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[TheDeadlyShoe]

Traps : I think a handful of traps is acceptable and adds to the mood.  Multiple lines of traps are right out. Indiana Jones never had to do his duck and roll four times to get through four buzzsaw traps.

Player Traps : Construction of them is awesome, but actually using them should be more sparing. I mean, it's nice that you have a super flood room or a collapsible bridge, but if you use them on every siege to make yourself invincible bleeeeeh.

Atom Smashers : I don't use them.

Quantum Stockpiles :  I use them for beautification purposes.  I hate having rock lying around in my beautiful constructions.

Crossbows: I'm fine with people using as many crossbows as they want.  It's how you use them that matters.  And to be fair, even a legion of marksdorfs behind fortifications can be punished by elite bowmen.

[NFossil]

Traps : Usually just at the entrance, cage followed by weapon. Never put any limits though.
Player Traps : Built a lot but never quite tested. I won't refrain from using them though.
Atom Smashers : Haven't tried.
Quantum Stockpiles : Only for getting stones out of areas to be flooded or sealed.
Crossbows : lots.
Modded Races : Haven't tried.
Modded World : Haven't tried.

[Pilsu]

Perpetual motion, quantum stockpiles and trap corridors exploiting pathfinding causing the enemy run back and forth are a bit 'sploity. Rest is fair game, think of it as a difficulty setting

[Guy Montag]

Not a big fan of traps, but I use a few cage traps to capture prisoners. Prisoners are alot of fun. I use quantum stockpiles in conjuction with atom smashers to get all that goddamn rock off my stockpiles screen. It creates lag. I don't use atom smashers for defense because thats just cheesy.

Almost all my soldiers use crossbows because they tend to get massacred by any crossbow-armed enemy if they don't have one. Having a dozen hammerdwarves get mowed down by a squad of goblin archers is frown town.

It is a single player game, but its already too easy to be using exploits to make it even easier. Theres no challenge to the game if your using solid miles of cage traps and atom smashers everywhere.

[The13thRonin]

These are my views:

Traps : I avoid bunching them all together in the one place. Spreading them throughout the fortress makes it much more realistic and fun.

Player Traps : The best and most worthwhile traps to make. Their destructive capabilities are often balanced by the work required to create them and their inclination to go horribly wrong.

Atom Smashers : Total exploit if used more than once but not so bad otherwise (IE - lowering the drawbridge once onto part of a goblin siege so the dwarves can rush out and wreak havoc).

Quantum Stockpiles : Exploit and unrealistic. I don't use it.

Crossbows : Limit myself to 50% of the armed forces having crossbows.

Modded Races : Cheating.

Modded World : I do this but I make sure everything balances out.

[Charlemagne]

Traps : I use a fair number of cage traps (I love messing with prisoners) and a few weapon traps. Since I play with the immigration set to 7 (which slows it to a trickle rather than cutting it off completely like you might think) if I didn't use traps my fortresses would rapidly become goblin forts.

Player Traps : Descriptions of these are the entire reason why I started playing DF. If melting goblins with Lava is cheating, then I don't want to play properly.

Atom Smashers : Just this minute learned they exist.

Quantum Stockpiles : Never done it, not even sure how I might go about doing it. When I was first playing I would have been tempted, but I'm good at using up stone now so I wouldn't bother.

Crossbows : My army tends to consist entirely of crossbow dwarves and maybe one or two melee dwarves (who are more arena fighters than actual militiamen.

Modded Races : I mod some things to make them more powerful, especially megabeasts. Also for a while I had modded elves to be evil but that got overwritten when I switched versions.

Modded World : I mess with the raws all the time, but not with the intent of making the game easier. More with the intent of making it more chaotic and insane.

[wendigo]

It's doubtful that any good will come from attempting to establish guidelines for what is and isn't fair play.  There's a couple major problems with the idea that I can pull right out of my, uhm, head.

1.  Logistical Issues:  Due to the "work in progress" nature of DF, the game fundamentals will continue to change, sometimes radically, from month to month.  Any guidelines that we establish will need to be re-worked constantly.  Something that was/wasn't cheaty in 2D DF would be a different story in the early days of the Z-axis and yet another different story today, and again next month.  Maybe after DF 1.0 comes out in 2011 or whatever there could be an "according to Hoyle" discussion, but it seems unworkable until then.  Also, what governing body will maintain the rules?  Toady?  A mob on the forum, armed with polls?  Whoever happens to be posting the most this week?  Batman?*

2.  Philosophical Issues:  Cui bono?  What's the benefit of having any consensus on these issues?  Consensus is a vice as often as it's a virtue.  Attempting to establish a baseline for fair play would be ignored by most people, and likely devolve into an endless, fruitless cycle of flames, trolls, and circle jerks among those that do.

