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[Pesty13480]

As the game stands right now, and I'm sure more will be added to it in the future, Dwarf Fortress isn't so much of a hard game as it is a fantasy version of Sim City. I suppose if that's your thing, that's fantastic, but the problem I'm facing is that the game isn't really hard at all and the basic challenges, at least as I see it, are:

1. Figuring out how to survive the first Winter, which is something that a lot of people have trouble with when they first start playing and assume the rest of the game is difficult because of it.

2. Surviving invasions.

Once you figure out how to do the first, reliably, about 90% of the difficult in the Dwarf Fortress mode goes straight out the door to never be seen again.

The latter is really only difficult if you deliberately choose to handicap yourself by meeting every invasion with your standing military. With some generic use of the traps provided in the game, or perhaps imaginative use of the water, lava or a combination of both, there goes the only other thing you have to worry about.

If you believe that Dwarf Fortress is hard enough as it now, or that the proper difficulty should come from self-sabotage at the embarking screen or through choices later on, fair enough, I guess this thread isn't for you but you're welcome to chime in. For the rest of you, how about we come up with some ways to make the game harder - not mind crushingly hard, just harder.

I'll offer these suggestions:

1. Disease - I don't think it's enough just to see your dwarves get sick every once in a while, but I think a novel way to increase difficulty would be to make it so that constant exposure to miasma has a chance at spreading some sort of deadly and crippling pestilence throughout the fort.

Of course, this could only really happen once the cleaning and hauling issues of the existing versions are sorted out. Maybe a way to designate an area as the 'quarantine' zone would prevent this from getting too horrible, with a decent chance of the ill dying, a decent chance of them maybe getting crippled, which could be reflected in the loss of skill and stats or potentially limbs from something like becoming lepers and a small chance of total recovery.

Blights.

Here's one that could easily be implemented. How about, very randomly and with only a tiny chance of it happening per season, the dwarven farmland becomes completely barren and nothing at all will grow for the duration of the season. The upside being that this wouldn't happen too often, but when it did happen it would throw a happy spanner of diffficulty into the works as your wards have to make due with slaughtering their livestock and trying to avoid starvation.

It would also give an incentive for people to overproduce food in case of an emergency, which is something that pretty much happens already since a few decently skilled growers can feed 200 dwarves on a tiny amount of land.

Evil Dwarves - Maybe make a random chance of a dwarf, when he shows up at the fortress, go totally bad and start to sabotage your work from the inside. Really, make it maybe a 1/300 chance, and let that trigger only kick in once the sherrif arrives on scene. The evil dwarf will occasionally participate in murder, destroying property and what not - to put a novel twist on this idea, when something bad happens because of an 'evil' dwarf, maybe you shouldn't be notified of it for a minute or two so that the dwarf would have a chance to flee and be undetected.

As overlord of the fortress, you'll have to watch carefully to see if any terrible crimes are in the process of happening and it will be up to you to tag the dwarf with 'accuse' or something of the sort where they get hauled off to prison then executed. And you'd have to choose well, because you might not get the right guy.

These are just a few ideas to make things harder. Contribute your own ideas, but nothing too complicated for Toady to implement.

[ November 09, 2006: Message edited by: Pesty13480 ]

[Pesty13480]

Make fell moods permanent is also an idea. When a dwarf slips off to a fell mood, since it's so expensive, why not have that dwarf get legendary in his two or three highest skills. Except that this will come at a price because, in addition to the first poor dwarf he murdered to get into the mood, he'll murder an additional and random pet or dwarf once a year.

[Pesty13480]

To clarify, anything that will make the game more difficult or, at the very least, kill off more of the dwarves so that they're not all virtually immortal if you watch the ones you like carefully, should be helpful.

1. More 'special' attacks. Having dragons or the odd iron colossus show up always makes things more interesting, however they're quite rare and frequently you'll run a fortress for years and years and years without seeing anything of the sort. Hell, I haven't seen either ever and I've played out several ancient fortresses.

Perhaps Toady could throw in a few special events, perhaps a pride of lions would set up shop in the entrance to your fortress on occasion if that's the right kind of map, or a few cavebears or anything at all.

