Caltrops - Dwarf Fortress - Re: I played some more

Forum Overview :: Dwarf Fortress

by Bananadine 02/15/2011, 6:54pm PST

Bananadine wrote:

Collapse was imminent.

Some migrants came and then everything was better again.

After having my fortress wrecked twice by seemingly not very powerful goblins, I was on the verge of giving up yet again. I knew the goblins would keep coming. Obviously I could beat them by making squads of genuinely good soldiers, but the training system, equipment system, and combat system all seemed so tedious and unrewarding that to embrace them would be to give up on the idea of having fun while playing. So far I'd only encountered one defensive method that appeared to be fully reliable: blocking enemies out with walls and with sheer-walled trenches. I knew of no enemy that could get past these. I figured I'd eventually run into a flying dragon or something, and it'd fly over my trenches and wreck everything and then I'd really have to give up for good. But maybe I'd find some cool new things in the caverns before then. Magma, at least. I wanted to pump some magma from one place to another!

So I walled off my fortress from most of the outdoors, and began building big pits, covered by lever-operated trapdoors, in the middle of my most important underground hallways. And I kept working on a big underground tree farm, and otherwise preparing my dwarves to move indoors permanently. When the next goblin attack began, I locked the single door separating the fortress' entryway courtyard from the wilderness, and opened a trapdoor next to it too. I knew they could bust down the door, but the pit would still stop them. Archers gathered on the mountaintop above the entrance and harassed any dwarves who tried to pick up stuff in the courtyard (where, as everywhere else, piles of items were still randomly scattered), and some of these dwarves fell. Then some more dwarves went to pick up the corpses or something, and they got shot down too. But I put a stop to that--it's pretty easy to get dwarves to STOP doing things!--and then the fortress was safe!

But I guess this was a "siege" rather than an "ambush", or something like that. I forget the exact terms. Anyhow there were trolls this time. And the goblins even had a few hunting beasts with them. One of these, a voracious cave crawler, turned out to be amphibious. And I hadn't given any thought to the fortification of my plumbing. I guess that's how the next disaster began.

I didn't actually see it. I just happened to notice at some point that the aqueduct that formed one of the courtyard's walls was full of monsters. It may be that some of the creatures there, maybe the cave crawlers or the trolls, had opened the waterway by breaking through a wall, though I'd thought that was impossible. Or maybe they just climbed up through the pump system somehow. At any rate, they got as far as a floodgate, and that was far enough to end my hopes of surviving this attack, because floodgates are a lot like doors and I'd seen goblins break down doors. Soon the entrance hall would be breached. I frantically ordered the dwarves to cut out the floor around the top of the main staircase, so as to protect the lower levels from any monsters unable to climb (presumably all of them). But the dwarves were too slow. Soon the monsters broke through and began destroying everything. They reached the stairs and killed the workers there, and that was the end. That fortress collapsed, for the last time. And some of my walls, it turned out, had after all been breached.

WELL, there were still natural walls. I started a new fortress, this time in a perfectly flat desert with an aquifer beneath it. I wanted to dig a single, narrow tunnel into the ground, start a self-sufficient colony at the end of it, and then cut out its floor so that it could no longer be used, except by fliers (or climbers, if any such thing existed). Maybe I'd dump an endless waterfall from the aquifer down the middle of the pit, too, so that any fliers crossing it would also need to be swimmers. The aquifer would serve as my water source, safe from any amphibians because it'd start from a dead end touching an aquifer tile! I'd just have to make sure that all my defensive walls were dug out of natural stone, not built. And then I'd be safe from goblins and their beasts. And if anything dangerous came from below, I'd try to block it off with pits or destroy it with cave-ins, which, according to the wiki, can instantly kill absolutely anything in the game, even ancient dragons and magical colossi made of metal! Which is stupid, but whatever.

