40 replies to this topic

[Potatoe]

Eagle of Fire, on Jun 24 2007, 12:21 AM, said:

I only barely scratched the surface of this game... But so far, it's brilliant!  

Same here. It's wonderful to see your little dwarves work away. I'm starting to get the basic infrastructure of my fort working, but still a lot of work to do. Soon I will have it ready and then all I have to do is wait for the winter and get my food supply ready.

[Havell]

That's about my third or fourth fortress since I started playing.  I'm in about the 6th year there.  It doesn't take you too long to pick up tips and tricks from the game and build up your own, personal style of designing fortresses.

The adventure mode indeed is fun, mainly because it gives you a good look at the fantastic damage model in the game, where limbs can be hacked off and internal organs damaged.  When you get powerful, fun games include seeing if you can hack alll four limbs off an enemy before they die, and going into a village and horribly disabling everyone there, before leaving.  I like to hack a limb off everyone in the village, any more and they tend to bleed to death, once I get good at wrestling I'll try blinding everyone in a village.  That'll be fun.

EDIT:  With the stockpiles, I guess you mean stone stockpiles to handle the stone you get from mining.  I used to make stone stockpiles and have the stone moved out whiel i dug, but this fortress was the first one where I just let the stone sit there.  I think this was a good approach to take, as I was digging out a lot of space comapared to what i was previously (if you look at the amount I'm digging out in my fortress, you'll notice that it's actually a pretty huge proportion of the total space I'm using, I only really leave rock untouched in the walls to my rooms, whic hare only a single square wide).  Having lots of stone lying around doesn't slow your dwarves down or anything (to my knowledge).  The only stone stockpiles I built were next to my masonry and mechanics workshops and outside, next to my catapult.

[Potatoe]

Havell, on Jun 24 2007, 02:08 AM, said:

That's about my third or fourth fortress since I started playing.  I'm in about the 6th year there.  It doesn't take you too long to pick up tips and tricks from the game and build up your own, personal style of designing fortresses.

The adventure mode indeed is fun, mainly because it gives you a good look at the fantastic damage model in the game, where limbs can be hacked off and internal organs damaged.  When you get powerful, fun games include seeing if you can hack alll four limbs off an enemy before they die, and going into a village and horribly disabling everyone there, before leaving.  I like to hack a limb off everyone in the village, any more and they tend to bleed to death, once I get good at wrestling I'll try blinding everyone in a village.  That'll be fun.

EDIT:  With the stockpiles, I guess you mean stone stockpiles to handle the stone you get from mining.  I used to make stone stockpiles and have the stone moved out whiel i dug, but this fortress was the first one where I just let the stone sit there.  I think this was a good approach to take, as I was digging out a lot of space comapared to what i was previously (if you look at the amount I'm digging out in my fortress, you'll notice that it's actually a pretty huge proportion of the total space I'm using, I only really leave rock untouched in the walls to my rooms, whic hare only a single square wide).  Having lots of stone lying around doesn't slow your dwarves down or anything (to my knowledge).  The only stone stockpiles I built were next to my masonry and mechanics workshops and outside, next to my catapult.

How about first buildings? The basic workshops? I already put them inside the mountain though, and left lot's of room for traps. I'm thinking of a trap, that closes the room and floods it. Is that a good trap?

[Havell]

I tend to dig straight into the mountain at the start, and build workshops outside for the basic crafts, and start to produce some of the essentials while the fort is being dug out.  That includes two floodgates, five mechanisms and a door for farming, and seven beds for the dwarves.  They're deconstructed and rebuilt inside the mountain once I've dug out a place for them to go.

Traps are a great way of defending your fortress that saves on training and equiping soldiers.  I'd say the best sort are weapon traps, fileld with captured weapons from enemies (there's nothing else to do with them, really), obsidian swords (easy to make near the start, and they do loads of damage) and trap weapons (like large spinning serrated blades, they do lots of damage to enemies, though you need to be able to do metalworking quite well to get a decent amount of them).  That said, stone fall traps are very easy to produce, needing only a mechanism and a stone each, so it's possible to fill a whole corridor with them, and they're also a good way of using up excess stone.

More creative traps, made from playing around with pressure paltes and things, can be extremely effective.  Some players fill almost all the space between the cliff face and the river with an incredibly elaborate mechanism that kills attackers en masse.  While they look quite cool, they're not that practical, taking up loads of space, etc.  Also, if you're flooding areas of your fortress, there's a huge risk you'll flood the entire fortress, killing all your dwarves.  A slightly safer optino would be linking a pressure plate to a support, so the roof caves in on your enemy, but I'd still advise you to stick to normal traps, soldiers, and war dogs for your defence.

At the chasm, which is where I tend to get attacked from most, I put weapon traps around the edge, and I chained up war dogs as well, it's a very good defence, my soldiers haven't had to do any fighting there since it's building, and I can tell it's working because the area is always covered in blood.

