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[Salmeuk]

Of course, proper challenge is a balance, and I think at a certain point you make the game unwinnable, but maybe there are ways you could handicap yourself that would make it reasonably exciting?

*Thanks, W.C. Fields

This guy gets it! Toady is trying something really crazy with DF. I mean, you don't have to understand the motivation and development of Dwarf Fortress in order to enjoy it, but to fully appreciate it you should take a look at past dev logs, goals, and DF talks. This game is more than a video game, at least as our society chooses to define video games. To be a willing player of Dwarf Fortress is to become involved in the story of your dwarfs! There is nothing more satisfying than becoming engrossed in the tale of one of your haulers, only to have a siege break against your walls and to see that hauler meet his end at the iron blade of a goblin swordsman.

Why? Because your attention then focuses upon the wife of that hauler, and you can see the gruesome effects of his death upon her psyche. Perhaps she eventually goes berserk, murdering the most talented weaponsmith of your fortress. Breaking your production of fine weapons causes your precariously balanced economy (because you decided to balance it precariously, you see) to falter and crumble. Dwarfs go weeks, months without a drink. Other production slows to a halt. You find yourself panicking, questioning your decisions. Dwarfs die. Emotions spiral downwards - you sweat the fearful sweat of a noble as the commoners riot.

I don't mean to single you out but I think there are two camps of DF players: those that approach it as a beast to be tamed, and those that seek out ulterior pleasure from the chaotic intricacies that every fortress births. I don't think either should claim to be the one and only way to enjoy the game, but I know that I firmly stand among those who delve into the strange and harrowing narratives thrown at us by the oddly persistent programmer known as Toady One.

[JustMercy1994]

I'd also like to mention the future (planned) features page. Sieges will be getting more love in the coming years, including your suggestion that sentient races gain the ability to dig sapper lines into your fortress if the main entrance is blocked or a trap corridor had been previously located by the civilization. You'll need to have patience, as the others have said, Dwarf Fortress is designed for two types. Those who want to "win" or at least succeed in their self-defined goals, and of course those (like myself) who revel in the immersive and divergent story telling possibilities of the simulation.

[Romeofalling]

I'm confused by your post. You claim to have spent hours looking up things and figuring out how they worked, designing overly elaborate and unnecessarily complex death traps, and deciphering the mechanics behind an incredibly deep system. You spent HOURS doing this, and....you're wondering where the fun is? Weren't you having it?

I go a decidedly different path than the folks who have posted (at least through about halfway through the 2nd page of comments). For me, the fun is in looking for connections and stories inside the randomly generated content. I spend hours looking things up in the Legends Viewer, tracing out the history of my civilization, examining the masterpiece artworks that display the history of a world created just for me. What's the story behind your crippled dwarven empire? Why have you decided to embark here? What's the backhistory of the Professional Hammerdwarf that migrated in last season? Who is this Ettin that we've just killed?

(Speaking of Ettings, the Ettin I just killed, Gotkol, fought the grandfather of my human liason three times, escaping each time. He's the only sentient to have escape Gotkol's wrath. Grandpa then went on to give birth to the guy who fathered the diplomat my fortress is negotiating with right now. That's cool.)

Okay, sure, you've read the wiki intimately and designed really complex things in an effort to avoid getting killed by the game. The trick is, the GAME isn't what kills you half the time. You are. Even with all the wikis and careful thought, it's the megaprojects that get me, every time. I have about seven forts that have died due to my profound desire build a Grand Staircase with waterfalls and sunlit gardens growing across 30 z-levels. I spent 4 hours today playing, mostly concerned with getting a minecart-activated danger room set up, during which time I breached the caverns, killed an ettin, doubled my population, and developed a deep enmity for Cerol Paintedbrushes, a Fisherdwarf whose death I am now plotting because no matter what tasks I enable, he simply will not testdrive my minecarts in a timely manner.

It's a simple idea, Cerol! You chop down the tree, you put it in the surface woodpile, you load it on to the minecart, AND THEN YOU PUSH THE GORRAM MINECART. How hard is that, Cerol?!!?

~cough~

Right, so my point here is that you're obviously an obsessive wiki-reader, mega-project loving nerd in the making. You're at your second fort and you've figured out how to protect yourself from the critters out there. It's time for you to try your hand at !!SCIENCE!!

And maybe some history.

[Robsoie]

A lot of the challenge (in term of difficulty i mean) from 34.11 has been lost since df2014 , the game became easier in similar conditions .

