Bay 12 Games Forum

The Total War games are pretty good for this, although I can only personally vouch for the Medieval 2 installment.

I played Empires and didn't really like it- my men were way, way too picky about trying to stay in neat little formations so I ended up losing a lot of control and precision to their brick-shaped obsession. A lot of my friends suggested Medieval 2 though, so I guess I'll try it.

I had a nice little fort, and I was a little paranoid. It wasn't my first fort, and it was doing fairly well and I was hip to some of the community's tactics for avoiding disaster. So I had the only entrance to the fort be a single staircase than I deconstructed when not actively in use. We sold bins of mugs to everyone who came by, and all in all, life was pretty bearable inside the fort. The only snag was that I'd settled near a magma vent but hadn't found the time to clear out the fire imps.

So one day, a load of immigrants rolls up and I pick and choose the ones that I like because I've gotten a little bit jaded. It's just a game, after all. It makes perfect economic sense to consign the soapmakers to death. In fact, I figured I'd kill two imps with one soapmaker and have them all charge the monsters inhabiting the magma vent. So the woodworker goes into the fort and the soapmaker marches off to a fiery, explosive death. His camel goes too. The next day, the woodworker is sitting outside, having a break, leaning against the wagon, and she sees what happened. It turns out that one of the soapmakers was her husband. It turns out the camel was her beloved pet. It turns out that when a woman catches a whiff of the fetid stench of burning camel hair on the wind she gets a bit irate.

So she rips the wagon in half and starts punching the brewer, who was also enjoying a bit of fresh, camelful air. She breaks his arms, cracks his ribs, and punctures a lung before she calms down and walks away. The brewer is left lying on the ground, coughing up blood, and it begins to rain. So he's rolling around a pool of bloody mud, getting ready to die, when he's saved! One of the unemployed blacksmiths wanders over and drags him back to a spare bed and starts trying to nurse him back to health. They fall in love. She is not a very good doctor. He dies. She throws herself into the river.

Dwarf Fortress is one of those games where whenever I start to try to economize and find the most efficient route, it slaps my hand and reminds me that these are trying very hard to be real people

Well I think the problem they're having is that they are actually making a game. If they really wanted to they could whip up the original XCOM with updated graphics in no time at all. Instead they're trying to make a new game that takes the spirit of the first game and adapts it for the different market that exists ten years after the original released. If I want to play the original XCOM I'll play the original XCOM. I don't think the graphics bug any of us who play it all that much. But kids these days wouldn't relish the expendibility of troops and the sheer amount of management that the original took.

Not saying I like the trends. Just pointing out the elephant in the room.

Also, to be honest, the original was tedious and clunky as hell in many ways. Even routine fights that you were 100% going to win could require thirty turns of carefully manipulating twenty soldiers. Soldiers with no strength would automatically equip heavy weapons, and you wouldn't know about because there was no way to check stats at the inventory screen. Sometimes you'd get cases where instead of every man carrying a rifle, a clip, and a sidearm, you'd get one soldier with three plasma rifles, one soldier with four laser pistols, and one soldier with every single spare clip and no guns.

I notice that the wiki page on bees is woefully lacking. I'm planning on devoting my current fort to bee science, but I thought I'd ask the community what information and questions they had.

CURRENT QUESTIONS:
1. What determines when a hive is ready to split? Is it time, or perhaps number of bees?
2. Does beekeeping skill affect the speed at which a hive grows?
3. Does beekeeping skill affect the amount of honey/wax produced when a honeycomb is produced?
4. Do environmental factors change the growth/productivity of a hive? IE: Will a hive surrounded by other hives produce more or less than a hive on a narrow precipice above magma or a hive deep in the underground?
5. If I line the entrance to my fortress with hives, do they have any effect on goblins?

Quote from: shadow_archmagi on February 19, 2012, 03:55:16 pm

... cut any rock as if it were a gem- ...

ANY rock? Some native metal stones are worth more than most gems. I also hope we won't get a "Perfect Microcline" gem artifact.

Just pulled up DF.

Native Silver and Native Gold are indeed available for cutting.

Most forts are easily capable of producing twice as much food as you need. I wouldn't worry about it.

My fort doesn't seem to have a river or anything, and my chief medical dwarf keeps cancelling his job. Is there a way to clean a wound without water?

I had a chameleon demon named Cona who pretended to be the god Azoc.


I'm not sure this really qualifies as "Trying harder"