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[Brian]

I'm soon to embark on my first megaproject and I wanted to know what's generally considered fair game or cheating. Things like disabling sieges, speeding up dwarves, stonesense-esk tools, etc.

I am prepared to burn many hours on the project, but i'd rather not come out at the end feeling like a sap--or a cheater!

[KillHour]

Megaprojects are your own little challenge.  You can make them as hard or as easy as you like.  If you make a dwarven supercomputer, or recreate the Three Gorges Dam, nobody's going to knock you for turning off sieges or even making your dwarves sleepless, noneating steroid freaks.  Just remember to post pictures if it's really cool.

[NW_Kohaku]

Right, if you don't want to feel like a cheater, then remember, it's YOU who would have to feel like you cheated, not us.  So it's really up to what you consider cheating.

Seiges are there to be fun, really, for people who don't consider making megaprojects to be the reason they are playing the game.  If you turn them off, it's no more cheating than simply sealing your entire fortress underground so no seige can reach you.

Retro openly talked about how he made his Undergrotto by using both SPEED:0 dwarves and by manipulating the raws to vaporize stone because hundreds of thousands of stones were driving his FPS below 1. 

Ultimately, that sort of "cheating" doesn't mean you couldn't have made the project without it, it just means that it would have taken much, much longer if you hadn't.

Of course, a project like Retro's is stunning because of not just its sheer scale, but also the creativity and artistry he used in making it, so forgiving him for making the process go faster is easy.  It's still more impressive the more you limit how you "cheat".  (Such as by making custom reactions that just plain destroy stone outright, and leaving several dwarves on stone-destroying duty instead of just raw editing to vaporize all layer stone.)

[Retro]

It's absolutely up to you. Consider the project at hand, what the FPS is going to be like, if there are any rare resources you'll need tons of, any other special requirements, and set yourself your own rules early on. Stay within your own parameters for a good challenge, but don't change them once they've been set. Rules give you a drive.

Retro openly talked about how he made his Undergrotto by using both SPEED:0 dwarves and by manipulating the raws to vaporize stone because hundreds of thousands of stones were driving his FPS below 1. 

Yeah, I changed the raws up; I was getting 4 seconds of video time (or 100 fps) every fifteen minutes - my game was going 225 times slower than 'in-game time,' which is as far as my math tells me somewhere around 0.0044 frames per second. So every single action I could do to raise FPS I took without hesitation ( to the point that I have the process rather refined :\ ). And I later had to get a new laptop because my old one partially melted and had its fan break. For me, I felt that without those raw changes it wouldn't have been a possible project. However, I wasn't really going for a technical achievement.

The main thing is the artsy vs. technical scale. If you're looking to do a crazy technical achievement (ie. Jong's supercomputer), you'll probably want to play it as straight as you can; if you're just going for pure beauty, your dwarves' hunger issues matter less. Find a good balance. I maximized speed and minimized lag but still made sure my dwarves were fed, trade was booming, and industries were naturally running smoothly, etc. Whatever works for you works for you. Like I said, make your own parameters and then stay within them. The challenge and the undertaking are both up to you.

[Shrugging Khan]

Since DF is very much still in Alpha stage, the lines between cheating, exploits and true game play are more than blurry. So yea, as others said, just consider how the various cheats and exploits would influence your project, whether you need them, want them, or you think it'd look better without them.

[KrunkSplein]

And in case no one has stated it clearly enough: If it's awesome, no one in the community will care about the speed:0, siege-free fortress.

Though totally keep track of the progress!  While we don't care about the hacks, we DO care about how it's built!  That makes for some damn interesting reading.

[Kardos]

Personally, I like to have mega-projects that exist within the toils of the world, so I play with all things normal.  In 40d I even used the Legendary Lands mod to make things harder.  It's all up to personal choice.

[NRN_R_Sumo1]

I just checked out retro's undergrotto and I'm so amazed, I don't even care that its kept me up till 1 am when I need to get up at 5:30 and go to work.

I'm definatly going to make something similar now I think.

[KillerClowns]

I personally leave all the bits on when building megaprojects, but I'm not an artist.  My megaprojects tend to be gigantic monuments to hubris and industry; it might just be a giant, square glass tower shining in the middle of the desert, but it's my giant, square glass tower shining in the middle of the desert.  As ever, it's all about what you feel like doing. If you have an artistic vision, mod away.  If you want to say "I built this even as goblins raided my borders and my dwarves danced on the verge of madness," good on ya.

[cephalo]

I like to keep the dwarf count low to avoid seiges. Seiges are fun but they bring so much junk... I keep to around 70 dwarves. I'll bump it up when the infrastructure is in place and I need a serious force of dumpers. For some reason I don't like to vaporize stone. I'm comfortable at 15 fps.

[Noble Digger]

Dwarf fortress is not a competitive game. It's up to you how you play, toward what goal, using which rules, the only thing I would ask is that you be careful not to misrepresent how you play the game when making claims. I.e., don't claim that you are playing some ridiculously difficult challenge fortress while omitting the fact that your dwarves are [SPEED:1]. Other than that, do what you like! Enjoy your sandbox. Kohaku's post about sums it up. If your goal is to struggle with default speed dwarves getting slaughtered by everything at their plodding pace and seeing if you can survive, hey, cool! But not many people will really look down on you for cheating, even excessively, if your goal is simply to create. Actions taken to reduce the amount of time spent "watching" are common, since people have responsibilities other than playing DF all day. Turning off invaders is also your choice. I tend to like them because they add an interesting element, but I ended up making it so Kobolds would automatically freeze to death upon reaching my fort because they were somehow teleporting inside my fortress walls past 30 traps, past 30+ chained war grizzly bears, past raised drawbridges, past the crowded living area of the fort, and walking off down the hallway with my artifacts before finally being caught. It was creeping me out.

Personally I tend to mod in reactions that allow my dwarves to combine underground plants with junk stone to create ore, wood, whatever I might need. This is partly because I never seem to get Liasons to trade with, partly because I hate buying anything brought to me by traders, partly because they never bring enough no matter how many years in a row I only request a single type of item, partly because for the sake of megaprojects it's just faster to create what I want instead of engaging in excessively-hasty mining out seams and the like. It also ends up being a very useful way to get rid of junk stone without just atom smashing it or god forbid, using it to make things.

[scira]

Personally I would leave everything on. It is the challenge of creating these woks of art while actually sustaining your fort. But no matter what people do I still respect their patience to do it.

[Shadowfury333]

I'd personally try to minimize the use of these raw/init file changes, but if necessary, don't worry about it. My current fort is on an island to prevent goblin attacks, and I needed to use [SPEED:0] at one point because of too much stone and not enough FPS. I've long since turned it off, as having it on makes the game feel like a convoluted drawing program than a fortress sim, which gets boring fast. Really, it's your taste, though.

[nbonaparte]

Quick question on a related note, I haven't been able to bump up the speed much in DF2010. Adding a speed:0 tag didn't do anything, but changing the agility values did. Any ideas?

[Urist Imiknorris]

Remember: A sufficiently large clear glass pyramid will absolve you of all modding "sins."