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[Chromie]

the only substantive measure of score is 'created wealth,'

If you measure like that, you've only got one way to win.

I know I'm echoing others, but the fun of DF is making your own challenges. For example, I'm playing a game on an island entirely cut off from the greater world. I could build a walkway to the edge of the map and get the regular amenities, but I'm choosing to build a little "village-looking" town, with only my 7 (now 15, with 8 children) to build it, and forced to let them party for long periods of time to start families, for the future of the fort. It's a real casual game (as opposed to my frantic building and digging projects) that I tend to play while shooting off another thirty zillion job applications...

The gameplay value of "created wealth" drops quite a bit, when you have no traders...

I see DF in my head as kind of, the Ant Farm you imagined you'd get when you wanted an Ant Farm as a kid, only better, and you're in charge.

You can mod a greater military threat, but they'll always be trumped by isolation or a sufficiently large military. Your best road to fun is choosing your own challenges. (limited embarks, single-gender forts, building projects, everything-is-made-of-imported-items forts, the list is endless...)

[Dante`]

I'm playing an island map for "fun", I just started and its a perpetual rain map, Others who've played the same map claim in the winter all of the dwarfs freeze solid.  So thats not chalanging enough? Thats a good 7 of the 7 starting *also doing an above-ground town so they HAVE to go outside enough, Means their probably all dead when I play to that point.*  Point is you can create your own fun.

[Gergination]

I'm playing an island map for "fun", I just started and its a perpetual rain map, Others who've played the same map claim in the winter all of the dwarfs freeze solid.  So thats not chalanging enough? Thats a good 7 of the 7 starting *also doing an above-ground town so they HAVE to go outside enough, Means their probably all dead when I play to that point.*  Point is you can create your own fun.

You've raised my curiosity about something.  Will water coverings freeze on a sufficiently cold map or do they have no effect at all?

[Dante`]

Well i hear in the winter on this island (freshwater lake) The lake freezes enough for animals to migrate off of it (while your dwarves become dwarfcicle.

[spinsane]

I'm strictly speaking in terms of game mechanics. Enjoying the mechanics of a game doesn't ever necessarily exclude the enjoyment of non-mechanical elements. My entire economy was dependent upon my stone crafter making masterpieces every few seconds... it's enjoyable thinking 'Kal does it again...' but... like in chess, you can make a story for your pawn as you move him forward (I frequently create anecdotes for my pieces when I play chess), but ultimately he is just a pawn. The cranial challenge is a necessary element for longevity. Because I did enjoy it and appreciate it's depth, I have to express my complaint that the cranial stimulation dies too soon.

50 migrants in a single wave? I've had two waves happen in two seasons back to back that totaled over 60, but I thought the cap for a single season was set at around 25. I don't see anything particularly cheap about what I was doing though, I didn't come up with the idea until AFTER I had done it. I merely though 'I should feed my dwarves well with a diverse diet', the resulting meals ended up having trade values far beyond what I thought should be possible.

Created wealth is also the means by which mega projects and more opportunity for story elements can be derived. When the game branches out and becomes more global I can see the game being much more interesting.

[denito]

I really enjoy the premise and depth of this game and even more just the learning experience... but...

After you get your head around the mechanics, is there anything remotely challenging about the game itself (aside from user-created challenges/mega constructions/wastes of time)?

Maybe you're just that good?  Every time I've tried to set up systems similar to what you outline, I mess up some small aspect and don't discover it until all my dwarves are out of booze and hunting vermin for food while they wait for the crops to mature.  I had to jack an Elf caravan just to survive.

[The Navigator]

Modding the game or limiting yourself to create a challenge is no different than Toady doing it for you, and is working entirely within the game mechanics. Once you know what you're doing, vanilla gameplay is ridiculously easy and it's only natural to set the bar a little higher. Try the orc mod at least. The possibility of getting sieged your first winter changes the way you play somewhat.

[Mandaril]

Feeling things are too easy?

I suggest trying some mods. There are a good variety of them, ones you are looking for may be the ones that create some mean badass motherf*cker monsters.

Orcs are good for starters but after you learn how to avoid them you might to ramp things up a bit.

