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[FallenAngel]

Post spoilered due to massive size.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I fail to see how spontaneously generating 200+ steel bars starting from a single pair of leggings and a magma smelter is anything but an exploit.  Part of the "fun" is working within the limitations of your embark.  No easy source of iron? You gotta import it.  No iron and only dwarven caravan (which lacks iron AND flux), then you have to play a trap-master fortress (drowning chambers and pit-traps- no atom smashing and pathing abuse). 

At least things like save-scumming are only "gamey."  They rely on mechanics of this actually being a video game (as there are no saving in life).  However... things like metal duping laugh in the face of realism and actual physics.  Again, how do you just spontaneous generate an entire army's worth of metal from one item!? How is this anything other than an exploit? Aka cheating. 

Its your game and play it how you want to, sure.  There are no competitions for prizes or even leaderboards here that exploits give you an unfair advantage for.  However, if you are going to use the exploit at least own up to it- don't say "LALALALA THERE IS NO EXPLOIT LALALALA EMERGENT GAMING/UNPLANNED FEATURE LALALALA"

Still, if you're new to the game, not that good a fortress builder, or just not bold enough to go for "challenge fortress" (I am the last one, and sometimes/often the second as well) it's a bit disheartening to go on the forums and see people calling you a damned cheater for trying to work around limitations of an embark because you didn't use DFhack to check whether you had iron on the embark or not... I understand you like to keep the game realistic, but why do you have to be a jerk about me and others who use some exploits to work with what is known to be a tough game to get into?

I agree with you, Aslandus.
I also agree with the argument that there are exploits.
However, do not force your views on others. I find it acceptable, albeit sometimes bland, to exploit. I exploit myself sometimes; typically, it's magic metal creation, and only with things that are challenging to get a hold of, which varies depending on the fort. Of course, if steel is able to be forged without exploits, I will stray away from them.
Please do not try to force others to not use exploits/gamey things, Niddhoger.

Stuff in spoiler applies to stuff at or before the quoted post; I'm not willing to argue any further.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Infinite metal generation is stupid, but so are many other features of the game: quantum stockpiling, dumping stone into magma and not making more magma, walling up vampires to keep the fort alive forever. If I had the power to change these things, then I would, but since Toady has not come around to fixing them yet, there is no need to demonise (or should I say clownise?) any player who uses it. I have generated metals this way, and I have not, as I have got better at the game. The player can make the game as easy or as hard for himself as he likes. Choosing to generate metals or not is like choosing whether to embark in an undead biome or not; the player chooses how hard he wants his game to be. Now I am reasonably good at the game, I too stay away from stupid things, and have even attempted to mod some out of the game by changing raws and so on. But, as a new player reading about infinite metal generation on the wiki, I thought I should try it, and when I found it was very useful I used it to survive my first terrifying biome by producing steel for weapons and armour.

[FallenAngel]

One final thing, actually.

Due to the massive amount of possibilities in Dwarf Fortress, there is no truly correct way to play. There are also no truly wrong ways. There are, however, better and worse ways. However, these are subjective. What one person might find a bad way, another may enjoy such a way. I agree that infinite metal generation is exploity, however, it's not wrong. Many people regard it as a bad way, however.

[Niddhoger]

*shrugs* using exploits as training wheels takes all the fun out of the game for me.  You might as well just use DF hack to generate the metal or fiddle with the RAWs to change goblin melting points so they instantly die when entering the map.  If you can step in and bend the rules whenever you see fit, where is the challenge and sense of accomplishment?  I am not even the only person to say that in this very thread.  Yet now I am the bad-guy for going a little more in-depth in to why they shouldn't be used? Aslandus said he needed training wheels to help learn the game.  I simply "suggested" that he not embark on more advanced areas (low metal in this case) until he is comfortable with dealing with the consequences of not having iron/any military-grade metals.  I didn't call him a n00b, I didn't tell him to go die in a fire, I wan't even condescending (to him) at all.  I was only condescending towards "Urist Tilaturist" WHOM I BLOODY QUOTED for saying that exploits didn't exist, and are in fact "emergent gameplay." 

My point was that if you were going to cheat, at least own up to the cheat and don't hide behind flowery words.  But that makes me a bad-guy, apparently.

