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[SalmonGod]

My favorites are the ones played by a single person, with others getting dorfed and just contributing writing.

[Imic]

My favorites are the ones played by a single person, with others getting dorfed and just contributing writing.

Actually... I agree on that, know that I think. It gives a more coherent storyline, allows for less rules and regulations, allows for advenced roleplaying, epbetter dorfing...
...
I think I just got an idea...

[Telgin]

My favorites are the ones played by a single person, with others getting dorfed and just contributing writing.

Agreed completely.  Succession or shared games have never appealed to me, primarily for three reasons:

• Players are flaky and you're guaranteed to have massive delays because player #4 on the list goes AWOL for a week, or takes two weeks to post their turn, or something similar.
• Writing and tone become very inconsistent.  One player may post a single sentence per event, while another posts three paragraphs and a screenshot.
• Whoever picks up after you can completely derail whatever you tried to do on your turn.  Admittedly, you're signing up for it, but the idea never appealed to me.

A single person playing the fort adds considerable cohesion.

[heydude6]

God, Roomcarnage was amazing.

[Imic]

God, Roomcarnage was amazing.

Yes.

[Truean]

Are Lazy Newb Pack, and Stonesense up to date?

Those are huge player drivers.

[Rose]

They are, yes.

PeridexisErrant does regular pack updates, which include Stonesense.

[Truean]

Hi. Good to see you. Your work is legend.

You wouldn't happen to have a link would you?

[Rose]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=126076.0

Get it here. Last update 20 days ago.

[Severedicks]

I think the community as a whole is slowly dying. People just don't post on the forums often. There are a handful of people at most who maintain the core utilities (DFHack, Dwarf Therapist), but even they are getting less active with time. Most utilities don't get maintained anymore, neither do mods. The wiki barely gets updated. Seriously, I had to look up "Insurrections" on the wiki and found out that there wasn't any mention of it or how they work. It's a feature that dates from 0.40, in 2014. In five years, nobody bothered to add an entry to a major feature of the game. Same as historical figures, it seems everyone knows how they work but no one bothered to write it on the wiki.

I really don't understand. The game has gotten a lot of cool features such as taverns, visitors, the ability to send armies out and interact with the world, pillage artifacts, that sort of stuff. Eight years ago I remember everyone was drooling over that kind of stuff that Toady announced, now everyone's just "meh". New articles on the wiki are lackluster, no one bothers anymore.

Do people just not care about the game that much? Or is it that Toady spends a lot more time fiddling with background worldgen stuff than actual fortress mode gameplay, so people just feel the game plays the same no matter what? Is it FPS death? I'm really worried at this point.

[Telgin]

For what it's worth, donations don't seem to have dropped off at all, and have only increased.  I'll admit that's a little surprising since, yes, the forum activity has declined.

There's no way of knowing, but I'm curious if the total number of people playing DF hasn't gone down much.  People might just look to other places for a community, like Discord or Reddit.

That said, I really haven't played DF in years.  I like to keep up with the development of the game, but not enough core gameplay changes in fort mode have been added to really drag me back into playing it.  I suspect that that's true for a lot of people, who played it hard in the 2012-2015 era and got kind of burnt out.  It's a little hard to call it a fad, but DF has been and always will be a niche game.

Seriously, I had to look up "Insurrections" on the wiki and found out that there wasn't any mention of it or how they work. It's a feature that dates from 0.40, in 2014. In five years, nobody bothered to add an entry to a major feature of the game.

I feel kind of dumb for asking, but what are insurrections in DF exactly?  It's something that happens off screen and behind the scenes, right?  That might have a lot to do with it if so: a lot of that stuff is frankly mysterious and poorly understood or documented.

[bloop_bleep]

No, you can start an insurrection now and get other people to join you in Adventure Mode. It means to try to overthrow the current ruler of a settlement, and if you win, you become the new ruler.

Not much you can do with being a ruler yet, though, other than delegating the position to someone else.

[Egan_BW]

Yeah, I guess the main reason why people aren't too excited out insurrections right now is that the only reward you get for it is the ability to make people say you're the king.

You can also stumble upon insurrections not started by you in adventurer mode, but the game's not always great about communicating things like that.

I believe that next update will feature insurrections in distant sites that you've occupied in fortress mode, so that will make them a little more relevant and interesting.

[Severedicks]

The visitors and offsite missions are a major game changer, certainly the game won't play the same if you choose not to. You can send dwarves off to do anything, from stealing artifacts to pillaging sites, rescuing citizens, etc. You can have multi-racial forts, brawls, mercenaries, secret agents, questers, and so on. You can have siege diplomacy and messengers. You may expel or request citizens at will. Certainly the core of the game has been dramatically altered.

As for insurrections, becoming a lord means you can invite people to become your hearthpersons and demand tribute from other lords. It's not just a cosmetic change.

But people don't know about that because the wiki is barely updated.

[Telgin]

Ah, insurrections are mostly an adventure mode thing?  That would explain why I didn't know anything about them.

The visitors and offsite missions are a major game changer, certainly the game won't play the same if you choose not to. You can send dwarves off to do anything, from stealing artifacts to pillaging sites, rescuing citizens, etc. You can have multi-racial forts, brawls, mercenaries, secret agents, questers, and so on. You can have siege diplomacy and messengers. You may expel or request citizens at will. Certainly the core of the game has been dramatically altered.

That's all true, but I guess for whatever reason those changes alone weren't enough to rekindle my interest.  In truth, I did try two forts in the newest version but didn't get very far because a necromancer stomped the first one, and a werecreature ended the second one.  I like the new ideas, but there's still a lot of tedium involved in playing like I want to, which involves a lot of above ground construction, so I didn't want to pick up the pieces and try a third time.  Actually, didn't adventure mode introduce a new templating system for building things?  I wonder why something similar wasn't ported to fort mode, where you still have to build walls 10 squares at a time and have to manually build scaffolding.

I don't know.  It's not really an answer since it's a very personal reason for not playing, but it does kind of relate to the bad interface and complex mechanics that new players can't figure out.  Same old story there, but I'm sure that's a barrier to new players that might otherwise replace people who lose interest.

As for insurrections, becoming a lord means you can invite people to become your hearthpersons and demand tribute from other lords. It's not just a cosmetic change.

But people don't know about that because the wiki is barely updated.

Out of curiosity, have you updated the wiki with this information?  If not, that would be helpful to others.


On a note unrelated to DF, I gather that a lot of Bay12's activity comes from people posting in the forum games section who have never even played any of Toady's games.  No idea how this forum came to be a gathering ground for that, but that's the kind of thing I'd never expect to be permanent.