Bay 12 Games Forum

Presumably it was a tantrum or other stress-related fight.
I think the justice system only tracks "premeditated" murders, i.e. vampires or fell moods.

If there were no other dwarves to witness what happened, there were no other dwarves to report the crime. The game still knows what happened to the dwarf that was killed, of course, so it gets worked into that dwarf's life story for legends purposes. I don't think the two systems are very connected at this point. If one dwarf from the fort kills another and there are witnesses, they will definitely see it as a crime—tantrums usually lead to a lot of "disorderly conduct" accusations and the like.

Quote from: spinnylights on May 21, 2022, 07:56:44 am

In my mind, there's more of a built-in threat slider than a "clock" in the game in terms of how much wealth you generate over time, and how much you buy from caravans, because you have a degree of control over those things. If you're not ready for "big threat," you can take care not to generate too much wealth as you make your preparations for big threat, e.g. by using low-value materials or sticking to utilitarian items or the like, and also not to export too much valuable stuff. This lets you tell the game to some extent how much threat you think would be fun or exciting or whatnot at that time. To me this system is already really really elegant, one of my favorite in any game really [...]. It also feels sort of like cool RP to me to do—laying low and building in secret, or being brash and confident and showy, make lots of fancy art and having a rowdy tavern and so on.

Interesting. I never thought of DF in quite that way before.

How should this interact with embark location, if at all?

Glad you thought it was interesting. At the moment, it has a degree of interaction with embark location already, because some embarks are very resource-poor compared to others, which pushes you to do things that will expose you more earlier. If you don't have much resources available to you at the start, you have some motivation to make valuable trade goods and to trade as much away to the caravans as you can so that they'll bring large quantities of whatever it is you're missing, but of course that can bring unwanted attention to you from the surface as well, so you have to be strategic about what you buy and how you use it. Of course, if what you need is something like iron, you might actually want to attract surface threat, so then the question becomes how quickly you can build up your surface defenses with careful use of the caravans, which is its own interesting problem. In other cases like wood, the alternative to trade might be to open the caverns early, but naturally that has its own risks. All of this can make for interesting play in the early game if you want these kinds of challenges, but you can also sidestep all of it by doing a large embark in a relaxed, resource-rich biome, as the quickstart guide understandably points new players towards.

One thing I do think dilutes the variation between embarks a bit for this kind of gameplay is how valuable prepared food is. Once you really get food production going, you end up generating a ton of wealth just by cooking which you're forced to do to keep the dwarves alive, and it's easy to get everything you need from caravans by selling prepared food stacks, so by the time you're not worried about your food supply anymore the early game is basically over. I think the player might feel more involved in the transition from early- to mid-game if prepared food wasn't worth so much; you would have more latitude in when you decided to make high-value goods, and you would have to make a more deliberate decision in what sorts of goods you wanted to go for, too.

In general too, to some extent I feel like the "less resources leads to more threat sooner" aspect of the gameplay could be brought out more strongly. Even in a very resource-starved biome, I don't feel like it's that hard to get what you need; there's always the caverns and the magma to lean on and they make up for almost everything. I'm trying a 1x3 embark in scorching, treeless badlands right now and I've got a well-established fort without having to think outside the box all that much; obviously I could go to even further extremes biome-wise but I was expecting this to be more of a brain-twister in terms of resources. Maybe next time I'll try an embark without much rock. In any case I think it would be neat if going off the beaten path felt more unusual on average biome-wise, like in terms of how you found yourself coping with the challenges of the environment.

I also think farming is vastly over-powered. To be harder/more realistic, it should take more than 3 farmers to feed an entire fort.

On the other hand, I do feel like keeping the fort fed is just the beginning. If you want your dwarves to enjoy the food and drink, you're then on a quest to supply the widest possible variety of both, which I feel like is a fun running thread to have winding through the gameplay. I like seeing all the different wacky foods they make too.

So if you're embark close to a dragon, a cyclops and a necromancer that wants to rampage, then all hell can break loose right at the beginning of the fort.

I think this is already true to some extent today at least regarding necromancers; I tried embarking very close to a necromancer tower recently and was attacked sometime in the first season or two I think (I don't quite recall but it felt very early).

My reason for preferring that is I love the idea of a fort just being part of the generated world with no special advantages or anything. The game should IMO not have a difficulty level as such - it should just be like, if you pick remote, safe site with no neighbours, then you might be out of harm's way and never get attacked. If you pick a site in the middle of mayhem, you should be attacked constantly.