I find it that trap is something to be avoided if you're looking for challenge against the goblins, because unlike 34.11 , the gobs will never bring any weaponmasters in their ranks (i wonder if the lack of them is a bug or if it's a huge overlook), so your legendary have actually no match, while in 34.11 if the gobs had enough weaponmasters , an open battle could very well decimate your troops even if you had a few legendary in the middle.

You had to be tricky to even the odds, but since df2014 there's no more need for tricks and traps against gob sieges, with time (and so with more legendary), the further gobs sieges will be decimated by your troops.

Only the undead siege is requiring tricks, because unlike in the past (i mean 34.11 and earlier) in which the big strength of the undead sieges were in the numbers + the re-animations of fallen troops, df2014 and 42.x undead are now insanely strong and will punch through the best armors without much problems.
So if you embark near a tower, you will need good defenses and traps, especially as undead siege do not care about the population 80 trigger like the goblins.

Now if you're uninterested by fighting broken undead, and still prefer the goblins and their mounts, be willing to edit files to have earlier goblins sieges or change the conditions to make the game more fun, you can open the file
entity_default.txt
in the raws/objects/ folder

In the [ENTITY:MOUNTAIN] (that define the dwarves entities), look for

   [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POP_SIEGE:3]
   [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PROD_SIEGE:0]
   [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_TRADE_SIEGE:0]

This is what controls the goblin siege
By default , it means that goblin are willing to siege you at +/- 80 population ( PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POP_SIEGE:3 )
But your production and trading wealth has no bearing on their willingness to siege ( PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PROD_SIEGE:0 and PROGRESS_TRIGGER_TRADE_SIEGE:0  basically means both triggers are disabled)

For the values, the pop_siege trigger :

A value of 0 disables the trigger. 1 corresponds to 20 dwarves, 2 to 50 dwarves, 3 to 80, 4 to 110, and 5 to 140.

the prod siege trigger

A value of 0 disables the trigger. 1 corresponds to 5000☼ created wealth, 2 to 25000☼, 3 to 100000☼, 4 to 200000☼, and 5 to 300000☼.

the trade siege trigger

A value of 0 disables the trigger. 1 corresponds to 500☼ exported wealth, 2 to 2500☼, 3 to 10000☼, 4 to 20000☼, and 5 to 30000☼.

So according to this, to increase the challenge against gob siege, you may want to change

   [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POP_SIEGE:3]
   [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PROD_SIEGE:0]
   [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_TRADE_SIEGE:0]

   [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POP_SIEGE:1]
   [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PROD_SIEGE:1]
   [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_TRADE_SIEGE:1]

So gobs may be willing to siege when
- you reach 20 pop
- or you reach 5000¤ of created wealth
- or you reach 500¤ of exported wealth

Meaning that instead of +/- waiting 3 years to reach pop 80 for a goblin siege to really come (and so be very prepared with strong enough by the time military to destroy them all), you may be able to be sieged by the 1st year.

Now something else i noticed when looking at the entity_default.txt is that the goblin entities ( [ENTITY:EVIL]  ) is lacking the
[AMBUSHER]
tag (only the kobold, elves and subterrean people entities have it)

This may explain why i never saw goblin ambushes since df2014 while they were doing that in 34.11
So adding [AMBUSHER] to the [ENTITY:EVIL] could be helpful to have early challenges.

NOTE : changing the raws may require to generate a new world for them to take correctly effect

[davsim]

If you want to have "fun" at this game, after you've learned the mechanics and how the game works, you have to pretty much shoot yourself in the foot, and while you're at it, play blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back ecc ecc...
Imo, having to play like this to have some sort of challenge means that the game is badly designed; if only people were more critical with Toady, instead of worshipping him like a god, maybe he would focus on important things rather than add layers and layers of fluff.
Sorry for the rant but I'm quite disheartened by how the game is being developed.

[therahedwig]

Well, I think the problem is not the layers and layers of fluff, but rather that there's a subsection of players who think the only point of the game is defending your fort. There is more to the game than that, and wanting to create mega projects, or trying to create a big farming fort, or getting temples in place are valid ways to play the game.

I like the taverns update, for me it's fun.

[Robsoie]

To each their own indeed, there are multiple ways to play DF.

But for the player interested in the war aspect against goblins and other civs, there's a lot of room for improvements to make it more fun and !fun! , as since df2014 it lost a lot in the "challenging" department.
Hopefully the siege arc will bring that, hoping it's not too far in the future.

People that did not want the war aspect could just turn off invaders in the init anyways.

