Please dont take my words as it was rant or whining, I am just only sharing my feelings about the game. I know that there will be a point to continue playing when you have everything in your fortress, but its probably many months or even years? away.
Anyone can give me some advice that what should I do when I have a very powerful fortress already? What are you doing when you have everything what is possible in the newest version? I've already built 2 fortresses in 2 very different biomes, and both of them are huge already.
[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: arthos ]
Examples:
* Glacier map, no magma.
* Learn how to mod the game by editing the raws. A lot of fun stuff you can do there.
* Try to build yourself the Great Lighthouse of Dwarfexandria by building a huge tower by the ocean.
* See how long you can last by building your fortress on top of a goblin city.
* Try to carve out Moria from Lord of the Rings, complete with narrow bridge over a 10-level-deep cavern and secret entrance into a cliff face. Bonus points by naming your head dwarf "Gimli".
* Get some experience in creative writing by making a journal for one of your more fun forts and posting it online here. Or, join succession games, which are always a lot of fun.
[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Tormy ]
[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Tormy ]
quote:
Originally posted by arthos:
<STRONG>There are no goals in the game, I have a feeling when my fortress is big enough, that I am playing in "sandbox" mode. </STRONG>
The goal, as I understand it, is to see how long you can survive. Then when you're wiped out or you abandon, you should be able to go through in Adventure mode as a dwarf and reclaim all your masterpiece steel weapon and armor - you did make masterpiece steel weapons and armor, didn't you?
EDIT: When you get attacked by a bronze colossus or dragon, send your "too powerful" marks dwarves out to stop them.
:D
[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: ravensword227 ]
quote:
Originally posted by arthos:
<STRONG>There are no goals in the game, I have a feeling when my fortress is big enough, that I am playing in "sandbox" mode.</STRONG>
quote:
Originally posted by Death Dragon:
<STRONG>
That's how I feel about the new version.</STRONG>
But what was versions before this? They were sandboxes too, but there weren't too much difference between them. It was always the same, river, chasm, magma, pits and adamantine. There was every medal in every fortress, cliff-face was always the same too.
Now? You tell me.
quote:
Originally posted by Tracker:
<STRONG>It's how I've always really felt about the game, but I still have fun.</STRONG>
Agreed.
[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Baneslave ]
I liked hitting the river, building a farm so I didn't die, then the chasm, then the magma... it all felt very goal oriented.
Maybe if there is more outside world interaction, like being sieged more, more advanced alliances or something, the game would feel like it had more of a purpose again. I think it needs some end-game things that are very hard to achieve, like defending against a dragon attack, or making legendary items and gaining a very successful economy.
Solution: Find a challenging start location, or continue searching your current one till you find something nasty underground. My super river creatures of dwarven doom have whittled away half my fort last night. And there I was thinking that river would be a cakewalk on my way to the chasm! Good fun though.
Another thing is that the "dig deeper" feeling is completely lost: you can dig stairs straight down to the bottom of the playable area in no time, and 1- there's nothing there most of the time except an artificial limit, and 2- it's not deep at all.
Toady warned us that the new version would be less playable overall than the last one, until he implements new stuff, but we can still discuss how the game could be made more fun.
Personally I think that you should be able to dig down indefinitely (but rock could get harder and harder as you reach pure magmatic stone eventually); and there should always be something to find down there. Between underground rivers, cave systems, ancient mines, underground (friendly or hostile) civilisations, magma, demons, spirits of the deep, Cthulu and his friends, or whatever else, there should be something at almost every location. This is a fantasy world, after all, and most of all it's a game, i.e. supposed to be fun. Now, we might want to keep a few safe-ish locations so that people who actually like to play sandbox can get a safe place to play.
Also digging infinitely down is bad for a number of reasons. There's insane amounts of space as is, this would kill anybodies fps after a while, it'd still be pointless, etc.
In the meantime, personally I'd recommend the following:
Quick start in a potentially fun area, use reveal.exe, go to the unit list to check what sort of monsters you can expect, end-process close, restart for real.
This way you can be fairly certain of danger in your fortress without having to know where exactly it is, the only thing you won't know for sure without looking around the map w\ reveal is if you've pits. Also, you don't have to look around and unwittingly remember where you're good ores are; unless you want to.
