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[LrZeph]

Today I was thinking, something should happen if your fortress has a very high Dwarfbuck : Dwarf ratio.
Then i thought of this message:    Your Fortress has Descended into an age of Decadence.
At this point your dwarves would become spoiled bastards who don't work as much.
Any other ideas of this vein?

[profit]

Bleh.. this sucks.. reminds me too much of America last year.

And the United Auto Workers Union this year.

[LegoLord]

I don't want to turn my dwarves into 1950's era Americans!  That just ain't too bright an idea.
(note that I am American)

[LrZeph]

Bleh.. this sucks.. reminds me too much of America last year.

And the United Auto Workers Union this year.

True, but if a civilization is going very well then it often becomes overprivileged and quite demanding,
Considering the needy nature of your dwarves (Must have 20 adamantine statues!) it could fit in rather well.

Oh well, an attempt for realism at least.

[profit]

Bleh.. this sucks.. reminds me too much of America last year.

And the United Auto Workers Union this year.

True, but if a civilization is going very well then it often becomes overprivileged and quite demanding,
Considering the needy nature of your dwarves (Must have 20 adamantine statues!) it could fit in rather well.

Oh well, an attempt for realism at least.

I accept from a realism standpoint your suggestion is dead on the money.

[King Doom]

I'd love to see random events, like you find in CIV 4. A little pop up with some background info and two or more choices.

A goblin caravan is passing through your lands, do you A. attack it? B. ignore it? C. Offer to trade?

Give them random outcomes, 50/50 chance of one good and one bad for each one. Attack it and get some nice stuff, or face a siege from a formerly peaceful tribe of goblins. Ignore it and nothing happens, offer to trade and get an extra caravan with stuff you can't usually get, later you might get a few penalties from your own traders or maybe the next goblin attack evades your traps since the traders told them where they were.

Random small bonuses or penalties. Oh no! weevils in the flour! (loose half your stored flour.) The iron ore you are smelting is almost perfectly pure! (you get extra iron bars.)

I think it'd give forts a little more flavour, especially if your actions effected your reputation. Good deeds and you become a well known, well respected fort and maybe adventurers stop by to trade or just to help you out. Maybe the biome starts to shift. Evil descisions? monstrous creatures start to turn up and offer services as mercenaries. Caravans or traders passing by offer you tribute for 'keeping the area safe' and 'ensuring no harm comes to travelers'.

I'm making all this up on the spot, it shows, doesn't it?

Depending on your alignment you gain access to new rooms that give different benefits. Good might get a hospital or an infirmary that gives a bonus to healtimes for injured dwarves. A cleric/healer job option that lets them tend injured fortress dwellers. Evil gets a torture chamber. Caged sentients go in there and information can be obtained, maybe the size and location of the next ambush is revealed in advance, maybe the next lot of goblin ambushers are completely visible the second they enter the map. Perhaps the victim just breaks and becomes a slave. They perform basic tasks, eat half as much as a dwarf, can only drink water and sleep on the floor, plus your evil beardos get a happy thought from kicking them as they run past.

[Draco18s]

So by solving my Too Much Stone Problem by minting crafts I end up with Lazy F*cker Syndrome?

No thanks.

[Footkerchief]

I would go with a more concrete and emergent approach to decadence -- dwarves eat more than they need to, given the opportunity, then get fat, then move slower.  The ability to get fat is already on the way.

[Cheshire Cat]

pff. decadence is allready here. look at those rich little bastards who fill their entire room with 50+ stone idols and 70 pairs of narrow iron low boots.

and my hammerer has been beating dwarves to death for a year now, all because they wont intstall an "item in bedroom" for her. whatever "item" is.

lots of nobles are decadent enough as it is, if you want to make things moreso then you could just have champions and legendary dwarves start demanding things, and perhaps have complaints to the mayor from groups of dwarves who want a better public dining area and their own little tomb, plus more jet millstones please.

[Granite26]

I'd love to see random events, like you find in CIV 4. A little pop up with some background info and two or more choices.

A goblin caravan is passing through your lands, do you A. attack it? B. ignore it? C. Offer to trade?

Give them random outcomes, 50/50 chance of one good and one bad for each one. Attack it and get some nice stuff, or face a siege from a formerly peaceful tribe of goblins. Ignore it and nothing happens, offer to trade and get an extra caravan with stuff you can't usually get, later you might get a few penalties from your own traders or maybe the next goblin attack evades your traps since the traders told them where they were.