The notion of establishing orthodoxy isn't without merit, and I'm not arguing against social cohesion in general... but one cannot frost a cake before it has left the oven.  One the game is more-or-less complete you should start this thread up again, and I look forward to tossing my curmudgeonly old self into the mix.  For now, this just seems to be opinion gathering-- and that's interesting enough in itself, but there's just nowhere else to go with it.



*(The correct answer is "Batman," but sadly the only hero that even occasionally plays DF is Ironman, so we're SOL here.)

[1138]

Eh, I don't think it's so much about establishing rules as basic curiosity. It's interesting to know what other people think.

[wendigo]

Oh, I've had fun reading people's thoughts on this too.  The language of the original post just made me a bit queasy.

I wanted to open up a bit of a discussion--

OK, cool...

-- to try to reach some form of consensus on what constitutes legitamate play strategies, what constitutes cheesy or exploitive tactics, and what represents out and out cheating.

Oh dear.


The "discussion" bit is great-- do keep postin'!  The "reaching consensus" idea is just way too premature to bother with.  Either A) nothing will come from it, which is admittedly the probable outcome, or B) people will actually get passionate about the idea and it might spill into / derail other threads.

[blakyoshi7]

This guy has answered several similar questions about competitive gaming. An interesting and relevant read for both this topic, and anyone who considers themselves a gamer or has played against someone who does.

[Bromor Neckbeard]

Iron Man plays DF?  I'll be damned.

Traps:  Now that I know what I'm doing, I hardly use them at all.  I pretty much only use a few cage traps to get something to sacrifice to Armok.  I don't consider it "cheating" to use traps, but I don't feel that they're particularly balanced at this point.
Player Traps: Not cheating at all.  This is the point of DF for me, to build huge overly-complicated deathtraps.
Atom Smashers:  As a point of honor, I see nothing wrong with using these for garbage disposal.  I don't use them for combat, though, that's not cool.
Quantum Stockpiles:  Now that we have mass designations, I don't use these.
Crossbows:  Like traps, I don't feel that they're an exploit, they're just not properly balanced at the moment.  Personally I have 40% or less of my military using them.
Modded Races:  I hardly bother modding stuff.
Modded World:  Again, I hardly bother modding stuff.  I've NEVER used modding to make the game easier, that would be cheating.

[Hishan]

Traps: none ever
Player traps: I sometimes do, as long as the engineering is brutally comple for no reason
atom smashers: What? and waste goblin bones! never!
quantum stockpiles: not now i have the Hide tool
crossbows: never, theyre just not as cool as warhammers
modded races: nope
modded world: Only to get a specific site that would appear in vanilla anyway, but not to enhance a site beyond that

[Shades]

Although I don't think anything qualifies as unfair play I do limit myself otherwise I find it's just boring. Totally subjective but these are my limits.

Vanilla DF
No traps or blocking pathfinding for hostiles. I don't even have movable bridges
No quantum stockpiles although I tend to pick maps with chasms for stone disposal.
No crossbows at all, which is a complete pain when you get into sieges and 80% of your army is totalled before they even reach the enemy.
No cooking of booze or seeds.
No public dining rooms (just chairs and tables in a meeting hall zone) , found everything was happy all the time if I use these, gets rid of parties too which is a nice bonus (actually no rooms at all bar bedrooms, barracks, studies and noble dining rooms)

I'm debated dropping armour too, the highly skilled (those that survive) troops you end up with make mincemeat of everything after a few years.

I also have no peasants, everyone gets put into a job group (by colour normally any more micro than that I'm too lazy to do).

[Granite26]

2.  Philosophical Issues:  Cui bono?  What's the benefit of having any consensus on these issues?  Consensus is a vice as often as it's a virtue.  Attempting to establish a baseline for fair play would be ignored by most people, and likely devolve into an endless, fruitless cycle of flames, trolls, and circle jerks among those that do.

To be honest, the only flames I've seen are from people saying what a bad idea this is.

This guy has answered several similar questions about competitive gaming. An interesting and relevant read for both this topic, and anyone who considers themselves a gamer or has played against someone who does.

Yeah, I'd read that before, but he's assuming a balanced, finished game designed to be played competitively.  You'll note that we haven't seen a single post from any player who is willing to admit to a core strategy of 'do whatever the game will let you do'

[Jude]

I'm curious why the one guy considers quantum stockpiling an exploit. It's not like it saves you work...well, I guess a little bit of work which you'd otherwise spend digging out rock stockpiles and figuring out what to do with all the stone from THEM...but until we have an option to have miners just smash everything into dust and not leave shit-tons of stone everywhere, I'll either quantum stockpile or drop it in the chasm/magma.