So there’s about a square meter of space per tile, right? And the way pits currently work is that you’re able have separate pits right next to each other, but with the amount of dirt they’d have between them as a wall in order to make the happen it’s hard to think that thin little wall is going to stand the test of time or rain, much less the forces involved in the digging of a pit. Sooner or later you’re going to have a single rectangular pit instead of two circular ones whether you like it or not.
So I propose this: Like how water currently is, a “Pit” type tile should behave in a similar manner and all tiles of this type should be connected. A shallow pit wouldn’t incur much aside from a movement penalty, but move from normal terrain to a deep pit and you’re in for a bit of a fall unless you can mitigate it like putting down a ladder or rope first, or using a shallow pit before going into a deep pit, or by having certain traits or CBMs
It goes without saying that moving from deep pit to deep pit if it were to be changed like this shouldn’t slow you down or hurt you due to it all being one big hole, so if you actually wanted to have successive pit traps to damage the horde you’ve lured you’re going to have to separate them by a tile each. Using a plank to cross it shouldn’t work either unless two normal terrain tiles are next to the tile being planked. Additionally, being in a deep pit tile should block sight out of it except for the edge, and anything outside of it shoulldn’t be able to see much into it unless it stood at the edge(unless you plan to use some sort of pythagorian formula to calculate how big the pit must be in order to see more than one tile out of it if you were standing in the middle).
It all depends on what the dimensions of the pits are. Step one is determine what different useful sizes of pit to have, then consider the implications. If a pit is 1mx1mx1m, then yes it will join to adjacent pits of the same size, but if it’s only 500cm across or so thrre’s another 500cm in between adjacent pits, do they’d likely survive.
I’ll assume the 500cm is a typo and you meant 50cm, since a meter is 100cm. Since pits are capable of damaging even the larger enemies it stands to reason that the pit is either:
Large enough for them to actually fall in and hurt themselves doing so.
Or
Large enough for a limb to get snagged and have the creature trip forward and end up hurting the limb and potentially something else.
It is also observed that every entity that gets stuck in pits seem to roll for or spend time climbing out, so it can be assumed that they’re actually trapped by the pit completely enough for them to need to climb out(possibly only a code/engine limitation, in which case larger creatures should almost ignore pits). Taking all this into account it’s hard to imagine the pit being anything less than a meter squared, and should actually be larger if it is to have any effect on larger creatures(bigger than “cow-sized”, if the game’s sizing system is anything to go by) apart from slowing them down.
I also considered that the pit might actually be deeper than 1m, perhaps 2m deep, since a z-level seems to be around 2.5-3m, and that’s why it hurts even the larger things. Even so, a certain width is required for things not to simply run across them, hence the reason that adjacent pits would just join together into a single pit sooner or later.
I understand what you mean, but I also see the problem we currently have… If one tile would be a square meter, we have:
walls with a thickness of 1 meter,
a lot of space to run between Zombies (as there’s only one monster per tile),
long cars,
very short alligators,
a lovely way to stack 1 cubic meter of junk on a tile and still be able to stand on it,
quantum storage, as it’s somehow possible to store up to 8 cubic meter of stuff in a dresser.
I imagined pits always as a small indent in the ground; a shallow pit as 10 to 20 cm (~5-10 inches) deep and a pit about half a meter (with about 40 cm diameter). So, more like “Large enough for a limb to get snagged”.
As someone who dug some holes for trees to plant in (and just for fun, too) I can tell you, getting stuck in a hole of half a meter depth takes quite some time to get out (and stepping into one hurts too).
A hole doesn’t need to be large enough to swallow a creature to hurt it (although, you probably wouldn’t go blind if that’s the case). You can sprain an ankle if you step onto a collapsed mouse hole/passage, even though your feet are (usally) larger than the hole.
So, from a game perspective, I would say, it’s reasonable enough that two (or more) pits can coexist next to each other, although it’s a bit wonky.