Bay 12 Games Forum

All your dwarves being dead is pretty clearly losing, even if there's no winning.

I don't wish to seem pedantic but, in my dictionary at least, losing is defined as failure to win.  All your dwarves being dead is just the end of this session, with no conditions there's nothing against which to judge your success.  OK I failed at not seeming pedantic but hey ho. 

This thread has taken a rather strange but interesting turn btw.

I don't think it's fair to criticise Gav for a lack of imagination, I think it's a good point he's making about challenges.  There's a reason why Will Wright called Sim City a toy rather than a game.

That sort of thing can be fun for a time, especially if there's lots of novelty, but for many people that wears off, reducing the replayability that you find in a lot of games.  It's the sort of fun that some people studying games have recently called easy fun - "...inspires exploration and role play. Fun failure states, fantasies, or simply enjoying the controls" to quote XEODesign - as opposed to hard fun which involves objectives and strategy.  Dwarf Fortress has to have the tagline "losing is fun" because it doesn't have another kind, there's no way to win, and after you learn a couple of basic strategies to avoid getting everyone killed (like walling in) you don't need to learn any new ones, and that rips the heart out of the experience for a lot of people.  Setting yourself challenges is all well and good but you can do that in any game, it doesn't really address the issue of why DF doesn't have any challenges in the ordinary gameplay sense.

I think the problem (if you see it as a problem), is that it's not a game, it's a simulator, but people expect it be a game.  Toady is a simulation programmer, not a game designer.  A fair amount of time must have been spent on geology, history, fluid dynamics, weather, temperature, physiology, personality, material properties and so on, time that a person writing a game might have spent on gameplay elements.

As someone who plays fortress mode almost exclusively, it's obvious just how much that part of the game relies on you making your own fun.  The overpowered traps, underpowered AI and the fact that after a decade you can still brick yourself in and ride it out if that's what you want to do - show that he's not all that bothered if you get smashed by the first siege 100 times in a row, or run a forgotten beast theme park and magma slide.  DF's gameplay doesn't seem like a priority, and from the dev roadmap I can't see that changing.  If you don't find it fun any more now, I can't see it being fun later.

(Also, there was not such thing as steel plate in medieval times, the best armors was made in iron with a pellicule of steel on top of it. Pure steel would have made a terrible protection. Sorry for the nitpicking  )

I don't mind nitpicking... if I'm wrong then I'm wrong, but I'm not pretending to be an expert, just give a basic impression

Indeed the real crossbows is a deadly weapon and it should remain deadly in DF. Maybe the rate of fire should be reduced. I once tried to reload a medieval crossbow and it's not easy since it involve bending the steel arc of the weapon. A crossbowman should not be able to shoot as fast as a bowman.

I wouldn't mind seeing crossbows become much harder to manufacture, and have their current position filled by selfbows with reduced power.  Create a tiered ranged weapon system, a bit like melee is tiered by metal properties.

I've never seen a humanoid corpse take a shot from a crossbow and not collapse.

Ranged weapons are statistically superior to melee weapons (Vanilla crossbows == railguns).

If we want them to be remotely realistic then this is how it should be, there's a good reason the Pope banned their use against good Christian knights... they're too effective.  At the sort of distances DF engagements happen, being shot with a medieval crossbow would inflict serious injury even to someone in steel plate. 

Thinking about it again this has a lot going for it, though there are probably a few edge cases that might result in a massive pathfinding workload, or ridiculously inefficient paths if the algorithm isn't smart enough (or the user doesn't make it easier for the algorithm). 

Apparently I can't upload images.  Take your first image and imagine something similar with only the topmost access point.  The algorithm builds 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 on the first round for example, but after that can only build one at a time and each one involves the longest possible route.  I'd bet someone would do the same thing with a square 150 blocks wide and wondering why the game stutters as it calculates 600 paths after each block is placed (if it's unlucky in its choices) and takes years to build.

Those are extremes though and I think on the whole it's a great idea.  Sorry if it seems like I'm always playing devil's advocate, but I can't seem to stop myself 

To me, adding some depth and actual gameplay to mining would be the biggest one. Rather than just having whatever you designate almost magically hollowed shortly thereafter your dwarves would actually have to mine and haul stuff outside. I'd love just to be able to see them scurrying back and forth slowly making progress into the mountain.

I think I can agree with you there.

The biggest effect this would have would be to make mining harder and more time-consuming the deeper you dig. This would hamper things like digging a narrow staircase straight down to the magma sea the first thing you do and make it more rewarding to actually get down there.

If you were to make the absolute time it takes to mine longer I suppose it would still be hard to increase the relative time taken to dig that far.  I can imagine you'd still be able to breech the bottom having only dug out half a dozen rooms at the surface, if there's no actual penalty to depth of mining.

Simply put it'd give birth to a whole new gameplay side with creative solutions to mining that while I certainly get many would prefer to ignore (and should be able to with the proper init settings), many others feel is sorely lacking in a game about dwarves digging into the earth. I haven't constructed a single minecart yet. There's simply no need to with the current system, which imo is quite sad.

I think I can agree with that as well, at the moment they're totally optional.

The reason I don't use minecarts for hauling stone however isn't because I don't have enough things to haul - it's because I lack the stockpile space anyway, so I really don't need to haul all that rock at once. Now if I was quantum stockpilining and going through stone faster than I could use it (for some reason) I might use it.

Perhaps if the game didn't treat stone like styrofoam then minecarts would be more useful.  At the moment a dwarf can haul a lump of iron ore big enough to carve a door out of, on her own, up several flights of stairs.  Quite how a wooden wheelbarrow allows that to happen at a jogging pace is probably best left to the imagination.

Maybe it would help if bringing quarried materials (or even just travelling) uphill was significantly easier with carts than any other way.

A reaction that magically destroys gravel is no more realistic than there not being gravel in the first place.

Part of the realistic challenge would be whay the hell you do with all the gravel. Concrete construction being one viable and well within 14th century technology option. Or defensive earthworks or dams or landfilling islands in lakes etc.

For those of us that dig out a lot more than we construct it's still going to leave a mountain of aggregates behind.  Presumably for concrete you're also going to need something like limestone on your map in order to make the mortar. 

I can't imagine many people want half their dwarf-hours devoted to hauling rubble to the surface to leave in a big pile that takes up precious memory.  Perhaps if OP desperately wants gravel he could compromise on a slightly increased stone drop-rate and a rock-breaking labour for prisoners 

More metals?  Being able to use more of the existing ones for something useful would be a start.

Dwarves can turn the hardest metal in existence into plate mail, but not put a lump of nickel on the end of a stick?