As the title says, I hadn't played DF in a couple years (not seriously, anyway) and decided to give it my all last night, especially since I've finally gotten an upgraded computer that actually runs the game pretty well, even with over 100 dwarves just idling around.
The result was several hours of consecutive gameplay leading to me giving up on my fort in frustration after nearly three years. Frustration that wasn't over the game's punishing mechanics, but over my own shortcomings when it came to the design of my expedition. Anyway, I wanted to post about my experience in the dual hope of, on the one hand, maybe helping anyone else out there avoid the same mistakes, and of eliciting any suggestions from the community at large. So here we go.
Fortress Design Flaw: The location was a brook-valley between two separate mountain biomes, which seemed to have everything you'd want from a fortress site: shallow metals, flux, deep metals, trees and even a soil layer with an aquifier in an adjacent biome. Nothing particularly out of ordinary for the start up crew. Two miners, a carpenter, a mason, two growers and a trader. I usually don't know what to do with the excess start up points anyway, so nothing revolutionary here.
Now I tackled the digging on a one-step-at-a-time basis. The entrance needs room for a trade depot. The trade depot has to have a stockpile nearby for efficiency. The stockpile has to have workshops nearby to produce finished goods. Then I go out of my way to find soil so that I can build a farm without needing to bother with a complex irrigation system that may flood my fort. Those farms need to be near plant stockpiles. Those plant stock piles need to be near the kitchens. The kitchens need to be near the dining room. The dining room needs to be near the common dormitory (screw private living arrangements until I can prove that I can get this fort defending itself 5 years running, right?).
Well, at that point I had created something that was neither aesthetically pleasing nor particularly efficient. What happened was that the further I dug into the earth, the more spread out and decentralized my fortress became.
The design flaws of my fortress became more obvious as I desperately started searching all the Z-levels for iron ore and coal so that I could start making some steel equipment. Now despite what the start-up location map told me, I found neither of these things. Instead a found a lot of cheap gems and, eventually, tons of silver ore. More ore than I could smelt with tree-fuel alone. Anyway, by the time I abandoned my fortress, my fort resembled a giant ant colony. The rooms and passages sort of had a function, but the type that would puzzle modern archaeologists on the scale of Knossos's labyrinth-city.
I think a lot of forts can get ruined by a player's obsessive compulsion to get everything to look perfect and geometrically exact, but clearly the way I was approaching it was not the right way to tackle this game. The one-room-at-a-time philosophy created a monstrous cave system in my game.
No Appreciation for Trade: As soon as I realised I wasn't getting any coke or iron from the this mountain, I should've been working to trade for these very things. In my past attempts at this game, I just threw a bunch of well made lavish meals into the trade depot and got tons of items from caravans through that, but that was never a rewarding experience. This time around I tried to trade only items that other civilizations would conceivably want/expect from a Dwarven colony; i.e. anything except meals. And whatever my dwarven mothercity is willing to pay double for, that's what I try to spend the year making.
Again, I think there was a problem with this approach. It focused on what I wanted to give away, rather than what I wanted to get out of trade. Dwarf Fortress operates on a bartering economy, so it's not like I'm amassing any real wealth by mass producing hot selling products. Should I have been taking the trading opportunity to stockpile on foreign foods and drinks? On cloth and leather so that I don't have to bother with making a new industry to acquire those raw goods? Or should I have just taken every single weapon and armour piece I could come across, even though lavishly expensive, in the vain hope of arming my citizens before I can get my hands on some quality iron ore?
I don't actually know the answer here, but it's something I have to think about before embarking on a second fortress.
Security Fail: Ultimately, a bad security design is what did me in. I had a drawbridge, war dogs and a ton of traps. And I learnt that these are not substitutes for a military. A fisherdwarf had spotted a goblin ambush miles away before they reached my entrance, so I got a change to get my fort firmly under lockdown. When over half of the invaders had fallen prey to stonefall or cage traps, I enlisted my miners, woodcutters and rangers to go wipe up the last of them. These guys had no actual experience as I had never put them in squads before. They wore no armour because of my game's utter lack of iron. They went out and chased the remaining two goblin ambushers across the map, only to fall right smack dab in the middle of a second goblin ambush, armed to the teeth! I lost every man.
Thankfully, the fort went back into lockdown mode and the goblins called it quit and ran off. I still had over 70 dwarves in my keep, but the problems piled up fast. The most annoying thing was that some of my soldiers had fallen into my own cage traps and I was having way too much trouble in releasing them. I had also collected over a dozen captured goblins in cages, and that's not much fun. I just sort of started accidentally collecting them as the years went by! Oh, and about a dozen of my civilians started going crazy because of the massacre of the sortie. So once those insane people were put down, that was over 20 dwarves I needed to make coffins or memorials for. And then it hit me: where on earth am I supposed to put a Memorial Hall? Where should I put my pet goblins on display?
I had no answers and my limited vision for the fort eroded into nothing.
I came to the conclusion that I have to be playing this game all wrong. I launched an expedition with the attitude of "I'll deal with it when it comes up," and that works for the unforeseeable things that can happen in Dwarf Fortress. But some things are inevitable and probably should have been planned for by me from the very beginning, like goblins attacks! I should've had a military by the second year. God knows I had the idlers to fill the rank and file. The problem was equipping them without iron. But with the amount of wealth in stone crafts I can make in a year, I should've been begging the dwarf caravans to bring iron bars to me, bins full of it, just in case I don't find any in two years time.
I think that for the second fortress I attempt, I should have a design for the society in mind. Maybe my original seven colonists should have a revered and honoured role in the society? Maybe two of them should be dedicated soldiers, rather than growers? Perhaps the entrance should be lined with statues of them, rather than innumerable cage traps that will catch anything that moves. I think playing this game with an initial, but flexible, plan for your expedition is the way I should have been going about it to begin with.
But I'm not sure about any of this, or really how you go about the problems I experienced as outlined above, so if you have any ideas or similar experiences of your own that you want to share, I'd love to hear them.
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Topic: A Few Lessons Learnt After Years of not Playing (Read 3192 times)