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[Arcvasti]

Try mods. Even if they don't make it HARDER per say, they definitely make it more complex and interesting. Also, aboveground forts are pretty fun. Plus making big projects like minecart grinders and other big machiney stuff is really fun too.

[GavJ]

Banished exiles.  Hardy pioneers.  Religious heretics.

It's not my job to be your imagination for you.

None of those remotely explain even 20% of the stipulations laid out by that challenge. So in other words, you can't think of any either.

Try mods. Even if they don't make it HARDER per say, they definitely make it more complex and interesting.

Which are your favorite ones? Preferably smaller mods that I could combine more customly (as opposed to say, masterwork), if you have favorites of those.

[WoobMonkey]

None of those remotely explain even 20% of the stipulations laid out by that challenge. So in other words, you can't think of any either.

The only challenge I laid out was a zero-point embark in a terrifying biome.  Exactly the sort of place you'd send convicts, heretics, or other types of exiles.

Is there anything to this thread, other than you refusing to take advantages of the challenges offered in-game, weakly justifying your own lack of imagination, and complaining that the parts of the game you will condescend to accept are too easy?

Meh.  Forget it.  Once again, UnReal World, Banished, or in fact any game that requires no imagination on the part of the player is more likely to be up your alley.

[GavJ]

* Where did they  get a wagon?
* How did they get half way across the world?
Obviously, even if heretics and exiles, they must have been given supplies to get to their destination. Sure, maybe they were measured out just right to run out by the time they got there. But if so, you should have plump helmet seeds with you, and other leftovers.
"Maybe they were waylaid by bandits at the last moment!"
Why is nobody injured then?
Why is nobody upset?
Why didn't they take the juicy draft animals and wagon wood too?
Why are there bandits living right in the middle of an evil zombie raising biome in the first place such as to have been there to waylay them?
etc.

* Once they were out of the mountainhomes by themselves, why would they continue to the evil biome instead of just going somewhere more hospitable?
Nobody is there to enforce those decisions. So why would they still suicidally make them? Surely you would just go far enough away so that nobody can see where you went and then go settle in a nice little forest or whatever next door.

* Why would the mountainhomes send you to what they hoped was your death with no remaining supplies in a zombie world, and yet still then send you a caravan a few months later, FULL of useful lifegiving supplies, and risking the lives of half a dozen merchants and guards?

* Why would a bunch of convicts be made into nobility just because they happened to forge some stuff, and just because of a population that YOU sent them, all of whom are presumably also convicts? "Oh shit, we accidentally sent 50 convicts to the same place. I guess we have to pardon them all now and raise them to esteemed nobility."

Ad nauseum.




I do not lack imagination. It is in fact precisely BECAUSE of my perfectly good imagination that I can see why such an embark makes absolutely no sense. What you seem to be suggesting is instead to have only a limited imagination, where I imagine whatever is convenient but then refuse to imagine the rest of the mountain of reasons that start piling up about why that solution doesn't add up.

Is there anything to this thread

Yes, accumulating suggestions that fit with realism. I have many now, and it has been very productive. Some of which:
* Burrowing invaders
* Longer farming mods, which I have already applied to good success since it was suggested.
* Adding more flying creatures and building destroyers to the world as at least a small step.
* Cavern invasions
* Aboveground forts / "pretend mining is realistically difficult"
* Not using unrealistically overpowered buildings like cage traps (rickety wood holding a dragon? no.), weapon traps (they are perpetual inertia machines, nonsensically), bridges as doors (too magically unbreakable for no apparent reason), etc.

[Arcvasti]

Try mods. Even if they don't make it HARDER per say, they definitely make it more complex and interesting.

Which are your favorite ones? Preferably smaller mods that I could combine more customly (as opposed to say, masterwork), if you have favorites of those.

Masterwork is pretty good. If you don't want the full conversion, then maybe just add in longer growdurs on all the plants, as thats the main added challenge of Dwarf Mode Masterwork. I rather liked Fallout Equestria, despite not being all that into MLP. As for smaller mods, the Spearbreakers[Not sure exactly where you can download that one, but it exists.] one is supposed to be good. As is the Nothing mod. There's also Modest Mod, which doesn't really change gameplay, but makes a nice stable foundation to add your own changes too. I remember at least one person increasing the size of goblins so that they were more challenging in combat, so there's a thought.

