In the 2D version, there was none of this "dig into the soil layer and plant". No, you had to dig directly into the natural rock, then work out a means of irrigating the ground before you could even get food going. You needed 2 floodgates (otherwise the whole system wouldn't work; took me a while to wrap my head around *that* one), channels that were on the same "Z-level" (made sense at the time, actually) and the happy-fun frustration as my mechanic continually decided that other jobs were more important than HOOKING UP THAT DAMN LEVER TO THE FLOODGATES SO THE FARMERS CAN START GROWING FOOD OTHERWISE EVERYBODY IS GONNA STARVE! >_< And god help you if something got stuck in a door, or if an animal decided to wander through at the wrong time, 'cause you'd end up with a fort that was permanently flooded. Lost a couple of forts that way.
*looks all nostalgic*
I remember being lucky to get my irrigation going by the time my 8th dwarf arrived with the anvil for a forge. Oh yeah, that's right, in the Dark Ages of DF, you couldn't pick and choose what to bring along with you nearly as much as you can now, which means that you couldn't drop the forge for some extra points. No, getting your first anvil was hardcoded and if it got stolen? Yeah, no metal industry for you. Of course, it didn't matter initally, 'cause you'd only come across the lesser metals at first. If you were lucky, a vein of hematite might poke it's nose on this side of the chasm. Otherwise, before you could do stuff like, you know, make anything out of iron, you had to build a bridge across the chasm. And doing that meant that you had to build a bridge across the river (which flooded yearly, of course; lost lots of dwarves to that one). I never did make it to the HFS on the other side of the magma river in the 2D version (you could only build *steel* bridges over it).
Oh, and one more thing! There was none of this "hunt around for the IDEAL location" stuff. No, you had probably a dozen pre-determined sites all located around the map that you were allowed to pick from. Not that it mattered too much, as each site looked very much like another (the environment made a big difference though).
OOH! And, if you didn't have a clear path from the left edge of the map to your trade depot, then you'd never get any wagons to your fortress! I went for the longest time wondering what the "The caravan has bypassed you site" message meant! I'd still get the guys with their mules though, so I wasn't totally bereft of trade.
*sighs*
Yeah, it was a different game entirely. If you wanted to figure out how to do something in the game, you just asked on the forums here and somebody might steer you in the right direction (folks here were pretty good about that sort of thing, actually).
Ok, enough with my trip down memory lane...
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Topic: In the beginning (Read 2090 times)