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[GavJ]

No matter how harsh the world is, you can wall yourself in an underground sand dune at a cozy 10,015 temperature with a single plump helmet and a barrel and survive until the end of time. Dwarf fortress is actually REALLY EASY, too easy. The only difficulties arise from taking risks out of boredom, which isn't really as compelling of gameplay as it could be.

However, there are a lot of options I may not have explored, and Toady's excellent moddability raws system may provide any lingering solutions not possible in vanilla.

What sort of challenges, if any, can reverse my jadedness, and do not simply require role-playing yourself into greater difficulty? Modding raws in a roleplay-consistent way is just fine (great!). What I mean is, I don't want to have to intentionally make dangerous choices in-game in order to experience any danger.



The best I've been able to come up with so far is something along the lines of a combination of:
1) [SPECIFIC_FOOD:ELF] [SPECIFIC_FOOD:HUMAN], etc.
2) Making plant growth times way longer (for alcohol) and removing all of the underground crops from the world and from Dwarven civilization.
^
Thus forcing constant somewhat risky activity on the surface over time, since your only food source comes on the surface and is non-breedable and armed.
But meh, even then, a handful of half-hearted weapon traps = the end of difficulty. Or a simple drowning trap, or whatever.

I suppose that the above 2 things PLUS razor steel toothed poisonous flesh eating bunny rabbits and 500 degree temperatures (and other civs being immune to these) would amp it up. But even then, there's probably some simple solution involving tunneling to bodies, grabbing, and filling in, or whatever.




Megaprojects I am not thrilled by, but they're okay. Not really what the thread is about. Also, I prefer minecraft for that if I'm in the mood, since it is more moddable to make it into a 3d world editor where I can spend more time being creative and less time designating walls one at a time tediously so that stupid dwarves don't starve to death in the drywall.


Is the game maybe just not entirely for me? Or am I missing some things?

[Melting Sky]

There's got to be a way to mod all creatures so they can phase/path strait through stone, soil and constructions. Also, for fun you could make them all trap avoidant and incapable of feeling fear or pain with syndrome causing blood. 

If you really want a challenge embark in an evil reanimating biome next to a necromancer tower with the above mods.

[pisskop]

Why not take a hand towards modding?

I would love to see some increased difficulty, and not simply by giving everything tags.  They have farming mods, and they have other mods (or simple ways for you to mod) increased difficulty.

[Caz]

Stop walling yourself in, and the difficulty is fine.

[wierd]

he needs impetus to abandon walls.

easy enough i suppose.

add trap immune, nostun, and web immune to goblins, trolls, and kobolds.
add building destroyer 2 to goblins and kobolds.
add the mischief related tags found on gremlins to kobolds.
give goblins wings, and can_fly.

DF is now MUCH harder.  enjoy.

for added fun, give goblin blood a nasty contact syndrome to dwarves.

[MDFification]

There's got to be a way to mod all creatures so they can phase/path strait through stone, soil and constructions. Also, for fun you could make them all trap avoidant and incapable of feeling fear or pain with syndrome causing blood. 

If you really want a challenge embark in an evil reanimating biome next to a necromancer tower with the above mods.

There's a DFhack Plugin called the Digging Invaders Plugin. It does precisely what the name suggests; if invaders can't find a path into your fortress, they make one. You can enable/disable it for various races to liven up your game by discouraging turtling.
Mind you, a single trapped corridor with maybe a marksdwarf bunker can take care of absolutely anything the game can throw at you...

But yeah, if you're looking for a challenge, I'd go with modding. First mod in some bugfixes and rebalancing (Modest Mod is a good idea, but if I may blatantly plug the Succession Optimization Mod...) with a side of performance upgrades so you can run truly giant forts, then add some more challenging races in for you to interact with.

This isn't the modding section of the forum but I have me some ideas (some pillaged from mods I've done);
-Making harpies reproduce, and making them a flying kobold-like civ
-Making kobolds [MISCHIEVOUS] so they go on gremlin-style sabotage missions in your fort (it's not just pulling levers, according to Toady).
-Giving elves a caste that's functionally identical to Satyrs, giving them melee powerhouses for their sieges.
-Reenabling elf and human diplomacy.
-Making a race that's [TRAPAVOID] to force you to take them on with regular militia.
-Races that siege from beneath (I've never managed to do this, but apparently it's possible)
-Some invaders given the ability to dig and deconstruct your walls

There are also other mods that make things like Mining harder, but I've never really played around with those.

[GavJ]

Cool. The digging critters sounds like it will fit the bill. I didn't know that was possible with the current modding API. Digging enemies + refusing to build the hardcoded traps or modding out building-traps (cage and weapon) should be sufficiently challenging. In conjunction, that is, with some degree of more threatening life on the surface.

