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[Torham]

"Want a wall of gold that spans the entire map?". Sure you can have it. But you will have to work for it. Solid Gold walls are expensive. See all that "useless" pile of rocks? Why not start exporting finely crafted statutes. or clothing? To establish a successful export industry you only need a patch of land and some seeds. Grow some pig tail, some dyes, and make fine cloth and clothing. Or even better, why not mass export your divine Dwarven Beer? In vintage glazed red clay jugs, the staple mark of Harrowing Spire Fort... With all that wealth I am sure you will be able to eventually afford that solid gold wall. Remember that this is a game still in heavy development, don't get too much used to some mechanics, because large parts of it are prone to change. Toady lives off our donations. He doesn't ask any money from you. If you really don't like the update stick to the older one. I bet this game is only going to get better.
Peace out..

PS: chickens look like a promising food source. My chicks just hatched. I forbid 2 batches from collecting and now I have 25 (!) chicks running around. Talk about ergonomics...

[G-Flex]

So you are advocating the death of the mega-construction then? People who build those often build them because that's what they enjoy doing. At least some of them will not appreciate being told that they have to wait for the single caravan of the year hauling six bars of metal so that they can continue doing what they enjoy in this game.

I'm not "advocating the death of the mega-construction". I'm saying that it's a bit silly to complain that it might actually be difficult to build gigantic statues made out of platinum, or the Great Wall of China made out of gold. You cannot treat this game as if it's an infinite set of Legos. Yes, some people play it that way, but that is not the general design goal. The player has limitations, and sometimes those limitations might increase/decrease depending on how development goes.

I think we can agree that building gigantic, sprawling walls out of solid gold is fairly unrealistic, at least without an extreme amount of effort going on, possibly over generations. There is nothing wrong with something that amazing requiring amazing effort. Keep in mind that we're talking about a game here, not, as I said, a set of Legos.

We are not going to agree because it appears we have vastly different play styles. I like to try and make a self-sufficient fort. I don't like having to depend on a caravan getting through a potential ambush and NOT having only 3 cow cages and some seeds (yes, that's happened before) when I also asked for some iron.

And THAT is why I'm asking for options.

Like I said, I agree that the game could give you a little more information about embark resources, and in my opinion possibly should. I don't think it should be entirely up to chance whether or not you get anything useful. I also think fortresses should be able to be self-sufficient as far as it actually makes sense, which is to say that you shouldn't curl up and die if the caravans stop (unless your playstyle relies on them a ton for some extenuating reason), but you also should find trade consistently useful and sometimes necessary for the industries and commodities that you have set up in your fortress.

Exactly, I 'can'. It should be possible to do so, or completely ignore it. Not that I must do so or be shot! Repeatably until dead. 

This is akin, in my opinion, to saying you should be able to "completely ignore" your dwarves having to eat or drink. The game is built around creating complex fantasy worlds with interacting civilizations that have a strong sense of economy and trade between them. This is a core feature of the game, and you blow this totally out of the water if you give sites the kind of mineral abundance and variety they had in the last few versions.

In other words, no, I don't think it's tenable right now to allow players to have just about everything on a single site, because it goes completely against what the game is trying to simulate. Yes, I understand how it can be fun to have all kinds of wacky stuff on-site and never have to look at a caravan in your life, and build dining rooms made entirely out of gold and platinum and rubies with little effort, but I also understand that I can't expect to get absolutely everything out of a single video game, and that it's an inevitability that as the game gets more complex and things change, people's playstyles will adapt along with them, and that you cannot expect the game to support anything any player could possibly imagine.

On that note, I really shouldn't say that it should be always impossible to play like that, just that the implications of having worlds like that are so severe that they simply would not work with the current game systems being built. I can see it as a sort of far-future development thing, where having worlds or sites with the mineral abundance of prior versions could be done in a way that makes sense and that the game can properly handle. Right now, though, it would just completely wreck the new economic and trade features being implemented, which is (I think) much of the reason this was changed to begin with.



Seriously guys, it's not as if you can't just do cool things. You could build a wall out of stone, or whatever metal you actually have available. You could engage in other industries. The thing you seem to be complaining about here is that in order to do something extraordinary, you're going to have to put in extraordinary effort. This is common in other games, and in a simulationist sort of game like DF, why is that bad? Why should Toady neglect/subvert the actual intent of the game and its design goals just so that you can do completely ridiculous/arbitrary things like building giant platinum statues as tall as mountains? I understand the game has a sandboxy nature to it, but sometimes unlimited player freedom has to take a backseat to what the game's actual design goals are.