Random small bonuses or penalties. Oh no! weevils in the flour! (loose half your stored flour.) The iron ore you are smelting is almost perfectly pure! (you get extra iron bars.)

I think it'd give forts a little more flavour, especially if your actions effected your reputation. Good deeds and you become a well known, well respected fort and maybe adventurers stop by to trade or just to help you out. Maybe the biome starts to shift. Evil descisions? monstrous creatures start to turn up and offer services as mercenaries. Caravans or traders passing by offer you tribute for 'keeping the area safe' and 'ensuring no harm comes to travelers'.

I'm making all this up on the spot, it shows, doesn't it?

Depending on your alignment you gain access to new rooms that give different benefits. Good might get a hospital or an infirmary that gives a bonus to healtimes for injured dwarves. A cleric/healer job option that lets them tend injured fortress dwellers. Evil gets a torture chamber. Caged sentients go in there and information can be obtained, maybe the size and location of the next ambush is revealed in advance, maybe the next lot of goblin ambushers are completely visible the second they enter the map. Perhaps the victim just breaks and becomes a slave. They perform basic tasks, eat half as much as a dwarf, can only drink water and sleep on the floor, plus your evil beardos get a happy thought from kicking them as they run past.

peh, most of this is already there, just happens on reason and cause, not random.  You can pick a fight with any peaceful race by killing caravans, and the pests already eat your food...

[harborpirate]

Threadjack!

This thread was about the closest thing I could find to what I was looking for, so I figured why not try and turn it into that:
A brainstorming thread for how to challenge the player in the later game.

What are the best ideas that the community can come up with to keep fortress mode challenging/interesting beyond the first couple of game years?

A post by NW_Kohaku got me thinking along these lines, and I was surprised to find I almost completely agreed* with everything in it (usually we don't see eye to eye). I've included it below for reference. It may not be a masterwork post, but its at least of exceptional quality. Its mostly about graphics but it touches on something that keeps recurring as a thought in my mind:
One of the biggest weaknesses of DF is that the game doesn't provide enough interesting challenges beyond initially setting up a fortress.

There a few suggested challenges to the player that come immediately to mind. They have far reaching implications if implemented. One is from my own Cooking and Brewing Megathread:

Food should spoil if not properly cared for.
Primary Challenge:

• Old food will go bad, requiring the player to continually replace it. As the food needs of the fortress grow, this will increase the pressure on the player as they will not be able to rely upon huge stockpiles of food created in the early game. Surviving each winter could become a serious challenge.

Implications:

• Creates a new food preservation industry.
• Huge impacts to trade.
• Could impact fortress construction for those that go for icehouses.

One from NW_Kohaku's masterwork that must have been as the result of a Strange Mood, the Improved Farming Megathread:

Nutrient tracking and the resulting domino effect on everything in the game.
Primary Challenge:

• Managing nutrients becomes a greater and greater part of playing the game until the player is able to finalize a strategy to maintain equilibrium. The player must be careful not to strip all the valuable nutrients from farm soil, and not to overgraze pastures.

Implications:

• Completely changes the entire food gathering industry.
• Closes the loop where currently some inputs and outputs in the food chain just appear and disappear into nothingness.
• Gives the player a reason to manage soil fertility.
• Creates a market for fertilizer, another industry for the player to explore.
• Much, much more

Also NW_Kohaku, on dwarven society in the Class Warfare Thread:

Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness Luxury.
Primary Challenge:

• Over time, more complex social structures and the dwarven drive for greed put pressure on the player to provide more and more amenities in order to appease the fort population.

Implications:

• Pushes players to delve deeper into the farthest reaches of the earth in search of valuable materials.
• Encourages the use of often ignored bits of industry that result in luxuries.
• Likely much more that I didn't catch.

An idea that emerged in the Alchemists Thread by Antymatter.

Procedurally Generated Alchemy.
Primary Challenge:

• Alchemical reactions are randomly generated at worldgen and the player can try to discover what these reactions are during play.

Implications:

• Re-introduces discovery into the game, even for veterans, since what items are reagents for reactions, the reactions themselves, and probably the results of reactions will be different each time a new world is generated.
• Gives a use to items that often go unused or have no use at all within the game, such as barrels of blood and ichor.
• Could result in new and strange materials that the player might find new and completely novel uses for.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You know, there might be OTHER reasons people don't play text-based MMOs or MUDs or other games besides a lack of graphics.

