

Now the central building has a roof, that's just not visible as we are looking at one z-level "slice" of the map, so we really have a "fort", not just a dinky hole in the ground. But of course we are dwarves, and our stairs go down deep. However first I'd like to mention our indoor farm plot on the left side, and a stone stockpile and workshop to the right. 

That's hard to find right? Well, after those 250 hours on the graphics version even my eyes have trouble getting the building outlines right, so let's switch over.


Better, right? Now it's very shrunk down, but the coal in the stone stockpile, the glass furnace, the smelter, the forge, the farmer's workshop, loom, and clothier's shop are visible now. The bridges look like bridges, and the moat looks like a moat. This time the UI is also visible, not cropped out so we see that it's currently late spring of 152, our third year in this place. We have 53 dwarves, most of them content at least, with one dipping into negative thoughts. Can't help it I guess, we had a rough start.

A little about our indoor garden is that despite being fully covered up, surface plants grow perfectly well in here. In fact if we go down an "elevation level"...

...we see some dead creepy crawler vermin, and pineapples grown in our right row. The left has sweet potatoes, perfectly good plants on their own right. Both are surface crops, but once a tile is exposed to sunlight, it'll always be counted as surface. The top indoor plantations are for fabric plants, namely cotton, kenaf, and rope reeds. Not too much, don't want to overload our stockpiles and our CPU, just enough to keep us clothed, alongside the stuff we import, one way or another.

Going down an elevation level has kind of spoiled that this fort is indeed, very vertical, and as any fortress I've ran, it's full of side projects. While there is plenty of fuel to mine out and use, as well as forests to clear cut before the elves start suggesting tree-felling quotas, I much prefer to use magma instead, saving the dwarfpower for more interesting projects. The walls are sand, which are an endless source of raw materials for glass. As long as we have enough power, which magma will provide, we can produce an endless amount of glass. Pretty neat.



A level below is a layer of clay, working the same way for pottery. Not fire clay, but when it comes to crafts for export, regular earthenware works just fine enough. This layer has our dormitory, a makeshift dining hall with green glass tables, kitchen, still for brewing the potatoes into alcohol, food stockpiles, trading depot to the right, central meeting hall doubling as our miner guild, where dwarves train pickaxe use, grate-covered indoor water source fed by the aquifer layer below, a hospital with many glass tables, and oddest of all, a tree farm to the north.

The tree farms have been side-projects that none of my forts survived long enough to realize, as they are simply large multiple elevation spanning rooms where trees can grow. Underground mushroom trees to be exact. I could also do the same thing as with the farm plot, of roofing over an open-air pit for an underground surface-tree farm plot if I wanted to, but right now I have more than enough wood, and fruits don't yet interest me. Maybe another fortress if you guys want to see!


Below the quarry area repurposed into dining hall, gem storage, stoneworker area and peafowl pen, with two more tree farm areas planned. The rock being irrigated from the aquifer above (while not being constantly underwater) is a small engineering feat, with the muddy tunnel used to access and originally build the "sprinkler" system that stores and releases the water. Better yet it's more excavated rock salt, which is in high demand for it's relative light weight.
There is also our future forging area, with pits for magma planned, but since we do have a lot of fuel to burn through it's not super high priority.


Then we have bedrooms, only 22, forcing most of our dwarves to share the dormitory and even sleep in the hospital, this needs to be expanded soon.


Then we have our dog and honey badger pens. The latter are our first "beasts", meaning not domesticated animals, that we managed to "imprison", and train into something. There is a tunnel leading to the two abovementioned tree farms' floor as well as every workshop we could need for meat processing and related industries: Butcher, Tanner, Leatherworker, craftsdwarf for bones, and finally soap maker.


A bit below is our temple grounds, and our soon-to-be excavated hunter's guildhall. The latter's size is due to the "room" value requirements, 2000[☼ total, and that can go up to 10000☼ when the guild requests a grand guildhall.


Then we have our goblin execution chamber as well as a room for expanding the prison, as well as a special stairwell,


The top of the special stairwell covered by a - currently retracted - drawbridge and having a water reservoir, drawing water from the aquifer as well as the underground lake, the glass door preventing water from flooding the fortress, although I do want to wall it up properly. The drawbridges are linked - via quantum entanglement or something similar - to a single lever, allowing an airlock system to work without any lag.


and finally far below, our magma works, to turn it into obsidian that is essentially infinite stone. It's also worth noting that magma in minecarts is exempt from being turned into obsidian, so as soon as I carve out the obsidian, I can obtain minecarts filled with lava. I guess filled minecarts are waterproof in a way. Iron, steel, and nickel minecarts are also magma-proof in dwarf fortress, and will never melt. Dwarves can carry magma minecarts in their hands, although wooden wheelbarrows can eventually disintegrate from the heat. This game is a little "weird" in this sense. The door allows dwarves to enter once the coast is clear, but also prevents stray spillover. A level below is a glass pump (which is also magma-safe) that takes directly from the magma sea below through a magma-proof floor grate.

To sum it up, our dwarves have been busy, and have plenty of ambition for the future! Stay tuned to see what else they've been working on in the past years, the world around us, and the dwarves themselves.

(March 30th, 2023, 13:51)Charriu Wrote: So Superdeath and me are both gone over Easter 8th - 12.th and 7th - 11th.

I can post plans for any global lurker to follow. Superdeath, do you have anybody, who can take over?
And is there anyone else gone over Easter. If yes we could just pause the game I think

(April 7th, 2023, 01:48)Charriu Wrote: In a few hours I'm off. I left instructions as planned for any global lurker to follow. The basically don't have to decide anything, so any spoiled lurker can play my turns. The instructions last until T71, which is when I'm probably back home again.
I will be still available via phone in discord or here in case there are any questions.

Hello
being out of (even somewhat successful) pitbosses I felt inspired by T-Hawk's and Kylearan's exploits in Diablo II to port the concept to Path of Exile.

So the basic idea is to solo play one character of each (base) class, progressing through the campaign at the same pace, and sharing the loot. As I reported elsewhere, I found the Ruthless mode quite fun, and it seems to be just what's needed to make the concept interesting through the acts. The new league that starts tomorrow seems like a good a time as any to get it rolling

Rules:

• Leauge: Crucible (?) Ruthless SSF HC. go slow.
  
• In case of one character unfortunately dying during act 1, I reserve the right to let a new exile wash ashore
  
• Every living character must have finished the current act before any starts the next one. The exception is the scion, who will only run acts 1-3 after all other characters have finished act 3, as Innocence intended
  
• After all characters have finished an act they can exchange items before starting the next one. The scion can help herself at leisure during acts 1-3. Need to organize the stash somehow to make this work (I'm not sure if I own 7 individual Premium Tabs), but it should be doable.
  
• If we make it past Kitava, we can make up new rules.
  
• I don't care for full clears, but overleveling is good in Ruthless
  

No players.