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[Henny]

My favourite explanation for what happens when dwarves get sober.

[NJW2000]

Ahhhh. So dwarves don't become depressed because they like booze, its because they realise that they have caged and captured hundreds of living creatures and sentient beings, that there is no wildlife on the map and are building execution chambers for people they could just release, and are being relentlessly attacked by some of the most dangerous creatures in the world.

[cephalo]

It's really a complex plot device. As it is a rather large part of the narrative and tradition (even pre-DF), it definitely deserves some major consideration by Toady.

If you look at it as a caricature of certain human behavior, it is possible that alcohol is actually very bad for them, yet they cannot accept this for cultural reasons. Alcohol then becomes a test of strength and will, similar to scarification or other such flagellant behavior. Just a common belief that a dwarf who can't take his liquor would be less likely to sacrifice for the community.   

[Calidovi]

It's really a complex plot device. As it is a rather large part of the narrative and tradition (even pre-DF), it definitely deserves some major consideration by Toady.

If you look at it as a caricature of certain human behavior, it is possible that alcohol is actually very bad for them, yet they cannot accept this for cultural reasons. Alcohol then becomes a test of strength and will, similar to scarification or other such flagellant behavior. Just a common belief that a dwarf who can't take his liquor would be less likely to sacrifice for the community.

I'd like ThreeToe to make a story about an ex-brewer attending a tavern and seeing the scarred souls that reside there, chugging away their problems.

[Ghills]

umpteen games that do a better job of simulation

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Anyway, if the only thing that makes dwarf fortress better than any of the attempts to copy it to you, is that dwarves don't get drunk, then I think you're playing dwarf fortress wrong.

DF does a great job of simulating geography and material complexity.  Social, political, military, economic, mental and emotional simulation are all really, really bad, and the ability of players to access this information is highly restricted, far more so than most other simulation games.

Patrician games do a better job of the political and economic simulation, no question.  Most RPGs do a better job of providing believable facsimiles of relationships and beings for the player to interact with.  There's a whole genre of games dedicated to simulating running a city, and most of them are far better at than DF.  Strategy games have turned simulating militaries into a fine art.   MMOs like Wurms and Eve have done a great job of providing a realish world for people to play together in.

DF's charm lies in it's ability to simulate a broader swath of many aspects of life, not because it does any aspect well, and in the unique aspects of dwarven culture.   With the changes to mining and trees Toady axed the all-rock-all-the-time aspect of fortresses - my current fort feels more like Elf Fortress, since practically everything is made of wood - and now he's moving away from other stereotypical fantasy aspects such as the fanatical materialism, the alcohol, etc.   Any one of those is a small change, but together they add up to DF feeling less unique...and if I wanted a bad, bland simulator I have a million options.  I want at least interesting and different to make up for the horrible, broken parts of DF.  Flavor and setting matter, especially when it's practically that the game has going for it.

[k33n]

umpteen games that do a better job of simulation

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Anyway, if the only thing that makes dwarf fortress better than any of the attempts to copy it to you, is that dwarves don't get drunk, then I think you're playing dwarf fortress wrong.

I think you missed the point of his post entirely, but at least you were respectful about it.................

Ahhhh. So dwarves don't become depressed because they like booze, its because they realise that they have caged and captured hundreds of living creatures and sentient beings, that there is no wildlife on the map and are building execution chambers for people they could just release, and are being relentlessly attacked by some of the most dangerous creatures in the world.

Not really. Certainly countless dwarf fortresses have dwarfs living in okay comfort, with absolutely no reason to go semi-catatonic without booze.

[vjmdhzgr]

I'll just say I'm responding to Ghill's post since quoting it would take a lot of space. I don't really understand what the problem is with trees dropping more wood. It was your choice to make everything in your fortress a out of wood. Building things entirely underground is just as viable as it always was. I also guess I understand that there's some parts of the simulation that is definitely worse than the rest. What I was talking about was that there's not many games similar to Dwarf Fortress (as in building a city and designating jobs for specific people and fighting off invaders), and that of the ones that exist none of them have anything near DF's simulation of anything.

Your last paragraph seems kind of contradictory though. You say "DF's charm lies in it's ability to simulate a broader swath of many aspects of life, not because it does any aspect well", but then bring up the possibility of building things out of wood like it's a bad thing. That's just another aspect of life.

I think that there are plenty of things to like about Dwarf Fortress. Like how it has the most advanced injury simulation of any game I'm aware of, or that it generates a whole world with potentially hundreds of years of (maybe not perfectly simulated), but interesting history, or the process of building fortresses, or how you can become an adventurer and go out and talk to or kill every single person in that world. If you really like the unique aspects of dwarven culture (also, what did he do to remove fanatic materialism?) Then there are things you can easily do to make them more prominent. Like for example don't choose to make everything out of wood, or mod dwarves to be immune to alcohol (it'll probably be possible). Personally I think dwarves getting drunk just makes it more fun. It means you'll have dwarves getting drunk and start barfights. I think dwarves drinking alcohol and getting drunk all the time is much more fun than dwarves drinking alcohol and not getting drunk all the time.

[Ghills]

I'll just say I'm responding to Ghill's post since quoting it would take a lot of space. I don't really understand what the problem is with trees dropping more wood. It was your choice to make everything in your fortress a out of wood. Building things entirely underground is just as viable as it always was. I also guess I understand that there's some parts of the simulation that is definitely worse than the rest. What I was talking about was that there's not many games similar to Dwarf Fortress (as in building a city and designating jobs for specific people and fighting off invaders), and that of the ones that exist none of them have anything near DF's simulation of anything.

