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[miyoung1]

I'm asking for some ideas, some suggestions to help me get past my third hour of the fortress.

I've played several fortresses, on all sorts of different embarks, but the overall pattern is always the same.  I dig out or construct a basic fortress, with whatever pathfinding scheme I'm messing around with at the time.  I make access to water and magma.  I establish farms and farmers, a food industry, cloth industry, meat industry, leather industry, stone/gem/glass/metal/etc industries, till I have every workshop and skilled people at every task.  I build up a small army of steel armored warrior dwarves to protect from invaders.

This all takes about two hours.  Then I get bored.

After it's all up and working, my only role in it is to every now and then put in an order that failed earlier (dyer's running out of dye, etc). 

I've tried various mega constructions, but all that amounts to is designating a bunch of constructions and then watching the screen for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen that I need to intervene in, and then another series of designations.  I wish you could designate while the game was running, so that I can actually feel active in playing it.

I've tried going for wealth, but you very very quickly reach a point where you can buy out everything on every caravan without feeling any strain at all.  Wealth beyond that point is useless, since there's nothing to do with it.  Money only has value if it can be exchanged for stuff you need, and my needs are far smaller than my production.

Most of my time is spent fiddling with stockpiles, trying to produce stuff (that I don't need) more efficiently.  But I don't really have a good idea if I'm successful, since there's so little information about the state of your fortress.  I'd love to be able to see a workshop's %time in use, or to see how many platinum crafts I'm producing per hour, or the average path length, or average dwarven happiness, ANYTHING I could use as a measure of how well my fortress is doing, so I can try to maximize or increase it.

I guess my frustration is that the game feels so short.  When I don't have every good or industry, the path to improving my fort is obvious, and I can look at my fort and see that it's better than it was 15 minutes ago.  Once that's all done, I end up with nothing to do.  Even mega constructions don't really improve your fort, they're just for vanity.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love this game, and I'm looking for ways to not get bored with it.  How do you guys get through the ennui of staring at the screen for hours waiting for something to happen that you can respond to?

[Tuxman]

Lets see...

You can...

Dig into HFS. As many times as you can.
Build megaprojects (your really going to have to just satisfy yourself with these)
Dwarf therapist tells you how happy your dwarves are en masse if you need to know

take a challenge from the forum.

[monkeyfetus]

I have the same problem sometimes, but the answer is simple: Losing is fun. The problem is that you fall into a rut. You need an element of danger, a novel threat. You could try:
1. Playing with magma. Install a decorative magma fountain spanning several Z-levels near the main stairwell. Put a little stream of magma on either side of the central path into your fortress
2. Revamp your defenses. You can either remove traps to increase the challenge, or implement creative and exciting traps, more dangerous to friend and foe alike.
3. Dig deeper, there are horrors below that should be an ample challenge for your military. Even if you've conquered the first level, there's more down below

When you almost lose a fortress, you may grow attached to the dwarf who single handedly repelled the goblin seige, and be compelled to reward him, or perhaps you might seek a unique way of punishing the dwarf who turned around to get a drink three steps from pulling the lever to lock the undefended back door and caused the catastrophe in the first place. The point is, a peaceful and prosperous fortress is rarely a fun one.

[jester]

1. embark in rough places.        I pretty much only play in challenging locals.  Having no access to wood and water from day 1 makes things harder.   Tundras, glaciers, jungles and swamps are all good.  Also anything with nightwings is funny.
2.  Be a racist.   Murder every nondwarf who comes anywhere near you until they get the message and send someone to do something about it.  Smashing bridges on their damn roads will always bring them running.
3. Wealth attracts bigger sieges.    When you suddenly get seiged by 80 gobs and their horror steads, 50 of who have crossbows you realise your military may not cut it. 
4.  I find the game has 2 challenges.  getting stuff set up and then about 6 years in.  You have a small pile of dwarves down with injuries, the military starts getting pissy about having to walk all over the map, few deaths here and there and things can spiral out of control pretty fast.
5.  Forgotten beasts.  I have an army of 20 steel clad legendaries and it still costs me a bad wound to take down each beast.  Between them and the titans I seem to get about 1 megabeast a year now.  Turning up the amount of megabeasts and turning down their attack requirements is good too.
6.  Mods rock.   Most of the mods are set up to make the game harder.  Playing with an ememy with [TRAPAVOID] that sieges in the first autumn can also make things a challenge.  I have yet to play a bad mod from these forums, anything by deon is especially good
7.  Limit yourself with traps.  2 rows of cages to keep the snatchers out is all you will need to keep the game fun.

