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[texmith]

DF is actually as easy or difficult as you want it to be already. Just don't bring any food, and the difficulty raises, don't bring any picks, and it raises even more, don't bring anything at all and it's going to be really hard, especially if you embark on a glacier.

Don't tell me the following 2 problems are alike:
- Fighting seiges against intelligent tunneling goblins with non-invincible dwarves.
- Learning to live without a pick (until you can make one)

Crippling yourself to the point of death is just not the same as a good fight. What you are saying couold just as easily be aplied to any game:

XXX is actually as easy or difficult as you want it to be already. Just play with your eyes shut or lop off your fingers.

[Skynet 2.0]

DF is actually as easy or difficult as you want it to be already. Just don't bring any food, and the difficulty raises, don't bring any picks, and it raises even more, don't bring anything at all and it's going to be really hard, especially if you embark on a glacier.

Would it even be possible to survive, at all on a glacier without any items? Or is that a challenge you're guaranteed to have 'fun' doing?

[zagibu]

I have no idea. I always failed horribly.

Playing a game blindfolded or without fingers is not playing the game, whereas there are valid scenarios that incporporate dwarves with no picks or no food or nothing at all.
But yeah, I'd also prefer the tunnelers, as long as it's done right, and I don't have to fight hordes of tunnelers in every fort I build.
But still, I hate the "this game is too easy, but I don't want to play it in a difficult setting"-attitude. It CAN be easy, yes, but it can also be very challenging. What those people probably mean, is that the game is too boring. Maybe they should do something else for a while and come back later.

[Captain Failmore]

I don't really understand the complaints about tunneling enemies. Regardless of any damage they do to the landscape, we need them in the game badly. Pushing back against the same wave after wave of goblins is getting pretty old.

I'm just as much of a perfectionist as anyone else here. I'd like to think of myself as an amateur architect when it comes to this game; I don't just build pretty things, I build things that do stuff. When all of those things work right and I wind up with a sweet fortress, I'm happy with it and don't ordinarily like to see it get messed up. That doesn't mean that I don't wish it were possible, though. Thanks to recent improvements made to the interface, repairing damage to our fortresses is easier than ever. As much as I might like to avoid damage being done to my fortress in the first place, I realize that whatever damage my fortress sustains is going to be simple to fix provided that my fortress survives and has the materials necessary for repairs to be made. So what if my fortress gets poked full of holes by tunneling enemies? I can reseal those tunnels from one end to the other if I want. Would the game really be more entertaining without tunneling enemies? It couldn't possibly be less interesting than not having to worry about the outcome of a siege!

My fortresses are entirely too easy to defend as it is, and only a minimal effort is required to repel even the most vicious attackers. This would be the case even if traps got the downgrades in firepower they so badly need, as we would only have to build more of them to achieve the same result. Let's also not forget the sinister defense systems players have concocted without the aid of traps, such as entry halls that can flood with water, be filled with magma, or drop away into deadly pits. The reason for making enemies more tenacious, clever, and adaptable is so they don't fall for the same tricks every time. This reduces the long term reliability of defenses and forces the player to counter-adapt to the attacker after the player's initial defenses have been breached. This means constantly changing your play-book instead of sitting on an invincible trap pile.

There again, can it really be called a 'pile' of traps? Can it really be called a fortress, for that matter? Most fortresses in the game only require a single trapped entryway to become siege-proof. That's not a fortified city, that's a doorstep. This isn't Dwarf Doorstep. When I think of a fortress, I think of layers of defense on all sides, patrols of vigilant guards keeping their eyes peeled for spooks, and multiple overlapping contingency plans to repel an attack in case the initial defense fails. And when I think of a siege, I don't think of wave after wave of goblins hurling themselves onto a trap-laden doorstep while the stragglers drown in a sea of arrows, I think of a persistent attack force that strangles strongholds to death and forces its way in through whatever means it finds convenient. As it stands there's no struggle here, no real need to actively respond to the threat of invasion, because even the weakest fortification can protect your dwarfish apartment complex from all but the most brutal attackers. More effective and dynamic attack forces would make more comprehensive plans of defense necessary.

