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[Rashilul]

The one thing that's turns me off is that it's not hard enough.

[Andir]

The one thing that's turns me off is that it's not hard enough.

"Hard" is subjective.  Hard, to you, could mean throwing fire beasts over the walls to rampage all your dwarfs.  This could be impossible and/or downright frustrating for someone else.

[bloodnok]

Which minutiae are you thinking of here?  There's a ton of minutiae in the upcoming version but I can't think of any that weren't motivated by an upcoming major feature (the Army Arc, in most cases).

Wrinkles? (Not the only thing, just the first to spring to mind).

... looking a bit further I find "Styling of cosmetic tissue layers" and "Make dwarves clean themselves up and groom/trim their cosmetic tissue layers".

Whether you suppose DF should be trying to become more playable now or strive towards the grand vision, I really don't see dwarves using moisturiser as a vital part of the process.

To stretch another analogy upthread to the breaking point, the foundations of the skyscraper may take a while to build, but why on Earth are we agonising about the carpet, wallpaper, and light fittings to be installed in the offices on floor 107 when the building isn't even up yet?

[Anu Necunoscut]

To stretch another analogy upthread to the breaking point, the foundations of the skyscraper may take a while to build, but why on Earth are we agonising about the carpet, wallpaper, and light fittings to be installed in the offices on floor 107 when the building isn't even up yet?

Considering we have a two man design team and a one man building team for our skyscraper, working on nothing but girders for this long would likely drive said team completely insane? 

I think as the ambition of the game rises, the gaps between feature implementation and efforts to balance them will also rise.  I imagine if the game had been frozen at where it was four years or so ago in terms of core features, the bugs would have been quashed, the scripted challenges would have been balanced, and Toady would have more or less moved on to something new.  Possibly we would all be bored with a static DF and not posting about it / playing it, as well.

[corvvs]

To a point that's true, but the same style of argument could be used to justify removing a lot of great flavor from the game.  The hilariously violent current combat system could be replaced with hitpoints,

Well, quite. As I mention, dwarfs only have about half a dozen distinct states. A dwarf is healthy, hurt, or dead; if hurt, they will or will not make an eventual recovery. Now the modelling of injuries in hideous detail is amusing once, and thereafter it contributes basically nothing, and represents a vast diversion of development effort. Furthermore the current system is very hard to balance compared to a simpler one - to write a creature that will, say, provide a reasonable challenge to well-trained dwarves is tricky at best without copying an existing one. Look at the way totally random creatures have become King of the Beasts. Carp?

Carp killing dwarves is a bug - they look scary and the dwarves fall into the water dodging.
And it's already fixed in the upcoming version.

Different injuries don't affect gameplay? I belive Lightning would beg to differ. To say nothing of goblins who have been shot in the leg hobbling slowly toward the edge of the map while their brother who had his left hand severed has already fled.

While complexity without overall consistency in sims can seem a bit wacky, you don't want the player to be forced into learning arcane real-world mechanics for mundane aspects of the game.  Imagine having to micromanage forge/smelter temperatures precisely based on what sort of metal you want worked. If sim complexity adds to variety and potential for player creativity, it's good.  If it provides only tedium, it's bad.  Still, it's a hard balance to strike.

But I don't think there is any effort to strike a balance there at all; sim complexity is added without any real consideration of the gameplay effects.

Really? Being able to grab the sutures on a recently injured and treated combatant and rip them out isn't a useful gameplay effect? Having a spear get stuck in an enemy's ribcage and having to choose between attempting to pull it out and dropping it to wrestle the guy coming up behind you isn't interesting? Having a poorly thought-out floor plan which ends up with you evacuating the dining hall because it's filling with water from the lake you accidentally tapped into isn't exciting? It doesn't make you think "wow, that's so cool - I've never played a game where you could cause that to happen?"

The current - and even the projected future - situation where interesting terrain features are scattered all over the world and a given site has only a small proportion of them strikes me as analogous to that. So what's the answer? Use Site Finder to find the spot in the world with them all. Why not just _generate_ a spot with them all and have done with it? The terrain in the rest of the world is basically irrelevant either way.

Sure, eventually there might be _so many_ fascinating terrain features that any site will have a good selection and a site with them all would be obviously mad. That strikes me as being a very long way off, though, and right now a reversion to the 2D model where you just get a site with all the good stuff wouldn't hurt.