2. More berserker rages.

If a husband or wife catches a partner in the room with another partner, perhaps they should fly off into a rage or deep depression and kill themselves or the offending parties. It doesn't have to be very likely at all, as with most of these ideas, they ought to be quite rare but still happen enough to make each dwarf's life less precious and encourage you to not become so dependent on a few of your best dwarves.

Or if unfaithful spouses is too much for some of you to tolerate, how about why not make it so that the odd dwarf becomes exceedingly jealous of a legend who shares their profession. Again, make it exceptionally rare, with the dwarf going berserk or thoroughly depressed when someone in his or her field consistently makes masterpiece items. Maybe just make him or her attack the legend (who will probably kick their ass given their stat bonus but might get wounded in the future).

I don't know, jealousy/berserk/attack of 1 out of every 50 or so masterpiece items. Or, Hell, maybe they'll seek out the item and destroy it - perhaps less for engravers.

[puke]

well, more advanced seiges will ramp up the difficulty.  also, it would be nice if some of these things were modable.

for instance, if you could increase the negative reaction dwarves had to misma, or other things.  or if you could increase the frequency of raids, or of moods.

some of these are neat feature ideas, but you must concede that the big difficulty slider is in your starting location, the hostility of the terrain, the presense of vegitation, temperature, etc.  i dont think of picking a challenging starting location as self sabatage, certainly not in the same way as voluntarily excluding specific starting items or skills.

[qalnor]

I like this general idea a lot.

I also particularly like the evil dwarf idea. Perhaps instead of making it necessarily random, it could be the result of a dwarf first having a random disposition towards evil behavior.

It could be scaled with happiness, so if happiness was on a scale of 0 to 100, then a dwarf with a 100 point disposition towards evil would behave badly even if he was ecstatic.

On the other hand, a dwarf with a 50 point disposition towards evil might only behave in an evil fashion if he was below average happiness.

These numbers are of course awfully high, and I would want anything above the 20% level or so to be awfully rare, and the 100% level might well be as rare as the 1 in 300 or even rarer.

Anyhow, some ideas that I think would contribute to the difficulty of the game:

1. Intensify the irritation factor of river/chasm/lava based on how many years you are into the game.

As it stands, the chasm is  the only thing that ever really spits things out on a regular basis, and then only when you dump a lot of stuff into it.

If you intensified the reaction to lesser stimuli based on how far you are into the game, even walking over bridges could start to seriously irritate the denizens.

2. Along similar lines (although both of these together might not be desirable) it would be nice if inhabitants of the various landmarks were to smash down walls to break into your fortress from other points.

I would limit this one to the chasm probably.

3. Make it a lot harder to meet noble room requirements. As it stands right now, a 4x4 room smoothed and engraved will satisfy pretty much any noble.

Taking a stab at a direct solution: I think that perhaps it would just be best if  a room only gained benefit from the best engraving in the room, and only a flat bonus for being completely smoothed.

4. Make farming less productive by about 50%.

[qalnor]

Some more:

5. Increase the initial point cost of plump helmet spawns to 2

6. Give dwarves cancer, causing the degeneration of a particular organ, with the possibility of the degeneration spreading to other organs.

7. Make cave-ins cause permanent lung and eye damage.

8. Random accidents based on skill levels, although they might be less common or nonexistent in the first year. For example, a dabbling miner might have a decent chance of hitting his foot with the pick.

Some jobs might not have any real dangers associated with them, for example the worst you would probably get farming is a stiff back.

[Draxxalon]

Seiges would be more difficult if the ability to make some of the "un-defeatable" defenses were removed.

1) Prevent channel building outside of the cliff face.  Prevent building anything except roads, bridges, buildings (workshops, trade depot sorts of things) and stockpiles outside, actually.  Dwarves shouldn't be building corrals up to their front doors.   Limit the distance from the cliff face that the non-road/bridge stuff can be built too (much like how close you can build to the left side of the screen).

2) Raised bridges should be destroyable.  Indestructible barriers totally defeat the point of having to defend something.

3) All creatures should be able to knock down buildings, given enough time.   (This could use a large fleshing out of material strengths, so tougher materials took longer to wreckand tougher critters would smash stuff faster too).

The Nobles could also be a bit stricter about some things.

1) Nobility in general is too forgiving for not meeting their room demands.   You can just have them sleep in a really nice barracks, and they'll be ok with it, even though they have no furniture, and no actual rooms.  

