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[Rysith]

I think that part of it is also that Toady wants to maintain the cliff-face of new challenge as a cliff-face, not as a greased sheet of plate glass with sharpened obsidian fragments.

Imagine if a new player encountered a challenge that was engineered to challenge a veteran player. Something that would pose the same level of difficulty to an army of multi-legendary champions that the first goblin siege does to new players. Their fort would be wiped, they'd get frustrated, they'd leave. They would be struggling enough with keeping their dwarves non-tantruming, nevermind keeping a spare army of fully-equipped champions lying around.

Dwarf fortress doesn't have levels, or missions, or any of the usual ways around this problem. It doesn't have them because it's trying to be a world simulator, not an RTS. That's part of the reason that I like it.

Now, that means that to get the difficulty scaling, you need to scale the whole world up to be more difficult. That's where the modding, and the megaprojects, and the challenges come in, and I don't see the problem with getting difficulty that way. Goblins aren't tough enough? Use Orcs, or Doombringer goblins. Comfortable getting everyone fed? Double the growing duration of everything. It lets people (and through the community, everyone) fine-tune the difficulty to where they want it, and that's great.

Now, maybe some of the more common mods could be implemented as world-gen options (food durations, enemies available, and so on). But I think that the current balance is fine.

[Sir Finkus]

I think that part of it is also that Toady wants to maintain the cliff-face of new challenge as a cliff-face, not as a greased sheet of plate glass with sharpened obsidian fragments.

Imagine if a new player encountered a challenge that was engineered to challenge a veteran player. Something that would pose the same level of difficulty to an army of multi-legendary champions that the first goblin siege does to new players. Their fort would be wiped, they'd get frustrated, they'd leave. They would be struggling enough with keeping their dwarves non-tantruming, nevermind keeping a spare army of fully-equipped champions lying around.

Dwarf fortress doesn't have levels, or missions, or any of the usual ways around this problem. It doesn't have them because it's trying to be a world simulator, not an RTS. That's part of the reason that I like it.

Now, that means that to get the difficulty scaling, you need to scale the whole world up to be more difficult. That's where the modding, and the megaprojects, and the challenges come in, and I don't see the problem with getting difficulty that way. Goblins aren't tough enough? Use Orcs, or Doombringer goblins. Comfortable getting everyone fed? Double the growing duration of everything. It lets people (and through the community, everyone) fine-tune the difficulty to where they want it, and that's great.

Now, maybe some of the more common mods could be implemented as world-gen options (food durations, enemies available, and so on). But I think that the current balance is fine.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it already does a bit of scaling.  I think that if your fort is more valuable, goblin seiges happen more often and/or are stronger.

[XSI]

It does, but it's nowhere near good enough to deal with your dwarves, You can have several champions by the time they bring their first elite, and even if they bring a lot of elites(Max 1/group?), the only ones that are a problem at all are the ranged ones.

[keith.lamothe]

Tricky problem.  Each new challenge feature gives new "Can I" time and new insight.  Personally I'm looking forward to construction-destroying and/or digging enemies for higher-wealth sieges, and  internal factions and conflicts.  After many new-challenges-new-ways-to-drown-enemies-in-magma cycles we may come to something truly challenging and lastingly fun.

[Sir Finkus]

Tricky problem.  Each new challenge feature gives new "Can I" time and new insight.  Personally I'm looking forward to construction-destroying and/or digging enemies for higher-wealth sieges, and  internal factions and conflicts.  After many new-challenges-new-ways-to-drown-enemies-in-magma cycles we may come to something truly challenging and lastingly fun.

Well if there are diggers, then we'll have an excuse to surround out entire fort in magma.

[Draco18s]

Tricky problem.  Each new challenge feature gives new "Can I" time and new insight.  Personally I'm looking forward to construction-destroying and/or digging enemies for higher-wealth sieges, and  internal factions and conflicts.  After many new-challenges-new-ways-to-drown-enemies-in-magma cycles we may come to something truly challenging and lastingly fun.

Well if there are diggers, then we'll have an excuse to surround out entire fort in magma.

Except that one square, which if dug, collapses the entire fort. ;P

[Sir Finkus]

Tricky problem.  Each new challenge feature gives new "Can I" time and new insight.  Personally I'm looking forward to construction-destroying and/or digging enemies for higher-wealth sieges, and  internal factions and conflicts.  After many new-challenges-new-ways-to-drown-enemies-in-magma cycles we may come to something truly challenging and lastingly fun.

Well if there are diggers, then we'll have an excuse to surround out entire fort in magma.

Except that one square, which if dug, collapses the entire fort. ;P

You mean the one that comes up in the middle of my marksdwarves' archery range?

:edit: oh wait, if they dug through that my entire fort would fall down.  I suppose you could just use supports.

[Leafsnail]

I would, personally, dig a deep channel around my whole fortress.  After all, enemies can't channel upwards.

The one problem I forsee would be if digging enemies just kept digging randomly until they found something, in which case I suppose they could keep digging until the entire set of walls under my fort were gone.  It would then be Mass Cavein time.