So I say put tunnelers in the game. Enable creatures like trained dogs to detect them before they arrive if a meaningful 'fog of war' is implemented that would otherwise prevent you from watching them approach. Learn how to repair your fortress if it gets damaged. Problem solved.

[irmo]

Would it even be possible to survive, at all on a glacier without any items? Or is that a challenge you're guaranteed to have 'fun' doing?

Of course not. This is a strawman that the sandbox crowd drags out when someone points out that the game currently has no challenges: "What do you mean, no challenges? You can make it as impossible as you want! Start with no equipment on a haunted glacier and then run your dwarves around in circles until they die!" Well, duh. That's not a challenge, that's just a self-inflicted game loss.

(And if you hit "Play now" and then abandon the fortress, you lose even faster! Woo hoo! Endless replay value!)

I've been considering whether the goal of well-curved difficulty (in the sense of the game giving you a relatively easy start and then cracking down on you as you progress, rewarding you for taking risks and overcoming obstacles) is fundamentally at odds with the goal of a coherent world simulation. It's certainly easier to generate challenge when a goblin army or a vein of platinum can literally come out of nowhere just because the risk/reward calculation demands it.

Presently, I think the goals can work together but it requires a really sophisticated simulation. For example, goblin raids. The goblins have to wait a while before attacking you, or you just get wiped out. This is a little weird, because goblins are a scavenger civilization and they'll prey on the weak. The best time for them to attack you, in terms of risk/reward, would be before you even arrive at the site. They knock over a couple of wagons and they get all your starting gear. But if you had a 75% chance of being instakilled by bandits right after the Embark screen, that wouldn't be much fun.[1]

The natural way to make this work is to have them not notice you until you're a big enough target. That, in turn, requires a world-map "fog of war" that applies to AI civilizations (this is a hard problem--it means they have to make decisions based on incomplete information), along with some kind of knowledge-spreading mechanic that makes big settlements more likely to be discovered than small ones, or the ability to track caravans and find out who they're trading with, or something like that.

Or the simulation can cheat, but Toady has made it pretty clear that he doesn't want the simulation to cheat. So it has to be very smart. Which, so far, is the direction it's headed.

However, I don't think it can be very smart across all the possible world configurations that players come up with. It needs a sensible stock configuration so that these mechanics can be tested and balanced. It doesn't bother me that you can change the raw files. It does bother me when any concern about game balance is answered with "just change the raw files".


[1] Though once some of the Army Arc stuff is in, it would make sense to have to protect your expedition on the road if you're going outside the borders of your home civilization. You might need to give your starting dwarves some combat skills, which would be entirely in character for these rugged pioneer types.

[zagibu]

The problem is, that tunnelers won't be enough for the hardcore-crowd. They will find some trick against them, and then ask for yet another more powerful enemy, that can circumvent this trick, and so on. You've already seen this in theory by the suggestion of magma-proof tunnelers (someone mentioned, that you can still build a completely sealed off fort in a world where goblins can tunnel, if you enclose it in magma, then someone else suggested magma-proof tunnelers).

Just to repeat what has been already said countless times: It should be possible to build an invincible fortress, but it should be much harder than it is now.

[irmo]

The problem is, that tunnelers won't be enough for the hardcore-crowd. They will find some trick against them, and then ask for yet another more powerful enemy, that can circumvent this trick, and so on. You've already seen this in theory by the suggestion of magma-proof tunnelers (someone mentioned, that you can still build a completely sealed off fort in a world where goblins can tunnel, if you enclose it in magma, then someone else suggested magma-proof tunnelers).

Just to repeat what has been already said countless times: It should be possible to build an invincible fortress, but it should be much harder than it is now.

I think it should be possible to build an invincible fortress, but pointless. In the case of your completely sealed, magma-encased fortress, yeah, you're secure. You also can't expand in any direction, you can't trade with anyone, and you can't do anything significant on the surface. You're there to bring civilization to the wilderness, secure trade routes, and claim the riches of the mountain for dwarfkind. On all of those counts, you've failed.

