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[Mechanoid]

quote:Originally posted by thvaz:
<STRONG>There is the problem with the bridges too.</STRONG>

Like Sean said, if a bridge tries to crush them, the bridge should be destroyed.

[Name Lips]

quote:Originally posted by Faces of Mu:
<snip>

Not just worms! Goblins are traditionally delvers of the deep places, too. They're just not as good at it as dwarves. imagine tunneling accidentally into a goblin colony! Or a network dug out by giant ants. Or the abandoned detria of such places, long since abandoned.

Perhaps certain magical creatures could just phase through the earth (like Xorn in D&D) because they're so in tune with it. They could literally just step through the wall and hold dwarfs ransom for gold and jewels, then vanish into the wall from whence they came.

----

Re: the farming discussion above.

Perhaps each fortress wouldn't have the proper setup to farm. Most modern cities aren't, either. They trade goods and services with cities that are, using the greater economy and infrastructure. So maybe your fortress survives by making high-quality dwarven stone toys, or bone crafts, or gold statues, or whatever. Those pesky humans and elves can spend their time grubbing in the soil - the Dwarfs have the riches of the earth to uncover and work into treasures beyond imagining

[Kagira]

Screw giant worms, its the giant moles you gotta watch out for! Sure they may be blind, but they have huge claws and sharp teeth!

[Delton]

Disclaimer: I'm not going to read through 100 pages of posts to see if these things have already been said. These are my thoughts, and some ideas that I am sure other people have already suggested. If you're interested, enjoy. If not, move along. :-D

Is there really any point in having a scripted endgame at all? Currently, there is no win-condition, and its relatively easy to avoid hitting the current end-game trigger (by simply murdering any king who suggests otherwise). Adding a new end-game trigger and sequence seems non-trivial, and its mostly content that we all avoid until we're either bored or finished with a game. Its not a surprise to anyone who reads the wiki (which you pretty much have to do to play the game) and I have not heard too many people complaining that the endgame was just too tempting.

I've never reached it myself, but I have heard a lot of people say they've avoided it altogether, or that you can defeat it (as mentioned previously in this thread). By doing that, sure, you might eventually run out of things to do, but that's sort of your prerogative - just like building the thing in the first place. There was never any "goal" for the dwarves of your fortress, other than to survive, and by the time you're anywhere near the endgame you've probably reached a point where they can produce more than enough of whatever they need, and have found some way of dealing with sieges rather consistently. If not, your endgame is likely to be starvation, or genocide, and another scripted one isn't needed.

I've hit a lot of un-scripted endgames. They were all more exciting and appealing than the idea of digging into what I know to be rock that will start a timer that will unleash a baddy that I have prepared to defeat.

Assuming your fortress is pretty self-sufficient, you have absolutely no incentive to dig deeper, since you don't need whatever is there (and are, presumably, offing any noble who thinks otherwise). You probably create more wealth than you need to import, and certainly solved your food problems early on. The fact that you're continuing to develop your fortress (and play the game) is certainly more for the love of your fortress, and the joy of playing than any desire to reach the end of a game - so why have an end to the game at all?

Also, I don't like the idea of an endgame scenario because its boring. It shouldn't be determinable ahead of time, if there is one. Once you know that digging adamantine triggers the demons and the end of the game, you just avoid it if you don't want the game to end, and have all the time in the world to sufficiently prepare for it if you want to take them on. I like most of the suggestions involving different endgame sequences for different fortresses - but unless they are emergent from the simulation (like a plague or a battle that goes the wrong way) they would take way too much effort to be scripted in.

Half of the fun of playing and showing my friends (who also play) my fortress is exchanging stories about the things that happened in there - the unplanned stuff. The endgame story is about as interesting as the prelude - "seven dwarves show up next to a rock wall". Its the same for everyone. When MY endgame is starvation during a winter after monkeys stole all my food supplies... THAT is a great DF story to tell, and its interesting because it didn't happen to EVERYONE (well, at least not to all of their fortresses). If my farm is overrun with locusts, or a skeletal elephant manages to take out all of my woodcutters... those are the sorts of anecdotes that make DF fun for us.

Given that Toady is already working on it... there will be an endgame... so I'm overruled. :-D Since there has to be one, I agree with the posts above (including Toady's) that say that the "endgame" should be something that lures you in. Failing that, it could be something you're increasingly pressured into doing (and not by whiney soon-to-be ex-nobles). There should be some reason why you either want, or need, to dig that deep, or simply a happy-ending where you did whatever the dwarven people wanted you to do when they sent you out there - and that by choosing to end the game that way, you're avoiding some worse ending in the future.