[Salmeuk]

If you want to have "fun" at this game, after you've learned the mechanics and how the game works, you have to pretty much shoot yourself in the foot, and while you're at it, play blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back ecc ecc...
Imo, having to play like this to have some sort of challenge means that the game is badly designed; if only people were more critical with Toady, instead of worshipping him like a god, maybe he would focus on important things rather than add layers and layers of fluff.
Sorry for the rant but I'm quite disheartened by how the game is being developed.

It's not so much bad design but intentional design. Seriously, go read about some of the primary motivations for developing this game and "designing a perfectly balanced siege simulator" isn't one of them. Sieges are secondary to the stories they spawn, and while it would be ideal that the game can perfectly simulate a realistic (or as realistic as fantasy gets) goblin siege, I doubt that will ever happen. Very few people worship Toady as a god, even if their affectations on his design choices often devolve into cries of ecstasy and imagi-gasms. I see him as a guy with a passion for creating entire worlds through programming, who happens to have struck a common nerve in all of us computer-dwelling fantasy nerds. We're just along for the ride, and frankly that's how I like it!

Perhaps, if you can't stop yourself from comparing DF to the current staple of indie-alikes and AAA fantasy loot-em-ups, you might find DF lacking when it comes to things like balance, UI, and player-focused design. Dwarf Fortress is a beautiful set of equations that scramble and churn against one another. This might come as a shock, but up until now these equations have never balanced out, and most likely WILL never. Every update brings another set of complaints: "You broke this thing, and even though it was already broken I'd gotten used to how easy/hard/neglible it made the rest of the broken things! Fix it now!" Perhaps, if T was a god, he could throw himself at these issues while maintaining his own integrity and vision.

Toady is no god. I've heard that he isn't even all that amazing as a programmer, compared to some of the designers out there in the corporate world. But DF is to Battlefront, Battlefield, Fallout, Skyrim (take your pick) as impressionistic painting was to the salon. If you aren't familiar check out the wiki on it, just read the first chunk and you'll see what I mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism He deserves respect for what he does and how he's doing it, whether you find the product entertaining or not.

 I'm utterly serious, and utterly afraid that Toady himself won't be able to continue development as he wishes due to a majority of players calling for some rather uninteresting yet "gamey" features. This game's development is not a democracy, and this game is not a product for you to consume. It's a shared endeavor between creator and player, and if you can manage to step outside the AAA gaming headspace you start to really notice just how different it is.

[Romeofalling]

Imo, having to play like this to have some sort of challenge means that the game is badly designed; if only people were more critical with Toady, instead of worshipping him like a god, maybe he would focus on important things rather than add layers and layers of fluff.
Sorry for the rant but I'm quite disheartened by how the game is being developed.

I'm not really sure what part of "alpha version" you don't understand.

This is probably the 20th or 30th alpha game that I've playtested, though admittedly the longest one, and the only people I ever see use the phrase "worship the developer like a god" are petulant whiners who says things like "he should focus on important things, like the stuff I want, and not his own design plans!"

There's a huge, volunteer-organized system for contributing feedback in multiple ways, and Today's response time is equivalent for any other sole proprietorship out there, if not better. There's a huge difference between "treating someone like a god" and "showing common courtesy at someone's place of work."

[therahedwig]

Guys, calm down, people who complain about "development direction" are always extremely common in any type of forum of a developed system. I do community management for an open source project, and people like this are always there.

It probably happens because people want to control the end product, like, they need a feature, or would love to finish a certain workflow with the program in question, but it's only once you are actually given that power and handling the actual code that you realise how it feels to be handling the direction a program goes in. Especially in the case where multiple systems need to interact, it's very scary to make a release or to even start pushing code. (I myself find it very scary to share even the designs of more complex systems, because I end up being afraid of having to spent three hours justifying my system to someone, in a very frustrating manner, while I could've just finished implementing a prototype of the system for them to feel what I was trying to get at)

It takes quite a bit of insight to know how that feels, and once you do you can also see what things are futile, and what kind of things are genuinely rude and passive agressive. Everyone had things they want to see in the game, and right now people who enjoy the world activarion stuff are being treated really well, while for the last couple of releases the people who enjoyed combat were being treated well. It 's not that combat shouldn't be fixed, but at the same time you gotta have patience with this game, as toady is trying to build a house by pulling up all the walls at once. So just be kinda relaxed and look at development with amusement.

