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[jonhuang]

Hmm, very good point. This may be too many bandaids, but I think the first winter thing could be overcome just by guaranteeing a flood the first time you hit the river. That makes sure everyone has at least a 1x10 farmable area or so, and that's plenty to feed a first year fortress.

With a guarenteed flood, you won't have much advantage from having floodgates your first year. Second year though...

[qalnor]

Easier might be to allow dwarves to bring copper mechanisms along for 25-35 points a piece.

This would actually serve to make that first winter perhaps a little easier.

[Grue]

I don't know what's hard in surviving the first winter. In my first game (and that was back in August, before wiki appeared), I started with default starting items, bought all food from dwarven caravan and used fishing to supplement that. No farming at all. Had plenty of food in winter.

[Chthon]

I concur.  I'm pretty new to this game, and here's my track record with the first winter:

Game 1: messed up a lot, but survived the first winter with more food than I started with and 12 dwarves.

Game 2: Accidentally flooded all but 1 room while playing with channels and levers.  In that one remaining room a dwarf was gleefully producing barrels to hide in and float out on.

Game 3: Lost most of my food supply due to cave-in because I didn't know what that rumbling was.  I had 10 food going into the winter, and left winter with over 50 left thanks to plant gathering and fishing in the underground river.

Game 4: Finally getting the hang of it, went into my first winter farming with 150 food and left it with 220, lost 2 dwarves to lizardmen while fishing.

Surviving the first winter isn't very hard at all, all you really need to do is if you are low on food, queue up a large group of bushes to gather, and set everyone to gather plants or fishing, and you'll be good all winter especially if you cook and clean the fish.

[Pesty13480]

It's not that the first Winter is at all hard once you figure out what you're doing, it isn't, but what I'm getting at is that the game really doesn't have too much of a natural difficulty when it comes to Dwarf Fortress mode and I think we need to come up with some more, more easily implementable ideas to make it so.

I mean, certainly fixing the starting number of barrels and slight inconsistencies at the very start of the game will address the supremely easy starting advantages you can muster up for yourselves, it's just that will not increase the difficulty very much for when you hit years three to five - which is the main point.

Once you're a bit established there's really nothing at all that could ever put a dent in your style, or even be amusing in a slightly annoying, slightly hard way (like my detective vs murdering dwarf scenario).

Not that the game isn't fun, it's glorious as a Sim Game, but I can't help but wonder if there's supposed to be more challenge to it.

[ November 13, 2006: Message edited by: Pesty13480 ]

[jonhuang]

Hmm.. difficulty in years 5+? Well.. simcity did it with natural disasters. DF has dragons, but they're really rare.

[lumin]

This topic seems a little pointless to me.

I just don't see what's wrong with just raising the frequency of invasions from dragons and other monsters.  That's easy to do and it will raise the difficulty considerably.

I think DF is so awesome right now.  It doesn't need a whole lot of tweaking to make it harder.    If you think it's too easy, raise the frequencey (higher is more occurances per time unit), and choose a "terrifying" starting location.

[Pesty13480]

Because "more invasions" does not make the game itself any more difficult. If you seriously think there's anything difficult, apart from invasions of various sorts, once you've established a few year old fortress, I question your ability to play the game.

[puke]

wow, this is like, the rudist topic ever.  so im a relative newb here, and ive never gotten very far in the game.  no demons, etc.

i restart alot, probably because im not very good at the game.  but i have a nice self-sustaining fortress, and then some dwarf pitches a fit and clubs their neighbor with an artifact grade bedpan or something, and then someones cat gets kicked, and the whole place is in anarchy and its like, WTF, time to give this one up.  sure the next wave of imagrants would probably restabalize it and i could spend another 3 years building back up, but all the dwarves you liked are dead.

or some architectural misshap screws your future plans for the grand hallway and waterfall, and then you need to start over.  lots of things cause restarts, not the least of which are invasions or demons.

sure the late game could be harder, and many of the suggestions here are good ones for that.  but i think theres also alot of people talking past each other here.

i think part of the problem is that the game is so huge that everyone enjoys it in a different way, and there isnt a whole lot of common ground for discussion.

i mean, theres seeming to be two major schools of thought:

"this games too easy, why dont we rip out a bunch of features that everyone abuses, and then it will be harder."

"hey man, those features are fun.  if you dont like it, stop abusing it.  just ramp up other difficulty settings"

"well, either i dont have the willpower to not abuse them, or i want to piss on other peoples fun while im nerfing the game.  so eff off."

see, not exactly constructive.  theres a million ways to make the game harder, but you need to determine wither you want

- harder battles, either from external aggression or internal ambushes

- harder environmental challenges and greater scarcity

- harder sociological challenges and inter-dwarven relationships

- harder to understand the interface.

in the last case, i suggest we replace all icons in the tileset with the "." character.  I'd just mod this feature in myself, but it would shatter the foundation of my relationship to the rest of the community, so I'm going to petition Toady to force the feature change on the rest of you, so that we can maintain our common ground.

take a deep breath.  have a beer.

[Capntastic]

A lot of people are expecting a quick fix to something that will inevitably be fixed by Toady as the game grows more complex, and enemies do more than wander into your traps.

Keep in mind that the game is still in Alpha, and balancing will come after more features are added in.

[Chthon]

quote:Originally posted by Capntastic:
<STRONG>A lot of people are expecting a quick fix to something that will inevitably be fixed by Toady as the game grows more complex, and enemies do more than wander into your traps.

Keep in mind that the game is still in Alpha, and balancing will come after more features are added in.</STRONG>

That's what I'm saying.  Chill people  

[qalnor]

Nobody here is expecting instantaneous changes. This is a discussion thread.

There are very few suggestions on this forum which are 'timely' in that Toady is likely to act on them instantly.

[Pesty13480]

Really, there isn't so much a breakdown in commuication as there is a breakdown in philosophy. There's two camps, pretty much, those who think the game should remain consistently, differently and thoroughly challenging all the way though and those who think that the only difficulty should be invasions and that those invasions should be toggleable.

I think people in the latter camp have no imagination and fear other, perhaps more interesting challenges.

[lumin]

quote:I think people in the latter camp have no imagination and fear other, perhaps more interesting challenges.  

Yeah, dude, I'm pissing my pants right now because I'm so scared of "interesting challenges".

Dwarf Fortress is the most interesting and complex Sim game I have ever played.  It wasn't designed by Sid Meyer or Will Wright or any other huge development team.  To think that Toady One and ThreeToes have come up with this all on their own without a paycheck is mind-boggling.  All of the ideas for making Fortress more challenging is in the works anyway.

We have to be careful here.  The interface alone is so challenging in its initial learning curve that it will push most gamers away.  Now if we make the game even harder in fundamentals, we risk squeezing the fan-base to only the hardest of the hardcore roguelike players.  That, in my opinion, is not healthy for a break-through roguelike game like this.

Yes, after the initial interface learning curve, it's easy not to lose.  There are temporary solutions like raising monster encounters, and there are long-term solutions like complex social environments with invading armies, contractable diseases, etc.    Reading the dev notes, I think there are plans on making the game more challenging down the road.  Don't pretend like Toady doesn't already know this and that you are suddenly pioneers in coming up with complex challenges.

[ November 14, 2006: Message edited by: lumin ]

[Pesty13480]

I'm suggesting we throw out ideas to make the game more challenging, you know, in case someone posts something that Toady did not think of yet. Or maybe a better take on an idea he already had - making his job easier.

What I did not count on was the concept being anathema to so many.