Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[NW_Kohaku]

What management games have ever featured direct control of your subjects? That's kind of the point of these games, you manage people, as opposed to playing as them (although in Dwarf Fortress you can actually do both). That's been the case since Sim City and Populous and probably earlier.

RTS games are notorious for players taking direct control over every tiny thing units do, including the "Command and Conquer Economy", where the whole economy only moves when you tell the miners to mine, the lumberjacks to cut trees, and the moms to give birth to more recruits. 

Even if you want to limit it to management games, it's a rare breed that doesn't involve direct control over something like a company and all its employees directly.  My ships only sail when I say to sail, trade what I say to trade, and move where I tell them to move. 

Populous and Majesty and Dwarf Fortress are of a different breed in that they expect players to have to indirectly control their assets.

[bloop_bleep]

I showed DF to a friend of mine. The first thing he said was "That's programming language."
I internally facepalmed right there and tried to explain how although the font may look like something you would use to write programs in, what's displayed on the screen is not code at all. All I got was a blank stare.
I then went on to try to explain how a crocodile bit off my dwarf's leg. "But that guy doesn't have a leg, he just has a face."
I again tried to explain how the dwarf smiley face was just a symbol and doesn't represent what the dwarf actually looks like. Another blank stare.

Sometimes I wish I could get people to even trivially understand DF....

Though, I have to say, DF is the perfect game for me. Its sheer complexity drives me towards it, not away from it. I love all the different stones and metals with accurate material properties; I love the realistic combat system; I love the endless micromanagement needed to run a fort. I'm generally a very nerdy type, so I love designing and building complicated contraptions to accomplish tasks. I love pretty much everything about it, and the extended ASCII graphics and bad UI doesn't matter to me at all.

[Pvt. Pirate]

i love most of that - although i use a tileset and the menus could need some streamlining.

[Uzu Bash]

That's one thing I don't like about the community. The elf hate. Why? Yes, they're only useful for bringing fruit and exotic animals, but that's still a use. Nowadays, you have to deforest the whole embark in a year to break the tree cap. Elves don't bother me and I don't bother them.

Might I suggest some supplementary reading?
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=140842.msg5727725#msg5727725

Behold why you should hate elves.

I found no reason to hate elves in that story?

I think he unwittingly demonstrated your point. Players who harbor the hate believe their reasons are self-evident when they look to me and anyone outside the DF community like petty bigotry.

[h3lblad3]

The only reaction I've ever gotten on mentioning DF was a guy on a forum asking me to tell him some of the stories DF has given me... Apparently on the gaming forum he was a part of DF is seen as the ultimate story generating game.

Something Awful does frequent (at least they used to, I haven't been on there in forever) succession Let's Plays of Dwarf Fortress. Long stories like Boatmurdered are common there, and even Boatmurdered itself is from there.

And in a way, it is definitely the ultimate story generating game. Especially the sad ones. I can't remember now if it was starvation, dehydration, or a syndrome, but my people were dying left and right at one point. It was so interesting to see my girlfriend's reaction as I relayed how one guy came home only to find his wife dead in her bed, walked over and sat with her for a few minutes, then walked to the over to the door and died against it.

[PFunk]

Sometimes I wish I could get people to even trivially understand DF....

He just seems to lack an imagination. Definitely never played DnD.

[Eschar]

Sometimes I wish I could get people to even trivially understand DF....

He just seems to lack an imagination. Definitely never played DnD.

It appears that he's never played NetHack either. Poor guy.
Of course, there but for the grace of Tarn (or the DevTeam) go I. Actually, all of us.

[Sefarian]

Eh, DF was a natural progression in my timeline of games to try, personally. Been doing MUDs and whatnot since I was in 6th grade. Got really into RTS and city developer games when Starcraft hit. The difficult part was coming to understand the UI to be honest. If DF had a more understandable UI, it'd be quite a bit bigger.

[Eschar]

Eh, DF was a natural progression in my timeline of games to try, personally. Been doing MUDs and whatnot since I was in 6th grade.

I congratulate you, sir.

[Pvt. Pirate]

yes, the UI makes it most comlicated for anyone to learn. the rest is quite nice the way it is.

[Farmerbob]

I wrote a piece of fanfiction called 'Overseer', crossing Wildbow's 'Worm' with Dwarf Fortress.

Worm is grimdark superhero fiction.  Not to Dwarf Fortress levels of dark, but close at some points.

It was pretty well received, and a lot of people asked me questions about it in it's original forum thread on Spacebattles.  I've since cleaned it up a little bit and put it on fanfiction.net.  I'd like to think that I might have sent a few people this way.

Disturbing Fact:  There are 10 Dwarf Fortress crossovers listed in Fanfiction.net.  Three of them are My Little Pony crossovers.

[pisskop]

MLP is an actual mod for DF.


My Little Fortress
My Little Fortress
Cut from Gabbro
and Cover in Guts

[Farmerbob]

Yup, I've played that mod a couple times.  One of very few mods I've ever played.  But that was years ago - I generally prefer to play DF in Vanilla mode, with only Dwarf Therapist to help me.

I have been laying very little recently because the broken hunter bug drives me a bit crazy.  Hopefully it will be fixed in the next release.

[pisskop]

That's one thing I don't like about the community. The elf hate. Why? Yes, they're only useful for bringing fruit and exotic animals, but that's still a use. Nowadays, you have to deforest the whole embark in a year to break the tree cap. Elves don't bother me and I don't bother them.

Might I suggest some supplementary reading?
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=140842.msg5727725#msg5727725

Behold why you should hate elves.

I found no reason to hate elves in that story?

I think he unwittingly demonstrated your point. Players who harbor the hate believe their reasons are self-evident when they look to me and anyone outside the DF community like petty bigotry.

And no.

The reasons to hate elves are as simple as the reasons anyone hates anyone else:

Either
- They are too different from us (alien morality or physiology or w.e.)
- They are too alike us, but have minor differences over important things (protestant and catholic faith)
- They are mimicries of us or fall into an uncanny valley (see number 1)
- They do stuff we consider repulsive (elves eating bodies and magicing trees and tolerating animal murder and genociding tree cutters)
- They fuck with our industry or livlihood (see: tree cutting mandates)


Like elves do all this.  And dwarves the de facto main protags of the game.  And we tend to sympathize with the protags.  Plus, dwarves embody good spirtits, fightmenship, hard work, and 'manliness'.  They get along well with ingame humies, and we watch them grow up from tiny little meatshields into srong defenders.

Everything about the narrative lends itself to this hatred of elves.


Its also fun to make the elves out to be worse than the goblins -> who even have more structures in their homes than elves do.  They have tombs, and prisons, and trollpits, and lootpiles, and child dorms, and massive fuckoff towers, and fortifications.

elves have trees, dirt roads, and crap in trees.


Elves are unsympathetic in DF, because they are made out to be more harsh than others.  They have less backstory, and so they become more stormtrooperish.  And, in keeping with the stormtrooper theme - they are by and large worthless in individual combat.

[Fleeting Frames]

I have been laying very little recently because the broken hunter bug drives me a bit crazy.  Hopefully it will be fixed in the next release.

Doubt that, given it's lack of focus on hunters. Going to have to use other methods to train archery.