It probably goes against the spirit of the game, but having some end-goal in sight would probably go a long way towards getting the user to the endgame. Maybe the REASON the dwarves were put there were to find adamantine to (somehow) save the princess who is going to die (from...adamantine-deficiency?) in like... 4 years, or 10 years, or whatever. There, now they have a reason to hurry their little butts into that mountain and find the adamantine. Making the fortress and all of the infrastructure necessary to sustain it, would simply be a way of insuring that they don't die before they find it.

Personally, I don't like that, because the fortress and all of that infrastructure is most of the fun of the game. Having some King on my back about digging out some cursed rock to save his spoiled brat just makes me want to open the floodgate to his throne-room.

It would be rather neat if there was a "good" endgame condition. Like, after you reach a certain amount of dwarves, with a certain history of production (exports > imports, food supplies always going up, etc) the fortress no longer needs your oversight and becomes a dwarven city in the persistant world just like any other civilization. Instead, you take seven dwarves, a wagon, a mule, and a few supplies and march off to establish the next settlement - but now you've added something cool to the world, with your own personal touch. You could later trade with them, or go to war with them, or whatever.

It might also be difficult to reach a balance where you're avoiding one end-game scenario but also don't want to hit the other one. You don't want to be too self-suffient, or the dwarven king will take over your well-established stronghold, but you don't want to be too poor or weak, either, or you'll die to the next siege or starve from one bad season of crops.

That way, most dwarven fortresses would end at some point, either with success (the establishment of a new town) or failure (they are all wiped out), but not by some plot-device. If you've got enough time on your hands that you're making doodles out of 1x1 bridges, the game will pleasently congratulate you on your victory and introduce you to your next challenge.

That might be a cool way to gradually increase the challenge. As more and more cities populate the world, they are fighting over land and other resources. Your 5th fortress might be in some haunted forest, or a glacier, or a desert - but by now the game is certain you've got what it takes to pull it off. Especially if you get to take some exceptional starting supplies from your previous fortresses.

[mickel]

quote:Originally posted by Delton:
<STRONG>
That way, most dwarven fortresses would end at some point, either with success (the establishment of a new town) or failure (they are all wiped out), but not by some plot-device. If you've got enough time on your hands that you're making doodles out of 1x1 bridges, the game will pleasently congratulate you on your victory and introduce you to your next challenge.

That might be a cool way to gradually increase the challenge. As more and more cities populate the world, they are fighting over land and other resources. Your 5th fortress might be in some haunted forest, or a glacier, or a desert - but by now the game is certain you've got what it takes to pull it off. Especially if you get to take some exceptional starting supplies from your previous fortresses.</STRONG>

I like it. Long before I get to the point where I'm doodling with bridges, or even before I get to the economy, I can be "done" with a fortress. It's not fun anymore, because I made it to the chasm, or dug out the entire cliff face, or whatever I set out to do.

In that case to just abandon the fortress is a drag. I've built a fully operational fortress here, it's doing something, and it's looking cool. I've got a mayor here, why doesn't he take over?

[Delton]

Right. It would be really cool if the stuff you did made a difference in how the place was run afterwards, but that would also require a lot of work. Some simplier metric mapping your success to the sorts of attributes the other civilizations currently have would probably suffice. Like, my dwarves produce TONS of stone mug crafts, currently. It would be bad-ass if after I started my next fortress, a dwarven caravan from my original fortress arrived, but all they brought were rock mugs. :-D

okay, that would suck for my new dwarves, but it would be awesome if it was capable of this. A more successful fortress would be capable of selling off some of their huge stockpiles of food and weapons to my new fledgling fortress - and the merchants who come might be named dwarves that I remember brokering in my trade depot last time.

[Black Hound]

I think, looking at the cores\reqs\bloats, that Toady is planning to make it so that as your fortress becomes larger and wealthier, you gain more control over the rest of the dwarven civilization you're part of, eventually culminating in getting the king\queen and ruling all the fortresses of that civilization and taking a malevolent pleasure in dispatching your rich, pampered dwarves across the map to demand 3 dark stone mini-forges and forbid the exporting of red spinel items each month. All the current endgame stuff with the adamantine demon seems like it's just to give us something to do while he works his way towards that end.