You're not the only one to make this complaint, I'm just singling out you for quoting because yours is quite lucidly written and your post had a lot of points I wanted to respond to.

But I don't understand it at all.

From a gameplay perspective, sure... IF each site wasn't part of a world.

But it is. You can't walk from place to place in a continuous world and see volcanos, rivers, marble, magnetite, sand, and trees all within one square mile of each other, EVERY square mile. Hell, I don't even know of ONE place in the real world where you can find all of those things so close together.

If you "fix" that by making fortresses standalone pocket dimensions then your actions in the fortress can't ever affect the rest of the world. And future actions can't ever affect the site of your abandoned fortress. Which makes the whole thing meaningless.

You say the terrain in the rest of the world is irrelevant, the history of the world is irrelevant, but you're playing a different game than I am. In the DF I play, there is a continuous story - the world's events flow. You can walk for miles and see the terrain change from lush countryside to dismal swamp to barren badlands to rocky mountains to evergreen forests. You can speak to a man and find that his great-grandfather was a legendary warrior who slew a hydra. That hydra had defeated seventy warriors of various races. It had killed the wife of the warrior who eventually slew it. The warrior had his arm bitten off in the battle and died of bloodloss, but was triumphant. This man, his descendant, proudly remembers his ancestor's victory and boasts of it. Flushed with pride, yearning for victories of his own, he agrees when you ask him to join you in your travels. Having heard the tale of a dwarven mine which was abandoned mysteriously, you set forth on a quest to uncover the treasure of the ancients. The dwarves had dug "too greedily and too deep," and had awoken ancient monstrosities that were their undoing. But you arrive at the site, as yet unknowing, staring in awe at the towers guarding the broad mountain road. Once shining, the silver blocks from which the towers are built are now tarnished and the site has fallen into disrepair...

If you ruin the simulation, you're not playing Dwarf Fortress anymore. You're playing Warcraft 2 with a graphical mod to make the Orcs look like smiley faces and say "We've struck native gold!" instead of "Zug zug."

[Neruz]

For the site features; i fully agree that we should have an embark-level map editor. If i want magma pipes, i would very much like to find a good site and plonk a magma pipe down there. Or play with soil layers, or whatever.

But i also think that by default not all sites should have everything. If i recall correctly some of the dev objectives relate to building multiple fortresses; having the features spread out randomly feels kind of stupid right now because you only get the one fortress, but it will make alot more sense once we have several fortresses up and running, and we're ferrying iron and flux from a lowlands sedimentary fortress to a mountain magma fortress for smelting and forging, and then ferrying the steel items to our frontline badlands fortress that is serving as a staging area for our armies forays into the hostile Human lands.



Remember that DF is intended to be much bigger than it actually is at the moment. A number of features do not make sense right now, but will make sense once DF achieves a larger scale.

[bloodnok]

$
Different injuries don't affect gameplay? I belive Lightning would beg to differ.

There's a neat example of rampant simulationism mixed with a sudden amusing lack of sense. We know he's blind, but nowhere does that discourage him from using a crossbow.

To say nothing of goblins who have been shot in the leg hobbling slowly toward the edge of the map while their brother who had his left hand severed has already fled.

Either one's a mission kill. Sure, you might get the stuff from the former, but again a straight up "some flee, some die" model would give you that.

I think this has been a bit misunderstood. I'm not saying it's bad to represent distinct states of temporary or permanent incapacitation - as long as they _are_ distinct - but that the existing model is far too complex given that the number of really distinguishable outcomes is small. It's like modelling the exact state of someone's digestive bacteria when all you care about is whether they are hungry. Sure, if your game is about 18th century navies, add scurvy - but don't try and get scurvy as an emergent effect of the digestive bacteria simulator. It can be done but it's a waste of time.

Being able to grab the sutures on a recently injured and treated combatant and rip them out isn't a useful gameplay effect?

It's not a distinct gameplay effect. The real effect from the fortress command POV is that someone who has not healed up fully is easier to defeat. A hitpoint system could do _that_.

Having a poorly thought-out floor plan which ends up with you evacuating the dining hall because it's filling with water from the lake you accidentally tapped into isn't exciting?

Hang on, I _don't_ regard the water flow and pressure system as unnecessary detail. It's quite important for a grand-scale terraforming game like DF.

You can't walk from place to place in a continuous world and see volcanos, rivers, marble, magnetite, sand, and trees all within one square mile of each other, EVERY square mile.

