Anyone play Dwarf Fortress?

[Mondkalb]

To prevent killings, some players place their workshops in little rooms which can easily be bricked up. So, in possessed mood cases where demands can't be fullfilled, it's time for the Amontillado Treatment.

Oh, and don't forget to bury your dead or make slabs. You don't want your fortress be haunted by ghosts.

[LostTemplar]

Slabs, yes, third most important thing after bees and golden roads, make a lot of them in advance, it is a good way to use extra stone.

[Patashu]

DF related - I have a friend who regularly livestreams Dwarf Fortress with commentary and chat interaction at http://www.twitch.tv/viewtifulrexx .

Schedule: "I currently stream Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 9 PM to 1 AM Eastern Standard Time."

[buzzkill]

My fortress continues. Lost a ton of progress due to a computer crash and it took me a while to get back into it. Seriously thought about abandoning the game a starting fresh but in the end I just hacked my way back into it. Doing a lot of above ground fortification now. Still haven't quite figured trading out, but I am learning what doesn't work. Yes, I read the wiki, and then I "Offered" up all my trade goods, and then I realized what I had done. Oh well, there's always next year.

Is the DF UI intentionally bad, to discourage casual players, or has it just NEVER EVER been refined at all? In some instances it's almost as if it was written be someone with a limited comprehension of the English language, or minimalist de-bugging type language. I'd think that clarifying many of the prompts would be a simple as rewriting a single line of code. I can't imagine why some things haven't been cleaned up.

Dwarf Therapist question. Is there a way to freeze the first column, the names, so they don't scroll off the screen when scrolling to the right. Also, is there a way to lock the order of the names so they are the ordered the same on every tab (the most recent sorting)? DT seems to do this somewhat, usually the first few names are the same, but then it gets funky. I can't find an option to set to fix this.

[Derakon]

Is the DF UI intentionally bad, to discourage casual players, or has it just NEVER EVER been refined at all? In some instances it's almost as if it was written be someone with a limited comprehension of the English language, or minimalist de-bugging type language. I'd think that clarifying many of the prompts would be a simple as rewriting a single line of code. I can't imagine why some things haven't been cleaned up.

As I understand it, the creator basically only ever implements the bare minimum to get the new functionality to be "usable", because the stuff he finds most interesting is the underlying model, and he doesn't actually care much about playing the resulting game. For the longest time you could only build walls and floors and so on one tile at a time, for example. Imagine constructing a huge fortification that way; you'd get RSI in no time.

[LostTemplar]

Is the DF UI intentionally bad

I find it very good actually, no junk text, etc. You have to learn it, but it is not bad at all.

And walls you can build 10 tiles at time, 100 for floors.

[Patashu]

Another reason why the UI is bare bones is because the game is constantly evolving and being developed. If he made a perfect, polished, optimized for the current state of the game UI, it would have to be torn open and rethought with every major new change.

[Derakon]

And walls you can build 10 tiles at time, 100 for floors.

You can, now; you didn't use to be able to. It took a massive hue and cry from the community to get him to implement the change.

[krazyhades]

I too play advanced levels of DF. Never played with Masterwork.

[NotMorgoth]

I used to enjoy playing earlier versions of this game, but for reasons that are too long to go into here I think the combat system in the current version is fundamentally broken and it annoys me so much I can't play it any more.

I do still sometimes generate worlds just to read the "legends mode" where you can see all the names and descriptions of the various monsters and civilisations etc. (The Violent Council of Breakfast still makes me laugh...)

[fph]

I used to enjoy playing earlier versions of this game, but for reasons that are too long to go into here I think the combat system in the current version is fundamentally broken and it annoys me so much I can't play it any more.

You mean in Fortress mode, Adventure mode, or both?

[NotMorgoth]

Never really played adventure mode (too grindy) but I'm not aware of any major differences between how combat works between modes, so probably both.

[Nivim]

You might say the reasons are too long to go into here, but I would still like to hear them. Last time I played a game it seemed that things still got killed or maimed enough, and any overwhelming losses or victories made sense.

[buzzkill]

It may be worth noting that I ended up abandoning my first and only fortress. Things were moving along OK, I had a pretty good grip on the interface. If I had to put it in a nut shell, I'd say the more dwarves that I had as whole, the less I cared about any of them individually. I enjoyed playing DF (to a point). Maybe I'll play again, but then again, maybe not. I never did figure out how to trade, just how to give all my trade goods away.

[NotMorgoth]

You might say the reasons are too long to go into here, but I would still like to hear them. Last time I played a game it seemed that things still got killed or maimed enough, and any overwhelming losses or victories made sense.

OK, I'll try to explain as briefly as possible.

Old system: Used fairly typical "numbers-based" combat - e.g. a battle axe has a damage rating of 120, plate armour has protection rating of 70, (or whatever.) This was then modified by things like material values, craftsmanship, and skill.

New system: Based on giving different metals and materials "realistic" properties like hardness, tensile strength and density. Nice idea in theory, but it's implemented in such a half-arsed way that it bugs the hell out of me. Just as an example, the hardness of a piece of armour largely determines its protective value, but the system takes no account of the thickness of the armour. Similarly, all hammers swing at the same speed regardless of their weight

In gameplay terms, this has some pretty absurd results. For example, a steel sword almost completely ignores armour made of weaker materials, cutting through it as if it did not exist, but if you have an iron sword, it is impossible to do any damage, ever, to someone in steel armour. (Except when you get a lucky blow that hits your opponents teeth or eyelids or something that armour does not cover.)

I really think that if there is going to be a combat system based on real-world physics, then the model has to include a lot more than just one or two properties of materials, and I suspect that if he ever tried to implement such a system properly, it would be beyond the capability of most computers to run it.