Bay 12 Games Forum

i restart alot, probably because im not very good at the game.  but i have a nice self-sustaining fortress, and then some dwarf pitches a fit and clubs their neighbor with an artifact grade bedpan or something, and then someones cat gets kicked, and the whole place is in anarchy and its like, WTF, time to give this one up.  sure the next wave of imagrants would probably restabalize it and i could spend another 3 years building back up, but all the dwarves you liked are dead.

or some architectural misshap screws your future plans for the grand hallway and waterfall, and then you need to start over.  lots of things cause restarts, not the least of which are invasions or demons.

sure the late game could be harder, and many of the suggestions here are good ones for that.  but i think theres also alot of people talking past each other here.

i think part of the problem is that the game is so huge that everyone enjoys it in a different way, and there isnt a whole lot of common ground for discussion.

i mean, theres seeming to be two major schools of thought:

"this games too easy, why dont we rip out a bunch of features that everyone abuses, and then it will be harder."

"hey man, those features are fun.  if you dont like it, stop abusing it.  just ramp up other difficulty settings"

"well, either i dont have the willpower to not abuse them, or i want to piss on other peoples fun while im nerfing the game.  so eff off."

see, not exactly constructive.  theres a million ways to make the game harder, but you need to determine wither you want

- harder battles, either from external aggression or internal ambushes

- harder environmental challenges and greater scarcity

- harder sociological challenges and inter-dwarven relationships

- harder to understand the interface.

in the last case, i suggest we replace all icons in the tileset with the "." character.  I'd just mod this feature in myself, but it would shatter the foundation of my relationship to the rest of the community, so I'm going to petition Toady to force the feature change on the rest of you, so that we can maintain our common ground.

take a deep breath.  have a beer.

quote:

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Originally posted by qalnor:
<STRONG>But I think the ideas you've presnted as 'solutions' for making the game harder are really not very useful or fun.</STRONG>

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actually he was contributing very constructively, and was finding ways to increase the challenge level of the game without removing other features.  I really dont like the idea of stripping out the game features, as most of them are what initially attracted me to DF in the first place.

In fact, nowhere did poor little Dav suggest that others' ideas were illegitamate.  Why are you telling him that his are?  lets just step back from that arguement, and continue posting usefull suggestions.  not everyone will like all of them.

for instance, if you could increase the negative reaction dwarves had to misma, or other things.  or if you could increase the frequency of raids, or of moods.

some of these are neat feature ideas, but you must concede that the big difficulty slider is in your starting location, the hostility of the terrain, the presense of vegitation, temperature, etc.  i dont think of picking a challenging starting location as self sabatage, certainly not in the same way as voluntarily excluding specific starting items or skills.

all the historical armor / protective qualities of silk that are being discussed are from silkworms. spidersilk is supposed to be considerably stronger.

Might I suggest the possibility of Isometric, or even 3D tiles.  it does not have to be a 3d game to have 3d or even iso tiles.

as a more general suggestion, i would suggest greater use of transparency for fewer icons.  or even texturing.  so you could color a dwarfs shirt depending on their job, rather than having a different icon for each job.  or you could texture or layer on armor, depending on what kind of armor they had on.  you could seperatly color their weapon, depending on what type of material it was made from.

or maybe each icon could be made up of layers, so when generating a dwarf icon, it picked an armor type, a weapon type, and colored each one individualy, then rendered it into an image dynamically.

while this may sound needlessly complicated, it would greatly aid the expandability of the game, as it would require a unique icon for every possible combination of thing.  you would just need a few icons, a few textures, and let the game engine multiply out the posibilities exponentially...

also, it might be nice if you could have some static colors in tiles, and other variable colorizeable parts.  maybe its this way now, i dont know.

but you cant move to mandatory unique tiles for each thing in a game of this scale.  the reason commercial games are so limited in features and scope, is that they cant create enough graphics to support all of the features.  At one time, I had a conversation about Wasteland with one of the Fallout designers, and they had to leave out a great deal of features (different states of items, quality, repair, etc) because they just couldnt create enough artwork to represent them.

the beauty of this system, is that it uses a small number of icons and they are colorizeable such that they can expand to a wide range of circumstances.

i mean, trees change color in seasons, lose their leaves, get covered in snow... that alone is beyond the scope of traditional graphics engines.  theres just too much variety for every single biome, and thats just the environmentals.

sure, some of the labor can be put off on the fans.  but the graphics need to remain modular and simple, with the OPTION of expanding their complexity.

one other idea might be if the engine could apply textures or 'filters' to objects, so that you would have slate or obsidian or steel textures on top of generic icons.

I stand by the idea that the existing mechanisms are easily 3d-able.  imagine a simple 5-20 polygon icon for each general type of icon in the game, which are in turn dynamically texturable.  it could start out with generics, 3d representations of 2d characters in the current tile set, and be expandable by modders.

or not.  just a fun idea.  oh, and @ FTW, you anti-medievalist muthafuckas.

or we could just wait until the main feature arcs are in, and see what graphics Toady has in mind then...

regardless of the gameplay tradeoffs that could never be reconciled between OCD completionists who want to know everything possible and simulationists who want a perfectly immersive fantasy world, my reasoning for suggesting things be done that was was out of practicality and expedience.  attend:

in one scenario, a second (possibly more, possibly less, depending on how they can be condensed) set of combat messages is written for each potential combat event.  then additional LOS checks need to be done during each event, and also aural range checks.  then the selected message must be displayed.

in the other scenario, there is a minor interface adjustent and all of the underlaying game mechanics remain unchanged.

I'd prefer things your way.  I really would.  But I'd never suggest DOING things that way.  the game's planned feature list is pretty long.  the bloat list is rather intimidating, too.

ultimately, its good that both ideas have been voiced, and the ultimate decision is up to Toady One the Great.