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[Eldrath.the.Sane]

I feel as though I have spent a reasonable time looking for an answer to this in the forums to no avail.

As a n00b I have a running and relatively successful fortress in a very quiet area of a vanilla DF world.  The only thing lacking being magma.

Now I want to take everything I have learned and up the FUN factor.

I want to maintain the flavour of vanilla DF but add more variety, more depth and more challenge.

My problem?  The modding forum is rather... threaded.  With a huge number of options and each one offering greater or lesser detail on what it actually changes.  Each thread talks about one mod without making much of a comparison to what other mods achieve.

So...  I am swamped with information but feel uninformed and I turn to you to enhance my DF experience, to add more flavour, more challenge, more beasties and more opportunity for FUN.

What would you recommend for my next game?
What mods?
What world generation?

Thank you in advance,
EtS

 

[Mindmaker]

As a pure military challenge I recommend the Orc Mod.
Lots of fun guaranteed.

[slink]

What sort of thing do you think you would find fun?  Harder/more megabeasts?  Larger/sooner seiges?  Tighter economies?  Harsher environments?  I'm sure I missed some, but these are the possibilities I could think of quickly.

[Chromie]

I definitely suggest a farming mod. It's way too easy to become overrun with plants and booze/prepared meals.

Until/unless you learn enough to mod growing times/values as you like, I suggest this one:

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=24666.0

You need more space and more time to make the same amount of grown plants, prepared meals and milled/processed plant products have their values nerfed. Above ground plants are more valuable, Cloth plants make low value liquor.

Otherwise you could just add [CARNIVORE] to your dwarves and depend on a butchering/hunting food production. -- this means dwarves will eat no plants, no flour, syrup, or sugar, no cheese, no tallow, no seeds. They WILL eat these things if they're prepared together with meat, but it's hard to specify what goes into a prepared meal without mega micromanagement.

[martinuzz]

I find the dig deeper mod to be nicely expanding on vanilla DF, upping the difficulty, without breaking the theme.

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=35736.0

[Eldrath.the.Sane]

I guess my user experience so far is:

great depth of gameplay
clunky but usable interface
fun economy that I have not yet fully exploited

lacking military challenge of any sort, particularly in the first few years
lacking variety of megabeasts
-

I plan on spending days of my life on my next fortress so all comments are welcome. 
I am looking for a scenario that gives constant challenge to a new player but still offers the chance to explore the game a little and build some fancy side projects.  I am bored of my current map on which trade wagons now roll across a flattened and paved mountaintop to a 10 level ramp to my little town.  I enjoy having the time to build the little fanciful constructs but I want there to be more hardship on the way.  The closest I have had to trouble was a giant bat causing a nuisance in the early years.

Thanks to those who have contributed so far.

EtS

[twwolfe]

I also Recommend 3Dwarf, just so you can look at what your building

[Chromie]

Orc mod Orcs will attack in the second or third years, and though you can wall yourself in, you'll likely loose your 'outdoor' dwarves frequently.

You'll find more challenge in vanilla if you embark near a chasm, or in evil biomes. Or on top of a cave. Skeletal creatures are very agressive.

You might want to try the Legendary Lands mod as well -- I found Flame Maidens (flying, agressive, fireballshooting bitches that live in magma pipes) a good early challenge, barring anything else.

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=19228.0

(Wow, read the Horrific Shadow post at the end of that thread, I'm picking up Legendary Lands again..!)

[Ubiq]

I am looking for a scenario that gives constant challenge to a new player

Try this out for size.

[CREATURE:CARPIPPOGONLEPHAGLEBOLD]
   [NAME:carpippogonlephaglebold:instant death:carpippogonlephagleboldian]
   [TILE:'C'][COLOR:7:0:0]
   [LOCKPICKER][GENPOWER:2][DRAGONFIREBREATH]
   [CAN_CIV][CAN_LEARN][liKES_FIGHTING][EVIL]
   [FIREIMMUNE][FIREIMMUNE_SUPER][FLIER]
   [CANOPENDOORS][NOFEAR][BUILDINGDESTROYER:2]
   [PREFSTRING:ability to kill without remorse]
   [BODY:HUMANOID:2EYES:2EARS:NOSE:2LUNGS:HEART:GUTS:ORGANS:HUMANOID_JOINTS:THROAT:NECK:SPINE:BRAIN:5FINGERS:3TOES:MOUTH]
   [SIZE:20]
   [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTYPE:MOUTH:bite:bites:5:15:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
   [ATTACK:SECOND:BYTYPE:GRASP:punch:punches:1:10:BLUDGEON][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
   [CHILD:5][BABY:1]
   [FAT:10]
   [EQUIPS]
   [STANDARD_FLESH]
   [HOMEOTHERM:10067]
   [SWIMS_INNATE][SWIM_SPEED:500]
   [PERSONALITY:FRIENDLINESS:0:0:0]
   [PERSONALITY:CHEERFULNESS:0:0:0]
   [PERSONALITY:TRUST:0:0:0]
   [PERSONALITY:STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS:0:0:0]
   [PERSONALITY:ALTRUISM:0:0:0]
   [PERSONALITY:COOPERATION:0:0:0]
   [PERSONALITY:SYMPATHY:0:0:0]
   [PERSONALITY:ANGER:100:100:100]

