If you’re not into micromanagement, Dwarf Fortress is not the game for you.
salwon
2802
If you dare complain about a gameplay element, Dwarf Fortress is not the game for you.
Seriously, it’s not about not wanting to micromanage, it’s about not enjoying certain parts of the game. The new farming, for example, is really stupid. The old patch still works great, though.
Pogo
2803
I see the game is well on its way to resembling a post I made months ago about how he’s going to want every dwarf to brush its fucking teeth in the morning, lest they go crazy from the plaque buildup engine he coded in there and murder everybody in your fortress.
What is this about farming and soap?
I have 31.16 downloaded but haven’t done much with it - the fort I’m still mostly playing in spare moments is a 40d fort. The farming in 31.16 still seems normal - but also most of my farming is aboveground, so I don’t have to worry about making mud.
Say what you want about the fort mode, but Toady seems to be improving adventure mode in every way imaginable. I’m really excited to see how it turns out, and imagine it’s going to be a lot more streamlined than it is at the moment.
Wolff
2806
Yes adventure mode! The mode that <5% of the people that play DF care about. Lets make sure that it is tidy before the long list of bugs and annoyances still exist in fortress mode. I would love to get back into this like I was in the 40d days, playing succession games with random WoW guildies etc. But every time I read a new update or bug report I put it down for another month.
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Random statistics aside, it is THE mode I play because I want to see the incredible world the game generates. Fort mode doesn’t let you do that at the moment.
Is adventure mode awesome? I would be tempted to learn it and make a play-along if it was.
As for Fort mode, I can’t face doing a other tutorial series for it now no get hundreds of question comments on each tutorial as it is, the new version is more complex and not that much more fun - the military organization screen alone shudder.
Maybe in a major patch or two…
I’ve always been a fan of Roguelikes, so playing even the sparsely populated mode in Dwarf Fort has always been my favorite way of playing. The good parts are advancing a character, killing mega-beasts in spectacular fashion, being sent on doomed missions by town mayors, and being able to go anywhere, including your old abandoned forts.
Obviously, it’s a matter of taste.
I’m not sure if the first comment was sarcastic or not, but given Toady’s approach to bug fixes and feature implementation, it’s not far off. He’s a seriously strange individual, and his coding priorities reflect that.
In any case, Arbit was complaining about making soap. Making stuff is the core mechanic of Dwarf Fortress. If he’s burned wood for charcoal, smelted 3 different kinds of ore for iron, combined iron, charcoal and stone for pig iron, pig iron and iron for steel, and then finally forged weapons and armor out of that steel, why is he complaining about soap? If he thinks needing to make soap is “too much micromanagement,” he’s definitely playing the wrong game.
Marcin
2811
My fortress is nearing 2 years, and I haven’t seen anymore need for soap than before.
Military screen is great, actually. Yeah, it takes a bit to learn and the setting alert mode feels really backwards (but again makes sense once you figure it out the first time - you select the squad first, which is INSIDE the tree structure, then you go up the tree structure and pick the alert you want), but once it’s done I can’t imagine doing it any other way.
The regular schedules for training sessions, workouts, restricted burrows and stations are a great change.
salwon
2812
Definitely sarcastic
Touche.
To me, the thing that kills the new patch is the underground farming “feature.” It makes no goddamn sense to have to flood an area once (only once!) before you can start growing stuff. Either require an irrigation system, or don’t, but having to make tapping the river my first priority makes me load up 40d every time I get the urge to start a new fort.
I know these complaints have been done to death, but I’m a new player and haven’t yet vented my frustration about: the incredibly awful UI.
It’s not that it’s too arcane, or that it’s not GUI enough. I wouldn’t mind if it was like vi or emacs, as people discussed earlier in the thread (heck, I still use vim as my main editor, and I’m on a Mac). What I really can’t get past is the lack of internal consistency in this damn thing – to the point where I have to think the developer is intentionally being inconsistent. Either that, or he begins each day with no memory of the day before.
I’ve only been playing for a week, and mostly 0.31.16 (though I did play through the version Calistas provides in his amazing tutorials), but one of the worst offenders is the new military menu system. Within the same menu, some orders have a target area selected by default in its list, and some force you to hit enter to choose.
And then:
[ul]
[li] all the various ways to close a menu (escape, enter, F9, shift-enter)
[/li][li] all the various ways to scroll (arrows, ±/*, umhk)
[/li][li] all the various ways to draw a square (sometimes mouse works, sometimes you choose the corners and hit enter, sometimes you use umhk to size it)
[/li][li] all the various ways to select something (like the custom stockpile menu with four different keys to enable and four different keys to disable)
[/li][/ul]
It’s complete insanity.
Thankfully, I’m having enough fun with the game to put up with the interface, and I apologize for rehashing a tired argument, but man, I just had to say something.
Yeah I’m not sure I’m getting soap. It’s not even so much that I care about the micro-management as much as I simply question the reasoning.
I can understand that they can’t function without alcohol but soap? Since when are Dwarves neat freaks?
boggle
These guys live underground. They live inside of dirt. It’s gotta be like their best friend.
Toady’s dwarves have their own personality, quite different from the post-Tolkien cliche of dwarves. They’re highly neurotic and will gladly eat dog meat, live in the jungle, use obsidian swords like the Aztecs, whatever. And they are neat freaks — they hate miasmas, for instance.
Oh, that. That’s not new. It’s been around since the very first release of 0.31.xx. I thought you were talking about something that had been introduced sometime after version 31.08, which is the last version I’ve played (I’ve been doing other stuff). I kind of enjoy that. I like the extra challenge involved in getting food production up. It also slightly reminds me of the 2D version, where farming required flooding every year. I’d even welcome the return of that, because it would mean I’d have to set up a repeatable flooding system, rather than the one-off cascading approach I usually take.
Yeah, it’s truly awful in that regard. Even within the constraints of text-based, mostly keyboard based menus, the UI design is terrible. Long term players sometimes say “it’s not so bad,” but only because we’re the kind of neckbeards who can thoroughly memorize the peculiarities of the system, where +/- works, where the arrows keys work, and where scrolling doesn’t work at all.
salwon
2817
Having to flood every year would be an improvement in my eyes. Only having to do it once doesn’t make any sense - either I have to set up an irrigation system (which is fine, it’s a problem to solve), or not. Having to spend the time at the beginning to tap the river, but then forgetting about it, is dumb. I was under the impression that Toady considered it a bug anyway, that farming should work more like the previous 3D versions.
Yeah the miasmas were terrible sometimes.
:(
I read somewhere this week that the intention is to return to needing to flood the fields regularly, but it’s just not there yet. Or maybe I saw it in a tutorial video. I don’t know how official that information is, though.
It would be better if there was high-labour easy to make food and low-labour but harder to make food. Eg, mushrooms require a lot of attention from dwarfs to grow, but grow anywhere, and other crops require irrigation and all that, but not much intervention from dwarfs. In this way you could always get food, but you’d be encouraged to be more ‘efficient’.