I really like that there's inpredictibility to it - that when you pick a site, you can't know if there's a bunch of monster lairs around it. This to me is just realistic and cool and I think it would just be fun if you got attacked by some megabeats when you're just 7 dwarves in the fort.

To me there are certain downsides to this as I elaborated on in my first post; at the furthest extreme it ends up limiting your control over how exposed you are only to where you embark, which I think is a rather coarse and static-feeling amount of control to give the player. I think it's nice if you also have some control over this in terms of what you do after you embark, just because adds more possible depth and variety to the gameplay. I think DF really shines as a "dwarven tales generator," and anything that lets the player have a bit of influence here and there to nudge the story in certain directions enhances the game's ability to play elegantly along with what the player has in mind.

Of course, if you embark in obviously hostile territory, I think it would make sense if you had somewhat less capacity to "lay low" at first, like if the point at which you start getting noticed is set lower. Then if you wanted to stay out of sight in the early game you would have to be really stealthy, which might involve avoiding a lot of what you would normally do when you start up a fort for some time or finding clever workarounds for things that would ordinarily attract threat. The current rhythm of the game, with the once-a-year outpost liason and the regular caravans and migrants waves and so on, kind of undercuts this idea, so maybe the game could support this kind of gameplay more elaborately in theory.

So I think it should be like, there's different kinds of attacks:

- some attacks you get simply because there's dwarves to kill and eat there, they only depend on location.

- some attacks are for money, so the likelihood of them should depend on traded wealth or on fort value*
 
- some attacks are because of poitics, say if your civ is a war with some other civ. I guess goblins also invade sites because they want to take over the world, I don't see why they would not like to conquer a small fort just to grab it and bathe the world in chaos.

*I find it fair that visitors would realize roughly how rich the fort is based on tavern talk and then spread the rumour, so I find it fair enough that the goblins know how wealthy you are, also if you don't trade much.

I like this line of thought. In some ways it's already like this of course, but I agree that the idea of "what's motivating the attackers" could be brought out more strongly. It would be more obvious how to model what the player could do to hide out this way too; you could consider what the surrounding threats were and then try to figure out why they might want to come after you, and either try to avoid doing those things to stay safe or do them on purpose to bring on the threat, depending on what you thought would be more interesting. Maybe you could even send out scouts or your own spies to try to discover more about the surrounding territory. Right now you find out some things from the outpost liason and such, but if your site is far away from the rest of your civ in hostile territory, there's no reason why the mountainhomes would have all that much of an idea what's happening around your fort. I mean, maybe you are the main scouting party—maybe that's why your starting dwarves set out. It would be neat if the game would let you RP around stuff like this more I think.

I don't think there should be something as crude as a "difficulty slider."

I think a "threat slider" is a bit different from a "difficulty slider." Increased threat will make the game harder for someone who's trying to play with peace in mind, but easier for someone who wants conflict. The reason I think it's nice to have a threat slider in the settings is in case the player wants to decouple the embark environs from the amount of exposure they're under, either to suite their playstyle or so they can play out certain scenarios. As a rather simplistic example, maybe you want to play out a "Siege-of-Gondor"-type story; you could build up an elaborate war fort with the threat level set to nothing, then dial it up to maximum once your "set" was built and watch the tale unfold. You might also just feel, as you're playing, "I could use a bit of excitement just now," and some players would appreciate the ability to just nudge the threat up a few notches if they felt that way. If you don't want to use it, of course, you don't have to; obviously there are more naturalistic, "in-game" ways of controlling the threat level, and maybe the game could use more of that than it has today too.

Just for the sake of convenience, here's a copy of Threetoe's post from the blog in case anyone else wants to get caught up quickly:

How hard a game should Dwarf Fortress be? The more technical among you have already found the text files that govern this. The various triggers that cause everything from dragon attacks to goblin snatchers are relics of a more primitive game where nothing existed outside the patch of mountain you dug into. Now the world is super-big, filled with all sorts of bad stuff waiting to find you. The triggers still exist, simulating the rumors of your wealth that the trade caravans spread to the outside world. However, nowadays, instead of generating an army from nothing, enemies are drawn from existing populations all over the world. The triggers are pretty much the same, but it is possible to do stuff like tick off the elves with a raid in order to get them to attack early. That might give you some control, but you are still on the same clock for everything else.

It's for the sake of the noobies that the triggers exist. No one wants to get overrun while they are still figuring out how to play in year 1. There has to be a default difficulty. We are in the process of logging the invasions versus different scenarios to calibrate this. Should it be based on population? Maybe traded wealth? Maybe you think you should have some time to prepare for the invaders with your hundred dwarves. Or maybe you want the dragon to come right after you buy out your first caravan. We are going to make this all customizable in a settings menu, but what about before you mess with that? How hard should the game be?