[Istrian]

IMHO, instead of an endgame it would be more interesting to have a set of missions generated randomly at the beginning of each fortress. Obviously these would have to be difficult missions (or just very long), like conquering a certain city or trainign a large number of champions and heroes, or accomodating a lot of religions while maintaining a high average happiness.

Each mission accomlished would bring a reward, of course. But that reward would have to be something you can't get the normal way. If, for instance, some skills were unavailable from the start, a possible reward would be new skills (say adamantine smithing), or a surgeon noble.

This way, we would have a way to customise our fortresses. Instead of having the generic uber-mega fortress where everything is available in abundant supply, we would have more specialized fortresses, which would be forced to trade for things they can't make.

[Minuteman]

Maybe it's just me, but I'd prefer if the game were open-ended, but with an increasingly steep curve of difficulty.

Getting to the "placeholder endgame" (adamantine) ought to be a challenge in itself, with the various fates previously-mentioned -- demons, vampire takeover, siege, whatever -- lurking around each bend. Then when you reach the point of Toady's envisioned endgame (control of more fortresses), on top of all these single-fortress dangers, you have to deal with large invasions, rebellions, and so on at a more epic scale.

The curve should be such that the difficulty and variety of challenges to your control increase exponentially as your scope widens and more tools become available. The game would end naturally this way. Of course, at any point the player could determine they've reached their goal and, say, start with a different civilization in that same world. (If the player continues this way, at some point the continent becomes hugely overpopulated and the destructive power of the various civilizations, with the help of magic, ensures a sort of M.A.D. scenario. And since the player can only control one civ at a time, world war/armageddon ends up as just a matter of time.)

[Savok]

What if you wipe out or subjugate all other civilizations, meanwhile maintaining peace and happiness in your own?

[Fieari]

Sounds about time for a civil war, then.  Or rather, a war for independence.

[SwiftSpear]

quote:Originally posted by Name Lips:
[QB]
Not just worms! Goblins are traditionally delvers of the deep places, too. They're just not as good at it as dwarves. imagine tunneling accidentally into a goblin colony! Or a network dug out by giant ants. Or the abandoned detria of such places, long since abandoned.

AWESOME!

quote:Perhaps certain magical creatures could just phase through the earth (like Xorn in D&D) because they're so in tune with it. They could literally just step through the wall and hold dwarfs ransom for gold and jewels, then vanish into the wall from whence they came.

Ugg, no.  Such a creature would be impossibly to sensibly design the fort against.  It would make players incredibly paranoid to have to deal with them in addition to all the other forms of attacks.  FFS, stuff jumps out of your wells.

[Tamren]

quote:Originally posted by SwiftSpear:
<STRONG>
Ugg, no.  Such a creature would be impossibly to sensibly design the fort against.  It would make players incredibly paranoid to have to deal with them in addition to all the other forms of attacks.  FFS, stuff jumps out of your wells.</STRONG>

Not if we get magic to deal with such creatures.

[Minuteman]

quote:What if you wipe out or subjugate all other civilizations, meanwhile maintaining peace and happiness in your own?

 

quote:Sounds about time for a civil war, then. Or rather, a war for independence.

Subjugation of the entire world, while technically possible, would (I imagine) be practically impossible to even the absolute best players. E.g., civil war, as mentioned.

The idea is that world conquest is possible for the express purpose of using it as a measuring stick of success, while so difficult to achieve that it's never considered viable. That way, DF doesn't ever follow a formula and no two "won" games are alike. You can always improve with diminishing returns for your effort, as if approaching a Calculus limit, but never reach the very end.

Consider also that the "home stretch" (conquering huge swathes of territory) is near the far end of that limit. By the time a very skilled player begins to approach it, a lot of his success should depend on luck too. It's the nature of the beast.

[ September 14, 2007: Message edited by: Minuteman ]

[ September 14, 2007: Message edited by: Minuteman ]

[vallannion]

I would prefer it if the endgame came about rather than by being scripted but instead as a combination of factors present through the whole game. E.g. ever more frequent and larger invasions as other civilisations grow greedy for your wealth, more migrants forcing you to expand and possibly causing a Malthusian collapse.

If it wasn't a demon say, wasn't a defined event or timer, but was the consequence of our actions it would make the endgame much more enjoyable.