2) The sherrif/captain of the guard is way too forgiving about having insufficient prison space.

3) Likewise, the mayor and govenor don't care enough about the fortress + royal guards.  

4) As mentioned before, it is really easy to meet some of the nobles room demands, if you use detailing.  (I hate the look of detailing, so I no longer use it - but this is basically personal handicapping).  The value of their furniture constitutes so much more value to the room than floorspace does, so even without detailing, it is easy to meet the demands by just adding a couple more pieces of furniture.  A portional value of the furniture being applied to the rent value could also make this a bit more difficult to to do.

5) Nobility could actually refuse to have their rooms shared (with other nobles, or their own rooms).

[qalnor]

quote:Originally posted by Draxxalon:
<STRONG>1) Prevent channel building outside of the cliff face.  </STRONG>

Not sure this goes far enough. On the surface, this sounds great, but in practice, I think all it would accomplish is moving floodbased defenses inside the fort instead of outside of it.

I'm not sure how to address this issue in a way which will continue to allow players to build floodgates and channels at all.

Lava I think could be somewhat handled by simply not allowing it past a certain distance from the magma floe, after which point it could perhaps naturally cool.

But still remains the issue of flooding an entrance chamber full of enemies. Perhaps for that larger invasion forces might bring along some sort of siege device which blocked the flow of water, or somesuch.

[Draxxalon]

I'm didn't mention that to prevent the usage of moats (the enemies need to be able to fill/bridge them, to combat that usage, see "advanced seige" tactics, as mentioned by puke").  Moat defences should be allowed, inside the cliff (and counterable by the enemy).

I specifically mentioned it to combat people simply "walling off the outside world" with channels, or building corrals to make the enemies walk into specific paths.

[Draxxalon]

If you wanted to counter water-flood-based defenses, it's pretty easy, actually.

Make water flooding non-lethal - ie, shallow.  It allows farming still, and becomes a hindrance at most as a defence.  Actual channels are still "deep".

Lava flooding could be countered with:
-destroy all non-steel objects (make it much harder to work with the magma in the first place).  This includes doors, floodgates, bridges, etc, etc.
-Channels become solid rock (to prevent "obsidian farming") once a flow has stopped moving.  Allows moats, as long as the flow is maintained.   "One-time" lava floods are still possible, but much more work is required to use them.  Steam defences are also still viable, but much more work.

[jonhuang]

A nice and subtle way to make the game harder is to require mechanisms to be made of metal, not stone.

0) Fits the lore. Stone clockwork mechanisms are kind of silly anyway.
1) Most people will have to nile farm the first year
2) Reduces abuse of hundreds of traps without making it impossible to make hundreds of traps. The game gets a lot harder if you have to use a dwarf military to fend things too--injuries are worse than death (which I actually think is too much).
3) Encourages people to make metal before lava forges
4) Makes it harder to have legendary mechanics

Also, there are "exploits" everyone uses right now.

1) loading up with 1 of every food for extra barrels / wagons / animals
2) We probably shouldn't be able to cook alcohol to make one unit of food into five.
3) Unbreakable defenses / drawbridge crushing
4) Noble stacking
5) Free crossbows with trappers
6) other things I forget

Amazing game btw.

[ November 10, 2006: Message edited by: jonhuang ]

[Skyrage]

I think that people are going way overboard with their ideas here

 :roll:

On the other hand, adding an option which sets how extreme the game difficulty should be in terms of events and whatnot else is always possible. That way everyone will be happy

[Pesty13480]

Why going way to overboard?

Like I said, when you factor out the difficulty of the first Winter and the odd siege, there is really no challenge; it all, basically, turns into Dwarven Sim City which is somewhat fun in its own regard, but really doesn't give me the impression of being like a "dungeon keeperesque city full of roguelike characters."

[CogDissident]

You can change the frequency of dragons and such in the files, try it sometime.

[dav]

Brainstorming is always good.  Some of this is in the dev files, and some can be modified yourself.  Add creatures, increase their frequency, make your dogs and dwarves slow and helpless.  Make trap damage pall in comparison to an elephant stampede.  (Don't mean this to be a conversaton killer, just pointing out that there are some noncomprehensive fixes.)