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[rosareven]

Hi all,

I am a 21st century lazy newb, who grew up with Age of Empire 2, Diablo 2, eventually today's MMORPGS, and just started trying out DF with the lazy newb pack. I'm not an ASCII graphic fan when it comes to games, I use the graphic packs just so I can look at a more graphical interface, I'm slow on the hotkeys and have to look at the menu all the time, I am utterly confused with things in the game and have to constantly rely on the wiki, I worried about the difficulty and I am one of those who wish there is a point n click interface.

All that being said, I'm still hooked with the game anyway because of one thing: losing isn't as easy as people make it out to be. I went ahead with my very first dwarf fortress under the first few paragraphs of guidance from the wiki's quick start guide, choosing a calm biome and all that, then I only planted a few farms beside digging a huge area out of the mountain. One in-game year has passed now and I'm surprised to see that every dwarves are still at least content and no real threat has been going on. I even purposely commanded a miner to dig through a damp stone to let a lake flood in, but instead of flooding the cave it just irrigated the floor and made it farm-able. I have no active still to make more beer, the only food source is my plume helmet farm that is now gigantic because of the unintended irrigation, but I am still not in any immediate danger and I have a lot of time to try all the buildings and most of the functions.

It's going to be a very messy fortress and I already feel like purposely killing it off so that I can use the new knowledge to build a better one, but in regards to the difficulty of dwarf fortress, it's actually not easy to die that soon and you have plenty of time to figure out what's going on. Later on, sure there may be more threats, but quoting someone on another forum thread, you can really just wall yourself in and play peacefully forever. Threats only come when you go out there to seek it, and if I do go out there to risk things that's just because I am willing (like me trying to flood my cave purposely).

I hope this give some insight to old and new potential players alike out there, what DF feels like to a 21st century lazy newb. Thanks for the game Tarn!

I'm still going to stick to the lazy newb pack though >.> (Thanks to all the creators of the tools and graphics included in the pack, and the pack compilation itself)

[optimumtact]

Sooner or later you'll find your self obsessively squaring out rooms and colour coding everything, then you know that your journey has truly begun.

[Gatleos]

You didn't start with 40d. The horror...

Welcome to the forums! Clean the blood off your feet on the way in, and don't feed Capntastic.

[Tharwen]

You won't be saying that in three forts' time when you've forgotten to make any farms and three of the starting 7 are tantrumming while skeletal camels knock down the door.

[i2amroy]

You won't be saying that in three forts' time when you've forgotten to make any farms and three of the starting 7 are tantrumming while skeletal camels knock down the door.

Skeletal Horses.... Oh God the horror!! 5 of my 7 slain in the first minute after embark in a terrifying biome, the other 2 followed roughly 3 minutes later. On the second try my starting 7 managed to last a whole 10 minutes (half of the way through the first summer!) before suffering roughly the same fate. On my third (and currently final try) I managed to last a whole year and a half before an error in my tree cutting designations opened a whole in my wall and let in the giant skeletal badgers who promptly butchered all 50 of my dwarves and my 10 war dogs with little contest.

As for the idea of losing not being that easy, I found that the majority of my fortress deaths in the earlier stages came at the first goblin ambushes. Sure you can say that all you need to do is wall yourself off at that point, but I found that walling yourself off is a little hard to do when 30 goblins suddenly appear literally inside your front door.

[Alastar]

Dwarf Fortress is difficult in a very different way from things like Nethack or I Wanna Be The Guy.
None of that 'your play needs to be 100% tight at all times'. Just enough low-level simulation for emergent behaviour that can spell disaster if you don't plan for it, and this risk scales with ambition. I'm a sucker for overpowered machinery, high-pressure plumbing and heavy automation - no need for outside help to accidentally my fortress. I'm getting slightly better at safety when I bother, but design elegance > safety.

The interface needs some work. While I think the old-fashioned keyboard-driven approach works well in my opinion, there is plenty of room for improvement... e.g. creature management, mouse support and consistency.

[i2amroy]

There are currently a lot of tools out there that can help out with those things you mentioned.

For dwarven management you definitely want to check out Dwarf Therapist, which also has a currently working version for Mac computers as well. DT definitely makes any fort much easier to handle, when the mac version came out I went from dreading managing even 80 dwarves to being well able to handle the labors of 200ish dwarves without breaking a sweat. It helps that much, seriously it is worth it.

Also there is a guy working on adding mouse support to the game. This looked like it died for a while there but I think somebody new just picked it up so it might be worthwhile checking out.

[rosareven]

The worst just happened. I was witnessing the impending end of my fortress in the hand of a lone forgotten beast, and just when the river started to run blood... the client crashed. I don't even get to keep this legacy for later D=

Weep, time to start another world.

[Ieb]

Let this be a lesson for you.
When things are going nice and smooth, it only means it's about to go bad sooner or later.

I managed to kill my woodcutter today on a new fort after a long period of screwing around on other games. How? I told the dorfs to build a wall section too early and since it wasn't connected to anything(making walls surrounding a bridge leading to the first cavern floor) it went down.

Luckily only the woodcutter died and they had no friends. Unluckily, they took my only metal axe with them.

Such is life in Dwarf Fortress.

[rosareven]

I enjoyed learning new lessons actually by trying stupid things just to see what happens, and it was a massive mayhem to watch the fortress fall. I was more referring to the crash that causes me to lost all the progress and thus it never happened.

But yes, it's easy to take things smooth early on, and the "fun" comes later. I had a possessed child that hasn't grown up in time, so he went berserk and the military had to take him down. It wasn't an "ending fun" thing but a noteworthy moment nonetheless.

This fortress was also somehow bringing up bunch of "surface dwarves" whose traits did say that they prefer working on the surface. I didn't get to start with any underground farming seeds and the caravan never carried any (can't find it as an option in liaison either), so I had to farm above ground, and so the fortress was either above ground or some parts are just one z-level below the surface.