Nor can I see a place where dwarves are digging into the earth. When realism trumps gameplay, something's gone wrong - and it's always a danger with an overly simulationist approach. People confuse realism with ability to suspend disbelief; but, of course, no-one seriously worried about the convenient juxtaposition of features in 2D. In that respect the generated world may be doing us a disservice by making us think harder about the plausibility of the embark site.

If you "fix" that by making fortresses standalone pocket dimensions then your actions in the fortress can't ever affect the rest of the world.

$

Right now, the effect is very limited either way. Once I embark the game consists of my embark site and some numerical properties of the adjacent civilisations. If you didn't know, how could you ever tell that the whole world had been generated in detail and then effectively thrown away?

You can speak to a man and find that his great-grandfather was a legendary warrior who slew a hydra.

Et cetera. But with the current limitations of procedural content, it's just the same blocks stacked in a different order every time. Real historical figures are interesting because they did different and memorable things; in the DF history the names of who killed who may change but the nature of the interactions does not. It's cute enough to produce an image of Urist HomicidalManiac striking down Bob McOrc, but reading one page of it is just like reading every other page.

[bluephoenix]

text

wall of text

Everybody has got different likes and dislikes, you might not care about those features while other people would die for them.

[corvvs]

$
Different injuries don't affect gameplay? I belive Lightning would beg to differ.

There's a neat example of rampant simulationism mixed with a sudden amusing lack of sense. We know he's blind, but nowhere does that discourage him from using a crossbow.

To say nothing of goblins who have been shot in the leg hobbling slowly toward the edge of the map while their brother who had his left hand severed has already fled.

Either one's a mission kill. Sure, you might get the stuff from the former, but again a straight up "some flee, some die" model would give you that.

I understand your point from a min-max kind of gamer perspective, but if all you want are statistics you might as well be playing Battle Champs. The main "selling point" of Dwarf Fortress is its individuality, as least as far as I'm concerned.

I think this has been a bit misunderstood. I'm not saying it's bad to represent distinct states of temporary or permanent incapacitation - as long as they _are_ distinct - but that the existing model is far too complex given that the number of really distinguishable outcomes is small. It's like modelling the exact state of someone's digestive bacteria when all you care about is whether they are hungry. Sure, if your game is about 18th century navies, add scurvy - but don't try and get scurvy as an emergent effect of the digestive bacteria simulator. It can be done but it's a waste of time.

Nitpick: I think scurvy is an effect of vitamin deficiency, not technically a disease. But yeah. It comes down to gamer types. You like statistics - X casualties, Y fatalities, Z gold pieces. I like personality. *This* dwarf saw his lover killed in battle and went into a fit of rage, flung himself at the oncoming horde and killed the Master Lasher, demoralizing them. Sadly, after the battle his leg had to be amputated. But that still wasn't enough to save him, internal bleeding and organ damage caused his lungs to slowly fill with fluid until he drowned. He and his lover were given a joint tomb with platinum sarcophagi.

Being able to grab the sutures on a recently injured and treated combatant and rip them out isn't a useful gameplay effect?

It's not a distinct gameplay effect. The real effect from the fortress command POV is that someone who has not healed up fully is easier to defeat. A hitpoint system could do _that_.

Not in adventure mode (which is what I was talking about). Fortress mode and Adventure mode use the same system for combat (and everything else). This is a GOOD THING. 1) Development time - get the world to work correctly once and it works for all gameplay modes. 2) Individualism/Detail - It would be less interesting if the dwarves in fortress mode COULDN'T do everything you can do as an adventurer. It would make it more of a "game" where you have scripted elements that ruin the fun (for me, at least) because they make it obvious that "somebody designed this, the team was only given six months to get it out the door by Christmas, you have awesome special moves but everybody else is a generic enemy with a palette-swapped costume, and you can't walk any further down this road because the designer said so."

Having a poorly thought-out floor plan which ends up with you evacuating the dining hall because it's filling with water from the lake you accidentally tapped into isn't exciting?

Hang on, I _don't_ regard the water flow and pressure system as unnecessary detail. It's quite important for a grand-scale terraforming game like DF.

Sorry, that part was really responding to:

There's a complete model of hydrostatic pressure, but tap into a river below a waterfall and comedy ensues.

I guess I didn't understand what you meant there, so feel free to correct me.

You can't walk from place to place in a continuous world and see volcanos, rivers, marble, magnetite, sand, and trees all within one square mile of each other, EVERY square mile.