Also, I do indeed know how to code pretty well, and have made inquiries into how to get into lua script making for that game. If I can figure it out well enough, then I might make some additional mods similar to that one (I'd also like to override the fixed underground temperature if possible, depends on the power of the API again). Also interested in making some fancy map gen / editing mods to import in cool landscapes, for instance FROM minecraft, which would make megaprojects in this game much more interesting IMO (like if there were lots of swoopy rock arches and chasms and overhangs, then you could make some badass cliff dwelling fortresses with very interesting traps and flying battles)

[MDFification]

modding out building-traps (cage and weapon)

Regrettably not possible, although I suppose you could write a plugin to run the DFhack command that closes the game without saving if one is ever built as retributive justice. 

[GavJ]

Hah, that's amusing. 

Not building a certain building though is not a big deal. That's easy to police oneself on. It's much more cut and dry, black and white than it is to say something like "I will not make an overly cheap defensive system" which is vague and very easy to creep around the boundaries of over time without even realizing you're doing it.

Oh also, probably only retracting bridges should be used (and not as a means of blocking a downward ramp, lol)

[pisskop]

Id suggest you get into community forts/worlds if that s your gig.  Maybe post what you call 'a challenge' and see who is up for playing it.  You could feasibly organize and participate/compete in these.

After a few plays you should have an idea about who is on your skill level and whose ideas mesh well with yours.

[FrankMcFuzz]

No drawbridge, no cage traps, no danger room

GOOD LUCK!

Megaprojects I am not thrilled by, but they're okay. Not really what the thread is about. Also, I prefer minecraft for that if I'm in the mood, since it is more moddable to make it into a 3d world editor where I can spend more time being creative and less time designating walls one at a time tediously so that stupid dwarves don't starve to death in the drywall.

Urist, do you even k, u, h and m?

[itg]

No drawbridge, no cage traps, no danger room

GOOD LUCK!

Megaprojects I am not thrilled by, but they're okay. Not really what the thread is about. Also, I prefer minecraft for that if I'm in the mood, since it is more moddable to make it into a 3d world editor where I can spend more time being creative and less time designating walls one at a time tediously so that stupid dwarves don't starve to death in the drywall.

Urist, do you even k, u, h and m?

I think the OP was worried about his builders walling themselves off. If so, his concerns are mostly unwarranted; dwarves rarely trap themselves these days, although they will sometimes stand on top of the build site, then whine that they can't build the wall because some idiot is in the way.

Just in case you (OP) were unaware, you can designate walls in patches of up to 10x10 by using u,m,k,h to expand the build area before designating the job, which is what FrankMcFuzz was getting at.

[GavJ]

Uh, what sorts of things are you guys building, exactly?

UMKH is almost completely useless for anything except floors (or other passable tiles made less often, like ramps). Walls or fortifications, impassable tiles, it fails miserably in most situations. With the relatively rare and/or expensive exception of walls along an entirely walkable perimeter (even then, you need to manually do outside corners first if you want everything completed).

Go try it out: build a 5 tall stairway, then designate all at once 5, 5x5 blocks of walls (so you designate a 5x5x5 cube of walls all at once), using the stairs as the support to allow you to do the designation. Lemme know how that works out for you... I predict about a 90% fatality rate of your masons with brutally violent deaths, along with maybe if you're lucky 5% of the structure being built before everyone is either dead, or all the designations are suspended or unreachable. High chance of a tantrum spiral and fort loss as a side effect.

BEST case scenario is they build one wall immediately adjacent to each stair level, and then can no longer reach anything else and stop with 5 out of 125 walls built.

[wierd]

That's (one of) the reason(s) for using obsidian casting methodologies for creating megaprojects. Mining/smoothing/fortification designations are much easier to control. (with the caveat of channeling. Dwarves are dipshits at channeling, but not as bad as they used to be.)

You built a simple retainer wall, and your delivery stacks-- iteratively react the reagents, and build the obsidian cason-- carve the megalith out.

[GavJ]

I'm not really seeing how that is a time saver for anything but the most massive projects.  You have so much more overhead in routing aqueducts and magmaducts to the site, hooking up mechanisms for floodgates and such. And then you STILL have to micromanage in order to do that carving out you mentioned.  And then do smoothing, although thankfully that is possible at diagonals, but if there are any interior portions / more than 1 thick walls, lolnope! back to individual tile micromanagement anyway...

It's still not as much micromanaging per tile (one z level of channeling at a time, instead of a few rounds of designations per level), but the overhead initial time cost will easily cancel that out for any small to medium sized constructions.



It would be feasible to make algorithms to make dwarves perfect at this. Not sure why it's even that difficult to implement. All they have to do is search each path of access to a designated construction, and then rank all the currently designated ones by how many other construction designations require you to walk through this one in order to get to them, using the least interfering paths. The ones that have NO paths required to go through them get priority, then recalculate when constructions are completed.

If there were such an algorithm, then you really could designate a 5x5x5 cube of walls, and they would correctly build the bottom layer middle outward, then the second layer back corners oevr to the stairway, and so forth, and succeed safely.