Bay 12 Games Forum

Overall, I have to say the game peaks early and becomes boring very rapidly after that. As Nirur Torir says, once you've gotten going and have a trade hub set up, it's mostly seeing where your import shortfalls are and conquering a planet that can provide the correct resources to cover it. If you're all covered, then you can instead take marginal planets and set up ship component construction and shipyard pairs, or infantry equipment and a infantry recruitment world.

The game is based on long term strategic maneuvering and PvP - there's no real PvE challenge at the moment. If you're lucky/aggressive enough to be experiencing border friction with someone else, the game basically becomes a permanent cold war until you can put yourself in a position (through increasing your war production or diplomacy) to win a war against them.

Sieges take 24 hours to resolve, as I'm currently seeing. That's more then enough slowdown on invasions, outside of a massive empire deciding the unrest is worth it and tackling all your systems at once, which couldn't be defended against anyway.

Sieges were introduced to stop players from completely destroying another players empire in a single hour while they were offline (which used to happen). Since it's game over for a player when they don't have any more capitals, it was necessary to slow warfare down so players didn't just capture every capital a player had before they could react.

It seems that starships are best used as very slowmoving doomstacks. 
Once blockades are in, preventing defenders from dropping in reinforcements without clearing the skies, you can go straight for capital sieges.  Any other reinforcements to that siege will have to be Gunship types and Jumpships.

Or defense stations that you place at important places way before hand.

Correct! Starships are mostly used in PVP (which is the main focus of the game). They're slow (although recently buffed in speed - as of this week, none move slower than 1 ly per minute, which is up to 10x faster than they were last week) but they don't need jump beacons, meaning that you can use them to hit enemy worlds that otherwise would be out of range.

Otherwise, your capital ships are mostly useful for defense (they can massacre hordes of lesser ships) or for clearing out your opponents capital stacks so you can siege a planet safely.

STATE OF THE GALAXY: July 10th

Or at least, the state of the galaxy that bothers to talk to me, and that I care about. On to the news.

The war between the Emdief Integration, self-proclaimed hegemon of the western sector, and the perfidious B (alias Whaleduck) has concluded. Casualties include the entirety of the Emdief fleet (it got better, this was two days ago) the entirety of B's jumpfleet, the majority of B's gunships and the entirety of B's infantry (due to a bug, unfortunately - for the immediate future, don't use armored infantry to besiege empire worlds). B agreed to pay reparations in the form of capital ships (using Terminus), and the Integration has agreed to demilitarize its southern border. However, a devastating psychological blow was achieved against the Integration after the cease fire, when envoys of the Whales brought it to the Integration's attention that their current borders resemble a chicken;



Warfare broke out between the forces of the Imperium, the rapidly-expanding superpower of the east, and its smaller neighbour Hegemony. This interrupted the Imperium's invasion of the Scavengers, the massive (but seemingly paralyzed by government gridlock) state that had previously been presumed to be the most powerful state in known space. The Imperium has already caused three neighbouring empires to collapse; one can only hope that the Hegemony does not become the fourth.

B, following its aborted invasion of the Integration, next made war on the forces of the Great Frog. However, despite being half the size of B and completely outclassed in terms of naval assets, Great Frog managed to repulse the invasion through careful guerilla tactics, heavy use of infantry and the reappearance of the bug that crushed B's army in the north. The Whales have declared that their interests in that region are 'fucking done'; they have subsequently invaded an attempt by Bozonation to colonize the region around B's northern sector, declaring that the mysterious clown-state must 'get off my lawn'.

The Aturi Collective was invaded by the Antares Coalition this cycle. Mirth was to be had when it was discovered that both sides were receiving massive quantities of starships from the perfidious whales of B, who appears to be waging a proxy war against its own proxies for reasons that, though the remain unclear, deserve the support of all civilized despots.

The Integration, in a shocking turn of events, is threatening to enter the war between the Whales and Bozonation on the side of its former enemy, apparently feeling threatened by Bozonation's aggressive expansion this past cycle. The hegemon of the central region, Thumohur Wuchaiju, has yet to enter the fray on either side, or formally acknowledge, well, any recent events.

All other powers are puny (or have failed to make other nations miserable enough to warrant mentioning) and must tremble in fear as much is appropriate to their locale.

This has been STATE OF THE GALAXY, brought to you by the Emdief Integration's Ministry of Truth. More information can be found in the discord.

EDIT: I'd like to issue a correction: Imperium was never at war with Hegemony, I got peoples discord usernames mixed up. Imperium remains at war with Scavengers.

I'm looking forward to the Big Wait to be completely honest. Sure, there'll be no new updates for a long time, but if the last Big Wait was any indication what that means is we'll see a renaissance in mods, player-made utilities, succession games/story forts... these are all activities that are disrupted by DF getting a new release.

But can not the same arguments be made about us?

DF AI and human neurology are not similar. I can see the possibility of the ethical dilemna you're proposing arising in the future (probably not with DF, but eventually), but as it stands right now videogame AIs don't approach the mental complexity of the nematode.

Minds in physical reality are computational, but not in the same way a video game critter is - IRL brains are neural networks, which are Turing-complete (meaning that, hypothetically, they're capable of completing any calculation possible, though the timescales required may stretch into infinity) and capable of true learning.
By contrast, a modern video game AI is simply a list of actions and an algorithm that determines when they are appropriate to trigger. It does not learn, it only exceeds its per-programmed behaviors (no matter how complex) by mistake, and it can't be said to be self aware. The AI might know things about the character it's simulating, but it doesn't know anything about itself, nor is it capable of abstract thought at all. It won't even realize if it's made a mistake or ceased to function as intended, it'll just blindly follow its programming regardless of context.

There is such a thing as an artificial neural network, a computer capable of learning and detestably thinking abstractly, but in all likelihood you've never played with or against one, unless by some off-chance you're a professional Dota 2 player. I should stress however that these minds are still very much different from our own, and in their structure currently only analogous to the most primitive animal life (the aforementioned nematode comes to mind).

If I do something weird with worldgen, say for example making dwarves sterile, will this still wipe out the civilization? If so, when I change the raws back I should have a breeding population in a world with no existing populations to receive migrants from.

Quote from: Sanctume on April 07, 2017, 02:07:10 pm

I've yet to see a succession game where HFS has been opened. 

If someone could setup a mechanic lock that opens a gate for a day or week once a year, then this gate to let out a bunch of clowns on an annual interval.

I like this so much, I have amended my list.

If you want to do this, you'll have to do some serious DFhack wizardry to get it to work. After the initial wave of clowns, the Circus becomes just another biome - critters wander in, and don't path to the fort unless they have a reason to. So you'll have far lower numbers of siegers (although, they would be pretty powerful) but they won't path to the fort unless you lay a trail of bait animals for them to slaughter.

It's possible that you could recover some version of the LPs via Wayback Machine or something similar that takes snapshots of websites and preserves them.