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There's nothing cool about creating extra busy work for the player just because it "weaves a narrative." Difficulty is only interesting when it takes the form of challenge -- that is, something novel, solvable, and non-trivial. If it isn't novel, it's tedium. If it isn't solvable, then it's just making things harder for the player for no reason. If it's trivial, it won't even be interesting the first time you do it. You could put interesting, challenging obstacles between the player and getting what they want but it's not as if making it really hard is virtuous in itself -- it's good because it's fun to figure out the best way to set up an Anno-esque production chain in limited space or whatever. I'm totally on board with "if you take the time to set up these various industries your dwarves will be happier and produce higher-quality goods." I'm not okay with "if you aren't constantly setting up production jobs for things you don't actually want or need you'll lose your progress."
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Jun 15, 2017 08:34
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Addamere posted:It is a right of passage, remarks Urist Attenborough, for the children of this tribe to be locked in a room and pelted with socks, coins, strawberry leaves, and the occasional serving of cat vomit, by the siege operators who fire catapults at all hours. Set up a viewing window at the bottom of the prisoner killchute with a room where you can strap dwarves to traction benches and keep their eyes open with matchsticks so they are forced to watch until they just have claim a workshop
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Jun 15, 2017 08:38
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:There's nothing cool about creating extra busy work for the player just because it "weaves a narrative." I agree with the "micromanagement sucks" point, but I don't think everything in a game needs to be so egalitarian in design. I think a problem with a lot of simulation games is that too much is in the player's control, out of a need to make things solvable, or fair, or rewarding, or whatever, and winds up making one playthough feel the same as any other once you've solved the puzzle. DF, as a game, is incredibly trivial to solve, and playing it optimally makes it suck a poo poo ton unless you're an incredibly boring person, but it was never that aspect of the game that made it stand out from all the others. Its the uncontrollable and unfair stuff, the bullshit, the things like "Oh my legendary warrior died because he got hit in the neck and bled out from an arrow" or "oh a forbidden beast bled in the hall and the blood got on everyone and rotted off all their feet" that are antithetical to the contemporary style of game design that nevertheless makes it so you can't just deny the possibility of failure or loss by playing optimally, and thus, screw yourself out of the fun that losing inherently has. All those individually loving dumb bullshit parts (and non-bullshit parts as well) combine, to make something greater. There's definitely good and bad ways of going about this, and I'm not going to defend skill rust mechanics as they're currently implemented because, well, they're boring and poo poo, but I think the overall idea of a "person coming out of retirement and having to play catch up", or even the idea of someone just never being as good as they once were, is a concept that can add more to the overall aesthetic quality that DF possesses, and should not be discarded just because as a singular part it fails to meet some criteria.
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Jun 15, 2017 09:21
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There's nothing more boring than getting screwed by something uncontrollable, rather than something you did wrong.
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Jun 15, 2017 09:23
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I disagree.
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Jun 15, 2017 09:23
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Tiler Kiwi = Tynan Sylvester?!