[Lofn]

Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy world simulator, not a lego set like Minecraft.  Keep that in mind when insisting you should be able to build a giant golden cock on every site with no trading required.

[Rose]

Minecraft is not a lego set. you have to work for that solid gold wall.

[Retro]

If you're complaining that you have to put effort into things to get quality results, maybe this game isn't for you.

[Ledi]

This is akin, in my opinion, to saying you should be able to "completely ignore" your dwarves having to eat or drink.

We can. I believe it's [Noeat] or somesuch added to the raws?  But we cannot tailor the view in embark or the amount of metal that is generated the same way (at least that I have discovered). So some official options to allow us to play according to our playstyles would be nice.

Forgive me if I'm starting to sound blunt, but I've been having nearly this same type of argument about female Worgen for the last week and my patience is thread thin. I'm trying to keep hold of my usual 'look at things from every playstyle' habit.

If you want a harder time, go embark somewhere without the resources. I spend days finding the exact resources I want, because honestly I want to play it to watch the little stories unfold, to be able to create my own self-sufficient fort, and to be able to not fall over and die when the caravan carrying my only stock of iron is waylaid by goblins on beakdogs. I don't build megaprojects - I don't want to. but for us to have this ability for so long and then for it to be ripped away is jarring, as it is forcing people to play by one narrow ruleset. Before, the difficulty of any one fort was controllable by selecting an embark spot of appropriate difficulty. Now we no longer have that choice.

[Flaede]

PS: chickens look like a promising food source. My chicks just hatched. I forbid 2 batches from collecting and now I have 25 (!) chicks running around. Talk about ergonomics...

Chicks running around is ergonomic? I don't even know where to go with that one.

[Lofn]

snip

The game is in development and is progressing towards a clear set of goals that have been on the cards since day one.  If you don't want to play the game that Toady is making, you are free to add in metal-producing reactions and change your creatures with modding.  Nobody is stopping you from changing the frequency of metals, either.  It is entirely unreasonable to demand that placeholder gameplay be retained because you have gotten used to it.

[G-Flex]

If you want a harder time, go embark somewhere without the resources.

Having sites with the old kind of abundance in general is a bad idea. You cannot assume that sites the player doesn't go to in the game might as well not exist; civilizations would still embark there, and it would still screw up the world economy.

I understand about being able to mod things that way, or using worldgen parameters, and that's reasonable enough, I guess, as long as the game can adequately handle it. However, I don't think we should expect that to be the default state of affairs any more than expecting dwarves to live without eating.

but for us to have this ability for so long and then for it to be ripped away is jarring, as it is forcing people to play by one narrow ruleset. Before, the difficulty of any one fort was controllable by selecting an embark spot of appropriate difficulty. Now we no longer have that choice.

You can't assume the game will always stay as it is, or that the way it is now represents what it is trying to be. Just saying.

[Ledi]

PS: chickens look like a promising food source. My chicks just hatched. I forbid 2 batches from collecting and now I have 25 (!) chicks running around. Talk about ergonomics...

Chicks running around is ergonomic? I don't even know where to go with that one.

I'd say your icon sums it up quite nicely. XD

snip

The game is in development and is progressing towards a clear set of goals that have been on the cards since day one.  If you don't want to play the game that Toady is making, you are free to add in metal-producing reactions and change your creatures with modding.  Nobody is stopping you from changing the frequency of metals, either.  It is entirely unreasonable to demand that placeholder gameplay be retained because you have gotten used to it.

Please refrain from making blanket statements and stating opinion as if it were fact.

I have asked for options, I have not stated that I want it completely reverted to the way it was. That, indeed, would have been unreasonable. Yet the responses I  have gotten have been that it MUST be this way. That, I find unreasonable, and in a few places, rude, insulting and vulgar.

[G-Flex]

"It should be optional" is usually something of a cop-out when game design questions are asked. The question is whether making it optional is worth it, or worth supporting.

In this case, maybe it is, provided you don't mind precious metals being hideously low in value because you flooded the market with them.

