Digging to Deep - A Game about HFS
Cheers and welcome to Digging to Deep, this will hopefully turn out to be a relatively simple and straightforward game, a sort of palate cleaner for me while Imperial Civil War waits for orders.
Anyhow in this game you lot play three Dwarven Mining Clans competing for wealth, influence and power in Thol-Sebshos, Deepmire.
Goal of the game is to get filthy rich and hopefully not die in the process. Simple? Yes. Uncomplicated? Probably not.
DtD has three main resources for you to worry about:
Wealth The accumulated mountains of wealth tucked away in the Clan Vaults. While wealth can be used for various things, its main purpose is to show how successful you are. After all you are not some filfthy human to spend all that hard earned cash. No. The more wealth you store in your vaults the more dwarfs want to marry into or join your clans, allowing you to bring in even more miners.
Beyond that Wealth can be used to hire mercenaries, Bribes and to buy special equipment.
Influence Influence is passively accumulated from the Size of your Clan, after all family politics is everything amongst dwarves and the larger the clan the more relations you have outside of it. Influence is very important to buy preferable treatment from the King, Hammerer and the Guilds.
Families The size of your clan. Each family counts as one pop you can use for various purposes, but mostly mining. You gain more families by aquiring more wealth and with more families you also gain more Influence in Dwarven Politics. Simple.
MiningThe most important part of the game. Each turn you send your dwarves into one of the three starting shafts. Once there you can either tell them to
Dig Deeper to do
Exploratory Mining or to mine existing Veins.
Should you find something worthwhile, you lay a claim to it allowing only your dwarves to mine it. HOWEVER, for various reasons you can put claims up for auction or even make them public domain allowing every other clan to mine there as well.
Auctions should be obvious, you sell your claim to whomever you want, who then owns your claim. This way you can get yourself some much needed wealth should your clan have fallen on hard times.
Grants happen when you offer your claim to the whole of the fortress, netting you a continouus influx of influence as long as that claim can be mined. This might be useful if your clan shrunk too much in size and you can't use much of what you found, or simply because you desperately need that extra Influence.
Shafts are always public domain, meaning in one mining shaft you might find claims of all three clans. With the right amount of influence however, you can temporarily close the shaft to others or completely and order the building of new shafts.
Digging too DeepWith each z-level you dig downwards, with each new exploratory tunnel and with each newly dug shaft, you run into one possibility: HFS. Should you crit succeed or crit fail during exploratory mining or simply have bad luck when expanding shafts, you get the
DUG TO DEEP event, what that entails you will find out...
The King's High Court and the GuildsOf course you are not living in a vacuum but rather in a fortress which goes about its daily business. A business which contains horrible clan politics, bribery, graft and price wars.
Influence and Money is your currency of choice here. But to bribe officials is illegal and should you be discovered, the Hammerer will take your families to task.
The King himself has a variety of purposes:
First and foremost he commands the Armies of the Fortress and to have them mobilize to clean out a mining shaft or worse just a single deposit of ore, requires influence.
The King also has the final say over the digging of new shafts and which shafts are to be closed to most or even completely sealed.
Due to the evolving situation in the fortress the King might also make demands of the mining guilds. From mining specific metals, to randomly closing shafts for various reasons to demanding families as conscripts in wars.
The Guilds meanwhile come in a variety of flavours and represent the economic side of the fortress.
For you see, once you dug up all your ores and stones and gems, they still need to be sold to the guilds so the raw metals can be turned to more useful things.
The Problem is, just like you, the Guilds are restrained by their numbers and so only a certain amount of raw materials can be bought up. Thsi is where influence comes into play.
For whoever gives the guilds the most influence gets preferential treatment...or you bribe them.
The Foundries take raw ore and smelt it for you for a fee, allowing you to make larger profits by selling ready made metal. Alternatively you can simply sell ore to them.
The Jewellers Guilds Buy up rough gems or refine them for you at a fee.
Smithing Guilds buy refined metals and might be "convinced" to part with some of their creations.
The Crafter Guilds buy refined metals, economic stones and refined gems.
Soldiers,Conscripts, MercsThe Army of the Mountainhome is always controlled by the King, but he might be nice enough to
loan you a squad or two of soldiers to clear out some tunnels. Soldiers in general are well trained and equipped and thus come at a consistent quality, but at the cost of influence.
Mercenaries are the alternative for wealthy clans. You can keep them on a retainer and thus always have a ready-made force at your disposal allowing you to even protect your miners while mining. The problem: Mercs come in all shapes, forms, equipments and training and much of what you get is a gamble, that only reveals itself upon meeting enemies in battle.
Sometimes you simply don't have the cash or Influence to deal with Mercs or the King and so you conscript your own families. Miners are in general not very good combatants but will do in a pinch, especially against less dangerous things you might encounter.
Sign-Up...i actually only need your clan name. Three players will be accepted.
Lost ClansThe Bronzebeards (Roboson)
Wealth: 81
Influence: 14
Families: 1
Exiled from the Fortress due to insulting the Kings Beard.
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Topic: Digging too Deep Turn 20: Drums in the Deep...and Adamantine! (Read 5677 times)