At the same time let's not dogpile on people who have different opinions than you have. I obviously don't agree with davsim either, but let's not all start lecturing him on the artistic value of df or whatever, because all you're gonna do is alienate the guy and everyone who enjoys combat.

Let's chill, and our op just needs to dig deeper and go hang in the caverns a bit, so he gets a forgotten beast to terrorise him.

[greycat]

If you want to have "fun" at this game, after you've learned the mechanics and how the game works, you have to pretty much shoot yourself in the foot, and while you're at it, play blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back ecc ecc...
Imo, having to play like this to have some sort of challenge means that the game is badly designed; if only people were more critical with Toady, instead of worshipping him like a god, maybe he would focus on important things rather than add layers and layers of fluff.
Sorry for the rant but I'm quite disheartened by how the game is being developed.

Dwarf Fortress aims to be a world simulator, not a war game.  And it's not finished yet.  It's not even half way.  By Toady's own estimate, we're at about 42%.

The true power of DF isn't what you get out of the box.  It's what you can do with modding.  If you want more battles in your fortress, mod in additional hostile civilizations.  (Look at the Fortress Defense mod, which was created for this purpose.)

[mirrizin]

And I was going to post after I my initial comment that the real challenge in DF is what you make of it.

I do remember a few versions ago, when I started, realizing that, given a reasonably decent biome, I could build an efficiency fortress to house 200+ dwarves in reasonable comfort, set up some traps, tunnel about, and live more or less indefinitely as long as I avoided certain game mechanics.

And yeah, I feel a little bad for learning about these mechanics, pandora's box...wah.

But yeah, it's not that painful. And even then there's a decent chance that *something* could go insurmountably wrong, but the odds are against it and at worst you could live in a hole in the ground forever.

So, where's the fun?

It's like that stupid question about "What would you do a million dollars?" What do you once basic survival is achieved?

I feel a false nostalgia for the years when there seemed to be a rash of megafortresses, the "favorites" of DFMA where people build these multi-story cities that are internally functional and aesthetically amazing. I don't have the time or resources for that kind of thing, but I try to design rooms with what I hope is more than average creativity.

Someone posted earlier that it's about the stories, and for me that's another thing. Like, in the midst of that pathetic first siege, where the goblins get mowed down like grass, I was amused to see one goblin who had tried to ford the river, but he slipped and fell something like seven stories. Because he didn't leave the screen by swimming downstream, as his partner had done, the siege technically continued until I sent over some marksdorfs. Fortunately, they got a bead on him. Unfortunately, they missed.  Fortunately, the stupid goblin dodged into the side of the canyon, demolished his hand against the rock wall, fell unconscious and bled out/drowned (not sure which came first.)

Crazy little stories like that are part of what makes the game work.

I get the frustration with the military, and it bugs me a little, but I also really appreciate the way that this game has the flexibility to offer something different to different players.

On a side note, I'm glad to hear that ambushes can be turned back on. They do make the game more exciting, and I was wondering why I hadn't seen any.

[Stragus]

This game is more than a video game, at least as our society chooses to define video games. To be a willing player of Dwarf Fortress is to become involved in the story of your dwarfs! There is nothing more satisfying than becoming engrossed in the tale of one of your haulers, only to have a siege break against your walls and to see that hauler meet his end at the iron blade of a goblin swordsman.

I fully understand the appeal of creating and playing a story, but an interesting story requires adversity. There have to be difficulties to overcome. There's nothing heroic or epic about a stroll in the park! Let's say the life story of Frodo Baggins wouldn't have been that interesting without Sauron and the ring.

Real role-playing games (like D&D), with a human mind as DM, are absolutely amazing for cooperative storytelling. Computer games are great at different things: deep simulation, big data crunching, fast-paced action, and graphics.

Dwarf Fortress is all about the first two points, with a touch of storytelling as an emergent property, and that's great! Now, if only the game could provide some adversity, some challenge... for those who would like some anyway.

I'm confused by your post. You claim to have spent hours looking up things and figuring out how they worked, designing overly elaborate and unnecessarily complex death traps, and deciphering the mechanics behind an incredibly deep system. You spent HOURS doing this, and....you're wondering where the fun is? Weren't you having it?

No, that wasn't fun! This is like preparing yourself for hours for a chess game: reviewing openings, studying tactics and strategies. And when you finally sit down, your opponent never makes his first move. You wait, and wait, and finally you win by default when his clock time runs out... No, that's not fun!