Then I found out how hard it was to dig through an aquifer. In my last area, there'd been irregular blobs of aquifer tiles. But in this one, there was a whole floor of it, a few levels beneath the sand. I spent an hour or two painstakingly cutting out a big chunk of desert that was supported by only one pillar at its edge, directly above an exposed, aquifer-fed pool below. I thought that dropping the land into the pool would destroy the water there and replace it with a new, dry plug (while also probably killing whatever dwarf happened to cut the pillar). And that's exactly what happened. A dwarf went in with a pickaxe, and suddenly the desert had a big hole in it, and my population was a little smaller. After the dust cleared I sent a miner in to cut out the centermost tile of the new ground where the pool had been, and--success! The new hole didn't fill with water.

Then I cut into the next layer down, and water rushed in. The aquifer was at least two layers thick. And the hole in the lower layer was too small to accept a plug big enough to dig a dry tunnel through. I knew I could make a bigger plug at the upper level, so as to support a smaller but still tunnel-friendly one through the lower level, and thereby find out at great cost whether there was a third layer of aquifer. I knew I could start another fortress in another area that might be less evenly aquifer'd. But that all seemed like work. Instead, I gave up. I'd had all the fun the game would allow me.

I still wanted to know what was at the bottom of the world. I figured it was probably just a boring layer of impenetrable rock like in Minecraft, with some extra-strong monsters hanging around. But I checked in the wiki anyway, and read all the spoilers I could find. And according to the wiki... there is no clear bottom to the world. There's a barrier of some kind, but it's a soft one made up of strange and surprising dangers, rather than a simple, impenetrable wall, and if there's an ultimate barrier somewhere beyond that, which there surely is, then the wiki authors didn't know enough about it to describe it. Which is cool! But alas, I only get to read about it.

Shredder wrote:

This would basically be the greatest game ever made with a manageable user interface. It's not open source, is it?

It doesn't appear to be. It seems to be highly moddable, though. If you look at Bravemule you'll see a friendly 3D-ish graphics engine, for instance. And there's the aforementioned Dwarf Therapist, which impressed me with its ability to casually link to a running instance of Dwarf Fortress and mess around with your dwarves' job settings. You don't even have to pause your game, it just hacks right in! And I tried some suite of game-altering tools called DFHack or something like that, once, because I wanted to just get rid of all the goddamned blood that was everywhere (I was afraid it was hurting my framerate), and that one also worked with a conspicuous lack of configuration. I just ran a simple command or two and switched back to the game window, and the blood was gone! I think the tool even reached into the game and paused the simulation on its own! It's crazy.

Now, if I made something that didn't work right until other people had hacked together some essential tools to awkwardly bolt onto it (the ones I mention above cooperated with Dwarf Fortress almost seamlessly, but it's still much more awkward to use two programs, each with its own distinctive UI, than to use only one), then I would feel badly. But I guess this is standard practice in the world of Dwarf Fortress. You play with the punishingly unfinished game, and you get your butt kicked, and it's a huge hassle, and you like it, and if you're a programmer then you demonstrate your interest by adding some painfully lacking feature to it yourself! This is the behavior... of Linux people! People who think command lines are better than GUIs. Of course they can handle the Dwarf Fortress UI! If an interface lets you do what you need to do at all then it's friendly, and if it doesn't then it isn't--unless you can make your own tool to fill in the gap, and in that case it's friendly again! These are not normal people who think fun is fun. They need to be forced to determinedly manipulate trivial but hard-to-discover details in time-consuming ways, before they can enjoy themselves. As the wiki helpfully illustrates: http://df.magmawiki.com/images/4/40/FunComic.png

What that comic leaves out, I think, is that no matter how beyond-hardcore you think you might become by successfully playing Dwarf Fortress, you're still gonna be a whole stratum of hardcoreness beneath the guy who wrote Dwarf Fortress. Or anybody else who carves out big, bleeding, previously unknown hearts of fun in spite of how the world in which they operate frequently hurts them in unexpected and unfair ways. Why does a Dwarf Fortress devotee need to enter a simulation in order to be severely punished for trying to succeed? Isn't that easy enough to do already? I don't get it, but more power to them I guess, except when they're being all uppity about how their game is better than your game because it hates the player more!