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[orius]

Games also change. Anyone in the "things are too easy now" boat? I've been trying to drive dwarves insane by failing to provide for their needs, and it's been almost 2 years of no-rooms, no 'real' food, only a small temple, and no tavern, and the dwarves are doing fine. I keep them busy, and this is hardly scientific, but you think my community would raise concerns about a complete lack of indoor spaces after 2 years of settlement.

I imagine that trying to balance this game is like riding a giant pendulum. .

Honestly, it's about the same general level of easy since 31.25; once you get the basic fort up and running and you have proper defenses and facilities you can more or less play indefinitely or at least until you hit FPS death.  I don't really see this as a big problem since it means the gameplay is much more stable than the earliest days where something would happen that would eventually destroy the fort.  The main balance issue I think is to keep the challenges from being front loaded because it's not really all that fun to deal with dangerous stuff right off the bat and then end up coasting once the fort hits Year 3 or so.

I haven't been seeing too many problems with stress both in the current version or 44.12, but I keep weather turned off for FPS performance too, so that's likely affecting things.  Still given what information I've been getting from DFHack, most of the dwarves generally seem to stay within 1000 points or so of 0 stress.  The dwarves that stay busy and who I guess are happy with their jobs tend to have very good stress numbers, but there's always a handful of hardcore cases that just let themselves get more and more stressed out.

One problem I have been having is that the game occasionally crashes when I enter the thoughts and preferences screens of some dwarves.  This issue is on the bug tracker somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it there again.  Apparently it affects specific dwarves rather than random ones.  Anyway, I think it's a fairly serious problem where stress is concerned because it makes it harder to monitor dwarves with happiness problems to see what might be causing it or how to fix it.

[feelotraveller]

One problem I have been having is that the game occasionally crashes when I enter the thoughts and preferences screens of some dwarves.  This issue is on the bug tracker somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it there again.  Apparently it affects specific dwarves rather than random ones.  Anyway, I think it's a fairly serious problem where stress is concerned because it makes it harder to monitor dwarves with happiness problems to see what might be causing it or how to fix it.

I'd suggest using dwarftherapist to look at/monitor those dwarfs.

That said a lot of crashes are caused by twbt, that might be worth investigating also.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Hmm. Heavily monitoring dwarf thoughts here and suffering no crashes so far. Seems likely to be your third party hacking tools than anything actually in the game.

[Maximum Spin]

(response to removed posts removed)

Anyway, I also don't seem to be having any serious stress problems and I never used any workarounds that could still be in effect (and they couldn't if I did because I install to a fresh folder every time).

[Toady One]

(cleaned out a derail - sorry for any useful thoughts lost in the mix.)

[Uthimienure]

I'd also note that Vettlingr's tileset, which seems to be rather popular, comes with modified raws that reduce the STRESS_VULNERABILITY for dwarves. Something to keep in mind when testing stress in the current version.

Thanks for mentioning this, I didn't realize it was set to 0:25:100 so I changed it back to the default 0:45:100.  Cheers!

[Bumber]

Okay, so, good news for my necro. She's actually slowly recovering from stress with no special effort on my part. She's down from 21k to 17k over several months from just praying and getting into arguments. She can't do anything useful like discussing scholarly topics (which gives her anxiety) or military training (which she won't take a break from,) but if I can get her down to 0 stress, I can let her do a bit of that later.

[clinodev]

I'd also note that Vettlingr's tileset, which seems to be rather popular, comes with modified raws that reduce the STRESS_VULNERABILITY for dwarves. Something to keep in mind when testing stress in the current version.

Thanks for mentioning this, I didn't realize it was set to 0:25:100 so I changed it back to the default 0:45:100.  Cheers!

I had a conversation with vettlingr last night about it, and I believe they'll have it changed before the next set of Packs goes out. That was a good call, Nilsom!

It invalidated most of my 47.05 experience, incidentally, which fortunately was well enough within the range here that there wasn't any need to report it.

I've always been a cautious dwarf coddler anyway, lol. It's new and casual players I'm concerned for.

[Salmeuk]

Okay, so, good news for my necro. She's actually slowly recovering from stress with no special effort on my part. She's down from 21k to 17k over several months from just praying and getting into arguments. She can't do anything useful like discussing scholarly topics (which gives her anxiety) or military training (which she won't take a break from,) but if I can get her down to 0 stress, I can let her do a bit of that later.

I think it's a good sign that we can now associate the reasons why stress changes occur, and sort of work towards controlling those reasons.

Regarding people's responses to, "Is this too easy now?, it is truly all over the board how people have received the various adjustments to stress in the past few updates. I suspect DF would benefit from a variety of difficulty sliders. Many game devs see value in giving the player some dimension of control over their, um, punishment. There would be no single 'slider' in such a complicated game, but manual control over things like stress propensity or something like a switch to turn off bad weather thoughts would be very nice.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For now, in case anyone happened to be reading and not know about it, you can open up the creature_standard raw file and edit the token[PERSONALITY:STRESS_VULNERABILITY:0:45:100], changing the values according to the wiki entry read here. You could bump the median up to 75, and the lowest to 25, and have a creature that is, on average, more susceptible to stress.

