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[Nukeitall]

One thing I am concerned about, however, is the speed of the game. It seems quite slow now. Almost too slow. Extremely slow.

I have the patience for it and enjoy it, however the speed at which the fortress progresses is somewhat ..well, slow.

[infinity]

quote:Originally posted by Nukeitall:
<STRONG>One thing I am concerned about, however, is the speed of the game. It seems quite slow now. Almost too slow. Extremely slow.

I have the patience for it and enjoy it, however the speed at which the fortress progresses is somewhat ..well, slow.</STRONG>

One way to speed up the game is when you choose your starting area, you can change the size of the window, it starts as 5x5 (I think), bring it down to 3x3, and everything should run much faster.    The screen I speak of occurs when you're selecting your site, and you have the uklm/UKLM options to move and resize.

[BurnedToast]

There is also a known bug that the more unrevealed (and sky and distant ground) tiles on the screen, the more it lags.

outside with no unrevealed tiles is ~150 fps easy for me. underground with all unrevealed? 25.

[Tracker]

The wiki is quickly coming together, folks. When you learn something, check and see if it is up on the wiki, yet - if it isn't...put it up.

[Faces of Mu]

I think starting with a belief that I will be learning and probably expending a few starting locations through learning helped me be patient with it. It's fun just to start a troupe and play around with only one feature of it (mining, or rewalling/flooring) until they starve to death. I did this at one map where I accidentally started on a town. I dug some holes and figured out stairs, drained a pond and then dammed it up before it all escaped. I also flooded some of the townspeople's homes and started on a waterwheel - all without building a single farm plot or workshop except carpenters. I learned a lot, had some fun and abandonned a forts once I realised I had the right skills to start a proper fort.

Mind you, my first fort was really bad and I didn't learn as much because I wasn't trying to learn. I thought it would be simple and easy to do, so I got carried away with design and didn't realise all the problems I had created before it was too late (miners getting stuck in channels and not being able to build up stairs).

Also had a few forts where my dwarves spent all their time and lives just being slaughtered by the wildlife. My last and most successful fort had my first ever elephants, and they were pretty tame to be honest.

[Mover#005]

I find it in fact easier. With the many starting points and the easiness of farming, food is now a complete non-issue, as is booze.
With the new terrain (which i absolutely love, every map is different) you can't use the same strategy over and over again. (Which is a good thing imho, the old version did start to repeat itself after a few tries, which isn't good for a procedurally generated gameworld like in df)

Balancing is way off, but this is to be excepted for an alpha, after all. DF isn't a game where you get the "highscore".  I see it as sandbox-game... a software toy if you will. The goal is playing, do as you wish.

I first thought the z-axis will make the game totally indecipherable, well I think I was wrong. It in fact comes naturally and I can't even think about playing df without a z-axis anymore.

The interface is the interface, I don't even find it as terrible as many people think here. There was a time where every single Interface of every strategy- or RPG-game looked like that. Many of this games where completely unplayable without manual. DF isn't even one of this games, you can learn to play it without manual. Much things in the gameworld are quite logical and toady did a good job to remove some of the things wich make the previous version tedious and cumbersome at some point in the later game.

Long post... all in all, I find the game easier.  

[Tormy]

Hmmm now I am not that messed up that I was yesterday.
However I still dont understand that why can we farm on sand for example without irrigating? This is making no sense imo.

[uberubert]

quote:Originally posted by mickel:
<STRONG>...how to survive in the previous version. I mean, I can't fail worse...   </STRONG>

Actually, this is what I like more about this new version... That you actually CAN fail worse!   haha!

I had a good laugh when my dwarves stopped everything they where doing, and ran around like crazy, trying to hide from a Giant Eagle soaring above them! I hadn't really gotten to the point where I had gotten underground yet. I actually could see the eagle fly up and down through the z axis! (Hard to spot it, since it didnt stay on the same z-level for very long at a time.. )

Also, I've flooded most of my farm-room attempts, and only recently discovered that sand would be sufficient alone. Even underground. This is like... my 10th fortress in 2 days...  

[Fleeb]

quote: However I still dont understand that why can we farm on sand for example without irrigating? This is making no sense imo.  

Possibly because the game is not finished yet? Just maybe?