Nor can I see a place where dwarves are digging into the earth. When realism trumps gameplay, something's gone wrong - and it's always a danger with an overly simulationist approach. People confuse realism with ability to suspend disbelief; but, of course, no-one seriously worried about the convenient juxtaposition of features in 2D. In that respect the generated world may be doing us a disservice by making us think harder about the plausibility of the embark site.

I know *I'm* not worried about the juxtaposition of features in 2d... that's because I don't play 2d.

But seriously -- you sort of glossed over my point -- you can walk from place to place. If every step you take you trip over a volcano, that doesn't ruin the effect of them being interesting? How do you explain a deciduous forest growing out of sand? Because deserts are convenient to make glass from and trees are convenient for beds and charcoal? I wish my life had everything I ever wanted available to me within a few yards of my house.

It's different because the 2d version didn't have a WORLD to wander. You couldn't walk from the edge of your abandoned fortress to the human town 8 miles away. The 2d version really is more comparable to Warcraft 2 in that sense. Individual maps with no coherency. That's one reason 3d was such a huge improvement.

If you "fix" that by making fortresses standalone pocket dimensions then your actions in the fortress can't ever affect the rest of the world.

$

Right now, the effect is very limited either way. Once I embark the game consists of my embark site and some numerical properties of the adjacent civilisations. If you didn't know, how could you ever tell that the whole world had been generated in detail and then effectively thrown away?

You never play more than one game in the same world, do you? Nor do you ever play adventure mode. Even if you only play dwarf mode and make a second fort in the same world, you'll find that the engravers in your second fort will know about the artifacts made in your first fort - they are now part of the world's history, and can be referred to in art and in conversation ("My mother was Urist so-and-so. In the year 282 Urist made AwesomeArtifact the Dawn of Reckoning.").

You can speak to a man and find that his great-grandfather was a legendary warrior who slew a hydra.

Et cetera. But with the current limitations of procedural content, it's just the same blocks stacked in a different order every time. Real historical figures are interesting because they did different and memorable things; in the DF history the names of who killed who may change but the nature of the interactions does not. It's cute enough to produce an image of Urist HomicidalManiac striking down Bob McOrc, but reading one page of it is just like reading every other page.

Well, sure, but the same would be true if you had access to knowledge about myriad alternate histories of Earth. "Oh, Roger Krugenfeld was this world's version of Einstein. Yawn." Again, if all you're looking for is statistics, OF COURSE the personal histories won't be interesting. But that certainly doesn't mean they shouldn't be there.

EDIT: I do however see an obvious improvement to Legends mode now that you've got me thinking about it - make notable characters stand out in the list so you know who to look at to find interesting things. It would suck to learn about World War II by going through a list of 8000 notable, semi-notable, and not-so-notable Germans and their life stories until you finally found Hitler.

EDIT 2: The above suggestion will be more useful once diplomacy and rulers are more detailed. Then wars may be said to be caused by the policies of the leaders, rather than merely "a conflict over the mutilation of dead bodies," which makes it sound like the entire society is to blame.

[jamoecw]

text

wall of text

Everybody has got different likes and dislikes, you might not care about those features while other people would die for them.

i think the walls of text are good examples of why walls of text are good, they contain a good amount of relevant information, and the shear mass of information hasn't caused one side or the other to start disregarding the other or start name calling.  i would call this a good example of how to have an argument on a forum.

[edit]

How do you explain a deciduous forest growing out of sand? Because deserts are convenient to make glass from and trees are convenient for beds and charcoal? I wish my life had everything I ever wanted available to me within a few yards of my house.

actually i'd explain it as the "volcanoes erupting from the sea floor from a magma source described in geological theory as a hotspot."  which would cause isolated land to form for these single map fortresses with magma, sand, forest, flux, and fresh water all in close proximity to each other.

"A sand volcano or sand blow is a cone of sand formed by the ejection of sand onto a surface from a central point. The sand builds up as a cone with slopes at the sand's angle of repose. A crater is commonly seen at the summit. The cone looks like a small volcanic cone and can range in size from millimetres to metres in diameter.

The process is often associated with earthquake liquefaction and the ejection of fluidized sand that can occur in water saturated sediments during an earthquake. The New Madrid Seismic Zone exhibited many such features during the 1811-1812 series of earthquakes. [1] Linear sand blows are just as common, and can still be seen in the New Madrid area.

