Bay 12 Games Forum

Okay, I now got the trigger for upgrading my baron to a count after letting the caravan leave safely and then holding the meeting.  This means the duke should be next.

The big question is whether or not I'll be getting any of the supporting nobles.  It's possible that they do in fact require a duke/king despite saying they can be appointed by the baron/count.  However, at a minimum it's possible to get these three core nobles; it appears not to be a bug at all so much as it is a difficult to fulfill and not immediately obvious requirement.  Fixing it by either removing this requirement or adjusting it to apply to the previous year's caravan would make it work completely as designed.  However, if I don't get the other nobles I'll have to assume there's something wrong with them...but I won't be able to confirm this until I get the king.

I want to also give credit to Miuq, whose post on the bug tracker was what inspired me to test out this condition.

Total happenstance.  I'm a huge fan of Baldur's Gate 2 (800 hours of gameplay time thanks to mods) and for one reason or another I did a Google search for "sleeping dwarf", in this case relevant to the one who is in fact sleeping at the Copper Coronet.  The first search result was for the 40d entry on Noise on the DF Wiki, which piqued my curiosity and led to further explanation.  From there, I discovered Boatmurdered, laughed my ass off, and started playing DF soon thereafter.  I remember being totally floored and from there the rest is history.

Even now I still get a fuzzy feeling when I see the screenshots from Boatmurdered, remembering that sense of wonder discovering this game.

That's what I'm going to be working on going forward.  The first goal is to get the count/duke (if possible) as well as the king and go forward from there.

Some kind of insect made out of amber with a poisonous sting.  All I could think of was Jurassic Park, at least until one of my Hammerdwarves laid in to it.

Actually, I once did a Science Fair project purely on a statistical analysis of Battletech, especially with customization strategies. 

I got an A.

Wow, the best I ever had was growing plants in sand.  I got an A, but still...

That's basically what I did.  I remember a quote along the lines of how someone learned to play: "terrifying swamp, Play Now".  Throwing yourself in to a brutal environment like that might not be the best way to learn, but it makes a pretty good point...DF is a lot to understand and you're not going to get it in one go no matter how hard you try.  Reading the Wiki is a good place to start but even that's not a substitute for just getting in there and giving it a go.

That being said, once you've got a fort that can sustain itself without running out of food or alcohol, the rest isn't that bad.  You really can take on other bits and pieces over time; turn off invaders if you don't want to deal with goblins or alternatively settle in an area without them, orsettle in an area with only dwarves if you want to avoid pissing off the elves or humans, don't dig in to the caverns if you want to avoid forgotten beasts, and so on.  This doesn't mean you're not going to lose forts, including some favorites, in spectacularly stupid ways but that's part of the challenge.

TL;DR: New players need to realize DF is hard and shouldn't be made easier or simplified beyond common-sense streamlining, older players need to remember they were new once and should focus on making the game more accessible through tutorials and help in the forums.

DF is hard...hard to learn, hard if not impossible to truly master (building a colossal, embark-spanning tower out of forgotten beast soap, adamantine, and clear glass with invaders turned on in the midst of a terrifying glacier might be a good sign of mastery) and ultimately unwinnable beyond the conditions and goals you set.  I fully believe this is going to be as much the case in DF 1.0 as it is in 0.31; there will be more features, for sure, but this will simply make the game more complex and probably even more difficult for new people to jump in to.

Ultimately, new players need to accept that this game is going to have a brutal learning curve, at least for the time being; there are more important features that need to be implemented and any official tutorials are going to come much, much later.  In a sense, the difficulty can be adjusted already by turning off invaders and embarking on a safe, isolated spot.  I think the community should do what it can to help new players learn the game but at the same time we shouldn't really be all that friendly towards people who trash the game because it's too difficult for them.  Dumbing it down or simplifying it would simply tarnish the game experience for everyone, not improve it.

At the same time, though, people need to avoid being condescending towards people who don't understand basic parts of the game or who come asking for help.  Does this happen often? No, but it doesn't mean it's not a potential issue.  Experienced players need to remember when they started, in my case stumbling on to the Wiki and reading the saga of Boatmurdered but then being completely incapable of telling pig tail from phyllite and losing spectacularly...hell, I remember the sense of triumph I felt when I got my first fort to survive on its own.