Sound off on the regular channels! We are monitoring you.

I kind of feel like he's talking about difficulty sort of in terms of combat/"world threat." In my mind, there's more of a built-in threat slider than a "clock" in the game in terms of how much wealth you generate over time, and how much you buy from caravans, because you have a degree of control over those things. If you're not ready for "big threat," you can take care not to generate too much wealth as you make your preparations for big threat, e.g. by using low-value materials or sticking to utilitarian items or the like, and also not to export too much valuable stuff. This lets you tell the game to some extent how much threat you think would be fun or exciting or whatnot at that time. To me this system is already really really elegant, one of my favorite in any game really, because controlling the amount of wealth you generate and deciding on your approach to the next caravan and so on is itself a kind of fun and interesting little set of games to play I feel like, so it's neat to communicate this larger gesture of "let's dial the threat up" or "not so much threat just yet" or whatnot through the means of that game. It also feels sort of like cool RP to me to do—laying low and building in secret, or being brash and confident and showy, make lots of fancy art and having a rowdy tavern and so on. Through this means, you can think about what sorts of dwarves these might be and why they might have come to this place and so on during the early game, so I feel like the "classic" trigger system is really nice both on a narrative level and on a mechanical level.

Of course, it tells the story of like, "word spreading about your fortress" in a pretty impressionistic way. I think it works really well on that basis, like on the basis of just giving you the visceral feeling of that happening, but I also do totally like the approach of having actual rumors that spread around the world and other simulated settlements and societies that they spread within and so on. That gives you a whole new perspective to look at the idea of "the story of your fortress" from, the sort of "macro high fantasy" angle, legends passed down through the ages and elaborate geopolitics and so on, and it's neat to imagine something on that kind of huge narrative scale playing out on as minute a level as one reindeer vs. beak dog interaction in front of you or whatnot. So I'm totally happy with the current direction.

There's an obvious sort of tension there with the old system of course, just because it's so vague, it just says like "(X) shows up when (a/b/c) numbers align" or whatnot, so it doesn't map very obviously onto a system that's trying to simulate large-scale sociocultural interactions. In that context, your fortress is just one settlement among many basically, and it doesn't really make as much sense to put you in this like super protagonistic role that the old trigger-based system has you in. The difficulty with that of course is that like, if you look at it from the perspective of vaguely medieval history or something, a  "highly accurate" simulation might have 80 years of peace in a large city or back-to-back wars sweeping through a tiny town, in either case due to forces well beyond them. If you were just playing on the scale of one settlement in that kind of context, you would only expect to have an impact on large-scale patterns of peace and conflict in the world around you if you were very politically prominent relative to surrounding settlements. You would only expect to reach that kind of position well into the game, when it's less important for you to be able to carefully restrain the amount of threat you're under. So, from the earlier perspective of "the joy of playing to tell the game how much threat you want early on," this tendency in a "highly accurate global politics simulation" feels kind of awkward.

What I think might work in well in this context is to have every settlement follow the same set of triggers in the simulated larger world as in the player's fortress, or at least a similar set of effects. Like, a model of a small town that looks more like, "no one knows they're here yet, so they're safe," and where there is some early stage in a settlement's development where it is "lying low," and in a way that in the player's case they can kind of influence in various ways by adjusting their playstyle. I'm not sure the current set of what stimulates rumors quite does this, because it seems to center mainly on artifacts, which are produced at a relatively constant rate which the player doesn't have much control over. It does seem like it would make a kind of reasonably-fast linear ramp-up in difficulty over time, which would probably be all right, but I think it would be lovely to preserve the ability to "lay low" or "be brash and bring on the big threat" in the early game even within the larger political simulation. In a way I think this goes beyond "mere difficulty"—even for an experienced player, it has to do with the sort of story you feel drawn towards that time around.

To be honest, I kind of feel like it would work fine to keep the existing triggers as they are for the player's fortress more-or-less and just treat the other settlements in terms of the rough wealth they've generated over time and their population size. Then there could be a larger world with complicated large-scale stories playing out and the player fortress would fit elegantly into it in a way that preserves the lovely quality of the early game. I think giving a kind of "manual threat slider" in the settings is great too, as long as the game has any sense in the background of a "sliding threat scale," just because that gives another fun way to play the game, experimenting with the different threat settings or designing little "scenarios" you want to play out. If you're treating the other settlements similarly to the "old school" trigger model, it kind of implies that every town has a "threat level," so artificially lowering or raising any town's threat level (including the player's) doesn't seem too weird still from the perspective of the game design.