[Magua]

Created wealth is a terrible metric.

Consider that you can easily get:

1) 100% safety -- wall up the entrance, raise drawbridge, of settle for 99.99% safety and go with a hall of traps
2) Infinite food -- farming, naturally
3) Infinite drink -- if you've got some water source, this is guaranteed, otherwise, it takes the smallest amount of micromanagement on your part to ensure you have infinite booze from your infinite food
4) Infinite resources:
   a) Stone - if you have water and magma, you have infinite stone.  Even if you don't, chances are you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of rocks, so it's infinite for all practical purposes.
   b) Glass, if you have sand
   c) Cloth
   d) Dye
   e) Food/booze - as above

Given all this, it's obvious that created wealth isn't a function of good gameplay so much as a function of time.  Once your fortress is secure (trivial) and generating enough food to feed itself (trivial), you can generate an infinite amount of created wealth.  There may be some questions of efficiencies -- how much wealth can you generate in two years? -- but then those always come down to finding the HFS and/or getting a lucky mood, rather than good play.

tl;dr -- Anyone can get 1,000,000,000 dwarfbucks, if they're patient enough.

[Frogwarrior]

Play as cats and antagonize all the other races

[denito]

Maybe we're all looking at the OP's point wrong.

You could look at it as just a balance issue:  right now, the game gives too high a value to prepared food and clothing vs. crafted objects.  I mean I've had fortresses where I busted ass to get a metal crafting industry going only to find I haven't produced nice enough things to afford anything I need from the first caravan.  Then I remember, "Oh yeah, Urist got himself killed and left his clothes behind."  I haul his old clothes to the trade depot and his (+Giant Cave Spider Silk Sock+) trades for more than my (initial) best craft work.  Something wrong there.

(Although it's not entirely inaccurate historically; making clothes and cloth used to be a lot more labor intensive than it is now.  We've all been spoiled by $10 T-shirts.)

Same thing with seiges, the game is just unbalanced at the moment because seige AI isn't finished yet.  Wildlife can provide a challenge but it's really random; sometimes you have lots of problems and sometimes very little.  Even as bad as I am at managing a fort, I too have gotten bored with some of my maximum-safety forts so I embarked on a frozen terrifying biome.  And I got... nothing.  Rarely get any wildlife at all - but it was just a bad embark location for that it turns out, better luck next time.

[Dante`]

I know how you mean there..
I just started a fort and set it all up, Didnt even look at my crafting untill mid-summer,  Set up a craftsdwarf shop and pumped out enough mugs to get a nice anvil and some gold bars (I never start with an anvil if I can help it)

Then again that fort got killed shortly after by 20 randomly generated skeleton monkeys,  Poor military that i started out witih got overwhelmed easily.

[denito]

I know how you mean there..
I just started a fort and set it all up, Didnt even look at my crafting untill mid-summer,  Set up a craftsdwarf shop and pumped out enough mugs to get a nice anvil and some gold bars (I never start with an anvil if I can help it)

Then again that fort got killed shortly after by 20 randomly generated skeleton monkeys,  Poor military that i started out witih got overwhelmed easily.

I suck at building up military; often the trade caravans do more wildlife control for me than I do on my own.  I wish you could pay to hire some of the caravan guards to stay behind and be mercenaries.

[Grendus]

Vanilla DF is easy, fortunately. Can you imagine getting killed by an orc siege two seasons in when Plump Helmets were still confusing? Or how about requiring a week and water to make booze when you just started and the only water you had was a carp infested river? Maybe requiring two seasons to get a crop up only to have half of it spoiled by rot and have to hunt the vicious wildlife for food?

The game is as hard as you make it, and since there is no victory condition, you're only as successful as you make yourself. Mod in something lethal or go embark in a dangerous zone (try a terrifying forest full of werewolves and harpies, those things will make you change your shorts). If you're embarking in calm zones with only the pitiful goblins to threaten you, it's no wonder you're bored out of your skull. Try embarking in a zombie forest with just an axe and no skills, then try to survive until the caravan arrives. Dig through a triple level aquifer with no magma. Build a stupidly complex deathtrap like a magmafall or a dwarven-fire trap. Build a deniac.