Caltrops - Dwarf Fortress - Re: I played some more

Forum Overview :: Dwarf Fortress

by Bananadine 02/07/2011, 12:31pm PST

After my fortress crumbled, my morale was pretty low and I thought I might give up the game. But I bounced back quickly. I'd just have to learn the REAL way to fight goblins, no big deal. And if that turned out to be too tedious then I could always try to dig a tunnel, as fast as possible, to the bottom of the world. I figured that'd be a simple way to get the game to give up a few cool secrets in a relatively short time. So I told the game to make me a new fortress.

But when the location selection screen came up, I remembered where my old fortress had been, and considered that the world might actually be persistent enough that if I settled in that exact spot again, I would find the fortress there with all my stuff still in it! So I began hunting around the giant world map for the old place, but before I'd even finished I noticed that there was a "reclaim" option, hidden at the bottom of the display. Oh. I took that option and sure enough it let me reclaim my old fortress! So much for being able to lose the game.

...Except when I started playing, I found that the place was a terrible mess! The many, many pieces of unused equipment and clothing and furniture and food and trash that I'd accumulated in my stockpiles were randomly scattered over every floor on the fortress' map, both outside and inside. It was like saving and then loading in SimEarth for the SNES--all the stuff you've spent hours building up and organizing, with each thing in its proper area, is suddenly spread out everywhere for no reason that makes sense in the game's fiction! I assume SimEarth did this because it hadn't enough battery-backed memory to store every object's location. But what is Dwarf Fortress' excuse? Is this supposed to be a punishment for losing? I think that could be done much better.

Anyway, at least I still had all that stuff. There was a complication, though: My dwarves wouldn't touch any of it! They wouldn't work in the old masonry workshops or eat the old food or anything. I had no idea why that might be. So I turned to the wiki, whose page on fortress reclamation informed me that things can be "forbidden", that forbidden things will never be used by dwarves, and that reclaimed fortresses start out with everything forbidden. Oh thanks for telling me game. I "allowed" lots of things, and suddenly my dwarves all decided to be full-time haulers. Dwarves seem very reluctant to clean things, but they do appreciate order! I was glad to let them put things away, aside from a few dwarves who I pulled aside to do some mechanical work and such. Because, of course, I still had a pump system to finish.

On the subject of cleaning, though, I was also very pleased to see that all the blood and dirt were gone from my fortress! Blood is an especially nasty thing in this game. It's emitted from wounded creatures of course, and thereafter, it lies on the ground and sticks to dwarves. I guess dwarves can decide to clean it, but mine rarely did. And they don't have to decide to spread it around; it does that on its own. A unit of blood seems to be able to duplicate itself many times. If a few dead creatures happen to fall into a dead-end canal, then spots all along the canal will become bloody, and they will stay that way, maybe forever. I've had underground pools that kept years-old bits of blood from whole crowds of dwarves that I didn't even remember seeing when they were alive. And that's the other thing: The game remembers which creature produced which unit of blood! So as you play, the descriptions of your ground tiles and your dwarves can become increasingly cluttered with lists of different lineages of blood. It's annoying, and it doesn't make sense. I was glad to see that crap gone.

But the scattered items turned out to be an even bigger inconvenience. I figured it'd just be a matter of time before the dwarves put everything away... but the longer I watched them haul things, the less likely it seemed that they'd ever finish. There was just so much stuff. I don't know where it all came from! More importantly, I saw no way to easily get rid of it all. Shouldn't at least the wooden stuff rot away after a while? I don't think that happens, though. Cleaning up seemed to be a job for me alone. There was one big underground room that had a few huge piles of seeds in it--and I guess the seeds had originally been in bags, but they weren't anymore, and my dwarves knew no better than to make the long march downstairs, pick up one seed each, and carry it all the way back up to the food stockpile. What a bunch of idiots! It didn't slow me down too much, though. I could tell as many dwarves as I liked to stop being haulers.

So I kept working on the big pump system for the basement. And I finished it! The hole opened in the water, sure enough, and before long I had most of that floor drained, and the rest blocked off. One of the blockages I used was just an ordinary door, and not long after the flood had been contained, a kitten wandered into the basement and opened that door. Water gushed out, and the kitten got scared and ran! It was cute. Then the door closed on the impending flood, stopping it again. Doors are magical.

Of course the floor where the water had been was muddy, because all water is muddy--and to my surprise, fungal trees began growing on it! I guess the game simulates the spread of spores from natural caverns, or something, and so once you've opened one of those, your whole fortress becomes hospitable to underground trees, wherever there happens to be mud for them to take root in. I was glad about this, because I always needed more wood! I decided to open and flood a much, much larger room a floor or two below, and let that be a new mushroomy tree farm as well. So most of the dwarves who weren't hauling began work on that.