Furthermore(!); not sure about this but I think the exact location of mountain features gets generated upon embark, so if you end process after reveal and then restart you may not even be guaranteed the cave features will be in the exact same place, only that they'll be there. (I think features are tied to local tiles, but where within those local tiles seems random.)
quote:
Originally posted by Funkadelic Jive Turkey:
<STRONG>Furthermore(!); not sure about this but I think the exact location of mountain features gets generated upon embark, so if you end process after reveal and then restart you may not even be guaranteed the cave features will be in the exact same place, only that they'll be there. (I think features are tied to local tiles, but where within those local tiles seems random.)</STRONG>
Once again, I'm not positive about this though.
quote:
Originally posted by Teldin:
<STRONG>* Try to carve out Moria from Lord of the Rings, complete with narrow bridge over a 10-level-deep cavern and secret entrance into a cliff face. Bonus points by naming your head dwarf "Gimli".</STRONG>
Gimli? Gimli came in as an Adventurer after Moria was already Too Deeped. I think it's Durin the Deathless you're talking about, or Balin, lord of Khazad-dûm in Reclaim Mode.
For example...
In a freshly-generated world, a civ might not have the resources to send out many supplies to its fortresses. Your starting locations might be limited in distance from the Mountainhomes, as you don't have the supplies to build outposts further away. But as you build more functioning fortresses, you have the resources to found forts in more and more interesting areas. Perhaps eventually have the player directly control a siege on a goblin tower.
quote:
Originally posted by JT:
<STRONG>If you're worried about the game's future, a trip through the Core features and the Future of the Fortress development pages should set your fears to rest. Right now, you're sandboxed. Eventually, you'll be able to change the world.</STRONG>
This is what I told to my bro also. :)
The problem is that he is VERY impatient. I think that hes playing more DF than me. Its quite funny actually. When I showed him the game, he was like "omg what is this crap". 1 day later he was playing like a madman. :D
1) Build in terrifying locales. More action = more fun anyways.
2) Don't use cheap tricks. In the previous version, I found that drawbridges, traps, and "cheap" doors made things too easy, and played without them. I also played without intentional floods to wipe out invading forces.
3) Make more soldiers! My goal was to make as massive of a military as possible. Maintaining a military of 25% of your troops is easy; maintaining 50% is seriously difficult. Sure, you think it's easy, until your legendary engraver punches your one brewer in the head AND IT EXPLODES and you don't have a backup. If you savescum, this isn't challenging; if you don't, occasionally crappy stuff will happen, and you'll get some adrenaline.
The thing to remember: this isn't an RTS. This is a roleplaying game. If you min-max, it will be easy. If you make an effort to do it your way, it will be hard-- but possible. Tell the elves to fuck off. Drown all your prisoners. Build a tower to heaven-- with a waterfall. There's a reason that they say that losing is fun. It's because winning isn't fun-- if it's even possible. Play to your principles, and not towards some boring ultra-efficiency, and the game is no longer easy.
quote:
Originally posted by Nil Eyeglazed:
<STRONG>It's because winning isn't fun-- if it's even possible. Play to your principles, and not towards some boring ultra-efficiency, and the game is no longer easy.</STRONG>
Bosh. Exercises in maximizing efficiency make for very interesting intellectual challenges. It's easy to produce enough food to feed your fortress, so just aiming for subsistence is not setting the challenge bar very high. Producing enough food to feed your fortress a thousand, ten thousand times over? That's a much more involved task.
In the old version, I was constantly afraid of digging a little deeper. What if I hit the chasm when I'm not ready for it? What if I get swarmed by magma men when I open up the magma? When am I going to be ready for the pits? But there was always better stuff, so I was always going forward.
I don't consider DF as it stands to be a sandbox type game. It would be more of a sandbox if someone handed the collective forum a map that had everything available to build with. "Whoops this map has no sand" ruins that effect for me. "Okay I've got a big military now where's that endgame, whoops I don't have one" is the same. I'm not afraid of losing now like I used to be, I'm afraid of NOT losing.
I very much liked Rollercoaster Tycoon, but I had to stop playing its sandbox mode because it made me crazy (and ate up weeks at a time). I enjoyed its scenarios much more, they seemed more fun, they had a distinct goal and a distinct end condition, and they were *balanced* at least a little. Setting your own goals is very hard to balance, and I myself don't feel as accomplished when I complete my own goals as when I complete someone else's.
Maybe we need some organized competitions.
quote:
Originally posted by Sowelu:
<STRONG>I don't like that, in the twenty fortresses I've tried reveal.exe on, I haven't found the endgame area a single time. Maybe I'm unlucky.In the old version, I was constantly afraid of digging a little deeper. What if I hit the chasm when I'm not ready for it? What if I get swarmed by magma men when I open up the magma? When am I going to be ready for the pits? But there was always better stuff, so I was always going forward.
I don't consider DF as it stands to be a sandbox type game. It would be more of a sandbox if someone handed the collective forum a map that had everything available to build with. "Whoops this map has no sand" ruins that effect for me. "Okay I've got a big military now where's that endgame, whoops I don't have one" is the same. I'm not afraid of losing now like I used to be, I'm afraid of NOT losing.