(And where's your water supply? Once farming and brewing are fixed to require water, this place would be just as much of a deathtrap as a glacier.)

[Align]

Teleporting enemies!

[Skynet 2.0]

We need to make the enemies be able to get around defenses better, not bypass them completely. Teleporting enemies would be completely impossible to defend against, short of having guards patrolling every square inch of your fort.

It should be possible to make an invincible fort, but it should be either very difficult to do, undesirable, or require extensive maintenance, i.e. with the lava cube, you would need many pumps constantly running to keep it full, as the goblins would drill holes in it that would pour the magma out, which would require either running water going into your fort, or windmills on top of the cube, which are both vulnerabilities which could be exploited, i.e. the goblins climbing up and disabling the windmills, or bringing in carp to send through the water.

(Also, with all the people using the lava cube as an example, somebody needs to go and actually build one, and post pics of it)

[Neonivek]

It's not playing dumb, it's just a different szenario

I am going to assume that was a typo.

Can you give reference for that?

Forget reference... I don't take self-imposed challenges as a replacement for real difficulty either and I am sure many more Dwarf Fortress players feel the same way.

[Silverionmox]

I wonder how many of those who want more challenges take their chances for magma? And how much fortresses do they make in the same world?

I agree that "change the raws" can be a cop-out, but this is an alpha after all. Some values are set to allow the player a generous margin of error to work around issues that aren't well implemented yet (for example, military responsivity). Migration is set at "cloning", food productivity is set at "manna", clothing requirements are set at "nudism" and morale is set at "dining room ecstacy". Balance is something that will only get its final shape at the very end of the development.

What we should be doing now is to stretch the engine, see what it can and can't do, and suggest what it should be able to do. DF now isn't intended to be challenging. Tunneling enemies is a fine suggestion for a game feature; but for those who do want a challenge now, voluntary challenges or editing the raws are the way to go. More features will not balance the game, nor should they.

[Jreengus]

If you want a challenge, set the speed of your dwarves to 100.

We shouldn't need to rely on Mods to get some difficult out of dwarf fortress.

Are we talking about the same game here?

[Tormy]

I don't really understand the complaints about tunneling enemies. Regardless of any damage they do to the landscape, we need them in the game badly. Pushing back against the same wave after wave of goblins is getting pretty old.

The problem is, that tunnelers won't be enough for the hardcore-crowd. They will find some trick against them

Yeah diggers/tunnelers is a must have, like I've said it countless times already, in fact -IIRC- the original idea was mine. 
However just a note: We have a problem here. Right now the player is able to see everything on the map. So even if we gonna have tunneling enemies, it won't be very hard to counter the situation, since we will see as the enemy is digging a tunnel. So maybe we will need to have "fog of war" also in the future. The player is totally handicapped vs. the AI as it is now.

[i are not good with compu]

However just a note: We have a problem here. Right now the player is able to see everything on the map. So even if we gonna have tunneling enemies, it won't be very hard to counter the situation, since we will see as the enemy is digging a tunnel. So maybe we will need to have "fog of war" also in the future. The player is totally handicapped vs. the AI as it is now.

It should be easy enough to make predators/enemies who tunnel hidden in the same way that underground features are hidden until broken into.  Enemies can also already hide, though it would be nice if the options were less limited there.  But there's no need for any huge changes

[Tormy]

However just a note: We have a problem here. Right now the player is able to see everything on the map. So even if we gonna have tunneling enemies, it won't be very hard to counter the situation, since we will see as the enemy is digging a tunnel. So maybe we will need to have "fog of war" also in the future. The player is totally handicapped vs. the AI as it is now.

It should be easy enough to make predators/enemies who tunnel hidden in the same way that underground features are hidden until broken into.  Enemies can also already hide, though it would be nice if the options were less limited there.  But there's no need for any huge changes

Well, that could work also, I guess.