I wasn't being a tyrant and telling this n00b to keep his grubby neck-beard away from using exploits.  I simply voiced my opinion and offered suggestions to work around not using it.  Why the bloody hell can't I have a reasonable debate to try and change someone's mind? "Never try to convince someone is your own personal views" sounds like you are hte one trying to force that view on me.  I told him I'd rather him not do it, but that it was his single-player game so w/e.   I never told him I'd shoot his dog or hack his computer or even ignore him if he tried to stop.  I just tried to calmly suggest otherwise.  I never once called him any names or got petty with him.  I simply cannot fathom how that is wrong.

Since I apparently need to clarify things... my point now is that there is no moral imperative stating you can't DISCUSS something with intent to change another's mind.  It's how the entire world functions!  Have you never once tried to argue why X game/movie/song/restaurant is better than Y with your friends? Seriously...  I never once tried to actually STOP a friend from listening to Nickelback, but I can sure as hell try to convince him to stop so long as I don't resort to name-calling.

[Aslandus]

One thing is that cheating and exploits are different. While it may not seem "logical" or "fair" to make metal by forging and melting objects it still takes time and fuel while simply spawning it in would be flatly cheating and wouldn't actually help get down methods for setting up jobs or keeping stocks of fuel on hand. I understand you don't like the training wheels, and presumably I will get tired of it when I learn to play better as well, but I don't feel I should have to play with a stunted military because none of the maps I embark on ever have iron (yes, I always start with both shallow and deep metals). I don't need you to change the way you think or play, but could you not call it "cheating" when it's a stepping stone in many people's gameplay growth?

[dwarf_reform]

I've done it all :> When one of my forts started to fall to fps death the God DFhack blessed my dwarves with a much faster movement speed (and eventually teleportation).. having fun..

I'm also playing a fort on version 21.93.19a, and having a blast..



I've led a miserable herd of dwarves through a sand-coated above-aquifer nightmare of an existence.. They fueled the furnaces with wood and green glass rained down in unlimited amounts..

One fort held an above-ground army of zombies on chains, another where the dwarves in my evil tundra biome painted (nearly) the entire surface from white to green with vomit.. the fort where everyone lived to serve a baby chick with two broken legs (that grew into a rooster with two broken legs; I could almost hear the rustle as it dragged its feathered undercarriage around the fort).. my glitch that caused a minotaur to (climb a tree to) beat an emu with a sock for 7 long years (with a massive page full of scars to prove it).. the map I expanded the river on until the only surface tiles were either at the map edge or the 3x3 entrance to my fort..

I've done it as many ways as seemed interesting, and had fun every time, and there are still a grotesque amount of scenarios to play with, so.. I win! Or at least I didn't lose

As far as "cheating", all I'd really consider "cheating" would be coming to the forums to show an awesome megaproject and then falsely claiming they did it with an unmodded/vanilla version of the game :> The community here is great, so I've never felt the slightest worry stating "Hey, I did all this with fastdwarves that teleport! Twas great!" But I also get that good pride when I accomplish something intense ("not easy") without any safety nets (as with all actions executed without safety nets, I'd imagine)..

.. And even then, I barely care, bahahahaha

[Urist Tilaturist]

Infinite metal generation is only cheating if you are playing a challenge where it is not allowed. Cheating means breaking the rules of the game (as in using DFhack), and infinite metal generation is, I am sorry to say, within the rules of the game. The only time I would say it was cheating is if there was a succession game that had the rule "no metal generation"and somebody did it anyway. That would be cheating, like bringing 2 picks on a 1 pick challenge. It is a stupid feature, likely resulting from a bug, but DF bugs have entertained us a lot over the years.

[peridot]

I came to DF from Nethack/Angband, so I started easy - anything that works within the rules of the game, embarking somewhere manageable. So quantum stockpiles, danger rooms, metal duplication, pathing traps, what have you. No savescumming, and DFHack only to automate things I could have done through the game UI (so, workflow but not fastdwarf for example).

Since I figured out how to make a fortress work under those conditions, I've been taking on voluntary challenges: I've given up quantum stockpiles, I usually embark on an aquifer, and I've recently started in a Haunted biome (no Terrifying embarkable sites). I'm going to try getting all my metals the hard way, but the traps don't offend me much so maybe later. Danger rooms aren't worth the trouble any more; stick a bunch of useless dwarves in a barracks and they become Legendary soon enough.

I play very cautiously so mostly I've been trying to do kiloprojects: an underground tree farm with the new trees, an obsidian casting/welcome chamber, a GCS silk farm, efficient cave-in traps for unwanted visitors, a completely sustainable fort (no consumables: no stone but obsidian, all metal obtained from caravans/goblinite, lots of green glass, etc.), that sort of thing. I choose my challenges.