[NW_Kohaku]

This isn't an example of realism being chosen over gameplay. Gameplay itself is moving away from every fortress being self-sufficient and having everything it could ever possibly want, and moving towards a greater focus on trade and interaction between your site and others.

The thing is, we're so used to being able to find basically anything we want that it's a little jarring that we can't, especially since the features that are intended to make up for it (like greater trade) are still in their infancy.

This, but another thing:

We still don't exactly have a "starting mission" yet, but presumably, our fortress is meant to expand our little dwarven empires.  Now that every mineral and metal in the world is suddenly much more rare, and I find myself much less able to trade for certain materials, just because not even the mountainhome has any metal ores to trade to me besides galena and sphalerite, then it makes much more reasonable that you be able to actually check what metals your civ does have access to, and what they need, and then embark in a place where you can find (and trade back) the things that your civ doesn't already have to trade up to you.

In fact, you should be able to see what materials any given civ has already prepared to trade with its forts before the embark screen, because if we're going to be trading stuff back to the "home base" or with humans or whatever, and we only want to be embarking on locations with access to the things the mountainhome doesn't already have, then it's worth knowing what the mountainhome doesn't already have, and what the place we are embarking on will have.  That's just some of the basic information that would be necessary to set this sort of system up.

Embarking on a metal-less, or only-useless-ores map can be a challenge and can be fun to play for the same reason people embarked on glaciers before, but the thing is, they knowingly chose to walk into a glacier to set up their fort.  People aren't capable of knowing what choice they are making when they walk onto a cinnibar-only or galena-only map versus walking onto a map that rains coal and iron into their lap.  It's a total coin flip whether they are playing on "easy mode" or "hard mode", and the player isn't the one making that choice.  That's a problem.

There's also the problem of having mountainfaces exposed to open air, here, where it shouldn't take a geological core sampling team to figure out "hey, look! That entire cliff face is made of magnetite!  Maybe the ore our metal ore radar that lets us magically know where "deep metal" is and "shallow metal" is is picking up is magnetite!"

Maybe we dont' have core samples, but the result of this change is a stupid one from a play basis - we have to be our own core samplers, and make a savescum save copy, embark, dig down, see what we hit, and then load the game back from the start if we wanted to dig into a copper mine, and instead find nothing but cinnibar.  That, or use reveal when the things like DFHack get up to date. 

That means the net effect is having to make dozens of embarks and abandoning to get the net effect of something the game should just be able to tell us straight-out.  That's pointless, tedious work to someone who just wants to hit "Play Now!", use the finder to get to a site with the amount of features he/she was looking for, and actually Play Now.  (Of course, I fully expect some sort of DFHack utility to come out with a geologist function that does a more detailed "find" function relatively soon...)

Even in real life from before modern geology, you typically only set up a mining expedition to create a permanent mining operation in a place where you actually know there is something there worth mining.  It's typically worth checking before you irrevocably commit yourself to spending the rest of your life mining that worthless ore vein.  (And it also makes it amusing that the spoiler metal seems much more common now than iron.)

On a somewhat unrelated note, what about coal and our dear friend microcline?  I find it a little bizzare that I can find low-grade useless gems everywhere and plenty of flux, but no coal, and not even microcline.  You're supposed to be able to find the feldspars almost literally everywhere, and I have to wonder if it counts as a "metal" like cinnibar does, just for being in the "mineral" raw?


Suddenly, ninjas, everywhere!

[zephyr_hound]

I think it's reasonable to at least know what kind of site we're embarking on. Surely that could be an init option at least. I like making megaprojects myself but at a fairly limited level and I can certainly live without making a "giant gold cock" in every fort, but I do want to know if I've got gabbro, because stone types are important to me. It feels like a huge amount of individual choice has been removed from the game.

My brother's saying he won't play the new version at all now, for the above reason, so there is definitely going to be some degree of player exodus if it's kept this way. Hardcore survivalism is a great, fun way to play Dwarf Fortress, but it didn't used to be the only method, and I don't think it should be the only method.