But of course I needed a militia as well, to prevent another collapse. The military menus didn't seem to present a nice starting point for this, so I turned to the wiki, which helpfully told me: "While far more confusing than before, the new military system makes up for its initial impenetrability with a huge increase in versatility." You know a UI is badly designed when even the Dwarf Fortress wiki calls it impenetrable! But actually I didn't have much trouble creating my first two military squads. It looks hard: "To apply your preset uniform templates, press U in the equipment tab to open the Assign Uniforms sub-tab and move the selector to the Position Uniform header. Pressing enter will apply the selected uniform to the individual dwarf of your choosing, and shift+enter will apply the selected uniform to the entire squad." But once I'd puzzled out that menu's unique layout and keyboard command set, I quickly became comfortable with it. I put a lot of dwarves into the squads, and told them all to wear metal armor, even though I didn't have a forge for anything metal or even know how to use one. I figured I could look at a few soldiers later on, to see whether they'd actually found anything to wear. If there was an easier way to see how much of each kind of equipment was available, then it must not have been easy to find, because I didn't know about it. :(

Before long, the goblins came. Naturally I didn't know how to tell my squads to attack them. According to the wiki: "Getting your military to actually do something is a lot more difficult than it once was; gone are the days of stationing a squad near the enemy and hoping for the best." Oh. :( As it turns out, you can give each squad a target, such as a single enemy. I gave fifteen dwarves the task of killing Ngbz Gzrsmtsp and Ngsl Olngosld, goblin pikemen. They sallied into the crowd of invaders and began doing... something. I couldn't see what. It looked like some dwarves reached the goblins, but both goblins and dwarves were spread out, and it was hard to tell where the main fight was, or whether there was even a fight. Well, I guess there was a fight, because some dwarves started to die. I knew this from my announcement listing, but not from the actual view of the world! In that view, all I saw was dwarves and goblins walking around. More and more of my dwarves were dying, but were they killing the goblins? I lost twelve of my fifteen soldiers and I still didn't know whether even a single goblin had been defeated! That is how much this game hates letting you perceive anything dramatic. It looked like the goblins were doing pretty well, anyway. By the time they reached the doors of the fortress, there was almost nothing left to stop them, except for my lines of traps.

The traps did okay though! One pine-green, short-nosed goblin had her left ribs broken--both false and true! Didn't get the right ones though. >:( Other goblins were similarly battered. Their bodies clogged my trap-riddled hallways. But enough came through to trigger all the traps, and after that I had no more defenses, except for the natural fickleness of goblins who have just won control of a fortress. Inside, the usual scenes of catastrophe were evident. A child went insane. A badly wounded donkey wandered near rows of coffins. The large caves beneath my lowest rooms were commandeered for use as a huge new corpse stockpile. And, in time, the goblins drifted away.

I turned to the wiki for help. AND SURE ENOUGH: Soldiers need to be trained! I had not trained my soldiers. (Also, I never really determined whether they'd found any weapons or armor.) Once my fortress became stable again, I made a new set of squads, and set them up with training schedules. And they actually seemed to follow them, sometimes! Also, I repaired my traps. When the next goblin invasion began, I was ready! I sent out my new soldiers, and the goblins immediately killed them all. Then they fought their way into the fortress, again, and pretty much took over. These are the most basic kind of invader, I guess--they should be killable without a huge hassle! Must I lose my ENTIRE FORTRESS just because my soldiers happen to lack armor? Dwarves are tough, they should be able to kill at least a few goblins without perfect preparation! But goblins ruined me every time, except when I simply shut them out.

When the latest invasion finally dispersed, it left only one dwarf alive: a miner who had mysteriously and fortuitously decided that she was never going to leave the lowest basement. That dwarf was my only hope. She would be my civilization, until a new set of migrants arrived! But she seemed to prefer starvation and thirst. I gave her different jobs, some of which could only be pursued upstairs (where the food and water were), but she continued to loiter in the basement. I changed the "alert level" so as to declare that all civilians were to remain near the dining room, but her response was only to refuse to take any jobs, including her previous "job" of scavenging for vermin, that were based outside that area. She wouldn't budge! I declared her to be the new commander of the militia, and placed her in a squad. Then I ordered her squad to move to the dining room. She did not obey. And she still had nothing to drink. Collapse was imminent.

The wiki's page on "Losing" says:

"Losing is fun!

Either way, it keeps you busy.

There is no internal end point, single goal, final Easter egg or 'You Win!' announcement in Dwarf Fortress. Therefore, eventually, almost every fortress will fall. The only ones that don't tend to be very conservative and very boring—and what fun is that? Therefore, DF = losing /\ DF = fun => losing = fun, and that's okay! It's a game philosophy, so embrace it, own it, and have fun with it!"

I like the "losing = fun" idea! It's the "DF = fun" premise that I'm uncertain about. :(