[Potatoe]

Can I somehow give orders to dwarves, like don't go there? There seems to be an order for just making dwarves do certain tasks and don't go outside.

[Havell]

No, other than blocking off areas with doors, you can't keep dwarves away from certain areas.  Building quite a few doors is advisable in dangerous areas such as the underground river (which floods every year, washing away and drowning dwarves that are by the side of the river).  You can see on the picture of my fort that I've made it so that it's impossible to actaully get onto the riverbank from the bridge.

[Japofran]

This game is awesome, I played it some time ago and it was really engaging but I then lost interest at once. Lately I tend to be inable to play a complete game of any long videogame even when I like it. After much online help and wiki reading I had built a working colony, although I hadn't gone beyond the river. Then more dwarves arrived and they didn't fit in my plans, and my interest went away.

But I'll definitely give it another try some day. When will it come out of beta? I can't find the info in its site.

[RyGuy]

In game it says it is still Alpha by the way...

[Havell]

Seeing as the Alpha stage of developed is defined as when new things are being added to the game (as opposed to beta, when there is just bugfinding to be done), it'll probably be in alpha officially for quite a while yet.  Just take a look at the development pages of the site, there's an incredible amount planned, magic hasn't even started to be implemented yet, for example.  Neither has religion.

[Japofran]

By the looks of the game and its site, it won't ever get out of alpha since they will never stop coming up with new ideas, the game would sooner get discontinued. This is the most complicated game I've ever seen but it would seem that it could be eventually made too complicated even for my taste. Nah, what I like is that a lot of changes just enrich the dwarves' behaviour (read make it more deviant) and although they make your job harder they don't add new things to control. Magic is something the game does very well without IMO --it's just that I hate D&D settings.

But is it true that major changes to the alpha are coming up in a short time? Because since this is a neverending alpha (DOSBox is still alpha as well, mind you) it could be added to the site right away. I think that it meets the standards and it's way more original than most freeware games, heck it's one of the most original games in history, even though a lot of people won't like it. Besides the review doesn't have to get obsolete with new versions because it should be generic enough, that is a review not a manual.

[Havell]

Yeah, there's one of the most major advances in the game coming up.

Multiple levels are being added, and the ability to build a fortress on any land square on the world map.  Also, the mountain maps themselves are being given more variety (Check it out).

The implications of this are incredible, it'll be possible to start building in a field and just dig your fortress straight down.  You can have incredibly elaborate defence systems, with murder holes that archers can shoot through, and a magma plumbing system that can flood any part of the fort with lava in case of attack.  Also consider the possibilites of dwarves living above their workshops, and having a network of access tunnels running above the main transport system.  There's also other matters such as increased realism in where different mineral deposits are found, and wells having to reach the water table in order to work.  The possibilities are staggering.

There are a few more things being added as well, such as being able to zone areas of river that your dwarves go to to drink, gather sand, fish, etc (to reduce accidental drownings), and being able to build walls in your fort.

[Japofran]

COOL. That's what I wanted to know, thanks. I'm not playing this right now because I've got real life things to do and it's Panzer General the game I'm currently playing. If I started to play now this I couldn't get anything done, at least PG encourages you to rest once a battle is over. Maybe the new release will be out before I go back to this or maybe it will be delayed for ages...

[Eagle of Fire]

After a lot of trial and errors (finding and using The Dwarf Fortress Wiki helped a lot) and after roughly 6 tries, I managed turn in my first successfull fortress. It's only three years in tough, so there's a lot more for me to do... However, I'm confident that I've done roughly all I needed to do up to now, the rest should only be polishing and making sure my Dwarfs don't die from starvation... As long as I don't end up like their predecessor, with the whole map flooded to death.


Fortunatly, I know how to transfer a .bmp into a .jpg. There's only about 68 megs difference between the two.  

[Japofran]

Dunno if this should be in "Favourite Games" anyway but...

I finally gave in to temptation. I've just begun and I've only got the seven initial dwarves plus the metalsmith. I customized their initial skills, now my miner is legendary, he's faster than dynamite. As you can see I don't like doors and walls, there's no point in them, the workshops area is completely open, each 7x7 section can have a workshop and/or convenient stockpiles and one rock square to support the ceiling.

Click to enlarge

[Potatoe]

Japofran, on Jun 29 2007, 03:41 PM, said:

Dunno if this should be in "Favourite Games" anyway but...

I finally gave in to temptation. I've just begun and I've only got the seven initial dwarves plus the metalsmith. I customized their initial skills, now my miner is legendary, he's faster than dynamite. As you can see I don't like doors and walls, there's no point in them, the workshops area is completely open, each 7x7 section can have a workshop and/or convenient stockpiles and one rock square to support the ceiling.

Click to enlarge

That's going to be a hell to defend.