In the past few years, much effort has gone into the mapping of liquefaction features to study ancient earthquakes [2]. The basic idea is to map zones that are susceptible to the process and then go in for a closer look. The presence or absence of earthquake liquefaction features is strong evidence of past earthquake activity, or lack thereof.

These are to be contrasted with mud volcanoes which occur in areas of geyser or subsurface gas venting."

thus magma areas would have sand at least sometimes, so magma and sand isn't unheard of.

"Sandy soils are ideal for crops such as watermelons, peaches, and peanuts and their excellent drainage characteristics make them suitable for intensive dairy farming."

so magma and forest isn't a big stretch to be close together either.

rather than provide all the quotes i'll let you look up where limestone comes from, i'll give you a hint raising the seafloor will give you access to this type of rock.

and there you have it all that it takes to have all that you mentioned in close proximity is a sea volcano that creates an island, like hawaii, or many other tropical islands.[/edit]

[bloodnok]

I understand your point from a min-max kind of gamer perspective, but if all you want are statistics you might as well be playing Battle Champs or MOO1. The main "selling point" of Dwarf Fortress is its individuality, as least as far as I'm concerned.

Mmm, but I think you must acknowledge as well that there are people (like me) looking for the detailed management game buried in DF but not really too worried about _gratuitous_ detail, by which I mean detail that has no consequences. A goblin sieger dies or they do not; I get their gear or I do not. The rest can't come back to bite me.

... of course, it would be _nice_ if you could let a lot of horribly wounded gobbos escape pour encourager les autres, kind of thing.

Nitpick: I think scurvy is an effect of vitamin deficiency, not technically a disease.

Did I say it was a disease?

Not in adventure mode (which is what I was talking about). Fortress mode and Adventure mode use the same system for combat (and everything else). This is a GOOD THING.

Let me go out on a limb here and say; no, it isn't, and furthermore the current system is appropriate for neither.

A basic characteristic a combat system may have is that any opponent has a chance, albeit potentially an extremely slender one, to kill you in one shot. This is a fine mechanic for fortress mode. You have lots of dwarves, and losing one unexpectedly is just the sort of hiccup you need to be able to deal with. What sort of a mechanic is it for a combat-focussed permadeath roguelike? Terrible; every time you get into combat you may get "game over" in spite of having made no mistakes.

For fortress mode, the current system is overly complex; for adventure mode, it's impossible to balance.

1) Development time - get the world to work correctly once and it works for all gameplay modes.

That assumes that the same behaviour is appropriate for different gameplay modes.

Sorry, that part was really responding to:

There's a complete model of hydrostatic pressure, but tap into a river below a waterfall and comedy ensues.

I guess I didn't understand what you meant there, so feel free to correct me.

That's an example of a different gripe - woefully inconsistent levels of detail. Having a complete model of hydrostatic pressure that doesn't actually work properly and requires you to memorise a few arbitary tricks isn't going to make _anyone_ happy.

But seriously -- you sort of glossed over my point -- you can walk from place to place. (...)
It's different because the 2d version didn't have a WORLD to wander.

In fortress mode (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is all I'm talking about) you can't do that either. Sure, you can in adventurer mode, but that doesn't mean that individual embark sites can't be dollied up for a better fortress mode game. (FWIW, the 2D version did have an adventurer mode, and you could walk the world).

Right now, the effect is very limited either way. Once I embark the game consists of my embark site and some numerical properties of the adjacent civilisations. If you didn't know, how could you ever tell that the whole world had been generated in detail and then effectively thrown away?

You never play more than one game in the same world, do you?

No reason why the salient details of fortress #1 can't be saved for use in fortress #2.

Et cetera. But with the current limitations of procedural content, it's just the same blocks stacked in a different order every time. Real historical figures are interesting because they did different and memorable things; in the DF history the names of who killed who may change but the nature of the interactions does not. It's cute enough to produce an image of Urist HomicidalManiac striking down Bob McOrc, but reading one page of it is just like reading every other page.

Well, sure, but the same would be true if you had access to knowledge about myriad alternate histories of Earth. "Oh, Roger Krugenfeld was this world's version of Einstein. Yawn."

Well, quite. I'm not sure "this would be dealthy boring if it was a clone of Earth's history" means it's not deathly boring when it's a DF world history made out of the same bits as every other DF world history.

[corvvs]

I understand your point from a min-max kind of gamer perspective, but if all you want are statistics you might as well be playing Battle Champs or MOO1. The main "selling point" of Dwarf Fortress is its individuality, as least as far as I'm concerned.