I guess, at the same time tough too, I don't necessarily think the triggers are the be-all-end-all of this kind of design for sure or something, I just do think they work quite well, specifically basing the threat level off of generated and exported wealth. That approach is nice in that it's worked into the game everywhere on a variety of levels, how you approach it has to do with your holistic sense of what your fortress is all about that time instead of just like "what the game thinks you should do" or whatever, and it's never exactly the same problem twice. Probably any system with those properties would be at least as good, if it turns out that other things about the larger-scale simulation fit in too awkwardly with the generated-and-exported-wealth-leads-to-threat approach. Wealth is nice because it's a number you can just kind of attach to everything freely and the player will accept it to some extent, because it has to do with how much things are worth in the dwarves' world, so although we would expect e.g. gold to be valuable it's fine and even desirable to some extent to surprise the player here and there with how valuable something might be or not, so you can base your idea of the worth of everything largely on other concerns then seeming credible to the player. It's nice to have some idea that you can work into the game everywhere where the player won't have too strong a set of fixed ideas about how the thing should be. I'm trying to think of other aspects of the game that are similar, but population and created artifacts and so on, while similarly abstract in scope, are much less under the player's control. There's the biome of course, but even that is a part of your thoughts about how you will generate wealth, because it determines the medium upon which you'll do this. Those dwarves, so ruthlessly industrial… XD

Hey, this is pretty cool. thanks for posting it!

Sure thing! ^^ Sorry for the three-month-late reply ;^^

Hey folks, sorry for my absence! The package manger of the Linux distro I was using ate itself alive along with its whole package database in the middle of a routine update, trashing the system.  I've spent the last several days getting everything set up again, this time with a different (more controlled/more laborious) distro. I finally have a graphical web browser going again (I spent a few days working purely from the system console mainly playing DF and waiting for things to compile).

(As a side note, in case anyone reading this feels put off by the idea of using Linux , it's not like this with every distro—the Debian/Red Hat/SUSE-based ones are more stable.)

I always love the names of the goblin civs. XD Anyone wants to start a band called "The Bad Apes"?

This diary belongs to Spinnylights Ódiral...not you.
22nd of Slate, 257, Waxing Gibbous Moon ◕

Was it a good idea to strike out on my own like this...? I feel more lonely than I thought I would...It's funny, I was so excited to leave but sometimes I almost want to go back. On the one hand, Goldsilver is surprisingly nice, I guess. I really like the clothes they gave me, I have my own bedroom and it even has a dresser, and the food has been good so far too. But on the other hand there are dead bodies everywhere. Some of them are even pretty old. It's not like I've never seen one before, but I can't exactly say it makes me feel safe. Plus they smell terrible. What is everyone doing around here???

I guess I'm lucky that I got assigned to mining duty. The air is cool down in the tunnels, it's quiet, and all the different rocks are actually really pretty. Way more than all the dead dwarves, that's for sure. I feel so tired at the end of the day but it's actually kind of nice, I don't wake up in the middle of the night at all even though I thought I might get nightmares here. It felt weird using a pick at first but I think I'm getting used to it. I even found a cluster of pyrope garnets yesterday(!!) and I secretly wanted to take the biggest one back to my room but I feel like the overseer might kill me for doing something like that. He seems really intense. It's kind of sad that they'll probably end up cutting them...I wish they would just leave them raw. We could put them in a bowl on the dining table for decoration, I think that would be nice.

The dwarf I got sent to help out, Lurker, is interesting. He's a lot older than me but he's not really old, either. He's new to mining too but he's really into it—he joined the "Diggers' Party" right when we arrived and when I first got down to the tunnels he told me I was really lucky to be given mining duty because it's so important. Apparently he hates going outside at all and thinks we should dig as deep as we can no matter what. It's kind of funny because he also seems sort of antsy, I keep seeing him looking up at the ceiling like he's worried it'll cave in. Who knows...

I still feel a little unsure about the whole democracy thing. Like, it's really neat that we all get to vote, I'm still excited about that...all the stuff about the different "parties" is weird, though. tonnot, the overseer, is in the "Sparkly Unicorn Party" ( ) and apparently that one is really into art so that's cool. But they're also kind of like, scary, maybe? I guess I don't really know still. The Diggers' Party seems nice in a way and maybe I would fit in if they keep me on mining duty. The election is months away so I still have time to think about it. I'm going to try not to let it stress me if I can...there's way too much other stuff to freak out about.