Your last paragraph seems kind of contradictory though. You say "DF's charm lies in it's ability to simulate a broader swath of many aspects of life, not because it does any aspect well", but then bring up the possibility of building things out of wood like it's a bad thing. That's just another aspect of life.

I think that there are plenty of things to like about Dwarf Fortress. Like how it has the most advanced injury simulation of any game I'm aware of, or that it generates a whole world with potentially hundreds of years of (maybe not perfectly simulated), but interesting history, or the process of building fortresses, or how you can become an adventurer and go out and talk to or kill every single person in that world. If you really like the unique aspects of dwarven culture (also, what did he do to remove fanatic materialism?) Then there are things you can easily do to make them more prominent. Like for example don't choose to make everything out of wood, or mod dwarves to be immune to alcohol (it'll probably be possible). Personally I think dwarves getting drunk just makes it more fun. It means you'll have dwarves getting drunk and start barfights. I think dwarves drinking alcohol and getting drunk all the time is much more fun than dwarves drinking alcohol and not getting drunk all the time.

If you're fine with the derail, I'm happy to keep discussing.  It's always interesting to see what kinds of things people value in games.

I think part of the confusion with my post stems from taking different sentences in isolation instead of taking the statement as a whole.  My point was that there have been lots of small decisions lately that have added up to my questioning whether Toady's direction with DF is still interesting or effective. DF's user experience is fairly horrible and its competitors fairly good if more specialized, so every change that alters the worldbuilding or makes parts of the game more difficult has a huge impact, where they wouldn't in a game that was better. 

It's not that I dislike Dwarf Fortress. I wouldn't be here if I didn't like the game. It's that several recent changes are adding up, to me, to Toady not thinking changes through and I dislike that.  The alcohol change has huge potential knockon impacts and Toady has actually said that he hasn't yet made decisions or even really contemplated options about how to compensate for it (seriously, go read FotF), which is a huge problem. Design should really not be done while developing unless the coder loves migraines, rewrites and bugs.

Re: Trees
Prior to the tree rewrite, forts had a ton of stone and everything was made out of it.  That's logical, since they were completely underground and stone was the most abundant resource, and matched the fantasy dwarf tropes Toady was going for.  Since Toady removed a significant amount of stone generation via mining and added multi-tile trees, the most abundant resource is wood, no question. Cutting down one tree produces 30+ logs. So suddenly we have all this wood to manage and not enough stone to productively run a fort without strip mining.  Toady was trying to solve a resource management problem (too much stone, not enough wood), but completely overcompensated in a way that damaged the worldbuilding for me. YMMV.

Re: Charm
World generation is simulating a broader swath of life. That's what I was referring to with that phrase.  DF's main unique feature is it's complex and dynamic world generation, we both agree on that.  But I don't play DF to read Legends mode - Legends mode doesn't stand up to close examination on a political, social or cultural level, and is plain boring to read most of the time. This could be covered over by a better interface, but Toady is avowedly uninterested in making DF accessible.

There are hundreds of games where I can build forts (sim games), become an adventurer (RPGs), talk or kill people (RPGs, sim games, really every game).  These are not unique or interesting features of DF.  These are things that DF does do, but it's uniqueness lies in the fact that it does all of them at once rather than that it does any of them well.

Re: Injury simulation
Detailed, yes. Realistic or useful? Not really.  It's a part of the game that doesn't really fit with any of the other parts, but was included because a simulation should include medicine. It's not easily accessible or interpretable, to a much greater degree than say mining, and is something that many DF players seem to simply skip.

I like DF, obviously, but there are a great many things about it that are fundamentally broken. Toady doesn't need to deliberately break functional systems, which so far is what the alcohol change sounds like.

[vjmdhzgr]

Again responding to Ghill while attempting to avoid making the biggest quote pyramid on the forum.
Re:Re:Trees
In the right biomes I definitely agree with wood sometimes being more common than stone, but the closest I've ever gotten to running out of stone was in a fortress where I only allowed flux stones for use which were only about half of what was mined, ran for I think 7 years, and had its only miner mysteriously die at some point maybe five years in, and I didn't want to replace them because everybody already had jobs. I think my legendary mason has even pretty much constantly been making furniture, and I've made a full seven full steel military outfits. So, honestly I don't get the running out of stone thing, but maybe I just make my fortresses a lot bigger than yours with a lower furniture density. Even still there is definitely a benefit to stone, that being that it can be more valuable if it's a flux, and that you get it without even trying. If you want to live underground then you just get stone, no woodcutter needed just from the process of living underground. It's also much easier to close off the underground from the surface then to close off a significant area of trees. Strip mining should you find it necessary also can get you ores and gems. So it's not like making everything out of stone isn't a viable strategy, or is even a significant handicap aside from not being able to make beds. I do remember hearing about how mining skill used to determine the amount of stone mined, but that ends up being a realism issue when you can have a miner getting a boulder from every tile, then using each boulder to make four blocks which can then serve as walls in four tiles.

I suppose the main thing to say on charm is that more things are being added. While the update is making dwarves get drunk now, it's also adding music, dancing, taverns, and a whole bunch of systems that while quite simplistic now, will be expanded upon soon to include some of the most anticipated features.

Then of course it's not confirmed yet that dwarves won't act drunk when they don't have enough alcohol, there was even that quote from Toady posted saying he'd eventually like it to be like they're drunk when they don't have alcohol. Then if they get drunk from having too much alcohol, then you get to have dwarves being alcohol dependant, but you also get to have them drink far too much and get drunk then do stupid things, which I personally think would babe quite fun.

[Loud Whispers]

I am utterly terrified by the idea that during one particularly large and amazing party, my Fortress could drink a 7 year supply of booze in a fortnight.

[NJW2000]

This is why we must have sensible booze production lines. That never stop.