[Xotes]

Yeah, I had farm room troubles when I dug under the surface river. I hadn't expected it to, ya know, flood, because I though it functioned like the cave river in previous builds, and it flooded my mine. All that hematite... (cries) And my guys were almost too stupid to get out of there, what with both my miners and only able grower down there. (My other grower got trampled by some horses, but she's recovering.)

[elipsis]

I find this new version WAY easier to start out on if you ignore the complex (and unnecessarily for basic learning) portions of the game.

All you do is start in the reccomended location, take a good herbalist, wood worker, stone worker, cook/brewer and enough rum to choke a dragon. forage for plants outside, brew those, cook the booze. when you've got enough seeds stockpiled plant outside. with your wildly excessive store of food, you can experiment and learn the game.

I never had this much food in my most prepared of expeditions in the previous version. I really do think a simple guide that elaborates my little outline there with really basic instructions (hit D, for designate. Then d to dig and carve out a long narrow tunnel...etc) would be far, far easier for a starting player than having to use nile/floodgate farming in the old version.

is there a newbies starting guide in the new wiki?  

[Entity]

quote:Originally posted by infinity:
<STRONG>

One way to speed up the game is when you choose your starting area, you can change the size of the window, it starts as 5x5 (I think), bring it down to 3x3, and everything should run much faster.    The screen I speak of occurs when you're selecting your site, and you have the uklm/UKLM options to move and resize.</STRONG>

Another way is to knock down your graphical refresh rate in the data/init/init.txt file. I think it's originally set to 50, but you don't need anything close to that. (50 Hz is overkill even for fully-rendered 3d graphics, which I think need 25 Hz to flow seamlessly. For ASCII, 50 Hz is like using a sledgehammer to squash a bug.) I set it to 5, and watched the FPS counter shoot from 15-17 to 80-100. (And then decelerate to 25-30 whenever I looked down a level... hope that bug gets fixed soon.)

[schm0]

I've actually spent most of my time with the new version talking to people about it instead of actually playing the game itself, so I can't personally speak to it's difficulty. There are a lot of things I still would like to know before going in, such as how immigration, irrigation/farming, nobles, machines and creature attacks work. The old DF was very complex and had a lot of difficulty, and the added complexity of the new version definitely makes me want to take things slowly. There are a couple of major bug fixes that have put me off from officially starting a fortress. I think I'll end up waiting a week before throwing a full effort into making a working, breathing fortress.

And for those of you who are saying the new DF is easy, then I think you need to take a step back and look at the game in the big picture. I think of this game as a combination of Lemmings, Sim City and the text-based adventure games that came on floppy disks when I was a kid (with a bit of D&D and LotR thrown in for good measure.) This quasi-combination game then takes an average $40 purchase from Best Buy and multiplies the complexity by 3. Then, on top of that, add on the fact that none of the maps (world, regional or local) will be identical. This game is unprecedented in it's level of detail, and it's only in an ALPHA.

I do think the interface should be cleaned up as well, as it can be very confusing to navigate through all of the menus and submenus.

Don't get me wrong, cuz I'm not knockin' DF.  

[Silveron]

One of the things I've seen are that if you look at the biomes, you see broadleaf forest, heavy vegitation, etc. But the actual site itself may vary from that. I ended up with a brook, couple hundred tiles of grass, no bushes, no trees. Id like to see a flag show up for maps being treeless/vegetationless. I think this happened because I resized to a 4x4 area (down 1 each way from default) and lost the one row of tiles that would have been forest. The south end of my map does have a good bit of grass, but evidently Im above the treeline.

[Dwemeri]

I actually think that this verison was easier to play than the previous one that I only played for about a month. You have more time IMO to build up due to the extra amount of food and drink you can bring. I mean, sure, I was confused as hell with my first fort, I didn't know whether to dig down or up or into the mountain or if I should farm outside, and so on, but thanks to the extra points I spent on food and drinks, I survived the winter and could keep testing new things... And, you aren't restricted to the dig-into-underground-river-set-up-irrigation-then-expand-into-mountain scheme. I think the main problem right now is trying to grasp the overwhelming amount of new information being thrown at you, so once you start to "see" the Z-axis, it'll work out.

Also, if you really want to challenge yourself or if you think that this version is too easy, skip some points or don't use a certain skill. Although, I think it'll take a while until I even try playing in any territory more dangerous then wilderness ATM. Crap, I didn't even last 10 minutes in haunted on the last version   :roll: