Plenty of people wouldn't be satisfied with hell being anything less than impossible...
Yes, but I suspect the majority of that crowd are hardcore gamers and those who've had a
lot of experience playing DF.
...come on, you freakin dug down into hell
So what? Big deal. There are numerous games which have the player take on the forces of hell or darkness, kicking a$$ and taking names. Heck, some games put the player in control of demonic forces or even allow the player to kill off the head honcho, be it the Nordic goddes Hel, the big "L", the big "B", or whoever.
I've never considered demons to be truely invulnerable. Neither does mythology nor religious texts, for that matter. (Not just Nordic and Christian traditions, either. Consider the
Ramayana, for example, in which the hero slays a
lot of demons and eventually the demon king, Ravana.)
Besides, I'm assuming that Armok and/or other gods defeated the demons and imprisoned them in adamantine. (That'd make demons the
loosers, hence beatable.) At least, what I've read on the wiki and elsewhere seems to suggest this.
what did you think you were just going to poke the legions of the underworld with pointy bits of metal until they died?
Umm... Pretty much, yeah. Well, I suggested that adamantine be required to put the hurt on them.
Just making hell possible to beat at all, no matter how hard, removes some of the mystique of it.
Actually, it is not possible to "
beat" Hell in Dwarf Fortress. I think thijser explained this pretty well:
The deamons do in fact respawn this is why it's quite difficult to defeat completly: even if you cave in intial wave you will now be facing a respawning group and your first defense is no longer functional.
The demonic encounters were never conceived as "a good challenge - something to push players to think strategically"
I never said HFS was concieved for that purpose. What I said was:
I can understand a desire for a good challenge - something to push players to think strategically and act cautiously for fear of the consequences.
I'm not even sure how that could imply I was suggesting this is what Toady had in mind. For that matter, how do
you know that was his intention with HFS?
...they were conceived as a particularly epic way to end a fortress, so that you could come back in adventure mode.
There are a lot of other epic ways to end one's fortress. But, honestly, I wouldn't mind the current system so much (with effectively infinite demon respawn) if only they weren't so dang near impossible to kill in the first place - esp. if it's easy enough to plug the hole after the first wave.
That's why you originally couldn't fight the game-over. 40d went the other way by making the encounter winnable, and even too easy for many people, and now 31 is making them much harder, but still possible.
Sounds like I would have liked the 40d version.
Like I said, it's a difficult thing to get right, because everyone expects something different of it, and being that it's the closest thing to an endgame we have, those expectations tend to be built up at length, and very strong.
I have to agree with you on this. It is a matter of expectations and personal preference. And it's not possible to please everyone all the time. Except... I can see a lot of potential to make more players happy just by having more customization options (via the Init file or options menu), including the difficulty of HFS.
I think the best compromise would be to have more variation. The entire cavern system could use more variation across the world, but in this particular case, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to bring back the 40d glowing-pit-in-an-adamantine-lump, and make that the more common form of demon encounter. The demons coming out of the adamantine prison could be the legendary-but-beatable challenge, and breaching hell could be more like "I want to face something completely out of my league knowing I can't possibly win".
Interesting ideas there. I might approve. However, if players could adjust HFS difficult, then a compromise would not even be necessary.
Currently a good way to get rid of the deamons is by putting up a lot of upright weapons+repeater.
But I thought...
...that all demons were [TRAP_AVOID]? How can traps harm them unless they get stunned by a collapsing floor/ceiling first?
We don't have any control, not even enough to say, make all titans organic.
Sadly, this is true. The type (headless blob or made of metals) and number of demons that spawn are so random that it can easily swing from managable (about 10) to insane (about 100). Such randomness makes fortress survival a gamble, even for those who know how to respond to the threat.
No excuse to send in mining teams and their guards into the mysterious glowing pits to retrieve adamantine. If the pits held promise, we could use the army arc mechanics to send expeditions down there to retrieve material we desperately crave, paving our own inevitable dooms as the pits eventually overrun us without warning. It'd play perfectly into the greed motif and inevitably result in the fortress' demise if handled properly...
Other civs could try to meddle in such affairs in their own way and migrants might not be too happy on your fortress being a portal to hell, making reinforcements largely unavailable. But alas, as it is, it's just a big cave with abstracted, glowing lower z-levels and once the ore is mined out, it ceases to have any purpose at all...
Some good points there. And I agree there should be some further incentive to get the player to risk it all, going for broke. The point that migrants would likely flee at the mention of there being a hellmouth is also a valid observation.
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Topic: [SPOILER] Why is HFS in DF so much OVERKILL?! (Read 20202 times)