I very much liked Rollercoaster Tycoon, but I had to stop playing its sandbox mode because it made me crazy (and ate up weeks at a time). I enjoyed its scenarios much more, they seemed more fun, they had a distinct goal and a distinct end condition, and they were *balanced* at least a little. Setting your own goals is very hard to balance, and I myself don't feel as accomplished when I complete my own goals as when I complete someone else's.
Maybe we need some organized competitions.</STRONG>
(possibly-)Guaranteed way to find the endgame area: Create a fortress on a mountain tile (must have some other biome or you won't be able to start in the area) at the maximum size, scroll down to the bottom level, designate the bottom layer, go and have a sandwich whilst it allocates all the tens of thousands of tiles (hundreds of thousands? millions?), then run reveal.exe. Reload the region from a backup and center your real fort around the area you remember the pits being, because maximum size forts are hell on FPS, not just the engravings of elves burning.
Now, ideally, one ought to be able to find a region where the endgame area, a decent-sized amount of magma, and possibly some sand, are all in the same general vicinity, such that one could have them all in a reasonably-sized area rather than filling up the whole region and making your processor sweat +silicon bullets+. For a bonus, this region should also possess at least a few squares of sand suitable for glassmaking, a cave river or the regional brook for irrigation/wells/tower-caps, at least a few trees, especially if you can't get tower-caps, and perhaps a chasm if you like that sort of thing.
That is pretty much the ideal of the Pregenerated worlds page on the wiki; hopefully someday soon we'll have an ideal site with everything in a known location on a known seed for everybody's processor architecture. It's already known that regions will generate differently under WinXP and Linux; I can verify that, at least as far as I could see, any changes between WinXP and Win2K are beneath my notice. (Which is only to be expected, it's nearly the same system.) Though I'm not sure quite how very slight differences in river generation crop up if the seed generates the same geography!
[EDIT: And once we have a "standard starter kit fortress location," as it were, the game will consist of two stages. 1) Experiencing the standard content including endgame pits and adamantine with magma smelting, on a standard seed. 2) Branching out and establishing forts in odd locations, like under a human town, or attacking the challenge of an aquifer. I think that, if anything, a goal for the game as a whole should be to make 1) more easily accessible, as something of a tutorial mode, and 2) more fun. This "more fun" could be achieved in multiple ways, such as different endgames (water demons in an aquifer? find a map with good and evil biomes and watch the two sides wage war?) or more interaction with the host civ, eg. the more successful forts you have, the better starting equipment a new fortress can have. Tutorial mode could simply be a lot easier than the reality of needing a full civilization backing you in order to stand a chance against the glowing pits.]
[ November 06, 2007: Message edited by: Alfador ]
There is so much variation in DF now that the game is essentially limitless, which as games go isnt always satisfying (but it is oddly like life, rather limitless and unsatisfying). Really the only problem is that it takes too long to loose in certain locations, but hey, thats part of the adventure right? It might turn out that your amazing adventure turns out to be rather boring.
And remember "Loosing is fun!" If you didnt believe it before, believe it now :D.
(Its also worth noting that the things toady plans to add will open up this new world and make individual starts more interesting)
quote:
Originally posted by Sowelu:
<STRONG>I very much liked Rollercoaster Tycoon, but I had to stop playing its sandbox mode because it made me crazy (and ate up weeks at a time). I enjoyed its scenarios much more, they seemed more fun, they had a distinct goal and a distinct end condition, and they were *balanced* at least a little. Setting your own goals is very hard to balance, and I myself don't feel as accomplished when I complete my own goals as when I complete someone else's.Maybe we need some organized competitions.</STRONG>
CONTEST: Let's see who's the best at setting and accomplishing their own goals!
code:
WWWWW
WFFFW F
WFFFWBBBBF
WFFFW F
WWWWW S
W=Wall
F=Floor
B=Bridge
S=Switch
So would this work? Would I be able to build a room like that only conected to the bridge? And if the bridge is withdrawn will it fall down? I will make a deep pond where it lands.
I haven't seen the economy activate under the new version but when it does it could provide an almost limitless number of goals. More rooms need to be built for rent, unemployed dwarves, demand for luxury good and foodstuffs, recreation areas need building etc etc.
Actually, I ran out of ideas a while ago and started playing adventure mode instead, and when I found my first dwarven settlement (yes, finding it took quite a while despite starting on top of it) I got a whole bunch of new ideas, from the sheer epic size of it.
Massive bridges over rivers.
Large wooden manors in remote locations.
Hollow wooden horses in human towns.
A huge wooden floor in an elven retreat...
Lots of amusing little projects can be had! Though, I just enjoy building things. :roll: