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[Chief10]

Just my two cents. in version 40, there was a little noted change that (in my opinion) permanently dented df’s reputation as a hard game: military skill training rate rose dramatically. In the past it was essentially impossible to get legendary military dwarfs without exploits. Now you can easily get a legendary military dwarf with 2 years of non-stop sparring. The result is that very few of the external threats are scary. If you have basic metal armor/weapons you can casually defeat any threat with your squad of 10 legendary hammer dwarfs.

I’m not sure if there was an actual change in xp gain rate or if maybe there was a sparring bug fixed. But either way, it takes away from the game when non of the military threats are actually threatening.

I also think farming is vastly over-powered. To be harder/more realistic, it should take more than 3 farmers to feed an entire fort.

[muldrake]

It would be cool if you got some sort if indication on embark as to the difficulty - like if you embark right next to 3 dark forts and a necromancer tower, the game should tell you there will be a lot of action.

.
 There is a screen in the choose-the-embark-point that tells you how hostile the area is, and who your friends and enemies are at that point. Legends Mode Viewer tells you who your civilization is at war with.
 
 'Embark Anywhere' allows interesting location options ( including inside other settlements ), and sometimes a world record for fastest way to kill all of the dorks.

I don't generally use embark anywhere (other than to embark on mountains when bizarrely of all the biomes you would think embarking directly on a mountain would be the dorfiest thing ever), but I have fairly often embarked within a day's walking distance of a bunch of obviously completely hostile stuff and then had a completely idyllic time where the only threat to my fort's continued existence was, well, me.

And then I've embarked in joyous wilds that look like something from a children's cartoon and then a were-elephant shows up before the end of the year and wrecks absolutely everything that wasn't destroyed by that cute unicorn.

[Magmacube_tr]

'Embark Anywhere' allows interesting location options ( including inside other settlements ), and sometimes a world record for fastest way to kill all of the dorks.

I propose a new speedrun. Kill All Dorfs. Goal is to kill the starting 7 as fast as possible. Normal% for normal embarks, Any% for embark everywhere.

TAS' are also valid.

[JasonMel]

In my mind, there's more of a built-in threat slider than a "clock" in the game in terms of how much wealth you generate over time, and how much you buy from caravans, because you have a degree of control over those things. If you're not ready for "big threat," you can take care not to generate too much wealth as you make your preparations for big threat, e.g. by using low-value materials or sticking to utilitarian items or the like, and also not to export too much valuable stuff. This lets you tell the game to some extent how much threat you think would be fun or exciting or whatnot at that time. To me this system is already really really elegant, one of my favorite in any game really [...]. It also feels sort of like cool RP to me to do—laying low and building in secret, or being brash and confident and showy, make lots of fancy art and having a rowdy tavern and so on.

Interesting. I never thought of DF in quite that way before.

How should this interact with embark location, if at all?

[Mobbstar]

I propose a new speedrun. Kill All Dorfs. Goal is to kill the starting 7 as fast as possible. Normal% for normal embarks, Any% for embark everywhere.

TAS' are also valid.

No need to TAS if you're allowed to choose your world seed:  Simply embark on a major river that starts frozen and thaws shortly thereafter.

[RLS0812]

or embark on an ocean ... the land doesn't generate and all the dorks fall to their deaths immediately after the game is unpaused  .

[muldrake]

or embark on an ocean ... the land doesn't generate and all the dorks fall to their deaths immediately after the game is unpaused  .

Use something like embark anywhere to spawn directly over magma.  I actually had a hopeless embark like this although it wasn't directly over magma, but it was near magma infested with magma crabs which immediately attacked the group and killed everyone in seconds.  Another is embarking on thralling terrain and embark dumps you immediately into a thralling cloud.

[spinnylights]

In my mind, there's more of a built-in threat slider than a "clock" in the game in terms of how much wealth you generate over time, and how much you buy from caravans, because you have a degree of control over those things. If you're not ready for "big threat," you can take care not to generate too much wealth as you make your preparations for big threat, e.g. by using low-value materials or sticking to utilitarian items or the like, and also not to export too much valuable stuff. This lets you tell the game to some extent how much threat you think would be fun or exciting or whatnot at that time. To me this system is already really really elegant, one of my favorite in any game really [...]. It also feels sort of like cool RP to me to do—laying low and building in secret, or being brash and confident and showy, make lots of fancy art and having a rowdy tavern and so on.

Interesting. I never thought of DF in quite that way before.

How should this interact with embark location, if at all?

Glad you thought it was interesting. At the moment, it has a degree of interaction with embark location already, because some embarks are very resource-poor compared to others, which pushes you to do things that will expose you more earlier. If you don't have much resources available to you at the start, you have some motivation to make valuable trade goods and to trade as much away to the caravans as you can so that they'll bring large quantities of whatever it is you're missing, but of course that can bring unwanted attention to you from the surface as well, so you have to be strategic about what you buy and how you use it. Of course, if what you need is something like iron, you might actually want to attract surface threat, so then the question becomes how quickly you can build up your surface defenses with careful use of the caravans, which is its own interesting problem. In other cases like wood, the alternative to trade might be to open the caverns early, but naturally that has its own risks. All of this can make for interesting play in the early game if you want these kinds of challenges, but you can also sidestep all of it by doing a large embark in a relaxed, resource-rich biome, as the quickstart guide understandably points new players towards.

One thing I do think dilutes the variation between embarks a bit for this kind of gameplay is how valuable prepared food is. Once you really get food production going, you end up generating a ton of wealth just by cooking which you're forced to do to keep the dwarves alive, and it's easy to get everything you need from caravans by selling prepared food stacks, so by the time you're not worried about your food supply anymore the early game is basically over. I think the player might feel more involved in the transition from early- to mid-game if prepared food wasn't worth so much; you would have more latitude in when you decided to make high-value goods, and you would have to make a more deliberate decision in what sorts of goods you wanted to go for, too.

In general too, to some extent I feel like the "less resources leads to more threat sooner" aspect of the gameplay could be brought out more strongly. Even in a very resource-starved biome, I don't feel like it's that hard to get what you need; there's always the caverns and the magma to lean on and they make up for almost everything. I'm trying a 1x3 embark in scorching, treeless badlands right now and I've got a well-established fort without having to think outside the box all that much; obviously I could go to even further extremes biome-wise but I was expecting this to be more of a brain-twister in terms of resources. Maybe next time I'll try an embark without much rock. In any case I think it would be neat if going off the beaten path felt more unusual on average biome-wise, like in terms of how you found yourself coping with the challenges of the environment.

I also think farming is vastly over-powered. To be harder/more realistic, it should take more than 3 farmers to feed an entire fort.

On the other hand, I do feel like keeping the fort fed is just the beginning. If you want your dwarves to enjoy the food and drink, you're then on a quest to supply the widest possible variety of both, which I feel like is a fun running thread to have winding through the gameplay. I like seeing all the different wacky foods they make too.

So if you're embark close to a dragon, a cyclops and a necromancer that wants to rampage, then all hell can break loose right at the beginning of the fort.

I think this is already true to some extent today at least regarding necromancers; I tried embarking very close to a necromancer tower recently and was attacked sometime in the first season or two I think (I don't quite recall but it felt very early).

My reason for preferring that is I love the idea of a fort just being part of the generated world with no special advantages or anything. The game should IMO not have a difficulty level as such - it should just be like, if you pick remote, safe site with no neighbours, then you might be out of harm's way and never get attacked. If you pick a site in the middle of mayhem, you should be attacked constantly.

I really like that there's inpredictibility to it - that when you pick a site, you can't know if there's a bunch of monster lairs around it. This to me is just realistic and cool and I think it would just be fun if you got attacked by some megabeats when you're just 7 dwarves in the fort.

To me there are certain downsides to this as I elaborated on in my first post; at the furthest extreme it ends up limiting your control over how exposed you are only to where you embark, which I think is a rather coarse and static-feeling amount of control to give the player. I think it's nice if you also have some control over this in terms of what you do after you embark, just because adds more possible depth and variety to the gameplay. I think DF really shines as a "dwarven tales generator," and anything that lets the player have a bit of influence here and there to nudge the story in certain directions enhances the game's ability to play elegantly along with what the player has in mind.

Of course, if you embark in obviously hostile territory, I think it would make sense if you had somewhat less capacity to "lay low" at first, like if the point at which you start getting noticed is set lower. Then if you wanted to stay out of sight in the early game you would have to be really stealthy, which might involve avoiding a lot of what you would normally do when you start up a fort for some time or finding clever workarounds for things that would ordinarily attract threat. The current rhythm of the game, with the once-a-year outpost liason and the regular caravans and migrants waves and so on, kind of undercuts this idea, so maybe the game could support this kind of gameplay more elaborately in theory.

So I think it should be like, there's different kinds of attacks:

- some attacks you get simply because there's dwarves to kill and eat there, they only depend on location.

- some attacks are for money, so the likelihood of them should depend on traded wealth or on fort value*
 
- some attacks are because of poitics, say if your civ is a war with some other civ. I guess goblins also invade sites because they want to take over the world, I don't see why they would not like to conquer a small fort just to grab it and bathe the world in chaos.

*I find it fair that visitors would realize roughly how rich the fort is based on tavern talk and then spread the rumour, so I find it fair enough that the goblins know how wealthy you are, also if you don't trade much.

I like this line of thought. In some ways it's already like this of course, but I agree that the idea of "what's motivating the attackers" could be brought out more strongly. It would be more obvious how to model what the player could do to hide out this way too; you could consider what the surrounding threats were and then try to figure out why they might want to come after you, and either try to avoid doing those things to stay safe or do them on purpose to bring on the threat, depending on what you thought would be more interesting. Maybe you could even send out scouts or your own spies to try to discover more about the surrounding territory. Right now you find out some things from the outpost liason and such, but if your site is far away from the rest of your civ in hostile territory, there's no reason why the mountainhomes would have all that much of an idea what's happening around your fort. I mean, maybe you are the main scouting party—maybe that's why your starting dwarves set out. It would be neat if the game would let you RP around stuff like this more I think.

I don't think there should be something as crude as a "difficulty slider."

I think a "threat slider" is a bit different from a "difficulty slider." Increased threat will make the game harder for someone who's trying to play with peace in mind, but easier for someone who wants conflict. The reason I think it's nice to have a threat slider in the settings is in case the player wants to decouple the embark environs from the amount of exposure they're under, either to suite their playstyle or so they can play out certain scenarios. As a rather simplistic example, maybe you want to play out a "Siege-of-Gondor"-type story; you could build up an elaborate war fort with the threat level set to nothing, then dial it up to maximum once your "set" was built and watch the tale unfold. You might also just feel, as you're playing, "I could use a bit of excitement just now," and some players would appreciate the ability to just nudge the threat up a few notches if they felt that way. If you don't want to use it, of course, you don't have to; obviously there are more naturalistic, "in-game" ways of controlling the threat level, and maybe the game could use more of that than it has today too.

[Alastar]

I want the difficulty to be organic, and I want enemy motivations that make sense.

Lots of tasty dwarves running around? Things that like to eat them may notice; this would greatly depend on surroundings and nearby exotic wildlife.
Lots of trade in expensive items? Some bastards will try to steal, rob, or simply shake us down for a cut.
We look like a growing military threat? Someone may want assurances, treaties... or go to war.

I want the ability to "keep our head down", and preferably alternatives to violence if we don't.

[Salmeuk]

in order for the difficulty to feel fair, you must first allow players to dig too deep, as in 2-d Dwarf Fortress. You must give the players the ability to provoke more danger as they see fit, or conversely avoid contact altogether and hunker down as others have suggested.

Triggering nearby sites to attack you should either occur more often, or be more explicit of an option (send a diplomat to spit on their king's face). And their armies should prove larger and more consistently aggressive, and with better climbing pathfinding perhaps, or digging abilities(though this is a very contentious suggestion I am aware).

As long as the danger come from the player's own actions, and choices, and reflects the larger world logic, then it can be dangerous as hell and still seem fair. You know, don't poke the beehive or slap the bear's ass without expecting to get bit (or stung), or the classic phrase "Losing is Fun," that feeling must continue to exist within the game. A sense of awe or wonder at one's own demise.

Even things like a monster of indescribable, almost broken difficulty should appear occasionally, but rarely enough they make for good stories.

I think allowing players to easily modify raw file values would essentially act as difficulty sliders. Increasing populations or decreasing food growth rates, etc. Those kind of things should be exposed to newcomers

Finally, and this kind of hurts to admit, but food has NEVER been an issue in 3d DF, unless you simply forget to brew. This really, really dates dwarf fortress, as new players are coming from games like Rimworld or Stardew or any number of other farming sim-types where the meat of the gameplay involves working with seasonal growth rates and balancing labor for the best production rates, and other complex tasks. None of that exists in the current DF, and would add a natural, player-action derived win/loss state of starving vs. not starving, due to player failure.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

this is being said with all the usual caveats of realism vs. game balance, since some natural locations IRL would easily support entire fortresses via simple foraging

It honestly hurts to see new players realize how simplistic and non-challenging the farming is. It reveals how much of a mythology has developed around this game's supposed difficulty, and so I think that represents a strong starting point for attempts to balance.