[G-Flex]

Now that every mineral and metal in the world is suddenly much more rare, and I find myself much less able to trade for certain materials, just because not even the mountainhome has any metal ores to trade to me besides galena and sphalerite, then it makes much more reasonable that you be able to actually check what metals your civ does have access to, and what they need, and then embark in a place where you can find (and trade back) the things that your civ doesn't already have to trade up to you.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I think one reason the civs themselves tend to have fuck-all for resources is that the game probably doesn't care what resources are available when it places the sites. Realistically, dwarves should settle in areas based on what resources are there, such that by the time you're 400 years into worldgen, they should definitely have found iron. However, if worldgen doesn't really take this into consideration, then it's up to blind luck.

In fact, you should be able to see what materials any given civ has already prepared to trade with its forts before the embark screen, because if we're going to be trading stuff back to the "home base" or with humans or whatever, and we only want to be embarking on locations with access to the things the mountainhome doesn't already have, then it's worth knowing what the mountainhome doesn't already have, and what the place we are embarking on will have.  That's just some of the basic information that would be necessary to set this sort of system up.

Yep. No reason why you shouldn't be able to see that sort of information about a civilization before embarking with them.

There's also the problem of having mountainfaces exposed to open air, here, where it shouldn't take a geological core sampling team to figure out "hey, look! That entire cliff face is made of magnetite!  Maybe the ore our metal ore radar that lets us magically know where "deep metal" is and "shallow metal" is is picking up is magnetite!"

Yeah. Even in cases where not much is exposed, it's still not too far off-base to be able to tell that a place has, say, major iron deposits or something like that.

On a somewhat unrelated note, what about coal and our dear friend microcline?  I find it a little bizzare that I can find low-grade useless gems everywhere and plenty of flux, but no coal, and not even microcline.  You're supposed to be able to find the feldspars almost literally everywhere, and I have to wonder if it counts as a "metal" like cinnibar does, just for being in the "mineral" raw?

Yeah, there's probably some work to be done there. For instance, people have mentioned finding huuuge platinum veins, which doesn't really make sense for metals like that.



I think the basic info to take away from this is that the changes made are probably ultimately good, but a real pain in the ass to deal with until other features are brought in (such as some of the stuff you mentioned, better trade, starting scenarios, etc.).

[Ledi]

"It should be optional" is usually something of a cop-out when game design questions are asked. The question is whether making it optional is worth it, or worth supporting.

In this case, maybe it is, provided you don't mind precious metals being hideously low in value because you flooded the market with them.

I wouldn't at all - because I use the metal, not trade it. Traders get stone crafts. Metals go towards moods, military and noble demands.

And I don't think that options are a cop-out at all. I think that they are  a valid way of ensuring that the largest percentage of a player base can be satisfied with a given outcome. If people did not want things different ways, there would not be debates about whether they were good or bad. There is quite a thread about the missing metals, and I have seen people supporting the return of the more detailed embark screen. We have not demanded that it returned to how it was before, but that we would like the option. Whereas many other people are saying it must be this new way, only this new way, and no other option is ever going to be feasible as if their opinion is the only thing that matters to anyone involved in this game.

And NW_Kohaku, I agree with you. At days per embark, it may now take me a month to find a playable fort area. That's not fun.

Embarking on a metal-less, or only-useless-ores map can be a challenge and can be fun to play for the same reason people embarked on glaciers before, but the thing is, they knowingly chose to walk into a glacier to set up their fort.  People aren't capable of knowing what choice they are making when they walk onto a cinnibar-only or galena-only map versus walking onto a map that rains coal and iron into their lap.  It's a total coin flip whether they are playing on "easy mode" or "hard mode", and the player isn't the one making that choice.  That's a problem.

Very well said.

I think it's reasonable to at least know what kind of site we're embarking on. Surely that could be an init option at least. I like making megaprojects myself but at a fairly limited level and I can certainly live without making a "giant gold cock" in every fort, but I do want to know if I've got gabbro, because stone types are important to me. It feels like a huge amount of individual choice has been removed from the game.

My brother's saying he won't play the new version at all now, for the above reason, so there is definitely going to be some degree of player exodus if it's kept this way. Hardcore survivalism is a great, fun way to play Dwarf Fortress, but it didn't used to be the only method, and I don't think it should be the only method.

Also how I feel. At this stage I'll either be sticking with .18 or just giving up on the game entirely. Hardcore survivalism should not be the only option given to us - especially in a game with such a steep learning curve already that it turns new players away without incredibly detailed tutorials.