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Jun 15, 2017 09:28
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hailthefish posted:Tiler Kiwi = Tynan Sylvester?! rude as hell dude  To elaborate a bit more, tho... like, losing because there's some dice roll you failed six times in a row and there was nothing you could do, is loving miserable as hell. And generally, its also poo poo, becuase in the vast majority of games, losing like that is fundamentally uninteresting as end up just doing it again and hoping the dice don't gently caress you, because losing leaves you in a situation where you're denied interesting things. But then, that's a problem of having games designed as a series of binary Pass/Fail systems: there are ways to make losing interesting and engaging, even if you've lost despite making all the right moves. And in a game like DF, its often failures, loss, and crisis, arbitrary or self inflicted, that lead to interesting challenges and gameplay. The flipside of losing being boring in most games, is that winning is often boring as well. Sure, you get the gratification, but in many games, it also means the conflict between the player and the game is gone. Its solved. And there's nothing deeper to such mechanics, beyond the fact you won because you did things right. I think the problem of what good mechanics are, is something that there's going to always be multiple answers to, just because people are complicated and the product of a bunch of conflicting things, and thus, our entertainment and media is full of contradictions as well. I think its possible to get to focused on the science side of game design, where you're working at making stuff thats entertaining, engaging, rewarding, and even educational, and lose sight of the other qualities in games that can bring people to them, mainly that mechanics can also serve as means of expression, on the part of the designer,, or on the part of the player, either through their own gameplay style, or via what the mechanics invoke in them. I'm wandering dangerously close to the Games Are Art pit of hell, but I do think that its good to explore design that is meant to be something other than a collection of Pass/Fail challenges, or problems to be conquered. Its alright for a game to make people miserable, unhappy, or be Not Fun, and its doubly good for a game, which is a collection of mechanics at its core, to be able to express those concepts through the mechanics rather than relegating them to safer areas like writing or art design or whatever. I think losing things because of things outside your control can be done in a good way, and allow a new way for people to explore themes and meanings that are important and relevant to us (and also, as I said, produce new and novel challenges to engage with), as human beings, because life is also often unfair and poo poo, and just as it can be good for media to serve as escapism from that, it can also permit new perspective on it through mechanics. And I think people can be mature enough to end up liking these games, despite having TOXIC MECHANICS or whatnot. Dwarf Fortress has always interested me in terms of both being a real poo poo game in terms of being A Game and its development priorities, and yet, being a unique, compelling experience to play, that manages to touch players on a level that other games can't do with AAA multimillion budgets. Blah blah blah words dumb gently caress fart fart fart if the rimworld designer echoed any of this at any point its because he probably read something smart like what i just wrote, because, hes a big poopy diaper baby Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Jun 15, 2017 |
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Jun 15, 2017 10:02
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I just want to have fun by starting the best tavern in the world and causing a huge ongoing drunken riot or building a huge trap hallway like in the game Evil Genius
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Jun 15, 2017 12:51
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that is also art imo
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Jun 15, 2017 13:04
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Buschmaki posted:I just want to have fun by starting the best tavern in the world and causing a huge ongoing drunken riot or building a huge trap hallway like in the game Evil Genius I recently had to evict all non citizens because i was tired of the continual bar fight and constantly having to convict the foreigners of pretty crime. The bar fight continues into it's fifth year, but at least there are fewer convictions. It also seems to have gotten rid of 2 out of the 3 vampires i had hiding in my population.
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Jun 15, 2017 17:08
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ok, this is good enough that I'll risk pulling attention to the horribly outdated op to post this d-d-d-devlogToady One posted:Things are still a little rough and square-ish in parts, but we're calling it for kobold caves. The new entity animal framework is set up, though I've only used it for kobolds. It's pretty basic -- you can compel an entity to use creatures that either belong to a list of classes (classes can also be excluded), or by their token, and you can set them to either use matching animals from the environment or to get a free environment-independent starting population as with the current domestic creatures. You can optionally override the mount/wagon puller/etc. roles defined in the creature definition, setting them to always or never be used for those roles. Kobolds use their new entity animal definition to keep as pets any creatures in the surrounding environment that are in the new poisonous class which do not have the new mammal class. In my test cave, this led to a scary pit room filled with giant cave spiders and rattlesnakes. can you say... civilization-specific special creatures free of exotic/domestic/biome availability fuckery? separate pools of "oh, every ranch has bred and sold these since time immemorial" domestic critters like grey egg hens and fungus cows for dwarves, brown-white meat birds and angus cattle for humans and scaly black murder-chickens and armored bulls for goblins, none of which need to occur anywhere in the wild? or deer that dwarves can train as war animals, elves take in as honored pets and humans have no dealings with? scamtank fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Jun 16, 2017 |
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Jun 16, 2017 08:18
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Dear god, he's turning them into Tucker's Kobolds.
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Jun 16, 2017 13:21
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Ever wanted to try taking on Tucker's Kobolds yourself? Try Smart Kobold. A short mini-roguelike where you get to do just that.
