So, I’ve been reading a few DF stories and such, and have been thinking about it in relation to Stonehearth. Specifically, what features from DF would be cool to, ah, improve ( ) for SH…
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World history: When you make a game of DF, you can specify the age of the world etc, and the game essentially plays itself for a while whilst it is generated. Thus, your poor dwarves enter a world where there already exist dragons with personalised histories from exterminating procedurally-generated, off-screen NPC civilisations, settlements & characters.
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Stupidly high max stats: In DF, you are superhuman (well, super-dwarven) when you get, say, Strength=5, or Toughness=5, etc. But it’s possible, if you stay alive, to go much, much higher than that. Allowing this would make for quite a bit of fun when it comes to legendary characters in our settlements.
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Diplomacy & trade: With off-screen NPC settlements, I mean. Fairly self-explanatory.
A final idea, related somewhat to this. Now, in regular Stonehearth, the plan is for the world to be essentially endless and procedurally generated, rather like Minecraft. However… what about… well, let’s call it Campaign Mode. In Campaign Mode, you create a world like normal, but one which is of a fixed size, and with fairly realistic terrain distribution (ie, no polar regions at the equator). You then plop your settlers down somewhere on this world, much like you do when making a world in DF (although in DF, the game picks your settlement location for you, and doesn’t let you stray beyond that area).
Stonehearth could then save the game in such a way that you can either return to your same settlement - or start a new one on the same world, and even visit your old one. The point here is to allow for a lot more immersion and world-building, which is rather more limited on maps without any limits to them.