Could you define WAD for me?
Yes, there are ways to get around the food issues with gathering, and the brewing/cooking exploit. I honestly don't see what the rule adds. For the new players of course it would probably mean death. To me, the challenge of creating a small walled area overland is trivial. The rules as stated don't prevent you from simply hiding your dwarves underground for a little bit until you have a safe area. After you have a safe zone, it's just a matter of logical expansion in the ways you need. All it would do is eat time building above ground and hauling crap. I think the only people who would be challenged by this are the same people who can't deal with 4 beak dogs at embark (even with permission to restart spring as many times as possible).
Forgive the snipe, but really. We signed up to fight zombie sasquatches and skeletal effing trogolodites, and people were getting stomped by half a beak dog pack.
To continue, I encourage you to start a branch-off game or something of the kind if you want an aboveground challenge, or we can collaborate and I'll fling all the support I can your way. As far as the LL mod, I don't WANT to abuse DF that way, but a huge hole in vanilla DF (imo) is the inability to crank up the difficulty when you want to. I want a hard embark, and I have to search like the dickens for two weeks to find one, which may actually turn out to be nothing but undead gophers, skeletal bunnies and some harpies? A simple addition of difficulty in our game would be enough for me.
Even the orc mod isn't guaranteed to present a challenge, as it's not uncommon for the orcs to not survive generation when you finally find that perfect map.
I agree it would be fun to toss something like the clothing challenge in there as an achievement, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with surviving or associated difficulty on a hard map. For instance: the wood challenge (as impractical as it turned out) was supposed to force players into the enemy-riddled overland to chop trees, or go through the logistics of making a large functioning tower cap farm in a short time.
It turns out none of this is even close to an original idea, which I discovered while looking at the DF Masters Challenge. One idea from it that I liked was nominating judges before we begin. When we open the new thread, I will ask for volunteers and get everyone's opinion on it. Then I can simply manage the logistics and let the judges hash out technical difficulties with the rules in situations where I might be biased.
*you posted while I was typing this absurdly long post, so in response:
Sound like interesting individual challenges, but unless we upped the play time it would only present distractions from surviving and thriving. Not having a permanent military is pretty difficult when considering the leveling dwarves do while fighting. A hero can't be un-heroed, and unless accidental hunter battles are the only kind you have then you will have military heroes.
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Topic: New Survival Contest (drawing to a close) (Read 21055 times)