[Cephas]

I've been playing a fort for six years now with the goal of avoiding all metal in a world that has no underground crops or trees. It's enough of a challenge to kill things with my shoddy crossbow army armed with wooden bolts in leather armor that I've been having fun.

You could always try embarking on aquifers or evil environments, building everything out of wood above the surface, Embarking with all peasants and no supplies, ignoring water or magma sources, piercing through the HFS and surviving...

[Funtimes]

Create a very old fort, specialising in a few things, moving on to others as time goes on.

Or make lots of personal rules for yourself, like:
1. No ranged weapons.
2. No metal.
3. No digging out anything that won't be a room.
4. Open door policy.
4+. With Pacifism. 
5. Never dig.
6. Embark with nothing.
7. Live above ground.

Take something from the challenges page, the one that puts you furthest out of your element. Those are the most rewarding for me.

[Shrugging Khan]

My plan is this (In ascending difficulty):

1) Defeat sieges of all three kinds.
2) Have a working in-hall waterfall
3) Defeat the HFS

Then I'll turn my back to DF until Toady revolutionises it somehow.

[slink]

My literal answer to your question is that I read books or browse this forum while boring things are happening in my fortress.

My less-literal answer is that if things are too easy for me then I mod.  In 40d I used an adjusted farming mod that made it less easy to live on a couple of tiny farming plots.  I added trap-avoiding orcs, which made me design more proactive defenses than my usual gauntlet of weapon traps.  I settled on the shores of an arctic ocean with nothing but tundra (no trees) and an aquifer.  And so on.

If the boredom gets really too much, I go play something flashy like Zoo Tycoon or SimCity Societies until I get sated on eye-candy and/or disgusted with irremediable bugs.  Then it is with delight that I return to the slow-moving world of DF, where I can alter almost anything to suit my whims and I don't have to spend every second clicking to avoid disaster. 

Edit: "Boredom" has no "e".   

[Shrugging Khan]

Oh yea, doing other things. I sometimes forget about that.
I usually read the paper while playing DF, but when I'm really fed up with the bugs or other limitations...it's either M&B, TF2, some complex game like EU3, Europa Barbarorum or AI War, or I actually venture out into the great outdoors. Although obviously, no true dwarf ought to do that.

You might try playing adventure mode a little, make a dwarven computer, or go complain to toady about the lack of possibilities.

[slink]

Yes, there is always reality if all else fails.  Sometimes I bake a cake or make something extra-special for dinner.  While it isn't nearly as interesting as a Lavish Meal made of minced fly brain, finely minced elephant cheese, well minced worm intestines, and minced frozen milk, it is somewhat amazing what you can make with things that have been in the kitchen cabinet for a decade or so.   

[mnjiman]

go into a embark where you dont have any iron..

or where its high evil and high savage.

try to get a king and an economy going on this area too.

[vlademir1]

This is often the bane of many when playing open-ended games.  For DF I've tended towards fortresses with no imports after the first wagon, surviving on only hunting and gathering for food and harsh environments like deserts as major interesting challenges (100% mountain embarks would be nice for that one).  I've recently been genning worlds for 100% dead dwarf civs so I can build my fortress population purely from breeding for several generations when I get bored next (it'll strongly affect my military design among other things) and toying with ideas for a 1 level total fortress and a fortress 100% in the caverns.

[jester]

Also, Nano forts, embark on a 1x1 area.  makes things a bit crowded on the surface

[doctorspoof]

...6.  Mods rock.   Most of the mods are set up to make the game harder.  Playing with an ememy with [TRAPAVOID] that sieges in the first autumn can also make things a challenge.  I have yet to play a bad mod from these forums, anything by deon is especially good...

This.
If you're finding vanilla a bit too repetative and easy for your tastes, grab a big mod pack, more races plants, metals, trees etc. That should satisfy your craving for more, at least for awhile.
Even better, make your own. The raws are notoriously easy to fiddle with.

[miyoung1]

Thanks for the advice, peeps.

I'm going to try a game where I don't use any wood, desert embark.  I'll see how it goes.

I'm not really looking to make the game harder.  It's more that as it goes on, I keep asking if what I'm doing is any good.  Sure I can make a crazy efficient fortress, and fill my stockpiles with 50 of every item, but what's the point?

It's like dining rooms.  For 100 dwarves, should I put tables and chairs for 30 at a time?  50?  All 100?  How about 2?  It doesn't seem to matter. o.O

Why make beds?  Sure, the dwarves will get a bad thought without one, but that's easy to fix with a well placed waterfall or seven.

I'm going to play where I pretty much don't make anything non-metal unless I have an immediate plan for where to use it.  Then I'll just make 2/3's of my dwarves army dwarves and outfit them in metal gear, and have the remaining third making a crapload of fine metal goods to push the wealth up.