Mmm, but I think you must acknowledge as well that there are people (like me) looking for the detailed management game buried in DF but not really too worried about _gratuitous_ detail, by which I mean detail that has no consequences. A goblin sieger dies or they do not; I get their gear or I do not. The rest can't come back to bite me.

... of course, it would be _nice_ if you could let a lot of horribly wounded gobbos escape pour encourager les autres, kind of thing.

And this is what the next few versions of DF will introduce - casualties will reduce the active, combat-ready population of the attacking civ (and I'm sure demoralization will be thrown in as well, although I don't think I've seen it specified). Not there yet, but on the other hand I'd rather incremental improvements than have to wait 20 years to play the finished game.

Nitpick: I think scurvy is an effect of vitamin deficiency, not technically a disease.

Did I say it was a disease?

"Sure, if your game is about 18th century navies, add scurvy - but don't try and get scurvy as an emergent effect of the digestive bacteria simulator. It can be done but it's a waste of time."

Although re-reading that, I guess you mean the bacteria that break down food into its nutrient components. I probably misunderstood.

Not in adventure mode (which is what I was talking about). Fortress mode and Adventure mode use the same system for combat (and everything else). This is a GOOD THING.

Let me go out on a limb here and say; no, it isn't, and furthermore the current system is appropriate for neither.

A basic characteristic a combat system may have is that any opponent has a chance, albeit potentially an extremely slender one, to kill you in one shot. This is a fine mechanic for fortress mode. You have lots of dwarves, and losing one unexpectedly is just the sort of hiccup you need to be able to deal with. What sort of a mechanic is it for a combat-focussed permadeath roguelike? Terrible; every time you get into combat you may get "game over" in spite of having made no mistakes.

For fortress mode, the current system is overly complex; for adventure mode, it's impossible to balance.

1) Development time - get the world to work correctly once and it works for all gameplay modes.

That assumes that the same behaviour is appropriate for different gameplay modes.

I suppose... but on the other hand I was writing a MUD at one point and instantaneous death being a possibility of combat was a strong feature that I thought made it much more exciting/fulfilling to play. Different strokes.

(If you're interested, the idea was that a goblin with an axe is a FREAKIN' GOBLIN WITH AN AXE! Sure, if you're seven levels higher in experience, you've got a strong advantage, but he's got an edged weapon and bad things can happen. I was a little thrilled and also a little miffed when I found out that WoW had "stolen" my idea for death - in my MUD you became a ghost, unable to interact with the physical world. If you tried to talk characters in the room would "hear the wind moaning." You'd have to find a cleric and get him/her to come back to your body with you [they could cast a spell to see/hear dead people] to revive. I understand WoW does something pretty similar.)

Sorry, that part was really responding to:

There's a complete model of hydrostatic pressure, but tap into a river below a waterfall and comedy ensues.

I guess I didn't understand what you meant there, so feel free to correct me.

That's an example of a different gripe - woefully inconsistent levels of detail. Having a complete model of hydrostatic pressure that doesn't actually work properly and requires you to memorise a few arbitary tricks isn't going to make _anyone_ happy.

I still don't understand your point, sorry. Are you talking about how a sudden influx of water into an existing channel will cause it to flash flood? That happens in real life too. Or are you talking about the infinite water bug? Hasn't that been fixed? I'm not sure - I haven't done any fluid engineering that was too complex.

But seriously -- you sort of glossed over my point -- you can walk from place to place. (...)
It's different because the 2d version didn't have a WORLD to wander.

In fortress mode (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is all I'm talking about) you can't do that either. Sure, you can in adventurer mode, but that doesn't mean that individual embark sites can't be dollied up for a better fortress mode game. (FWIW, the 2D version did have an adventurer mode, and you could walk the world).

I know it did have adventurer mode, but could you literally walk from place to place? I thought you could only 'T'ravel. I guess it could work anyway due to the fact that, not being able to climb any mountains, you never knew if you were walking next to a mountain or a volcano (in reality they were all volcanos, but you couldn't tell, not being able to look up). Except you couldn't choose your embark location right? How did that work?

Right now, the effect is very limited either way. Once I embark the game consists of my embark site and some numerical properties of the adjacent civilisations. If you didn't know, how could you ever tell that the whole world had been generated in detail and then effectively thrown away?

You never play more than one game in the same world, do you?