Maybe they have no graphics, and their gameplay is boring and repetitive, too.

I know that the way that many of the MUDs I used to play on were played was to have players make an account, powergrind to the level cap, and then make a new account to powergrind, because there wasn't much to do besides level grind in between brief RP sessions, which rarely had much to do with how powerful your character was, anyway.  (And combat mainly consists of spamming the same attacks over and over, at that...)

Yes, game makers today can't be bothered to make engaging and approachable games that are difficult anymore because they are scared of frightening away a larger market share, and put graphics ahead of most else, but frankly, graphics aren't to blame for that.  The fact that they make games easy is a deliberate choice made about market demographics, and shooting for the lowest common denominator to reap the greatest common profit.

You want to know why easy games sell better (regardless of graphics)?  Then watch this clip.  DF and NetHack aren't just "ugly", they're frustratingly difficult to learn, and filled with YASD to the gills. 

Likewise, DF and NetHack aren't as complicated as you'd like to think they are.  There's a difference between complex and hard to learn.  True complexity is almost never achieved in a game, and some of the games that best achieve complexity are some of the most apparently simple games - like Goh or Chess - while being hard to learn doesn't indicate complexity, it just indicates that the designers didn't bother to explain anything.  Hell, DF's help file for the longest time pretty much just said "Losing Is Fun."  That's not a tagline for the game - that's Toady's placeholder for a real manual or tutorial.  He's just saying to experiment until you DO learn the rules, not that you should enjoy losing. 

You can tell that many people aren't really that keen on complexity, because you see people arguing against complexity every time someone proposes adding it in the suggestions forum.  Typically, they're many of the same people who brag about how elite a player they are for playing DF, since it's so complex. 

Why do people oppose, say, Improved Farming?  It's too complex.  We don't need realistic farming systems, we just need to keep throwing seeds at mud, and make less plants grow because of it.

The same can be said of making dwarves more autonomous, having more complex desires, and being less generally obedient.  Having more complex social interactions, and making solving the tasks you need to solve more puzzle-like, and less a matter of direct commands over a workshop whose entire construction of counters, chairs, and tools consists of a single stone.

They're proud of their learning DF in spite of an obtuse interface, but terrified of the actually rather simple mechanics behind the obtuse interface actually becoming complex enough that you can't solve every problem with a binary knee-jerk response.

And while we're on the topic of why you loved old-fashioned quarter-grabbers, I might as well point out the Skinner Box, the psychological engine that drives slot machines, as well. Getting past level 20 in Pac Man, or getting the 25-kill killstreak reward is just as much a conditioned reward as the rare triple-bars.

If you put DF on the Havok engine, and somehow managed to find a computer capable of running that monstrosity, it would still have all the depth and complexity of DF, regardless of how you saw it.

In fact, the greatest single HANDICAP of DF right now is interface, no matter how much you might want to deny it. 

No, I don't mean we need pretty pictures, but what we need is access to the data we need to play the game. 

There were many bug complaints about doctors refusing to treat their patients.  Mysteriously, doctors just don't treat them occasionally, and ignore patients until they die.  The cause was that they didn't like helping people, and so they didn't.  But a great many players never even noticed that the doctors didn't like helping people - it's buried in the details page of the 50th dwarf to migrate into their fortress, and this critical piece of information was never checked, because it was drowned out by all the other data that a DF player naturally has to ignore to ever get anything done.

As the game of DF actually BECOMES complex, instead of just LOOKING complex to an outside observer, that means that we need to have real data management tools to be able to understand what is going on in the world we see.

Right now, all we can really see on the map is where the walls are, where the dwarves and other creatures are, the jobs of the dwarves, and maybe some flashing status indicators that only tell us about immediate physical peril or needs.

If we are going to have a game where the complex personality of a dwarf is actually going to matter, as Toady is gearing up to do, we need to see some sort of feedback to actually see that the dwarf HAS a personality, much less what his mood is right now.  We can't constantly check the details page of every single dwarf in the fortress every two seconds to try to figure out

We need a visual clue, some sort of flashing sign, that tells us, "This dwarf is happy because strawberry wine is his favorite, but still feels existential angst over the recent death of that dragon that people worshiped as a deity, and the implications for his own religion that gods can die. Worse his son died a few weeks ago, and just plain eating in a fancy dining room isn't enough to counteract that in this version anymore.  So he's taking a break right now because you don't have enough religious or psychological support facilities, not because he's just lazy."

