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[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

Yeah, I dunno if every area should have horrible death at every turn, but there should be a (more accurate) way to judge threat assessment maybe.

Also digging infinitely down is bad for a number of reasons. There's insane amounts of space as is, this would kill anybodies fps after a while, it'd still be pointless, etc.

In the meantime, personally I'd recommend the following:
Quick start in a potentially fun area, use reveal.exe, go to the unit list to check what sort of monsters you can expect, end-process close, restart for real.

This way you can be fairly certain of danger in your fortress without having to know where exactly it is, the only thing you won't know for sure without looking around the map w\ reveal is if you've pits. Also, you don't have to look around and unwittingly remember where you're good ores are; unless you want to.

Furthermore(!); not sure about this but I think the exact location of mountain features gets generated upon embark, so if you end process after reveal and then restart you may not even be guaranteed the cave features will be in the exact same place, only that they'll be there. (I think features are tied to local tiles, but where within those local tiles seems random.)

[Vengeful Donut]

quote:Originally posted by Funkadelic Jive Turkey:
<STRONG>Furthermore(!); not sure about this but I think the exact location of mountain features gets generated upon embark, so if you end process after reveal and then restart you may not even be guaranteed the cave features will be in the exact same place, only that they'll be there. (I think features are tied to local tiles, but where within those local tiles seems random.)</STRONG>

The same seed is used to generate it. It ends up identical.

[JT]

If you're worried about the game's future, a trip through the Core features and the Future of the Fortress development pages should set your fears to rest.  Right now, you're sandboxed.  Eventually, you'll be able to change the world.

[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

Vengeful, I meant that, and am still pretty sure that, features maybe moved around within the space of the local tile they exist in. For example, a feature, say an underground river, will always appear within the same tile that was selected in local on embark screen, where within that tile it appears on the play screen may be randomized. So maybe you'll strike it 10 tiles sooner, for instance. Or chasm branches may look different.

Once again, I'm not positive about this though.

[Alfador]

quote:Originally posted by Teldin:
<STRONG>* Try to carve out Moria from Lord of the Rings, complete with narrow bridge over a 10-level-deep cavern and secret entrance into a cliff face. Bonus points by naming your head dwarf "Gimli".</STRONG>

Gimli? Gimli came in as an Adventurer after Moria was already Too Deeped. I think it's Durin the Deathless you're talking about, or Balin, lord of Khazad-dûm in Reclaim Mode.

[Alfador]

One of these days, perhaps not too distantly in the future: Fortresses where nothing really eventful happens, but which have a steady economy and source of food, can be ended not by abandoning, but by simply stopping YOUR RULE. The fortresses will have a measurable effect on the economy of your civilization.

For example...

In a freshly-generated world, a civ might not have the resources to send out many supplies to its fortresses. Your starting locations might be limited in distance from the Mountainhomes, as you don't have the supplies to build outposts further away. But as you build more functioning fortresses, you have the resources to found forts in more and more interesting areas. Perhaps eventually have the player directly control a siege on a goblin tower.

[Tormy]

quote:Originally posted by JT:
<STRONG>If you're worried about the game's future, a trip through the Core features and the Future of the Fortress development pages should set your fears to rest.  Right now, you're sandboxed.  Eventually, you'll be able to change the world.</STRONG>

This is what I told to my bro also.  
The problem is that he is VERY impatient. I think that hes playing more DF than me. Its quite funny actually. When I showed him the game, he was like "omg what is this crap". 1 day later he was playing like a madman.  

[Doler 12]

Yep just wait. Toady is resting now. But he will be back on track, making Dwarf Fortress even beter, with armies.
Now here is a list of plans, Toady wants to do in 2008. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_v1.html

[Slartibartfast]

Without reading anything but the opening post (I have to go somewhere and still want to give my advice) :
Strictly speaking there are no goals in DF, part of the fun is to make them yourself.
1) You can try something like building a fort in a much more dangerous/difficult zone.
2) You can play without traps or without marksman or without any army and just raise a militia against invaders. You can choose to rely only on hunting for food, or choose to restrict the materials you work with (like the elves).
3) You can set goals like replacing all the walls in your fortress with clear crystal walls, or making every single thing in the fortress out of glass, or building an elaborate tower that will reach from the lowest z-level to the highest z-level. Maybe try and dig out every single diggable tile in your area. (Should be much harder than in the previous version. Especially if you have some source of fluids.
4) You can do build all sorts of cool designs like this or a more humble this (Which I chose only because I made that little running man)

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Personally, I went for:

1) Build in terrifying locales.  More action = more fun anyways.

2) Don't use cheap tricks.  In the previous version, I found that drawbridges, traps, and "cheap" doors made things too easy, and played without them.  I also played without intentional floods to wipe out invading forces.

3) Make more soldiers!  My goal was to make as massive of a military as possible.  Maintaining a military of 25% of your troops is easy; maintaining 50% is seriously difficult.  Sure, you think it's easy, until your legendary engraver punches your one brewer in the head AND IT EXPLODES and you don't have a backup.  If you savescum, this isn't challenging; if you don't, occasionally crappy stuff will happen, and you'll get some adrenaline.

The thing to remember: this isn't an RTS.  This is a roleplaying game.  If you min-max, it will be easy.  If you make an effort to do it your way, it will be hard-- but possible.  Tell the elves to fuck off.  Drown all your prisoners.  Build a tower to heaven-- with a waterfall.  There's a reason that they say that losing is fun.  It's because winning isn't fun-- if it's even possible.  Play to your principles, and not towards some boring ultra-efficiency, and the game is no longer easy.

[RPB]

quote:Originally posted by Nil Eyeglazed:
<STRONG>It's because winning isn't fun-- if it's even possible.  Play to your principles, and not towards some boring ultra-efficiency, and the game is no longer easy.</STRONG>

Bosh. Exercises in maximizing efficiency make for very interesting intellectual challenges. It's easy to produce enough food to feed your fortress, so just aiming for subsistence is not setting the challenge bar very high. Producing enough food to feed your fortress a thousand, ten thousand times over? That's a much more involved task.

[Sowelu]

I don't like that, in the twenty fortresses I've tried reveal.exe on, I haven't found the endgame area a single time.  Maybe I'm unlucky.

In the old version, I was constantly afraid of digging a little deeper.  What if I hit the chasm when I'm not ready for it?  What if I get swarmed by magma men when I open up the magma?  When am I going to be ready for the pits?  But there was always better stuff, so I was always going forward.

I don't consider DF as it stands to be a sandbox type game.  It would be more of a sandbox if someone handed the collective forum a map that had everything available to build with.  "Whoops this map has no sand" ruins that effect for me.  "Okay I've got a big military now where's that endgame, whoops I don't have one" is the same.  I'm not afraid of losing now like I used to be, I'm afraid of NOT losing.

I very much liked Rollercoaster Tycoon, but I had to stop playing its sandbox mode because it made me crazy (and ate up weeks at a time).  I enjoyed its scenarios much more, they seemed more fun, they had a distinct goal and a distinct end condition, and they were *balanced* at least a little.  Setting your own goals is very hard to balance, and I myself don't feel as accomplished when I complete my own goals as when I complete someone else's.

Maybe we need some organized competitions.

[Alfador]

quote:Originally posted by Sowelu:
<STRONG>I don't like that, in the twenty fortresses I've tried reveal.exe on, I haven't found the endgame area a single time.  Maybe I'm unlucky.

In the old version, I was constantly afraid of digging a little deeper.  What if I hit the chasm when I'm not ready for it?  What if I get swarmed by magma men when I open up the magma?  When am I going to be ready for the pits?  But there was always better stuff, so I was always going forward.

I don't consider DF as it stands to be a sandbox type game.  It would be more of a sandbox if someone handed the collective forum a map that had everything available to build with.  "Whoops this map has no sand" ruins that effect for me.  "Okay I've got a big military now where's that endgame, whoops I don't have one" is the same.  I'm not afraid of losing now like I used to be, I'm afraid of NOT losing.

I very much liked Rollercoaster Tycoon, but I had to stop playing its sandbox mode because it made me crazy (and ate up weeks at a time).  I enjoyed its scenarios much more, they seemed more fun, they had a distinct goal and a distinct end condition, and they were *balanced* at least a little.  Setting your own goals is very hard to balance, and I myself don't feel as accomplished when I complete my own goals as when I complete someone else's.

Maybe we need some organized competitions.</STRONG>

(possibly-)Guaranteed way to find the endgame area: Create a fortress on a mountain tile (must have some other biome or you won't be able to start in the area) at the maximum size, scroll down to the bottom level, designate the bottom layer, go and have a sandwich whilst it allocates all the tens of thousands of tiles (hundreds of thousands? millions?), then run reveal.exe. Reload the region from a backup and center your real fort around the area you remember the pits being, because maximum size forts are hell on FPS, not just the engravings of elves burning.

Now, ideally, one ought to be able to find a region where the endgame area, a decent-sized amount of magma, and possibly some sand, are all in the same general vicinity, such that one could have them all in a reasonably-sized area rather than filling up the whole region and making your processor sweat +silicon bullets+. For a bonus, this region should also possess at least a few squares of sand suitable for glassmaking, a cave river or the regional brook for irrigation/wells/tower-caps, at least a few trees, especially if you can't get tower-caps, and perhaps a chasm if you like that sort of thing.

That is pretty much the ideal of the Pregenerated worlds page on the wiki; hopefully someday soon we'll have an ideal site with everything in a known location on a known seed for everybody's processor architecture. It's already known that regions will generate differently under WinXP and Linux; I can verify that, at least as far as I could see, any changes between WinXP and Win2K are beneath my notice. (Which is only to be expected, it's nearly the same system.) Though I'm not sure quite how very slight differences in river generation crop up if the seed generates the same geography!

[EDIT: And once we have a "standard starter kit fortress location," as it were, the game will consist of two stages. 1) Experiencing the standard content including endgame pits and adamantine with magma smelting, on a standard seed. 2) Branching out and establishing forts in odd locations, like under a human town, or attacking the challenge of an aquifer. I think that, if anything, a goal for the game as a whole should be to make 1) more easily accessible, as something of a tutorial mode, and 2) more fun. This "more fun" could be achieved in multiple ways, such as different endgames (water demons in an aquifer? find a map with good and evil biomes and watch the two sides wage war?) or more interaction with the host civ, eg. the more successful forts you have, the better starting equipment a new fortress can have. Tutorial mode could simply be a lot easier than the reality of needing a full civilization backing you in order to stand a chance against the glowing pits.]

[ November 06, 2007: Message edited by: Alfador ]

[Hyperion2010]

I am currently in a rather large area with tons of trees, no lava, and only sliver, tin, zinc and bismuth ore which is rather peaceful and during sieges doesnt get attacked because goblins have bad pathing.  Sure I dont get to experience everything, but I do get lots of good practice (I also have no sand   ) trading and developing good fortress layouts and mechanism designs.  Its not all about glory (ask the first folks who settled Nebraska).

There is so much variation in DF now that the game is essentially limitless, which as games go isnt always satisfying (but it is oddly like life, rather limitless and unsatisfying).  Really the only problem is that it takes too long to loose in certain locations, but hey, thats part of the adventure right?  It might turn out that your amazing adventure turns out to be rather boring.

And remember "Loosing is fun!"  If you didnt believe it before, believe it now  .

(Its also worth noting that the things toady plans to add will open up this new world and make individual starts more interesting)

[RPB]

quote:Originally posted by Sowelu:
<STRONG>I very much liked Rollercoaster Tycoon, but I had to stop playing its sandbox mode because it made me crazy (and ate up weeks at a time).  I enjoyed its scenarios much more, they seemed more fun, they had a distinct goal and a distinct end condition, and they were *balanced* at least a little.  Setting your own goals is very hard to balance, and I myself don't feel as accomplished when I complete my own goals as when I complete someone else's.

Maybe we need some organized competitions.</STRONG>

CONTEST: Let's see who's the best at setting and accomplishing their own goals!