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[cog disso]

The Real Code Of Dwarfliness:

1. Grow beard.

2. Be short.

3. Do nothing to alter the status of 1. and 2.

[krenshala]

The Real Code Of Dwarfliness:

1. Grow beard.

2. Be short.

3. Do nothing to alter the status of 1. and 2.

Cool!  All I'm lacking (IRL) is the "needs alcohol to get through the working day" designation and I'm a DF dwarf!

OnTopic:  I can see the reason behind not using Dwarven Water Reactors, but a properly constructed waterwheel with the appropriate supply of water can generate quite a lot of power.  Way more than you can get from (inconsistent, not always available when you need it) wind power.

[Dorf3000]

I'm curious what drives people to take something fun and eliminate everything about it that makes it fun, and then claim they made it 'better'.  All these rules do is make playing the game frustrating and perversely unrealistic.  No sealing yourself off?  So, lets take the canonical example of dwarves, from Tolkien - at Moria they had a password-activated door.  Yet somehow it's "dwarvenly" to have it all open?

Perhaps you should make some more rules that armor and clothing is too effective, so shouldn't be worn, and also no training of any kind can be made because it's "cheese", and also all wounded dwarves and dropped equipment has to be collected from the battlefield immediately?  You're free to make up and play by whatever silly rules you like, but to present them here in the forum as some kind of 'more noble playing style' is just asking for a flaming.

[V-Norrec]

I would hardly say it's asking for a flaming.  He wants to present acode for VETERAN players who have grown bored of playing the game as is.  Thus many of these rules are simply, don't use exploits.  Now, you may say a danger room isn't an exploit, but it does artificially raise your dwarves skill with almost no risk, so it's not much of a stretch to call exploit on that. 

My final words:  don't be trollin' a guy who isn't trying to push his rules on you.  Really when did NOT taking advantage of exploits become controversial?

[Dorf3000]

I would hardly say it's asking for a flaming.  He wants to present acode for VETERAN players who have grown bored of playing the game as is.  Thus many of these rules are simply, don't use exploits.  Now, you may say a danger room isn't an exploit, but it does artificially raise your dwarves skill with almost no risk, so it's not much of a stretch to call exploit on that. 

My final words:  don't be trollin' a guy who isn't trying to push his rules on you.  Really when did NOT taking advantage of exploits become controversial?

Calling it a Code of Dwarfliness is asking for criticism, especially when several of the suggested rules are not even respresentative of the dwarven mythos.  I really wouldn't have felt the need to point it out if it had been a post titled 'Hard rules for veteran players'.  That is all.

<~@ having a bad day.

[Rastaan]

Criticism for the sake of criticism. Everybody here has a way they like to play and Penco here has shown us his own. If you don't want to change your style, don't criticise his (as V-Norrec said; Penco isn't forcing you to do anything). The point of such an open ended game is to encourage different ways of playing it; at least be open to listen to other ideas; rather than moan and argue over details which are purely subjective.

Play it how you will; chances are there was (or will be) somebody who was looking for something new to try and the ideas in this thread gave them pause.

[Nyxalinth]

8)Thou shalt not have fun, so follow the above rules!

I do a lot of this and have fun anyways.  Guess I'm weird *shrug*

[penco]

Thanks to Rastaan and V-Norrec for the defense.


If you read the top post, I said the rules aren't about forcing anyone to play a certain way to have less fun. It's about identifying things in the vanilla, unmodded game that make it far too easy so that veteran players looking to perfect their technique can do a better job.

Any game with a serious following has a crowd that wants to not just have unrestricted fun but to be skilled. You see this with mods like Fortress Defense. You can say there is no such thing as "skill" in an open-ended game, and while that's technically true, it's obvious from experience that skill exists.


A skilled player...

-Can build a defensive squad very early.
-Can get industries up quickly.
-Can micromanage dwarves and livestock.
-Can build big, cool things while still doing the above.


The point of the Code of Dwarfliness is so that veteran players can have a common ground to talk about their achievements. Take this conversation:

PENCO: Whoa, awesome tower, Urist McForumUser! How'd you long did it take you?

URIST: I had it done by Summer Year 2!

PENCO: Wow, I wish I could build things that fast. I am usually stuck focusing on getting a metal industry running first so I can equip my army. How do you manage to defend yourself?

URIST: Well, I just wall off my fort!

PENCO: derp.


In that conversation, I was hoping I had met a player who could share some tips with me to improve my gameplay, but my hopes were quickly dashed when I realized he didn't play the same way as me. You can't share strategy with someone playing by a different set of rules.