Warning: trying this out is not really recommended.

[AlienChickenPie]

You could make the game more challenging without any mods at all by taking on some restrictions to make easy aspects of the game less easy. Farming is easy, so you could try a fortress that depends on trade or hunting for its food. Trading is easy, so you could limit you exports to harder industries such as cloth, leather and metal. Defending is as easy as shutting the gates, so you could try keeping them open and maintaining a military to match.
As for a mod, you should try Dig Deeper. It adds hundreds of creatures and crops to the game, adds several new stones and metals, makes many things (including meals, engravings and crafts) more diverse and makes fort's harder to defend with the addition of orcs as a sieging civ. All in all, it makes the game more awesome and more diverse.

[Eldrath.the.Sane]

Warning: trying this out is not really recommended.

 

[Innominate]

Step 1. Find HFS raw entry.
Step 2. Add [LARGE_PREDATOR], [BIOME:ALL_MAIN], [POPULATION:100:100], etc.
Step 3. Have plenty of fun.

For bonus points, add an appropriate entity (i.e. civilisation) that uses this creature as its base. Feel free to make it a breeder.

Also note that a bronze collossus civ is truly fearsome, as the walking suits of armour can create and wear their own, additional armour.

[Doomshifter]

Try the Kobold Camp mod. It's heaps of fun!

[slink]

It sounds like, for now, that you would be challenged by trying a more difficult site. 

The Waterfall embark site which is in another thread is challenging, but the lag might be too much for you to enjoy.  I also have an arctic colony on that world but it would probably bore you since there is very little wildlife.  However, it has an aquifer as well as a magma pipe and is quite challenging when combined with the plant mod that I use.

One world I am playing on was made in the LARGE model with the following seeds, which I got from the island thread.  The tropical volcanic island I found was not small enough to be entirely isolated, but I only have Dwarves to trade with.  I also do not seem to have any invasion, but there are skeletal fish in the ocean who apparently can walk on land as well as jaguars and the like.

[SEED:1255582336]
[HISTORY_SEED:992286784]
[NAME_SEED:1737441664]

To find a more difficult site, use the site-finder in the game and choose strange combinations.  Deserts make water hard to manage, as do frozen sites.  Rocky areas make it harder to get wood, needed for barrels, bins, and beds.  Thus you end up balancing the need for beds with the need for booze.  They also make aboveground farming more difficult, and, unless there is a soil layer below ground, make underground farming quite challenging because you have to flood some stone to make plots.

To make restarts less of a hassle, save a basic setup for your embarking party under some name that you can recognize.  That way you won't have to redo the stats for the Dwarves every time.  If you have some basic equipment or animals that you always take with you, save it with those also.  For instance, I always have two picks, an axe, a rope, two cats and two dogs.

Don't be afraid to abandon a site that either bores you or is too fatal for your taste.  The site-finder will only give you one site that meets your requirements, but if you settle there and abandon it, it will not choose that site again.  You can keep looking for your perfectly fun site. 

Edit:

I forgot to say, if you want to try different things with the same site, pause the game as soon as your group arrives.  Save and exit.  Go to the data/save folder and find your save.  It will be region1 or some such.  Make a copy of it, and rename it region1 Initial, or whatever means that to you.  Also, you can rename the region folders to more meaningful things such as the name of your fortress so you can go back days later and remember which one is which.  I have four right now.  One is building road, hoping for the king's arrival (Bittersweetness).  One is trying to decide how best to get through a two-layer aquifer with both freezing temperatures and magma at their disposal (Icywaters).  One has just started building over an enormous river (Riverwalls).  One is trying to build a pyramid on a tropical volcanic island (Hotcakes).

Remember, losing might not actually be fun, but starting a new colony is!