While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[qoou]

rofl.

My bathtub's water came from the local river. So naturally, the first time a dwarf decided to bathe himself of 2 years of grime, the evil tub almost drowned him. I had to wait a week before the water flow died down enough for me to force the doors closed, and worry about actually dealing with the bathtub later.

Ok so it is a world building game. Can you ever have more than 7 dwarves? What creates the "fun occurs" as the game advances? What creates the "!!FUN!! Occurs" later in the game?

It is a very, very, very, incredibly in-depth fortress-building game. You start with 7 dwarves, get migrants along the way (depending on things like wealth, proximity to dwarven civilization, hostility of locals, etc), lose dwarves in battle, and lose plenty of dwarves to accidents (or "accidents", as they may be).

The fun/!!FUN!! (note: those "!!" symbols are used to denote burning objects in-game; death due to magma pipes being miscalculated and accidentally lighting the booze stockpile on fire are not infrequent) is due to the incredibly immense depth of the game. You can get into a vast array of hilarious situations.

Dwarf A's kid throws Dwarf B's life work down a magma pipe to see if it floats, Dwarf B kicks the kid into the magma pipe, Dwarf A gets Dwarf B executed, the fortress dissolves into a huge brawl between the friends of the respective clans.

A greenhouse meant to make possible the growing of light-needing crops even while under siege by dozens of wolf-riding goblins, the result of 2 years of hard dwarven work, has a slight miscalculation that takes it a bit too close to a magma pipe, and after a week the glass ceiling suddenly melts, destroying all the planted fields, killing half of the farmers, and letting in the massive dragon that wants your gems.

You dig deep and greedily, spotting some veins of gold, when you suddenly find an eternally-burning Forgotten Beast. It kills your miners, it burns alive 5 of your swordsdwarves, but a shower of crossbow bolts takes it down. A week later you notice that the arms of the hammerdwarf that it put into the hospital just rotted off, and he's gradually bleeding to death (the doctors unable to do anything, because everytime they try to stitch him up, the stitched flesh just rots by the next day). Next thing you know, the entire hospital, then that entire wing of the fortress, is running around screaming with their arms slowly falling off. You manage to wall a small group of dwarves off, hoping to wait for the plague to die down, then rebuild. A week later you notice that the plumbing section is shared between the two sections of the fortress, but by that time your survivors start showing sign of the plague.

What actually happened to me yesterday, when I picked up DF for the first time in ~2 years: a zombie raven crushes Iggy's skull with its claws, before Iggy has a chance to put a helmet on. The survivors manage to drive off the ravens, fc losing motor function in the process, but then Iggy's corpse reanimates, and usee the sole warhammer in the fortress to make bloody messes of everyone else. He goes down in the legend books (in fact, I'll probably have a dwarf this current fortress that heard that story, and decides to engrave it on a wall).

 

[qoou]

What is the DF story line?

If that is an answer to my question, it is not very helpful, Iggy . Are there dwarves? Hobbits? Dragons? Is it an economic game or battle game?

The story line itself is randomly generated, against with lots of depth (and hence lots of CPU stress). The main civilizations are usually dwarves, elves (cannibal tree-huggers), goblins, and humans. Then you also have a ton of other stuff like kobold civilizations (they're too dumb to make tools/weapons themselves and subsist off stealing; once in a blue moon they can actually become the dominant group in world gen), Forgotten Beasts, necromancers, vampires, zombies, and of course, Hell (one of the reasons why digging too deep and too greedy is a bad idea). The cool thing is that the story line is incredibly detailed, and you can even have a look at the entire thing. It also impacts your individual game (this version more than previously), with migrants coming out of the history rather than out of thin air, historical wars and treaties continuing into your game, local baddies having a chance to show up and make life hell for you, etc. Sadly, I don't believe you can do a handful of things in Fortress Mode, like get necromancers, found colonies, or send invasion parties. You actually can in Adventure Mode though (at least the 1st and the 3rd).

 

[Birdjaguar]

Thanks. You get to name your citizens?

 

[qoou]

Thanks. You get to name your citizens?

Yup. Or, well, you get to give them nicknames. Pretty much the same thing, just that it wouldn't make sense to literally change the name of a 100-year old war hero.

 

[Tycho]

I'll have to look into your NES sometime, Starlife, see if it's a good fit or not.

 

[SouthernKing]

I haven't really been paying attention to this, so what's the difference between #nes and #neverending, and if I ever were to go on one which one should I go on?

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Personality conflict. Sign into both and see which you prefer. I spend my time in both.

