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[jimjulius]

If there was one aspect from the changeover from 2d df to 3d that i had a little difficuculty getting over it was the loss of cave-ins and dig-danger.

I met dwarf fortress in the 40d days when cave-ins were self inflicted and you damn well deserved them if they happened. But I went back and played 2d to see how it was done before, and while i think things have improved beyond reckoning since then, we lost something.

I am sure if this has been brought up before in some way or another, but my main concern is there are not enough negative enforcments to stop you from digging down in a realistic sense. I mean the difficulty of digging deeper is ignored.

What i would like to see is pressure.

Pressurised water, pressurised maga, and most importantly pressurised stone.

Could there be something which causes us to hesitate while staying at the lower, less rewarding levels of stone, that makes the reward of getting deeper even sweeter? I am not talking about insta-death at a certain level, or even increased cave-ins the deeper you go, but maybe something beyond martial challenges to stand before you when you seek those deeper ritches.

Yes, I like troglodytes in the caverns, but what about the danger of deadly shallow gas before you get there? Or high pressure mini-aquifers (not infinite)? Or diseases trapped in the rock you dig? Or having to re-enforce cerain sections of tunnels?

I know this is a programmers nightmare, but this is the suggestions thread after all

[peskyninja]

i loved the diseases,gases and reiforcing walls part.

[sockless]

You need to dig deeper...
That's before someone else says it.

How exactly do you get pressurised stone?

One of the problems with water is that it is essentially instant death in many ways, because it can be very difficult to stop, and even more difficult to overcome. It's fine to have pressurised water, but would it cover a whole layer? I guess it could be in the form of a sort of underground, pressurised pipe, which doesn't give a damp stone warning. The same could be done for magma.

I think that cave-ins would something nice to add back into the game, where if you make a room too large, it can collapse, but it should be based on what stone it is, and not how deep you are.

Dwarf Fortress is really the sort of game where the game shouldn't get harder as you go down, since that's not really realistic.

Also, you don't get increased riches as you go down (well, mostly...), and that shouldn't really be in the game either, as that's not really that realistic either.

[Dradym]

or variable-pressurized water/magma, based off the time of year/weather conditions/seismic activity(completely random) creating geysers/eruptions!...sometimes temporary, sometimes fortress-ending !!FUN!!

i was thinking along these lines all week

[Waparius]

Explosive/poison gas (Firedamp and...chokedamp? Whatever the term is) is something I've suggested in other threads, since it would be great fun, though firedamp would be better waiting until the lighting arc comes in.

I'm picturing pockets of pressurised water bursting out into the fortress when dug into, and possibly causing underground plants to grow or swarming with nasty little monsters. Maybe diseases...?

[irmo]

Dwarf Fortress is really the sort of game where the game shouldn't get harder as you go down, since that's not really realistic.

Wait, so that game I played a couple years ago and still have on my hard drive was not Dwarf Fortress? It says it's Dwarf Fortress.

Okay, sockless. How should it get harder, then? Because right now, the way it works is that everything is stupidly easy right up until you dig into hell, and then suddenly turns stupidly hard. So tell us: what's the "realistic" way to achieve a satisfying difficulty curve?

[harborpirate]

One of the things I'd like to see implemented would be groundwater seepage. This would add difficulty as you went farther down as the problem tends to steadily increase. Real world deep mines need to pump fresh air in and water out, and I'd like to see those enter the game at some point. Of course there would have to be corresponding rewards for fighting these additional barriers or hardly anyone will bother.

[Forumite]

Underground pools and rivers might be the trick, you get a warning, but they can still be plenty tough to get around. From my experience, they disappeared, replaced by the water and rivers in the cavern layers.

[Joakim]

Dwarf Fortress is really the sort of game where the game shouldn't get harder as you go down, since that's not really realistic.

Wait, so that game I played a couple years ago and still have on my hard drive was not Dwarf Fortress? It says it's Dwarf Fortress.

Okay, sockless. How should it get harder, then? Because right now, the way it works is that everything is stupidly easy right up until you dig into hell, and then suddenly turns stupidly hard. So tell us: what's the "realistic" way to achieve a satisfying difficulty curve?

First of all, in that game you went to the right, not down.


Dwarves could become more picky and demanding as time goes along. They would expect better food etc and more easily become unhappy otherwise.


Increase the difficulty of the goblins and other hostiles and make them attack more aggressively the richer you are (already happening I think?). The way they can be easily slaughtered by traps isn't really realistic. I imagine the Clowns would be pretty easy too if they could be dealt with in the same way.


The soil could produce less and less food unless you fertilize it, meaning you would need to set up and maintain a much more complicated farming infrastructure after some time.


There could be a much higher risk for disease and stuff as the number of dwarves increase. They could start getting ideas and rebel or something.


You could get aggressively taxed by the mountainhome when they realized how stinkin' rich you are. Without representation! The choice is yours, liberty or death?


In general, the more wealthy and successful you become, the more people, monsters and armies should try to take that which is yours. Sounds realistic to me. Still, I have no problem with that digging into caves increases the chance of forgotten beasts coming into your fortress. Nor the idea that the deeper you go, the more corrupt the caves become. You're approaching HFS after all. And it's probably harder to dig very deep mines than it is to dig shallow ones. So I guess I'm agreeing with everyone.

[peskyninja]

dwarves could have a unhappy though for "living in a shallow fort" then emigrate to other places,so the player after 1or 2 years would need to dig deeper.

[Bohandas]

In practical terms, wouldn't this suggestion totally **** your framerate?

[UltraValican]

dwarves could have a unhappy though for "living in a shallow fort" then emigrate to other places,so the player after 1or 2 years would need to dig deeper.

What if your not playing as dwarves?

[Artanis00]

In practical terms, wouldn't this suggestion totally **** your framerate?

Probably, but who cares? We shouldn't be thinking about either the implementation or optimization of the suggestion, the former being impossible and the latter being orthogonal to the suggestion (unless the suggestion itself is for an optimization).

This is game is alpha software anyway. Features will be added (some hopefully from suggestions) at the cost of performance, and later be optimized to gain performance.

If we aren't all forced to play in 2x2 maps with 15z of head room on top of 35z of terrain at some point just from normal development, then I will be very surprised.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Relevant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_burst

Digging deeper can cause the tunnel walls to shoot shrapnel at you IRL!

[sockless]

The game should get more difficult as you get more dwarves.

Essentially, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs needs to be implemented into the game.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Open the spoiler for the image.

I think that the image itself really explains it, if it doesn't, you can look at the Wikipedia article yourself.

If you read though Kotaku's suggestion for improved farming, you would also see another way in which the game could get harder as you go on.

It's not to say that it shouldn't get harder as you dig down, but it shouldn't be a focus to have super riches deep down that aren't further up, because it's not really like that in real life (with some exceptions). Most forts can be build on the top Z levels as well, so there isn't really any incentive to go deeper, which I think is just fine.