'Guard' upgrade, Raiders, building armies, and proper factions

   There should be more option with setting a follower to guard a location, here's how i think it should work:
  1. Guard this position. (The current only option where the follower stands in one place)

  2. Patrol this area - Have the follower patrol this tile (example: house, bowling alley, shops) or several tiles (example: Hospital, Mall, fema camp, large power substation)

  3. Set patrol route - Sets a path that the follower will patrol and guard until otherwise told not to (Areas must be visible of course, however it does not need to be cleared)

    This would allow easier control of 'your' property. As another thing, there should be 'raiders' once you gain a large enough amount of followers, you could potentially get raided! Raiders are not always humans - mutants, zombies, and maybe even the leftover military fighting for their own survival!
    
    Adding this could add more late game content (and it kinda makes sense too). You could potentially take over a whole town with an army of followers at your command. At some point out could build robotic minions to help along with replacing bits of your followers with bionics. With necromancy you can have a zombie army as well!
    Once you achieve enough progress, you can found a Faction and name it what you want! Factions can be met beforehand also, but if you stay more local then you'll only meet other Factions in raids or from travelling merchants. You can become friend with other Factions and trade with them, or raid them yourself!
    
    As an alternative, you could simply JOIN a Faction. Or at least be allied with them. However, if you kill/hurt just one member of a Faction (on purpose) it will anger them. However, they don't need to know you just killed their leader's only heir, right? Most NPCs that are alone with not be in a Faction - Faction NPCs like to travel in groups.
    
    This can be expanded and changed to make Cataclysm: Aftermath. This is what happens after the Dark Days, after the survivors regroup, after there is a sense order lain in place. Humanity is rebuilding, but there is still trouble abroad...

That would be a combination of cdda, df fort mode, df adv mode, and would be the best sandbox roguelike.

 Of course, you need to survive long enough to get to that point. It may take ingame years to build a fully productive faction. I don't i mentioned this earlier, but your Faction members can also do things like hunt and scavenge for you, after all, once you have like, 20 followers, they all need food and drink and clothing. It's something you would need to set up potentially, but you could send them on a route to a forest to cut down trees for supplies or hunt for food. It all adds up to a cool late-game civilization type change to the game. Of course, to accurately program all this in without too many bugs and for it to actually work right (most of the time) it would take a LONG time to finish. But boy would i love it if this was all added, or at least some of it...

Yes, it would be tremendous, and my recent thread on “secure” areas had those exact kinds of things in mind, trying to solve how to handle the “fortress” area part when you weren’t there. I hand-waved the “better NPC guards” problems away, but yes, improvements would definitely be needed.

Nice to know other people are thinking the same kinds of things.

making base what we can strategically manage would be interesing, while i think that raiders should be only human a firefight of your followers with raiders or sound of gasoline generators and trees falling on ground will make enought noise to summon zombies if there is horde nearby, they could alslo follow sound of engine of your looting party truck, df system of stockpiles and labors would work fine

but sending teams to automaticaly loot would be useless because of stupid ai or staright op if they just walk outside of reality bubble and spawn some loot when entering it again after some time, i think that we should have some better way of commanding npcs what are walking behimd us, ability to tell them to chop trees or help you haul your loot

but there is one large issue, optimalization

I think we could do npc looting “right” pretty easily. The NPC team would spend most of it’s time not even spawned on the regular map since they’d be travelling to and from a target through areas with no enemies*. Once they start interacting with enemies, we’ll probably do some kind of “fast combat” to resolve it with less load on the game**, then when they start looting they’d actually retrieve items from the map, then head home and drop off their loot.

Easily doesn’t necessarily mean simple, this would be a lot of code, but none of it should be terribly complicated.

*This would use “fast travel” code that we want to write for the player anyway.
** I’m thinking about a situation where you have many NPC teams active at once.

I like it.

fast travel for players? im curious how this will work, maybe corssing a bridge with large car will not be that hard anymore

My only intention for fast travel is to cut down on pointless player interactions. Crossing a bridge with a lot of obstacles wouldn’t be affected because the fast travel code probably wouldn’t know how to move obstacles, just avoid them if possible.
The npc version probably wouldn’t support vehicles at all, since there’s no fallback n if it can’t navigate something.

I would support OP’s suggestions, as having cdda more social in terms of NPC interactions is something a lot of people want for the long time. Factions, quests, reputation system, managing big group of friendly NPCs etc. Sounds like cool future for cdda.

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:6, topic:13456”]I think we could do npc looting “right” pretty easily. The NPC team would spend most of it’s time not even spawned on the regular map since they’d be travelling to and from a target through areas with no enemies*. Once they start interacting with enemies, we’ll probably do some kind of “fast combat” to resolve it with less load on the game**, then when they start looting they’d actually retrieve items from the map, then head home and drop off their loot.

Easily doesn’t necessarily mean simple, this would be a lot of code, but none of it should be terribly complicated.

*This would use “fast travel” code that we want to write for the player anyway.
** I’m thinking about a situation where you have many NPC teams active at once.[/quote]

Maybe make an option to see the battles, too, or even control one of the npcs in the fight. You could also have the npcs call in a radio, saying they found enemies, and actually have the player order them to either engage or sneak past them; Also applying a speaking test there, to see if the minions followers are actually gonna listen to the orders.

About the looting, if there is a way to get info on which items are on the tile, maybe show a list to the player about said items, and have him choose which ones are gonna be taken, taking in consideration followers’ volume and weight capacities(also vehicle storage, too). However, that would come after the npcs checked if the house has enemies or not. Also, what about z-levels? Would the npcs check underground stuff, like labs and the basements on houses?

There is in fact a radio in the game, so that idea should work just fine. If nothing else you could probably tell them to bring back something in a category, such as guns, ammo, weapons and things like that. Or you could do something like the auto-pickup system, where you tell them a more exact description of what to grab.