The Obsidz Dwarf Fortress Succession Game Exploratory Thread

[Pop]

Okay, so there's this game you might be aware of. It's called Dwarf Fortress. It is somewhat legendary for its difficulty and insanity. And part of that is earned!

 

It is not as hard as you've probably been led to believe, though. It comes from the grand tradition of early Maxis-type strategy games, in which there are a whole bunch of little rules that have to be followed and tricks that have to be learned, but when you have them down the game starts making a lot more sense and being a lot more fun. Problem is, nobody ever really tells you what they are, so your first DF games will invariably end in quick failure, not unlike those times you tried to build a city in Simcity 2000 without knowing how water supplies worked, for instance, or the "three-tiles-from-road" rule. You will spend some time, a few hours probably, learning how to work the game, but it will be worth it.

 

The game also has the reputation of being hard to understand. This was in large part due to the ASCII tileset. Luckily for us, in the last few years a lot of people have made their own replacement tilesets that make the game much more sensible for newbies. I use Mayday's tileset, but there are others. There is also the matter of using context menus, of which there are dozens, but you'll get the hang of them.

 

Why do I bring this up? Because, like the hardcore strategy games that came before it, the majority of the fun of the game comes from the imaginations of the players. Nearly everything in the game is procedurally generated, from names to terrain to the histories of the world, but there's a lot of hidden logic to the game, and when you play for extended periods of time it will surprise you in a lot of ways. For example, if you play a game in which you encounter and fight a lot of giant cave spiders, the artisans in your fortress may craft items or engrave stone that features depictions of dwarves fighting giant cave spiders. If your fortress falls (and it will), you can go into "adventurer mode" and, with a lot of work and some luck, actually travel to the site of your beseiged fortress, collect the treasures your dwarves left behind, and read the histories etched into the walls, complete with names and dates of events in your previous game.

 

This has led to "Succession Games", in which players on a forum play one year of in-game time while chronicling it for the forum before passing it on to another player. Essentially players interpret and describe the various events and alerts of the game for the benefit of all. With luck, a game will escalate to such a degree that it will be madly entertaining. Crazy and unpredictable **** will happen - one of your dwarves' pet dogs might drown, causing him to go insane and slaughter the rest of your population. An un-reinforced wall might give out, spilling pressurized magma into your packed Great Hall during the Queen's birthday celebration. You may be set upon by bloodthirsty gorillas or frog-men. A corrupt noble may execute your best craftsmen up for imagined crimes, leading to a bloody revolt. A demented player may order their dwarves to construct a colossal stone **** on the top of the tallest mountain they can find and plate it with platinum. There's really a lot that can happen.

 

To give you an idea of what the possibilities are, you can read the archives of old Dwarf Fortress Let's Play threads, many of which originated on Something Awful. The most infamous of these is probably Boatmurdered. It takes about a half an hour to read the first round of successions, but it really gives you a feel for the intricacies of design that you can pull off, and the insane phenomena that can occur (the really entertaining stuff starts happening during StarkRavingMad's first turn). They were using an old version of the game and a lot of the tricks they use, particularly the incredible "Release the Lava Ocean" trap, are nigh-unworkable now that the game has a Z-axis. I highly recommend reading it even if you're not interested in playing the game. It gives you a sense of just what two brilliant designers can accomplish with a lack of regard for visual pizazz, a lot of programming know-how and a lot of their own spare time.

 

Now I started this thread thinking maybe we could get some Obsidz people on board for a Succession game. I know you're thinking "but hey Pop, I've never played Dwarf Fortress before in my life", but I've got you covered. I've re-upped a very, very handy tutorial for the game in .pdf format, which you can get here, and it corresponds for a specially prepared version of Dwarf Fortress with a pre-saved tutorial game, which I've uploaded here. Just unzip and run the game and you're on your way! You'll have to get through around 60 or so of the tutorials 100 (short) pages before you get to a point where your dwarves won't die of neglect or exposure, but it's the best resource I've found for people who are completely green to the game. I started last week and it has pretty much swallowed my life. If you like Theme Hospital or other games of that type, you will love this.

 

And one last thing: This game is not made to be won. You'll probably go for a number of years, even as a seasoned player, before your fortress inevitably falls to something. Winning is not the point. The emergent gameplay is. Realize this, and the game becomes more fun.

 

Let us know here in the thread, if this is something that interests you. Devs who don't mind wasting what little free time they have are welcome!

[Calax]

http://www.nzfortress.co.nz/forum/showthread.php?t=20768

[Serrano]

Sequel to Bronzemurder

[Tale]

I'd be up for it. Are we going to run a gimmick? Glacier embark? Evil embark? Sky fortress?

Edited September 6, 2010 by Tale

[Rosbjerg]

Pruned "a bit" .. Any way, I'd like to try it out! - downloading now and getting familiarized.

[Pop]

I'd be up for it. Are we going to run a gimmick? Glacier embark? Evil embark? Sky fortress?

Depends on what the people want. I've never done an evil embark or sky fortress, but as long as we can keep the fort going for a few years anything's good.