Bay 12 Games Forum

Thanks so much for the info guys I had no idea that was a thing now. It also made sense since I was actually reclaiming that fortress from a demon necromancer. I made him the Baron since I felt bad that he lost his old title. I'm enjoying my immortal zombie ruler/corpse hauler.

There were a lot of things as a beginner that caused me grief
Funny enough the very first time I tried the game I gave up because I kept trying to use the w: Burrow to make the dwarfs "burrow" into the ground. I got frustrated and had no idea it was under the (d)esignate ->(d)ig, lol. I then took a look at some yt tutorials a few weeks later and figured it out.

Honestly I think the one thing that really screwed me up was trying to get my dwarfs to spar. When I first started out it always felt like I could just never get them to go at it properly I would just have a bunch of dwarfs in a squad and they're all doing individual combat drills. I think a good way to make this more noob friendly would be to reduce the rate of skill gain for sparring and then have two equally skilled units have a high rate of sparring while a skill differential will lean more towards demonstrations and only resorting to individual combat drills when nobody else is around.

Oddly, I really don't remember a were creature ever being an issue for me. I know I died to it a couple times but it never upset me or made me want to quit the game. For a new player it might be just an automatic loss but it's one that should be preventable by even a new player as long as they have foreknowledge. The next fort they make they will probably design around the issue and a change in the sparring mechanics would probably go a long way towards helping out that initial barrier.

I have to say I hope any more changes to the game are more along the lines of making things more clear or less gamey and not just removing challenges which might alienate veterans. Could there possibly just be sort of tailored sandbox "newb mode" which skips world creation, site selection, and eliminates or reduces some of the more difficult features of the game. It would really help newer players not have to deal with stuff like aquifers and the dreaded no iron ore embarks. Losing generally feels a lot less worse if you haven't invested all the effort into selecting your site, preparing your equipment, and giving your dwarfs skills. I remember quitting DF a few times as a newbie just because I didn't want to go through all that again to just die to some mechanic I didn't understand.

I can't say how happy that this is being worked on. DF has been my absolute favorite thing in the world and as of right now I simply am unable to play it. The question of the game used to be "what is my fort going to die from" now it is "how long can I last before all of my dwarfs inevitably go insane from not eating pears or getting rained on while trying to get pears." I start every game focusing almost only on stress and do everything to reduce it and I still just collapse from it despite filling literally every square inch of unused space with masterwork golden statues and every other trick in the book.

I think a lot of people have pointed out the problems with the system but I think a lot of the proposed solutions will just lead back to the old system. Way back when I first started playing I had a tantrum spiral after my queen got ganked. I went to the wiki and found out that you can't just make plump helmet wine and you need a nice dining hall. I created those things and I never had to think about it after that.

After you did the basic things it stopped providing any sort of interesting stories or gameplay. The stress system ideally combats this by making trauma something that you actually have to deal with. I think Toady's description of his venerable 3 year old fort is a great description of what I'd love to see in this game. it's a great story and makes the events in your fort feel like they meaningfully impact your dwarfs. If someone's child dies or they're a new recruit and see the horrors of battle they should be terrified (maybe  even to the point that they can't continue fighting), depressed, and inconsolable so that no legendary dinning hall will just make them instantly happy again. But if you care for them they will recover and even grow from the experience. That's a good story. As of right now it just seems like if you are in any fortress for long enough most of your dwarfs will just get more and more stressed.

A lot of people suggest automatic stress reduction to fix this and to a degree I think that would be good. Being able to set a workshop or training space for free use and having dwarfs that have a need to craft or fight to go and fulfill that. But having stress reduction be itself an automatic action that depressed dwarfs do until they fell happy again would just lead us right back to the same old system of not having to care until I realize my legendary weaponsmith is off reducing stress instead of forging. That's an annoyance and not a challenge. What I really wish I was able to do would be something like seeing that my militia commander has been fighting off goblin raids for so long and losing so many of his comrades (though dwarfs no longer casually socialize on the job anymore so he probably wouldn't even care lol) that he's getting really depressed and being able to send him off to something like a golden mist filled pleasure dome with exotic elven women who serve him wine until he feels like he can get himself back in the game.

People have also mentioned people becoming inured to stressors which is in principle a good idea but could easily lead back to just not having to worry about massive amounts of stress causing things. Like not even caring about a miasma filled corpse pile in the middle of the fortress because they've already maxed out their miasma bad though penalty for the day. I think ideally the end result needs to be that say hunters who are constantly going out into the rain should start appreciating nature and not really care about getting rained on but will still be horrified at combat and visa versa for a military dwarf. Similarly a mortician dwarf should not care about handing corpses but still retch at miasma and be afraid of combat. Though dwarfs should be limited to only ever being able to not care about a few stressors

I also really like the idea that personality traits should play a bigger role in the amount and cause of stress. Dwarfs that love war and conquest should get happy thoughts from corpses while peaceful and skittish dwarfs should be reduced to a brief and recoverable catatonia from simply seeing a few dead bodies. Same with rain and nature, and I'm sure there's a lot of other examples of things that would make most people happy make people with certain traits uncaring or sad and visa versa.

I have some thoughts on corpse hauling. I have to say that I'm an average person who has worked in a funeral home and been around many dead bodies. It is frightening and unnerving to see a corpse for the first time. But just a corpse isn't really anything that you think about after the next day. Seeing a horrifically dismembered and rotting corpse is absolutely horrific and can scar a person for a while, particularly if it's a loved one. But even that you get used to fairly quickly.

TL;DR I think the stress system needs to have the average dwarf in a reasonably well kept fortress be generally happy even after a long period of time. Meanwhile, dwarfs that are subjected to a particularly specific and easily recognizable horrific event should be ripped from their happiness into depression. This means increasing the initial values of particularly horrific things like seeing combat or having a loved one die to be much, much higher while increase the stress decay rate and giving players specific tools to reasonably focus in and unstress those specific dwarfs with a reasonable amount of time and resources.

SFML for graphic is probably the best choice. Learn to make sprites move on a screen and you can make any 2D game.

I play DF for the story the world tells (and they can be really amazing) but legends mode is nearly unusable and obfuscates everything. Will there be any changes to legends mode in this or further releases? to help the players get the information they want.

Is there any possibility of Nobility succession for fortress mode in the next release?

Being stuck in noble limbo really sucks the fun out of the game for me.