FAKEEDIT: Calm down there GavJ. Woobmonkey is making some valid points. I don't think its entirely called for to bite his head off like that. I remember having a lot of fun doing conducts and inventing justifications for them. Like a having an entirely aboveground fortress because its leader was an insane prophet who wanted it that way. Or a fortress in a terrifiying biome because the king wanted sliver barb dye. Or if a fortress in the caverns because the king wanted them to study cavern creatures better. "Because the decadant king said so" is too boring for your taste: Rebels fleeing a despotic ruler take refuge in an area which most consider to be certain death to protect themselves. As more and more of the dwarven empire falls under the thrall of the Tyrant, refugees from across the realm come flooding into their unlikely safe haven. Meanwhile, some discontented parties in the foreign Elven and Human Empires make pacts with the rebels and send them supplies in exchange for valuable sliver dye. Even a few foolhardy Dwarven smugglers make their way to the rebels, seeking profit.

[WoobMonkey]

Okay, one last try.

* Where did they  get a wagon?

The Wagon held supplies for the guards/militia that were enforcing the death march upon the exiled dwarves.

* How did they get half way across the world?

They were led.  Where there's a whip, there's a way.

Obviously, even if heretics and exiles, they must have been given supplies to get to their destination. Sure, maybe they were measured out just right to run out by the time they got there. But if so, you should have plump helmet seeds with you, and other leftovers.

Not so obvious.  One does not supply undesirables with amenities best saved for soldiers.

"Maybe they were waylaid by bandits at the last moment!"
Why is nobody injured then?
Why is nobody upset?
Why didn't they take the juicy draft animals and wagon wood too?
Why are there bandits living right in the middle of an evil zombie raising biome in the first place such as to have been there to waylay them?
etc.

Irrelevant.  You're the only one talking about bandits, so the onus is on you to supply the backstory.

* Once they were out of the mountainhomes by themselves, why would they continue to the evil biome instead of just going somewhere more hospitable?
Nobody is there to enforce those decisions. So why would they still suicidally make them? Surely you would just go far enough away so that nobody can see where you went and then go settle in a nice little forest or whatever next door.

Nobody is there to enforce those decisions, right now.  The guards, having done the duty of transporting prisoners to an inhospitable place, have since gone home - taking whatever supplies with them.

* Why would the mountainhomes send you to what they hoped was your death with no remaining supplies in a zombie world, and yet still then send you a caravan a few months later, FULL of useful lifegiving supplies, and risking the lives of half a dozen merchants and guards?

For the same reason that England trades with Australia.

* Why would a bunch of convicts be made into nobility just because they happened to forge some stuff, and just because of a population that YOU sent them, all of whom are presumably also convicts? "Oh shit, we accidentally sent 50 convicts to the same place. I guess we have to pardon them all now and raise them to esteemed nobility."

Migrants aren't always sent, you know.  Those who are, say, dissatisfied with the harsh punishments meted out by the administration of the Mountainhome, may well have left of their own accord.  When criminals are successful, and are showing signs of economic viability, there is plenty of incentive (especially for a capricious, greedy, and resource-starved monarch) to re-negotiate trade accords.  England, once again, trades with Australia.  Is that senseless, as well?

Nobility has, historically, been granted to those who are most economically expedient to the current ruling class - regardless of criminal history.

Ad nauseum.

Yep.



 

[GavJ]

I wouldn't have btiten his head off if he hadn't condescendingly ended every post with "Lol, since you must be a boring, unimaginative dumb person, just go play the Sims"

Anyway, does masterwork have a menu where you can tick off different parts of it you want to add or something? I've never actually downloaded it and checked it out in that much detail. The farming comment sounds like it might be the case (I did add in longer growdurations myself after the first poster here, and I really like the result).

