Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[smokingwreckage]

About a week, referring back to the wiki as needed. That wasn't too hard.

Oh, sorry, burrows and military. No idea how they work. "Indoors/outdoors civilian/military" worked nicely, not sure why it's not an option now. Before all that could be taken care of with proper design and layout, now.... ugh.

[thvaz]

About a week, referring back to the wiki as needed. That wasn't too hard.

Oh, sorry, burrows and military. No idea how they work. "Indoors/outdoors civilian/military" worked nicely, not sure why it's not an option now. Before all that could be taken care of with proper design and layout, now.... ugh.

With Burrows I can keep my siege operators always near the siege engines - they will left it just if starving or if they lives are in danger. I can do the same with little farming outposts. It is not so intuitive, but once you get it, is really easy. The same with the military.

The problem with military was that it was mostly taken by bugs - but now they are mostly fixed. You have so many more options now that I couldn't really go back to the old military.

[Neonivek]

I sort of understand how Burrows work... the problem is I don't know how to make them work without WAAAY too much work and effort (for example I have to reselect my entire population everytime... and I really hope I am not supposed to be)

[smokingwreckage]

Sorry, derailed. To return to my answer: It took me a week with the wiki to have the interface nailed, a competent military, moderately optimised infrastructure and industry. Further mastery of things like multiple action magma-obsidian traps wasn't really my interest; I did love how my 10 masterwork obsidian sword traps would paint the walls with goblins.

On the Off Topic; I'd like the old basic options to rough up defences etc., so I could work on optimising details as needed, is all, that's how I learned everything else... hell it's how I play! Step one: mess everything into one z-layer of dirt. Step two: working fort. Step three: optimisation and elegance.

[Cyntrox]

I sort of understand how Burrows work... the problem is I don't know how to make them work without WAAAY too much work and effort (for example I have to reselect my entire population everytime... and I really hope I am not supposed to be)

If you want to restrict your civilians to a burrow, all you need to do is use a civilian alert. Make a new alert (m->a->c) and select a burrow for it. Then you just press enter on the alert name (not a squad) when you want your civilians to be restricted there.

[Artheon]

A failed fort, a few hours of studying a tutorial, and another kinda-wreck fort, so perhaps a total of 6-10 hours before I felt confident that I halfway knew what I was doing when I embarked.

That said, since I play very bursty (hardcore fortressing for a week or two with next to no other games, then a month or more off), I always have to relearn stuff when I get "back".

Parts of the new military still does my head in atm.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Depends. Unless you count the time I spent lurking the forum and reading the wiki before actually downloading, none.

[futility]

Unless you count the time I spent lurking the forum and reading the wiki before actually downloading, none.

This was pretty much it.  I think I watched all of the captainduck videos, read most of the wiki, read a few guides, read the forums etc for like 2-3 months before even playing the game.  It was fascinating.  Anyway I started and got humming along fine until...

Migrants

I think I abandoned like 4 forts at progressively later migrant waves just because I didn't want to deal with them.

[612DwarfAvenue]

About a week, didn't even go to the wiki until a while later.

[The Grackle]

No one really understands it.  I still find fresh mysteries every time I play.

[Soralin]

The basics I had down in a day, a few hours, although I had spent a while on the forums before that, and read part of the introduction on the wiki, but decided to not go through the step-by-step parts, since I wanted to do that stuff myself.  And I had played roguelikes before, so first thing I did when I got in was paused it, examined all the controls, found the ones that would give me information on stuff, and probably spent an hour just looking at things and familiarizing myself with what everything was, and all the stats and screens and such.

I had chosen a fairly tame place, and was expecting things to be harder then how they turned out to be, I focused on immediately getting defense, food, and water covered.  Which mostly consisted of a 3x3 fortification wall around my hole in the ground, with a dwarf keeping on eye on things, a single-wide path in with a few stonefall traps, a good underground farm, with at least a few farmers, and people doing cooking and brewing, and a hole dug into a murky pond, into an underground room, which I stuck a well over.

It wasn't that much, but I learned doing those things, and improved and built onto things as I went on, and my first fortress stood the test of time until it chugged to a crawl as a 200 dwarf fortress with piles of everything everywhere, and water flowing around.

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-3744-whipcaught  It still has most of the 3x3 wall around the main entrance, although I expanded it a bit to add a guard tower above it.  As well as evidence abound of my various learning experiences.   All the single-wide passageways.  The patched-over roof (and several floors beneath it) where I learned how destructive falling natural floors can be.  The re-purposed bedrooms, now filled with pressurized water.  The pump stacks piercing into the ground at various places to try to drain the flooding.  The outer fortification wall, that I had to raise up a level when I discovered enemies with bows that decided to walk right up to them and use them against me.  My artificial underground lake and waterfalls, which is filled with bones because I underestimated how fast a single pump could turn a lake into a whirlpool.  etc. etc.

[Zaerosz]

Three days to learn, five days to relearn when DF2010 came out, three months to succeed.

[Cruxador]

A couple hours. But I used the wiki.

[rangarkash]

Several months of lazy efforts.

Then one day I put some actual effort into it. :p

[Cerol Lenslens]

I was able to get my first fort to stable conditions with a few hours of gameplay. I wasn't using all of the features, of course, and still haven't to this day.

And seeing as how over several fortresses I've never killed an elf merchant and never flooded anything with magma, some folks would say that I still don't know how to play Dwarf Fortress.