[keith.lamothe]

A complete ring of to-the-bottom-z-level channel completely filled with magma... well, then you *should* be pretty invulnerable to tunnelers.  Your fortress is floating in a sea of magma, the invaders will just have to try something else.  Unless the tunnelers make a deal with some magma men and give them picks, etc, but let's hope that doesn't happen.  The point isn't an impossible challenge, just one requiring a proportional response of either active vigilance (patrols around possible dig points, etc) or an utterly gratuitous and permanent passive defense (magma island).

It would be a whole new field of "fun" to see what people do to deal with tunnelers, and I'm sure they'd find very effective and definitive means that are easier than they should be, and we'd have more ideas on how to proceed.

In the recent DF talks Toady has mentioned many ways to introduce new "fun", this is just one tool in his arsenal to keep us on our toes.

[Typoman]

hehe one problem with the magma defence. i assume bridge building etc will also be implemented. this ends up with a possible and rather Fun problem in some cases.

side view   

Code: [Select]

.....   F...x...F  ...
    |M|         |M|   \
    |M|         |M|    \
    |M|         |M|     \

now if invaders were to tunnel in at the bottom z-level it would drain your moat, horribly burning anything in the way, but there may be enough invaders left to dig in on a higher z-level, bridge across the gap and dig into your fortress. Fun!

[qwertyuiopas]

Simple: support the fort with a series of ~16 bridges, dropping and raising in sequence, so that less than half are down at any one time, but enough redundancy is preserved that you can manually(lever) disable any half of them and the fort will still support itself.

Any invader will get flung or squashed during the entry attempt.

Bonus: surround the fort in magma, and have the support tower use the bridge-machine over a chasm. It would take flying enemies that can also mine to get there.


Also, Another bonus, no invader can get to the support by building a bridge. They must mine out a very large portion of the nearby rock to cause the fort to drop, and cleverly placed magma hatches can stop even THAT. Unless there is a flying, magma-immune race, with the ability to mine, AND access to a pick that won't melt in magma, AND that won't be washed away in the flow, AND then a clever player can use a self-healing obsidian base so that when they remove a tile, the magma will fill it in...


Not *impossible*, but would take a human level of intelligence and an impossible civ, plus a full steel+ industry backing it...

[Typoman]

hehe i never said the problem couldn't be fixed, just that said defence was perhaps inadequate

[Draco18s]

Simple: support the fort with a series of ~16 bridges, dropping and raising in sequence, so that less than half are down at any one time, but enough redundancy is preserved that you can manually(lever) disable any half of them and the fort will still support itself.

Bridges don't support constructions.

[Chronas]

The point isn't an impossible challenge, just one requiring a proportional response of either active vigilance (patrols around possible dig points, etc) or a dwarvern defense (magma island).

fix'd

come to think of it, that has become quite a cliche`

[Anu Necunoscut]

I think that part of it is also that Toady wants to maintain the cliff-face of new challenge as a cliff-face, not as a greased sheet of plate glass with sharpened obsidian fragments.

Imagine if a new player encountered a challenge that was engineered to challenge a veteran player. Something that would pose the same level of difficulty to an army of multi-legendary champions that the first goblin siege does to new players. Their fort would be wiped, they'd get frustrated, they'd leave. They would be struggling enough with keeping their dwarves non-tantruming, nevermind keeping a spare army of fully-equipped champions lying around.

Dwarf fortress doesn't have levels, or missions, or any of the usual ways around this problem. It doesn't have them because it's trying to be a world simulator, not an RTS. That's part of the reason that I like it.

Now, that means that to get the difficulty scaling, you need to scale the whole world up to be more difficult. That's where the modding, and the megaprojects, and the challenges come in, and I don't see the problem with getting difficulty that way. Goblins aren't tough enough? Use Orcs, or Doombringer goblins. Comfortable getting everyone fed? Double the growing duration of everything. It lets people (and through the community, everyone) fine-tune the difficulty to where they want it, and that's great.

Now, maybe some of the more common mods could be implemented as world-gen options (food durations, enemies available, and so on). But I think that the current balance is fine.

Yeah, a new player shouldn't have an army of tunneling mole demons turn his starting seven into *dwarfleather thongs* when he's just learning how to farm.  But I think a system wherein dangers are attracted/released by digging deep, generating wealth, or maintaining a large population would mostly work, and be consistent with the idea of a world simulation.  Unless the player willingly embarks on a true hell-zone, it should take a while for a fort to be important enough for various entities to attack it.

Ideally, the challenge wouldn't have to be actively pursued by the player via modding or self-crippling.  These can result in fun challenges (there are some amazing mods out there), but require a lot of energy from the player or community, and some don't have much access to the latter. 

The more mature/wealthy your fort, the more likely it is you know DF's ropes pretty well, and thus the more likely you are ready for some extra challenge.  If this were simulated realistically, based on your fort gathering notoriety, wealth and power enough to attract more dangerous antagonists, it could work without making things worse for new players.  If these attracted antagonists are pulled from world-gen and not hardcoded, unique to a site or the map squares near to a site, discrete embarks would have a lot more personal flavor.

Tying it to fortress style/operation would be nice, also.  After your fort murders a whole cavalcade of picky nobles, for example, your fort could become more and more associated with death.  This could attract some truly fell dwarves as immigrants, packs of EVIL critters could migrate to your heretofore BENIGN site, etc.