Print

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

[RedWick]

I play straight up vanilla for starters.  No tilesets.  I grew up playing Rogue-likes, so uckily reading ASCII hasn't been a problem for me for a very long time.  No mods.  I find there's generally enough diversity and challenge without ramping it up.  I do alter the init options a bit, so there is that. 

I don't use DF Therapist to manage my dwarves.  I've run multiple successful forts at 180+ dwarves without a problem.  I assign jobs to immigrants when they walk in (unskilled types usually end up as masons), so I usually have a pretty good spread of jobs initially.  When the number of dwarves in my fortress gets above 80 or so, I stop caring about each individual dwarf.  If I have a job that needs doing in my fort, I find a handful of idle dwarves (of which there are plenty) and turn the appropriate job on.  It's an iterative process.  At some point in a fortress' life, I have enough jobs turned on on enough dwarves that when I want something done, my dwarves spring into action without me worrying or cursing their laziness.

Yeah, at the 180+ population point, it runs slow, but I fold it into how I approach the game.  I generally run the fortress in the background and check back on it every now and again.  And while it's running, I read stuff, or work on other projects or whatever else.  I don't really get worked up over how slow it's running.  Mostly my forts end because I get bored with them and run out of ideas on how to grow them.  I'm really looking forward to the addition of inns and other means of interacting with the outside world, since it'll give me additional in-game goals to reach.

I rely on traps only when I'm just starting off and haven't had a chance to develop a military.  Once my military starts getting its bearings, I deconstruct the traps (or reposition them to act as a last line of defense; usually cage traps).  I leave my fortresses open, with one or two strong bottlenecks that I position my dwarves at.  Early on, I relied on archers, but realized that I didn't mind losing a few dwarves here and there to invaders or rampaging megabeasts.  It just adds to the background story.

I've never tried to manipulate the artifacts that my dwarves make.  I actually enjoy watching one of my mooded dwarves run all over the place and look to see what object they're dragging back to their workshop, even if it only lead me to say "Aww...just an oak log".  I don't really bother training up my weapon/armor smiths (I'm not sure I've ever had one get above proficient).  I don't delve down after the deep blue metal.  It's been a while since I've actively used magma too.

I'm probably not the only one who plays like this, but some days, it seems like I am.

[Vercingetorix]

Sounds pretty much identical to how I play...I've gotten so used to managing dwarves that I don't need DF Therapist or other utilities.  Over time things pretty much fall in to place on their own with jobs/supplies/etc.  I also enjoy the luck-of-the-draw artifacts; it makes the really, really awesome artifacts even moreso because you're used to the generally mundane.

The only difference point is the non-use of magma, which I always go for if I can.

[Gatleos]

Your method of play seems identical to most folks around here, actually. Except the magma part.

Heretic.

[puke]

I think its a rareish subset.  I play pretty much the same way, or I used to.  I use DT only when migrant waves come so I don't have to 'v' them individually.  I use tiles, but they preserve the ASCII curses set.  I do use creature graphics and custom init, but only slightly customized.

I usually try to pick one anal theme for each fort, somehow based (at least abstractly) on the random name.  Usually things like path optimization, or some particular industry or decoration, or whatever.

[Angel Of Death]

I usually try to pick one anal theme for each fort,

I just imagined you making a fort shaped like an arse.

[Lectorog]

Cool! You play almost exactly like I do. The major difference is just fort size - I generally keep a below-100 population, so I don't have to worry about some of the things you do. I handle them in the same way when I have to, though.

And the magma. It shames me to admit, I have never actually used magma. Set up a workshop on a volcano, sure. Never had much interest in all the machine work, the pumps.

[MaskedMiner]

Yeah, I also play Vanilla game without mods or anything usually(I've been for first time ever playing with raws edited so that Dwarfs and Kobolds would survive world gen), I don't use tilesets nor utilities, I don't use magma since I can't get water pumps work right so I know I can't get magma pumps work right, I don't create invincible trapzones nor do I save scum to get best outcomes of random events like migrants or artifacts or such o-o

So yeah, I play most of the time identical to yours.

[thvaz]

Welcome to the club.

[Urist Mcinternetuser]

I play my forts the same way, I don't use magma, or adamantine. The main difference is that I get bored at round 20 Dwarves.

[loose nut]

I play more or less like that, though I'm more careful/protective about my defenses and keep my traps around.

[gumball135]

I play almost exactly the same way as you, but begin to get overwhelmed by the huge influx of migrants after about 40-50 dwarves. After that I seem to spend my whole time catering to the fort's population. Making sure that there's enough food and drink, preparing bedrooms for migrants, meeting noble demands, setting professions...I just get sick of it before long.

Actually, there're several reasons behind me abandoning my forts prematurely (pointless rant ensues):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-My dwarves lose any sense of personality after a while, as I don't have the time or patience to give them individual attention because of the demands of the masses. For some reason, any sense of sentimentality that I have towards them in the early game turns to staleness as the fort becomes flooded with migrants

-Something that would be one of my favorite aspects of the game - building - simply takes too much effort in my mind, because you can't make designations based on designations (ie, you can only make one floor of a building at a time. I just can't stand waiting around for my dwarves to build things; I'd rather just spend ages planning out and designating a construction, letting my dwarves get to work and then coming back to my PC an hour later and thinking "Wow, they finished! That's awesome. On to the next design!").

-A lack of fortress self-sustainability is also a big negative for me. The endless micro-managing begins to get tedious after a while - placing food orders in particular. I'm afraid to leave the fort running by itself for any length of time in case my dwarves starve to death. It'd be so useful if one of the nobles would make food orders for you after the stocks went below a certain number (I know this is on the feature list already). I also don't bother letting it run by itself because it's inevitably going to pause at some point due to an event. I find it difficult to give DF the attention it needs and read a book or watch a movie simultaneously, so that's not really a choice. So I have to sit through the initial base-mining, the piece-by-piece construction of mega-projects, and everything in between, something that I just don't have the patience for!

[Rowanas]

Yup. Sorry. Consensus appears to be that most people play like you. I remove most of the chaffinches and gibbons, and replace them with more interesting creatures (My dwarves have no cats or dogs, only crocodile monitor lizards), but apart from that, i'm mostly mod-free.

[nil]

I used to not use DT, doing pretty much what you did.  Since then, though, I've picked it up.  It's not so much that I need it or even use it to play normally, but that it allows me to easily do things I would almost never do otherwise.  For example, lately I've been going through the personality details of the dwarves who came out of a recent, massive military training effort to see what works and what does (so far, it seems like the trainee's personality doesn't make a difference, but captains high in leadership, activity, and especially recklessness work really well).  I also sort out those who are particularly lazy or compassionate from the ranks of new recruits (given that my pop just passed 400, those ranks tend to be large).  The thought of doing those sorts of things from within the game makes my brain cry.

And man, I can sort of understand why people don't use graphics (well, not really, but I've resigned myself to the lack of understanding) but I really can't imagine using a non-square tileset.  Maybe it's just because my fortresses are full of circles and other radially symmetrical objects which look like garbage when things aren't properly proportioned.

[Areyar]

yup also, pretty much the same.
used to use tileset, but got tired of copy-pating them during the 31.19-24 time because of the frequent new versions.
I like magma, but it depends on the location and type of economy the fortress is supposed to model whether i dig down for it. . . don't really dig down for mithril either.

[farecoal]

Use a tileset because I hate the ASCII art.