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Jun 16, 2017 13:29
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Trying to start a new masterwork world, but when it gets into the 'choose world' view, all the text just becomes blobs of color. Any ideas? I chose text will be text and a font for twbt. e. swapping to standard didn't fix it, but 2D did. Not going to be playable that way, however. Ambaire fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jun 17, 2017 |
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Jun 17, 2017 20:41
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Ambaire posted:Trying to start a new masterwork world, but when it gets into the 'choose world' view, all the text just becomes blobs of color. Any ideas? I chose text will be text and a font for twbt. Press all the buttons and screenshot your journey
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Jun 17, 2017 20:42
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Ambaire posted:Trying to start a new masterwork world, but when it gets into the 'choose world' view, all the text just becomes blobs of color. Any ideas? I chose text will be text and a font for twbt. Welp. Re-extracted the package to a new folder, duplicated the settings, and the problem is gone. Computers, man.  Edit: Problem came back, but I'd also made a simultaneous post in the Masterwork thread on bay12 and someone said to try enabling large address aware on the df exe. It seems to have been fixed, for now. Ambaire fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jun 17, 2017 |
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Jun 17, 2017 21:18
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Today, for the first time in playing the game off and on for years, I fought off a real siege. I think it had around 60-80 units and I did it with 13 dwarves, most of them with silver warhammers and little to no armor. I just led them into a chokepoint and did it 300 style. My militia commander bit a goblin's tongue and ripped it out of his face, and proceeded to disembowel him. One of the dwarves apparently lost his weapon and beat a troll to death with an iron helm. I think I only lost 2 or 3 soldiers, the rest came from dumb farmers wandering into the tunnel. I just imagine a few goblins waiting outside the tunnel after all their friends enter, hearing screams and metal clashing getting closer and closer over a few days, and finally seeing a dozen blood-covered dwarves pour out, swinging wildly and vomiting from cave adaptation. I love this game.
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Jun 18, 2017 07:02
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page 420 woo woo
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Jun 18, 2017 07:10
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When will Toady implement cave weed??
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Jun 18, 2017 12:05
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A giant magma chamber you throw bales of weed in to hot box your fort, this "Purple Haze" ain't miasma!!!
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Jun 18, 2017 14:58
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This may be a stupid question, but I downloaded the latest version of masterwork a couple days ago and I cannot, for the life of me, find where to build a magma glass furnace. I've been looking at every workshop and furnace option and it's just not there. Has anyone encountered this? I've got huge piles of sand and a source of the hot stuff and I need to get this going... Oh, you know..For some reason it didn't trigger the magma discovery. I dug a little farther and found the actual magma chamber and it's fine now. I keep forgetting this aspect of the game (been a while since I played). TyroneGoldstein fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jun 18, 2017 |
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Jun 18, 2017 16:25
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Someone in my fortress wrote a book called The Dwarf and Other Travesties. The writing is a bit stiff, yet reasonably serious. e:And now I'm being attacked by a forgotten beast which is a literal gigantic blob of vomit. I sent in my military to just beat the crap out of it because i thought it might make a fine meal for my fortress, my brave soldiers beat it with only two deaths on our side, but not before it breathed some syndrome causing dust on my army! Now they're all feverish and all of their body parts are swollen up with blood, they're also oozing miasma everywhere. Uh-oh!! Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 12:30 on Jun 20, 2017 |
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Jun 20, 2017 10:47
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Forgotten beasts made of materials are actually made of that material, so you can't eat the giant rock monster or whatever if it's made of something weird like that.
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Jun 20, 2017 13:09
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My favorite syndrome was when it looked like nothing happened, then I noticed a lot of blood trails on the stairs and it turned out everyone who fought the monster suddenly was bleeding out of everywhere after a short delay and they all died.
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Jun 20, 2017 16:25
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So I started a plump helmet man fortress today, and it's a lot of fun. They are hilariously fragile, a fight after an argument can leave them with fractured extremities and even missing limbs. My woodworker was just immobilized from a few scratches from a badger sow. I dread the day we get an ambush, god forbid a siege.