[clinodev]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For now, in case anyone happened to be reading and not know about it, you can open up the creature_standard raw file and edit the token[PERSONALITY:STRESS_VULNERABILITY:0:45:100], changing the values according to the wiki entry read here. You could bump the median up to 75, and the lowest to 25, and have a creature that is, on average, more susceptible to stress.

Your spoiler text here makes an excellent point, advertently or not. It's trivial for experienced players to add challenges, while expecting new players to adjust is likely to mean lost players and unhappy experiences.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For now, in case anyone happened to be reading and not know about it, you can open up the creature_standard raw file and edit the token[PERSONALITY:STRESS_VULNERABILITY:0:45:100], changing the values according to the wiki entry read here. You could bump the median up to 75, and the lowest to 25, and have a creature that is, on average, more susceptible to stress.

Your spoiler text here makes an excellent point, advertently or not. It's trivial for experienced players to add challenges, while expecting new players to adjust is likely to mean lost players and unhappy experiences.

And what do you suggest? A tutorial on how to edit a text file?
A raw editing utility with a simple interface would be nice, and make the job much more user friendly. But again, not something a new player determined to be lost and unhappy would ever use.

The alternative is arbitrary "difficulty levels" in which Toady decides which part of his completely customizable game count as "easy", "medium" and "hard". At which point experienced people point out better options for a more nuanced challenge and new people are lost and unhappy again.

Why not just embrace how customizable the game is? Make it a feature and not an noob scarer?

[clinodev]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For now, in case anyone happened to be reading and not know about it, you can open up the creature_standard raw file and edit the token[PERSONALITY:STRESS_VULNERABILITY:0:45:100], changing the values according to the wiki entry read here. You could bump the median up to 75, and the lowest to 25, and have a creature that is, on average, more susceptible to stress.

Your spoiler text here makes an excellent point, advertently or not. It's trivial for experienced players to add challenges, while expecting new players to adjust is likely to mean lost players and unhappy experiences.

And what do you suggest? A tutorial on how to edit a text file?
A raw editing utility with a simple interface would be nice, and make the job much more user friendly. But again, not something a new player determined to be lost and unhappy would ever use.

The alternative is arbitrary "difficulty levels" in which Toady decides which part of his completely customizable game count as "easy", "medium" and "hard". At which point experienced people point out better options for a more nuanced challenge and new people are lost and unhappy again.

Why not just embrace how customizable the game is? Make it a feature and not an noob scarer?

Perhaps I wrote awkwardly, because I agree with every one your arguments here.

I'm suggesting that if the "game balance" has to be off for someone, it's probably better for the "out of box" experience to be scaled for new and casual players, i.e. "maybe too easy."

People who have played for years (like most of us commenting in this thread) can trivially make the game more difficult, whereas, as you say, sending new players to edit text files is likely to go poorly.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For now, in case anyone happened to be reading and not know about it, you can open up the creature_standard raw file and edit the token[PERSONALITY:STRESS_VULNERABILITY:0:45:100], changing the values according to the wiki entry read here. You could bump the median up to 75, and the lowest to 25, and have a creature that is, on average, more susceptible to stress.

Your spoiler text here makes an excellent point, advertently or not. It's trivial for experienced players to add challenges, while expecting new players to adjust is likely to mean lost players and unhappy experiences.

And what do you suggest? A tutorial on how to edit a text file?
A raw editing utility with a simple interface would be nice, and make the job much more user friendly. But again, not something a new player determined to be lost and unhappy would ever use.

The alternative is arbitrary "difficulty levels" in which Toady decides which part of his completely customizable game count as "easy", "medium" and "hard". At which point experienced people point out better options for a more nuanced challenge and new people are lost and unhappy again.

Why not just embrace how customizable the game is? Make it a feature and not an noob scarer?

Perhaps I wrote awkwardly, because I agree with every one your arguments here.

I'm suggesting that if the "game balance" has to be off for someone, it's probably better for the "out of box" experience to be scaled for new and casual players, i.e. "maybe too easy."

People who have played for years (like most of us commenting in this thread) can trivially make the game more difficult, whereas, as you say, sending new players to edit text files is likely to go poorly.

Ah, but "where are the goblins, the game is so boring. My 79 dwarves have been making so much gold recently and yet we're never attacked. Dull". Is also a comment thrown out by new players (especially those trying to make things easy to manage or easier on the fps by capping their population).

Well, never mind, off-topic I guess. Balance is hard. 

[Maximum Spin]

Personally, I remember why I was drawn to the game in the first place: Partly because of its memetic difficulty, but even moreso because of its reputation for simulationism. What I have always wanted most out of all my games is detailed, accurate simulation. So in this case I don't care if DF is hard or easy, as long as it's correct, which to me means that dwarves behave in a way that's psychologically realistic... which, based on my life experience, pretty much means they should be freaking out from stress all the time.

I really think what this comes down to, to a large degree, is disagreement about what DF is. Is it a game to be balanced, or a simulation to be accurate? I've always thought of it as the latter, and it would be disappointing to me for it to go the other way, but ultimately that decision is up to the dev.

[Sver]

which to me means that dwarves behave in a way that's psychologically realistic... which, based on my life experience, pretty much means they should be freaking out from stress all the time.

Well, yes, but also, they would have various defence mechanisms that are not just alcoholism. And then there is an old argument that "lorewise" the dwarves live in a much less sheltered environment than a modern person does, so they should be more accustomed to violence, death and general hardship.