No reason why the salient details of fortress #1 can't be saved for use in fortress #2.

I'm confused - what I was saying above was that the salient details of fortress #1 ARE saved for use in fortress #2.

Et cetera. But with the current limitations of procedural content, it's just the same blocks stacked in a different order every time. Real historical figures are interesting because they did different and memorable things; in the DF history the names of who killed who may change but the nature of the interactions does not. It's cute enough to produce an image of Urist HomicidalManiac striking down Bob McOrc, but reading one page of it is just like reading every other page.

Well, sure, but the same would be true if you had access to knowledge about myriad alternate histories of Earth. "Oh, Roger Krugenfeld was this world's version of Einstein. Yawn."

Well, quite. I'm not sure "this would be dealthy boring if it was a clone of Earth's history" means it's not deathly boring when it's a DF world history made out of the same bits as every other DF world history.

So I guess we're on the same page here?

[bloodnok]

I suppose... but on the other hand I was writing a MUD at one point and instantaneous death being a possibility of combat was a strong feature that I thought made it much more exciting/fulfilling to play. Different strokes.

But death was not permanent. In a roguelike, it ordinarily is; and so having a mechanic where you can be oneshotted without making a mistake (this does assume that the game isn't one where being in combat in the first place means you've made a mistake) is inappropriate.

I still don't understand your point, sorry.

I'm referring to the way rivers downstream from waterfalls have incorrectly high pressure and the water doesn't behave as you expect.

I know it did have adventurer mode, but could you literally walk from place to place? I thought you could only 'T'ravel.

Oh, I see what you mean. No, you couldn't walk it tile by tile. My misunderstanding.

I'm confused - what I was saying above was that the salient details of fortress #1 ARE saved for use in fortress #2.

What I'm trying to say is that that could be done without simulating the entire world.

So I guess we're on the same page here?

I'm not sure. Let me try and explain what I'm really getting at more clearly.

I don't object to all that detail per se. It doesn't normally make the game worse for me (in the way that, say, the nightmare of micromanagement does). And I'm not soley concerned with statistics; that individual dwarves have personalities, or that engravings depict notable events (elephants on fire, say), is all perfectly jolly.

But I have three caveats about all that detail. The first is that it does make the game worse when suspension of disbelief suffers because of inconsistency. Brewing doesn't require water. An artifact pigtail sock, singular (and spiky to boot, so how does anyone wear it?) When I stop and think "what, that's obviously daft!", that doesn't help the game; and these oddities are amplified by the way things are so detailed. A stick figure with no nose looks normal; a lovingly detailed human face with no nose looks distinctly odd.

The second is that, while DF has got a lot of interesting gameplay from emergent properties of simulationism, simulationism can also work against gameplay. The way I can't just have an embark site with some of everything fun and I could beforehand strikes me an an example of this.  Another worry would be the upcoming Army Arc. If I establish a fortress of seven dwarves in striking range of goblins, the sensible thing for them to do would be to send a sufficient force to wipe me out immediately and take all my gear. For a fun game I want the AI to be stupid - to send attacks I can defeat; but from a simulationist POV the AI should surely do what real militaries do and try to fight battles it can win.

The third is that I think a lot of development effort is diverted into either quite arbitary detail (as mentioned upthread, do you care about dwarves' skincare routine? A difference between you and me may be that I don't care at all and you care a bit, but is that as important to either of us as, for example, having fire behave like fire?) or needlessly complex mechanics which don't really change the gameplay significantly (hospitals, treatment, and surgery - great! yet more injury minituae - not so good), and when there are a lot of long-known serious issues that impact the play of the game today, I personally would prefer to see those addressed.

ETA another pet hate. Gaining experience in umpteen jobs improves attributes. Hooray! So doing fine jewel work all day makes you stronger whereas hauling blocks of stone up stairs for your entire working life does not. That's another incongruity case - "if they simulate everything, why on earth is _this_ missing?"

[smokingwreckage]

it will make alot more sense once we have several fortresses up and running, and we're ferrying iron and flux from a lowlands sedimentary fortress to a mountain magma fortress for smelting and forging, and then ferrying the steel items to our frontline badlands fortress that is serving as a staging area for our armies forays into the hostile Human lands.

NERDGASM!!!

[Neruz]

I know, i'm really looking forward to setting up an actual proper empire with multiple fortresses.

Until then though, i'll have to content myself with Dawn of Discovery.