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Jun 20, 2017 20:40
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GenericOverusedName posted:Forgotten beasts made of materials are actually made of that material, so you can't eat the giant rock monster or whatever if it's made of something weird like that. Well vomit is technically edible, I reasoned. I've seen dwarves eat worse things. I discovered that they are spreading miasma because their body parts are rotting away, so now i have a bunch of alive guys with all of their body parts showing as red but without any actual injuries. They still have a fever.
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Jun 20, 2017 21:10
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My worst syndrome, I managed to kill the forgotten beast with exploding vapor or something, and watched everyone closely. They were dizzy for a bit and then seemed to be okay, maybe I got really lucky. After a few months everyone just started falling asleep. Please wake up dorfs. No one woke up. Saddest fort end ever.
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Jun 20, 2017 21:44
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Got attacked by a were-gila monster today. I'm not sure how my dwarfs knew
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Jun 20, 2017 22:31
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Tars Tarkas posted:My favorite syndrome was when it looked like nothing happened, then I noticed a lot of blood trails on the stairs and it turned out everyone who fought the monster suddenly was bleeding out of everywhere after a short delay and they all died. This one happened to me literally an hour ago, exact same thing.
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Jun 21, 2017 00:37
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counterfeitsaint posted:My worst syndrome, I managed to kill the forgotten beast with exploding vapor or something, and watched everyone closely. They were dizzy for a bit and then seemed to be okay, maybe I got really lucky. After a few months everyone just started falling asleep. Please wake up dorfs. No one woke up. Saddest fort end ever. 
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Jun 21, 2017 04:08
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Well, my stocks now show a huge stack of forgotten beast meat, so I guess my scheme paid off! Barf globs for everybody! e:  Another one just showed up! This one has wings though. And it makes barf webs. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Jun 21, 2017 |
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Jun 21, 2017 10:43
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counterfeitsaint posted:My worst syndrome, I managed to kill the forgotten beast with exploding vapor or something, and watched everyone closely. They were dizzy for a bit and then seemed to be okay, maybe I got really lucky. After a few months everyone just started falling asleep. Please wake up dorfs. No one woke up. Saddest fort end ever. At least they didn't die bleeding out of every orifice.
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Jun 21, 2017 15:38
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Do you instantly get a game over in that situation, or do you wait for a goblin wake-up call?
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Jun 21, 2017 15:52
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I would think they would still die of thirst/hunger. Related: I remember Toady talking 6 years ago how he had to suppress the game over screen for players who want to turn their whole fortress into werewolves. You know, because the population count would hit 0 every full moon.
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Jun 21, 2017 17:10
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Scratch what I said about my plump helmet man fortress earlier, they defeated a forgotten beast yesterday. It was a pretty easy one (coral humanoid with poison vapors) but still. Then a siege happened, and my men refused to obey a burrow order and 20 plump helmet men + goblins trying to go through my 1x1 trap hallway caused the game to crash, and I lost a lot of progress. 
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Jun 21, 2017 20:06
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So Math posted:Do you instantly get a game over in that situation, or do you wait for a goblin wake-up call? They died of thirst. There were a handful of survivors but I quit because I was sad.
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Jun 22, 2017 00:45
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Shibawanko posted:Someone in my fortress wrote a book called The Dwarf and Other Travesties. The writing is a bit stiff, yet reasonably serious. Post that book kemosabe, I am a collector of funny dwarf fortress books
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Jun 22, 2017 04:47
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Vengarr posted:Post that book kemosabe, I am a collector of funny dwarf fortress books Nish Rewardbridged was one of those self hating dwarves: 
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Jun 22, 2017 08:30
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This thread made me reinstall DF to try the new version and to poke into Legends for the first time. Two hours later, I still haven't started a fort. Some notable books I found:  A book about Doomsday Levers. This game is getting more and more self aware.  
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Jun 23, 2017 03:29
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I imagine this one being written in crayon, or possibly turning up scrawled on walls throughout the fortress.
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Jun 23, 2017 07:52
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