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Optimization: Maximize production, minimize waste, keep the fortress running until the game runs at one frame per hour

28 (22.4%)

Losing spectacularly: Lava deaths! Plagues! Tantrum spirals! Etc!

39 (31.2%)

Clown invasion: Break into the circus and hope your last stand becomes the stuff of legends. May overlap with option 2.

17 (13.6%)

War: Because fuck those elves, man.

15 (12%)

Custom Objective Completion: Finally finishing your megaproject or finding narrative closure for your LP or any other option not covered by the first four.

26 (20.8%)

Total Members Voted: 125

[Telgin]

I tend to go for narrative approaches to it.  My forts tend to have some sort of RP aspect to them, and I just pick a vague story related to that and play the fort until it feels like I've achieved a reasonable conclusion to the story.  That tends to coincide with lack of enthusiasm for the fort and FPS death, as I'll usually extend any story I've conceived until one of those conditions hit.

[Drazinononda]

I consider the game won when my settlement crumbles, all the dwarves having fought valiantly to their last breath against goblins/humans/zombies/spoilers. Anything else I consider a loss.

[Minnakht]

When some aim is fulfilled, that's what.

For an end, there needs to be an end. If a fortress doesn't end, but keeps going, that's not an end.
Finishing a project a fortress is built around is a fine end. The work is done and everyone can go off and try to do something else.

Especially since you have to abandon a fortress if you ever want to drop by as an adventurer...

[Wellincolin]

I voted for "Clowns" because it is the most end-game content you can arbitrarily trigger to "win". Allow me to explain:

1 - FPS death isn't an intended feature and is by far one of the most subjective aspects in the game. It can wildly range depending on your computer's specifications, so this means you can have a FPS death with 50 dwarves or play normally with 200. You can also have FPS death because of a pathfinding bug or game programming issues (e.g. the game handling data the hardest way possible making it consume an unecessary amount of memory). So FPS death should be out of the table, and I hardly believe lots of people consider it to be "win". They usually abandon because they get pissed about not being able to do anything, or they force a "fun" situation.

2/3 - Losing spectacularly is considered "fun" and win by most people. Actually, this might be my personal favorite. Losing because of a legendary megabeast that was sleeping for years under your fort until you dig it up is as satisfying as it gets. By a certain point of view, this is also the only way of "winning" with the first option, because you made your fort last so much long that it will have to be spectacular to make your fort end. It can be frustrating if you were really engaged into a personal megaproject and it ended up making you lose your fort and progress.

4 - These are extremely fun but it usually is the most frustrating way to lose. Because it is so "easy" to set up defenses (you could literally just close up your fort, tell the invaders to fuck off and live without even needing to open it up), there are literally infinite ways of dealing with these. It is much more satisfying to release a sea of magma into the invaders than losing to them in a "fair" fight.

5 - Yeah that's win, but your fortress won't die. After it you'll end up doing something else or relinquishing your fortress anyway, in which case you'll be missing the whole point of the game.




By point of the game I obviously mean making epic (and !!EPIC!!) stuff and bragging about it on the forums more than you would if you had 100000 gamerscore on LIVE. Also having infinite times more recognition for it, and eventually becoming a legend to never be forgotten by the community.

[Urist McLaptop]

My personal favorite win is when I .....okay I engineered my underground fortress to cause a massive cave in.when a slew of goblins came in I knew I would die. So I a spectacular and glorious win I closed up all the entrances and I pulled the lever (I don't wanna explain how I did it)   the ENTIRE. Fortress caved in killing everybody! Then at the same time my magma pool up top was released and covered the mountain in lava!!  .noone got out, and noone can get in! 

[Tamber]

When I manage to screw everything up so wonderfully that the huge fortress full of happy dwarves, or whatever it is I'm playing today, is utterly gutted by demon-fire, blood, miasma and goblin-giblets; with any hope of recovery lying well beyond my skills.

I don't try to kill them randomly, I like them too much for that; but that doesn't mean I'm not going to send them all off in a glorious battle against all the odds, that will be sung and talked about for years to come, if I start getting bored or the fortress starts getting stagnant. After all's said and done, these creatures exist purely for my amusement.

And maybe I might 'accidentally', in the confusion of the fight against the Deep Ones, order the gates lowered to let the siege in.

[Itrade]

1 - FPS death isn't an intended feature and is by far one of the most subjective aspects in the game. It can wildly range depending on your computer's specifications, so this means you can have a FPS death with 50 dwarves or play normally with 200. You can also have FPS death because of a pathfinding bug or game programming issues (e.g. the game handling data the hardest way possible making it consume an unecessary amount of memory). So FPS death should be out of the table, and I hardly believe lots of people consider it to be "win". They usually abandon because they get pissed about not being able to do anything, or they force a "fun" situation.

That wasn't exactly the kind of end I was talking about, though. If you get a regular FPS death from the things you've mentioned, that's bad and hopefully it'll be patched some day. What I'm talking about can happen in any simulation game to some extent, but DF is perhaps the most complicated so it is also the most interesting:

Basically you want to streamline everything in your fort so it causes the least strain possible on your hardware. Routes should be clear, fluids should be still for the most part, everything should be neat and tidy and as simple as possible. Within that framework, you want to have as many ecstatic dwarves as possible. You are trying to build the most utilitarian fort that your computer can handle. It's an interesting balance of two main factors: running your fort well and managing your PC to ensure it doesn't melt from trying to simulate the lives of these incredibly elated dwarves.

[Burnup]

I wish DF was multithreaded.

[muzzz]

I wish DF was multithreaded.

That probably wouldn't be the silver FPS-bullet that many people want it to be.

Basically you want to streamline everything in your fort so it causes the least strain possible on your hardware. Routes should be clear, fluids should be still for the most part, everything should be neat and tidy and as simple as possible. Within that framework, you want to have as many ecstatic dwarves as possible. You are trying to build the most utilitarian fort that your computer can handle. It's an interesting balance of two main factors: running your fort well and managing your PC to ensure it doesn't melt from trying to simulate the lives of these incredibly elated dwarves.

While I wouldn't call it a win-condition, I do find this one of the more interesting parts of DF. Drowning your fort in food, booze and crafts is easy. Producing just the right amount of stuff is much more challenging.

[VerdantSF]

Personally, my dream victory would be to have a fort with as many ecstatic dwarves as possible. Ideally the fortress wouldn't have an end, there would just be so many dwarves using up processing power that the game would be impossible to play except for when Moore's Law allows me to squeeze a few more months with each upgrade to my computer until either I die or computer reach maximum efficiency.

What about you?

For the Mountainhome to also be party central sounds like a worthy goal to me!  Let the booze flow!

[AutomataKittay]

My endgame? When the fortress is so well-entrenched and it's material processing capacity is running at bleeding edge efficiency and there're nothing left to improve or change.

Yeah, I'm pretty utilitarian, but I find the process planning and design to be fun for myself

[Burnup]

I wish DF was multithreaded.

That probably wouldn't be the silver FPS-bullet that many people want it to be.

With 24g+ ram it would most definetly help.
Otherwise, silver bullet? Such a thing doesn't exist when it comes to coding.
Only a lot of little simple things really have a chance to add up.
It's not until we attempt to look at these little things as one unit that it becomes mind staggeringly complicated.