[Eric Blank]

I like that idea @alastar, and especially think "keeping your head down" should be the default option, especially for new players, where your fort is default hidden from civs nearby besides your own caravans and can be spotted by military patrols or other wanderers who spread rumors, with the Dwarven caravan slowly leaking information over the years, and you can take the stance to openly invite and advertise the forts services to visitors like the library, temples, inn, open trade with other civs etc that might bring villains and banditry, and then take the step to formally claim surrounding lands prompting negotiations with other claimants that didn't already find you.

That would make the progression of difficulty organic and give new players a couple years where other nearby civs don't immediately send sieges and are willing to negotiate for, for instance, vassalization of your fortress into their lands or pay tribute, demand a certain profit margin for their caravans etc (which you can break later prompting a vicious war!)

[anewaname]

I'm with the "embark location should decide difficulty" crowd and "there should be more info about the threats of neighbors', because if the player can choose between selecting to embark near "tens of goblins" or "thousands of goblins", their choice indicates what they want for a difficulty.

[Salmeuk]

from the most recent blog post:

The elves are also getting reworked to make them more of a challenge. The number of trees felled that it takes to anger them has been greatly reduced, and their attacks are more deadly.

looking forward to this. I have always enjoyed the ambushes that elves will send, you often first spot them climbing in the trees in some attempt at a water crossing, or half-way up your perimeter wall, and the sort of strange cultures that elves have suggests a real creepiness to this image.

If you think that's a waste of time, you can now buy them off as they will demand an artifact as a bribe before they attack,

this is a great example of giving us a meaningful choice to circumvent the "normal" difficulty curve. Pairing the above with the (admittedly meta) knowledge that strange moods derive from total number of ground tiles dug, you can imagine certain strategies involving strip-mining.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

or, as I have also noticed in the most recent versions, very often travellers will come equipped with all kinds of valuable artifacts. Not just books, but proper artifacts, like the usual trash of earrings and whatnot. So shaking down incoming travelers would make for another source of artifacts - and all of this knavery is, of course, merely to prevent the much larger and more terrible threat of goblin invasions.

I'm with the "embark location should decide difficulty" crowd and "there should be more info about the threats of neighbors', because if the player can choose between selecting to embark near "tens of goblins" or "thousands of goblins", their choice indicates what they want for a difficulty.

you know, I really like this idea. but what other qualifiers might we add to display to the player? And how far out should the game count populations? I almost feel like these numbers would give a really quite vague suggestion, unless the data was somehow filtered for clarity or meaningful-ness. Since some civs never really attack, or are at war with some other civ on the other side of the continent, I can imagine situations where high pop but also low chance of invasion exist at the same time.

not sure if that's true though, and I imagine there are a few people who do know, who might correct me if I am wrong.

[LuuBluum]

Finally, and this kind of hurts to admit, but food has NEVER been an issue in 3d DF, unless you simply forget to brew. This really, really dates dwarf fortress, as new players are coming from games like Rimworld or Stardew or any number of other farming sim-types where the meat of the gameplay involves working with seasonal growth rates and balancing labor for the best production rates, and other complex tasks. None of that exists in the current DF, and would add a natural, player-action derived win/loss state of starving vs. not starving, due to player failure.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

this is being said with all the usual caveats of realism vs. game balance, since some natural locations IRL would easily support entire fortresses via simple foraging

It honestly hurts to see new players realize how simplistic and non-challenging the farming is. It reveals how much of a mythology has developed around this game's supposed difficulty, and so I think that represents a strong starting point for attempts to balance.

If I recall, in some FotF reply a while back, proper cooking with recipes and whatnot was intended to be a part of the dances/songs/etc. update but didn't make it in. Hopefully Toady gets around to a food/cooking overhaul at some point, though as far as farming is concerned there's a FotF reply saying that it'll probably have to wait until after the map rewrite.

[Quarque]

One really big problem with difficulty: migrants. You get so many of them and you get them so quickly. This has several effects:

* as a noob it makes the game much harder, because you're forced to manage a big fort very soon
* as a veteran is makes the game too easy. Who cares if you lose a bunch of dwarves if you get new ones right away?
* It makes children irrelevant; natural growth is far far slower than migration
* It makes you care far less about individual dwarves

The same goes for visitors, by the way.

In short, it has several bad effects. In my own games I always disable migration, but as default setting I'd say that migration and visitors should be tuned to about 10% of the current size of your fortress, at most. If you have only 7 dwarves in your fortress, getting zero to one migrant each year feels much more natural than getting five.