I like the sound of the Nothing mod. Harder creatures are something I've always wanted to try, but they usually seem to come packaged with a bunch of other junk, and meticulously designing them all myself is a lot of work. So that sounds great (or masterwork if I can just tick off some creatures and not use the other stuff, etc.)

[WoobMonkey]

I wouldn't have btiten his head off if he hadn't condescendingly ended every post with "Lol, since you must be a boring, unimaginative dumb person, just go play the Sims"

Except that that never happened.  I did, however, suggest a few other challenging games along the lines of DF (whether as roguelikes, or as difficult city-builders), which require no backstory to be internally consistent.

Oh well.

[wierd]

Indeed-- It was pisskop that said "then dont play"...

I was approaching more from the intellectual side of the discussion; Kinda like how the challenge presented by a tall mountain, is "because it is there".   I was pointing out incrementally taller mountains, with increasingly treacherous cliffs.

As for why you would want to do any of them? Each layer of difficulty presented imposes a handicap that has wide reaching effects on how you CAN play. There are basically limitless ways to play dwarf fortress. Boredom happens when you have come up with a working formula that works basically 100% of the time. You are bored because you dont really even have to play. The formula works, you could program a computer program to simulate your input, and the game would literally run itself.  Boring.

However, like the mountain, looming overhead-- the very existence of such handicaps presents a challenge, because it forces you to change your play style paradigm. It forces you to try new things that you would previously not have considered ever trying. It forces you to grow in different directions in your understanding of the game and its mechanics.

It isn't so much that I have to create some convoluted and tortured RP backstory-- In fact, the premise here was that you wanted actual challenges, which are *NOT* roleplay based. This is mechanics, and adaptive playstyle based.

You are limiting yourself and your ability to try new and crazy ideas (which may prove useful or insightful if you ever play a succession fortress and get caught up in a seriously screwed up situation where your predecessor went on a rampage and destroyed all the axes and picks in your fortress, and now you are well and truly screwed---- (or are you? )) all because "There's no way that would ever conceivably happen, and because I assert this blandly, I just cant commit to trying."

For any of the issues I mentioned, there could be situations presented by a succession fortress where that exact symptom is being manifest--


No food: On a glacier, some dumbass destroyed all the picks in the atom smasher, animals have already eaten all the grass (It does not grow back in certain biomes!), and there are no longer any trees to cut, and no longer any bushes to pick. 

This places you at the mercy of the carivans, even if only for one yearly cycle.  Being able to devise workable solutions to these problems, instead of just abandoning, tests your mettle as a player.

Challenges like these are artificial, to artificially and forcefully MAKE you grow.

That's why you do them. The challenge is THERE. Like the mountain.

[gritstone]

I don't think it's fair to criticise Gav for a lack of imagination, I think it's a good point he's making about challenges.  There's a reason why Will Wright called Sim City a toy rather than a game.

That sort of thing can be fun for a time, especially if there's lots of novelty, but for many people that wears off, reducing the replayability that you find in a lot of games.  It's the sort of fun that some people studying games have recently called easy fun - "...inspires exploration and role play. Fun failure states, fantasies, or simply enjoying the controls" to quote XEODesign - as opposed to hard fun which involves objectives and strategy.  Dwarf Fortress has to have the tagline "losing is fun" because it doesn't have another kind, there's no way to win, and after you learn a couple of basic strategies to avoid getting everyone killed (like walling in) you don't need to learn any new ones, and that rips the heart out of the experience for a lot of people.  Setting yourself challenges is all well and good but you can do that in any game, it doesn't really address the issue of why DF doesn't have any challenges in the ordinary gameplay sense.

I think the problem (if you see it as a problem), is that it's not a game, it's a simulator, but people expect it be a game.  Toady is a simulation programmer, not a game designer.  A fair amount of time must have been spent on geology, history, fluid dynamics, weather, temperature, physiology, personality, material properties and so on, time that a person writing a game might have spent on gameplay elements.

As someone who plays fortress mode almost exclusively, it's obvious just how much that part of the game relies on you making your own fun.  The overpowered traps, underpowered AI and the fact that after a decade you can still brick yourself in and ride it out if that's what you want to do - show that he's not all that bothered if you get smashed by the first siege 100 times in a row, or run a forgotten beast theme park and magma slide.  DF's gameplay doesn't seem like a priority, and from the dev roadmap I can't see that changing.  If you don't find it fun any more now, I can't see it being fun later.