You're probably not going to convey all that information with just a flashing down blue arrow.  You're not going to meaningfully convey that information to the player by burying it in the back of a detail view that players rarely ever look at. 

Until the game is capable of supporting conveying visual information ABOUT the subject that the game is calculating, all that complexity is meaningless;  Look at the temperature system, which many people simply turn off as a waste of processor power.  Toady just completely reworked it to run significantly faster.  Thing is, most players can't see how it really works, anyway.  Turning it off just means things don't melt in magma, anymore.  No big deal.  All that complexity is wasted unless the player can see and interact with the system in some meaningful way.

We already have a bulk of players refusing to play the game without tools like Dwarf Therapist, just because it manages the data that the game isn't capable of sorting for us.  That's only going to get worse the longer that Toady puts off the very real problem of his unwillingness to convey the information that is conveyed in his game to the player in a meaningful way. 

And that's something FAR more important than "just some pretty pictures".

*My one disagreement with NW_Kohaku's post is one primarily of semantics.
Boring Semantics:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

DF and Nethack are extremely deep games, but in the case of DF, it doesn't capitalize enough on that depth. The temperature system should provide TONS of mileage in terms of the benefits and challenges that it could create in the game, but there are too few things that take advantage of it. Food doesn't spoil, so why bother figuring out how to freeze it? Heavy winter runoff when the first months of spring are hotter than usual doesn't cause rivers to flood. Dwarves don't care if its freezing outside when all that they're wearing is a sock and a loincloth. Temperature information should be a gold mine for Toady to hook in interesting causal relationships, and yet most players can turn it off and not even notice.

I don't think the problem is a lack of depth, because most of the time things that you would expect to happen do happen. For instance you can cause things to freeze by getting them cold. The issue is that the player doesn't have any problems to solve that require, for instance, freezing stuff. DF has loads of places where the interactions and causal results are there, but there just aren't any reasons to use those interactions, and those interactions don't cause enough trouble.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, I don't think you understand what my main annoyance was with the megathread you did on cooked food.  The specific ideas are mostly fine by me, it's the format you were using that I was raising a complaint about.  I'll just post on that thread, though, since I had been meaning to do it when I was done working on the IF thread, and your thread had pretty much died off by that point.  No real reason not to revive it, though.

Anyway, if you want to add onto your megathread about food and eating, then why not use your own thread, instead of this one?  It seems to fit with the megathread you have more than this one.  Likewise, I've been meaning to rework and expand Class Warfare, but putting it off until I work up the (strange?) mood to really hack out another large thread. 

Class Warfare IS a thread about making the game more challenging as the game goes on, and your fortress gets larger.  Internal social stresses are just some of the ways to do that. Also, you might want to note that I did two different references to "Happiness", one was a change in how emotion (such as being happy or unhappy) is tracked, and the other is in reference to property and luxury.

... That said, I actually have been considering producing an even larger-scale thread on Resource Management as a whole, and using that as an "umbrella" or megamegathread of sorts that puts stone management, digging, AI control, increased complexity, the Improved Farming, Class Warfare, Cooking Megathread, and others in, and generally threads about how to dramatically change the way the player plays the game.  Sort of a way to orchestrate an all-fronts push on how to change the complexity of the game.

[harborpirate]

That last bit, grabbing all the ways that the community can come up with to challenge the player in the late game was what I was driving at. The three items listed are the three topics that I'm aware of that have attempted to achieve that. I'm curious if there are more, or of others have new ideas to contribute in that regard.

Unlike yourself, I have no desire to attempt to unite them all into a cohesive goal, rather my point was simply to fire up discussion and idea sharing around the topic.

If you start another topic I'll be glad to participate, though will probably continue to be annoyed by your excessively verbose posts.

[harborpirate]

Thinking about alchemy in another thread, it came to mind that if it was properly implemented, attempting to discover its uses could be a great challenge for later game play.

Procedurally generated alchemy, wherein reactions are randomly generated at worldgen and the player later can try to discover them.

I'll be editing my post above to include this item.