Common rules foster discussion by creating a common playing field. That's all.



Regarding Tolkien and Moria, that's a pretty lame example. In Moria, the dwarves sealed off their cavern for the sake of privacy as much as security. The real threat, as we know, was sealed in their with them. In DF, if you seal off your fort, no trolls and goblins are going to rush from beneath you and murder you like in Moria (unless you stupidly break through caverns or HFS unintentionally, which no one will do who has any experience playing the game.

[penco]

Having said all that, can we focus on creating a list of exploits to add to the original post?

[Dorfus]

See I'm not convinced that walling up is such a bad thing. It brings about additional challenges, mainly ones involving wood and water, which usually involves caverns. Granted, there's rarely anything tricky in the caverns but I'd say they're comparable to most sieges, which is all you'd have to fear at the top anyway. Making drowning traps is easy, even without using bridges, and making magma traps is only slightly more tricky.

I wouldn't consider myself a Veteran player as I usually make very stupid mistakes, but I follow all of what you said bar walling myself in, which I do simply because goblins are less exciting to kill than the stuff below.

I don't use magma workshops because there are ridiculous amounts of coal around. I don't use HFS metal because steel seems to be enough, unless you want to dig deeper. I use cage traps to catch wild game and occasionally goblins to feed to some captured FB. I don't use any real exploits (apart from quantum dumping to make my rooms look neater, I never reclaim the dumped stone) and due to how I run my food industry it's hard to avoid cheering dwarves up all the time. Oh, I also trade in gem-encrusted crafts. My current fort (as a challenge) is to move into the caverns immediately and wall myself off, surviving there. I've lost half of my dwarves to one cave crocodile.


But back to the idea of a challenge for veteran players - I saw a thread a while ago where someone had moved into the basement. I've never managed that myself - that, I think, would be more challenging than simply having open doors and burning wood. The clowns do not like it when people move in, not one bit...

[penco]

Walling yourself in does not make the game completely easy to the seasoned player. You're right. However, if you always build walls, you will never learn how to develop an early defense.

The reason walls are so overpowered is not that goblins are terrifying and godly baddies. It's that they are the first thing likely to really attack you, and if you seal them away, you will never learn to deal with attacks properly.

And that is very undwarfly.

[NW_Kohaku]

You know, immediately calling anyone who tries to talk about what you are doing in anything other than glowing terms "sarcastic/trollish" and utterly ignoring their opinions or why they have them is hardly a good way to get most people to be anything other than "trollish" if that's what you call it.

If you want to make the game more based on "skill", then many of the things ZetaX was talking about also involve making things harder.

I still ask why it's "an exploit" to put a waterfall in a room I have specifically designed to try to make dwarves happy, simply because it makes dwarves really happy.  Toady specifically went out of his way to code in the way that waterfalls make dwarves happy, just the same as he coded in making very high quality food make dwarves happy, so why is one an exploit, and the other not?

Or am I just a "troll" for daring to ask?

After all, you're pretty much declaring that if we don't follow what you consider to be an exploit, and ignore anything that other people consider to be an exploit, then you're a more "skilled" player, and we're just the rank scrubs.  That sounds pretty "trollish" to me...

[blue sam3]

Depressurize water by making it flow diagonally.

I wouldn't consider this an exploit, more something absolutely necessary for many engineering projects.


Also, thou shalt not put an "L" in "Dwarfiness".

[Malibu Stacey]

The point of the Code of Dwarfliness is so that veteran players can have a common ground to talk about their achievements. Take this conversation:

PENCO: Whoa, awesome tower, Urist McForumUser! How'd you long did it take you?

URIST: I had it done by Summer Year 2!

PENCO: Wow, I wish I could build things that fast. I am usually stuck focusing on getting a metal industry running first so I can equip my army. How do you manage to defend yourself?

URIST: Well, I just wall off my fort!

PENCO: derp.


In that conversation, I was hoping I had met a player who could share some tips with me to improve my gameplay, but my hopes were quickly dashed when I realized he didn't play the same way as me. You can't share strategy with someone playing by a different set of rules.

At least he was still playing the same game as you. In my experience they usually reply with "I turned off invaders in d_init.txt, modded my dwarves to 1 speed & turned off their thirst & hunger". Great, that megaproject is an awesome achievement. No really it is dude. So.........ever heard of lego?

[rephikul]

So.........ever heard of lego?

Real life equivalent of making megaprojects in DF with invader on would be a king trying to have his castle wall constructed when it's already being under siege.