[GavJ]

I think the problem (if you see it as a problem), is that it's not a game, it's a simulator, but people expect it be a game.  Toady is a simulation programmer, not a game designer. 

Somebody should let Toady know that!


But yes, he has been prioritizing weirdly from the perspective of probably most/many players like myself. Started out quite reasonably and now I guess he thinks he can afford to go tie up some minor loose ends like trees for ... a long time. But whatever. That's okay if enough modders have compiled work to fill in the gaps, though. So still definitely interested in hearing more. Keep it coming if you have other suggestions for challenge mods of the sort this gentleman is describing.

[gritstone]

Somebody should let Toady know that!

Would it make any difference if he called it a left-handed guitar?

[wierd]

The lack of an established "goal" seems dead on with toady wanting to build a world simulator.

The "fun" in Dwarf fortress comes mostly from "meta-gaming" after mastering the learning curve for the game's mechanics. Things like the "one pick challenge", "succession play", etc-- are all manifestations of meta-gaming.

There is no "goal", so we CREATE one, arbitrarily.

(again, this is essentially the same thing that climbing a mountain is about. there is no particular REASON to climb a mountain, like Mt Everest. One can just use a helicopter to get to the top, so why climb? The challenge of doing it, while absurd, holds value for some people. The mere existence is sufficient challenge to undertake the effort. The mountain is still there, even if you decide not to climb it, and there is no real penalty for not trying to.)

Since DF is basically a world simulator, and you have mastered the interface and understand the mechanics, the only avenues left are metagaming ones. From what I am seeing, GravJ is systematically excluding metagaming as a class, and asking an unanswerable question.

Unless toady gives a definitive "Goal" (rescue the princess!, whatever), there can only be metagaming based challenges.

[GavJ]

Somebody should let Toady know that!

Would it make any difference if he called it a left-handed guitar?

Well right, but the first several years of development seem pretty clearly oriented toward implementing a set of features necessary to make it a very playable game. He didn't just start out doing ALL of the foundation work. And in many cases, he took steps backward from a simulator to improve gameplay.

One small but illustrative example: He removed / avoided realistic topography and cliffs and overhangs that would be spot on for a simulator, due to the fact you couldn't climb them yet in adventure mode gameplay.

Since DF is basically a world simulator, and you have mastered the interface and understand the mechanics, the only avenues left are metagaming ones. From what I am seeing, GravJ is systematically excluding metagaming as a class, and asking an unanswerable question.

Metagaming OR modding more non-imaginary challenges in.

To be clear, I am also considering more metagaming. Both routes. It's more like just "I know what to do in metagaming to expand my game. Whereas I don't know about a lot of great mods that might be out there. So I want a thread focused more on the part I don't know as much about."

[wierd]

as far as I can tell though, DF has never actually had an explicitly stated goal or objective-- either in fortress or in adventure modes.

even in the 2D only versions, the game was "unwinnable", and toady has openly asserted that he does not like making games with objective goals, because it creates expectations he does not like to fill; (see for instance, "getting killed by a motionless bush" from one of his previous "armok" games. There needs to be some kind of handicap to gameplay, but the handicap can be unreasonable, or provide insufficient difficulty if made realistic-- breaking game mechanic enjoyment. Toady seems to prefer to set the goal of "realistic simulation with fantasy touches", instead of trying to build an actual "game".)


Using a 3rd party utility to runtime patch the game to add a new mechanic (digging invaders, smarter AIs, et al) is altering the paradigm under which you play-- the only practical difference between it and any other arbitrary imposed obstacle, is that it does not require self-discipline to adhere to the challenge.

EG-- digging invaders are handled by the binary patch injected by DFHack-- where as not building walls at all is done solely by player willpower.

You are specifically asking for cases where mechanics are changed, and enforced by the game itself, because having to enforce it yourself breaks the 4th wall-- specifically such enhancements that are not well known.

If I am reading you right.