If you want to have "fun" at this game, after you've learned the mechanics and how the game works, you have to pretty much shoot yourself in the foot, and while you're at it, play blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back ecc ecc...
Imo, having to play like this to have some sort of challenge means that the game is badly designed; if only people were more critical with Toady, instead of worshipping him like a god, maybe he would focus on important things rather than add layers and layers of fluff.
Sorry for the rant but I'm quite disheartened by how the game is being developed.

I am mostly in agreement. Yet... if Toady is fully aware of the lack of challenge, if the current sieges are just a placeholder for something far better, and if he's working on taverns/temples/libraries just because it seemed more fun at the time... then that's great! I have no problem with that. There's no need to add features strictly in the order of what would make most sense for playability. Also, you sometimes need to brainstorm further on the very important stuff, and that causes less important features to get done first.

But the documentation seriously needs to reflect this. The myth of an extremely hard game and this "losing is fun" slogan have to go. Currently, this is a very easy game: you can't lose unless you want to lose. That being clearly established, now let's hope future updates can provide a challenge for those who seek one. The players who only want to build peacefully already have what they seek.

Toady is no god. I've heard that he isn't even all that amazing as a programmer, compared to some of the designers out there in the corporate world.

I'm a software programmer myself (I write high-performance physics running on CUDA clusters), and I must say I agree. I see some bugs/flaws as symptoms of poor design. Performance is *way* too bad for the current complexity, it's a symptom of poor code. And the fact that 64 bits binaries have problems (as I read somewhere) is a symptom of poor programming practices.

But Toady appears to have a vision, good ideas and plenty of motivation. I'm just hoping he can get an optimization expert to help, there's no reason why dwarves couldn't be smarter, why job assignment shouldn't be near-optimal with distances sorted by true path finding (among many other things).

Eh, if the project were open-source, I would offer my services.

[Zekka]

FWIW, I hear his dev practices have improved since then, but if you want to see a lot of actual Toady code, Liberal Crime Squad is open source.

Based on the code in that project I think it's refreshing to see a guy who codes by introducing all the special cases right upfront, inline, with little or no abstraction where it's not absolutely necessary. For most projects of single-programmer scale you can just set the abstraction level right out at the gate by picking a programming language that makes good assumptions for your project, and then seldom thinking about it again. There are a lot of good videogame projects with easy-to-understand code which uses very little abstraction. (like Dungeon Crawl)

(sidenote and pet peeve: most programmers appear to think every abstraction they introduce is 'absolutely necessary.' This is what I mean: if the codebase size would increase superlinearly over time if you don't introduce whatever your abstraction is, your abstraction is absolutely necessary. Preventing the programmers from duplicating a constant or linear number of checks does not make the thing you introduced "absolutely necessary".)

IMHO many games are totally shaped by how they frame special cases -- "if we can't represent this spell effect as a callback taking the player object, we won't have that spell effect!" DF, being mostly unconcerned with methodology, outright refuses to play that game.

Unfortunately, AFAICT, Dwarf Fortress is one of those rare one-man projects where you can work yourself into a hole by assuming you don't need any extra abstraction and never deviating from that assumption. Example: Toady's mentioned in DF-talk about how the game's timescale assumptions are completely inconsistent, with lots of hardcoded special cases for every action, which means it's going to be nearly impossible to reconcile adventure mode time with dwarf mode time.

[mirrizin]

Stargus, I don't totally agree with you, but I think your point is very interesting, so I quoted you and ran with some thoughts of my own. Here's a courtesy link: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=155045.0

A few more thoughts of mine:

In Dwarf Fortress, the goblins aren't the biggest threat. The dwarves are their own worst enemies.

As development of the game has continued, the fortress has become less and less the focal point of the game. This could be a problem for fortress players, or players in general until the adventurer mode gets more fleshed out, or unless fortress mode takes a far broader scope (for instance, if becoming the mountainhome gives the player responsibility for the entire dwarven nation. Though at that point nit'd become a radically different game, more Sid Meiers Civ than Warcraft (not World thereof). one reason you're getting fewer sieges could be that the goblin civilization nearby has already been wiped out by your allies, which is a shame if you were looking for goblin invasions.

One thing about DF is that the game puts a huge burden on the player to take responsibility for their own fun. It's a very weak disciplinarian. I think, as it is now, the real existential threat in dwarf fortress is the player's own ambition, or lack thereof.

And I can see how someone might take that as an insult, so I hope you don't take it as such. It could also be seen as a very harsh criticism of the game itself.

And yeah, "Losing is Fun"...it's true, in a sense, but it's also false in many ways and could be improved on. I completely agree with you there.