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Whenever I feel like it

65 (33.7%)

Only to correct bugs and other alpha-related occurances

27 (14%)

Almost never

57 (29.5%)

Losing is fun and savescuming is cheating!

44 (22.8%)

Total Members Voted: 193

[nil]

Personally, I savescum all the time.  My criteria is mostly based on "is it dumb" whether than "is it bad."  If a random bowgoblin gets off one shot that pierces my best champion's lungs and heart in one shot, I'll savescum, while an epic battle against their swordmaster that ends in two deaths and a lost eye will be much more likely to be accepted.

But to many people, savescumming seems to be an absolute last resort; if they accidentally leave a gap in the wall and loose everyone to the goblins but a soapmaker and a baby, they'll build the whole fort back up from the unskilled ashes.  In a lot of ways I admire this, but if I don't save every half hour I'm sure to loose everything to a program crash, and the temptation to savescum is too great to avoid when I have a fresh save just three keypresses away.

How about you guys?  Do you savescum at will, occasionally, or never at all? Do you feel the same way when playing bloodline/succession games?  DISCUSS

[Crossroads Inc.]

I mostly savescum for things that are really bad... If I loose a Legendary Craftsmen because he sealed himself in a wall built ages ago, i'll savescum...The big things I'll savescum for are catastrophic things.. Someone running into a booze stockpile on fire... A dragon that gets by the gaurds etc.

The only other time I savescum is usually exploratory minning, i'll mine out a vast amoutn of rock, find deposits, savescum, and then go back ot th exact locations avoiding extra digging.  The other main thing I'll savescum on is BIg things, like breaching HFS

[3]

I only savescum in situations which I view as positively unfair. The only ready example I have is of the first time I played the Dig Deeper mod - scumming after being attacked by a massive force of trap-immune orcs in the first year, before I even had any immigrants, struck me as acceptable.

The example you used regarding the death of a champion strikes me as a rather romantic situation - the sort of thing that should go down in the history books - and as such something that I'd actually treasure more than scum over.

[nil]

The example you used regarding the death of a champion strikes me as a rather romantic situation - the sort of thing that should go down in the history books - and as such something that I'd actually treasure more than scum over.

Yeah, that's what I'm looking for too--a good, suitably dramatic death.  I just don't think a single-shot-ranged-death counts there (now if he went down to 3-6 hits and managed to strangle the guy who shot him before bleeding out it would be a different story entirely)

[HatfieldCW]

I did once, when I found a really spectacular 2x2 embark site (two tiles of heavy forest, a magma pipe, HFS, and an underground river flowing into a chasm) and then picked the wrong saved embark profile and went out there with my novelty "cats but no food or equipment" setup.  No axe, no pick, couldn't even build a depot to buy stuff.  Had to take a mulligan on that one.

That's not even technically savescumming, I guess, since I just ended the task and redid the embark.

I never revert to previous saves.  Too much to learn from Fun, and my forts never go more than five or six years anyway before I either tap out the 2x2 embark, get fed up with hauling goblin socks to the magma 24 hours a day or drop to 5 FPS and ragequit.

That 2x2 fort ended when I accidentally breached my HFS, and the battle ended with fifty surviving dwarves, one of whom was a berserk legendary hammerdwarf in elite gear who finished what the clowns could not.

I'm not above cheating, though.  I use artmoney to beef up my adventurers and skip the pesky "Wrestle a gopher, then swim the ocean" phase of the game.

[Tamren]

Depends on what I am doing. In games where I have a specific objective like build a castle, reloading a save is okay under any circumstance.

In "ironman" sandbox games, no save reloading for any reason.

In adventure mode only if my adventurers death is not suitably epic. I don't consider a death epic until the adventurer is fairly high level. Losing a 6 page long duel with a dragon is fine. Getting taken down by some random kobold arrow is not, unless my adventurer already blocked the preceding ten.

So in other words, yes I savescum. But only in the interests of having fun.

[Rowanas]

I savescum a lot because I hate the initial setting up stage of DF. I won't re-embark! I won't, you hear me! NEVER!!!!

My imagination is good enough that I accept pretty much any dwarf death as epic, because I imagine it going down in the best way.

[HAMMERMILL]

Apparently save scumming is the main reason the "Nemesis unit error" bug happens that corrupts your save. If the program ends without it letting the game offload the units and save the game, it can apparently corrupt the file.

 I dunno if thats fixed or not but I don't savescum for that reason alone.

That said, I'll savescum an adventurer if I don't plan on doing anything in fortress mode again. Its too much of a pain to grind up stats with one to just let any random bolt kill him off.

[Randall Octagonapus]

honestly I dont even know how to save scum

[Skorpion]

Very, very rarely. If it's something like accidentally flooding the brook into the workshops, or something that just wouldn't be fun to cope with, I savescum without guilt.

The dicey issue of the human siege in year 2 was the only time I did it wilfully and for a petty reason. I sent out the champions to stop the invaders, and they got slaughtered. I savescummed and the same happened. Then I savescummed again, used different tactics, and won with heavy losses.

Honestly, it was either that, or abandon. And I didn't want to reclaim.

[Grek]

No, because I don't want to corrupt my saves.

[Sysice]

Only for adventurer mode. Fortress mode is almost... sacred, or something, to me, so I don't cheat.

[Jim Groovester]

I savescum all the time.

Savescumming to avoid injury? Nah, I can deal with injuries easy, even fatal ones without dwarves dying. Savescumming to avoid important dwarves' death is something I frequently do. Soldier's war dogs, too, sometimes.

Savescumming to influence moods is something I'm working on right now.

I'm basically cheating as much as I can without using utilities.

[ein]

I only really savescum when I screw up.
If my super legendary, artefact wielding champion macedwarf gets killed by a gobbo with a bow, I leave it.
If I'm building a tower and remove a block that causes the whole thing to fall, killing three workers, I'll reload.

[Moose Fisher]

Only for adventurer mode.

I roll with whatever fortress mode tosses at me.