 

[Terrance888]

#neverending. We have cookies. And Luckymoose.

More importantly, #nes have all the people who dislike/disliked by luckymoose, so as long as you prefer luckymoose compared to everyone but luckymoose, you'd do fine.

Also, we have nk. :3

 

[erez87]

#neverending. We have cookies. And Luckymoose.

More importantly, #nes have all the people who dislike/disliked by luckymoose, so as long as you prefer luckymoose compared to everyone but luckymoose, you'd do fine.

Also, we have nk. :3

So you're saying I should go straight to #nes ?

 

[Starlife]

I'll have to look into your NES sometime, Starlife, see if it's a good fit or not.

I'll be the first to admit that it's not particularly easy to join. I think the mistake people make, though, is that they feel they must absorb all of the worldbuilding prior to making a submission. It is perhaps better to just jump into the thick of everything and let it fold around you.

That said, the gameplay mechanics are simple and straightforward -- little to no learning curve there. And once all of the worldbuilding stuff has become canon, there is little else to do but play the NES and enjoy.

 

[thomas.berubeg]

I'll readily admit, Starlife, that it does seem very daunting, which is why I've been keeping away from it.

 

[Starlife]

I'll readily admit, Starlife, that it does seem very daunting, which is why I've been keeping away from it.

Well, I'm more than willing to assist anyone who has genuine interest.

 

[Tycho]

Like I said, I'll check into it and I've definitely added it onto the list of NES's I will be watching, if not joining at the very least. It does seem very interesting and a great concept.

 

[qoou]

Prompted by Thlayli.

"Ground level" is level 166. It's where my wagon showed up. It contains a bunch of refuse piles, an open-air chicken coop with a couple of dozen hens in it, the butcher and milker's shops, the manager's room, and a trade depot. The depot is currently housing a dwarven caravan. Most importantly, it contains stairs. The only way up in fact (I removed all other ways) is through the central staircase.

One level up, level 167, holds nothing that interesting. It has the corridor that connects the fortress with the mountain on top of it (splayed with goblin guts of course), guarded by war dogs (that are busy rolling around in their friends' guts).

One level down, level 165, is the actual ground level. It holds the sheep pasture, stockpiles of useless stones that give the peasants something to move back and forth, and the most useless moat ever. You might notice, if you're familiar with the game, that it's frozen over. Holy what is that N on the bridge, that looks like a zombie, oh god why didn't the game say anything, . Ok... it turns out it's a guy that went missing 1.5 years ago and now came back as a ghost.

Inside the actual fortress though, ground level holds the dining room along with every non-animal related workshop. There's an entire clothing industry running non-stop (I may have to double up on some workshops), furnaces have been melting all the iron junk I can find to make into steel armor, and the poor mason is up to his neck in door/cabinet/chest requests.

Level 164 has the farm, the pantry, and associated stockpiles under every workshop. Level 163 has the massive, ever-expanding bedroom complex. 162 holds the barracks, the noble quarters (what a cluster of engravings), and the hospital with a badly-designed dwarven tub around it. 161 has the jail (currently drenched in grasshoperwoman blood), the catacombs, and soon the mausoleum. The main staircase under that got flooded by the dwarven tub a few years back, and I haven't bothered to try to drain it safely.

And in the lower-right corner of the map is my exploratory mining (which actually managed to find iron ore recently). The first few levels were abandoned after a goblin ambush showed up and massacred everyone inside. I then dug a tunnel from the main fortress, under the river, and got rid of the stairs so goblins wouldn't be able to get to me in the future. Now that I think of it, that actually made a perfect access pipe into the fortress for the first dragon that comes by.

 

[Thlayli]

I forbid the export of malachite bracelets, on punishment of hammering.

 

[qoou]

As soon as you came into office, you banned the export of any bucklers whatsoever. Over the past few months you've proceeded to order the production of several dozen bucklers of varied materials.

 

[Thlayli]

A well buckled fortress is what sets us apart from barbaric goblins and effeminate elves.

*twitch*

 

[Birdjaguar]

Moderator Action: I will be attending a conference in Phoenix Wednesday through Friday and I am not sure I will have any time to check in here. While I'm away, please behave. Keep all the nastiness in chat. Thanks.

Spoiler :

Lucky, that means you too!

 

[Angst]

FREE HUGS FoaR EVERYBODY

 

[Crezth]

I'd like to schedule a paneled discussion to occur in While We Wait for the Wednesday through Friday period. Discussion topics will include:

• Why the Holocaust was necessary or, On the Merits of National Socialist Apologism
• Fire-walling Based on Ethnicity or, Is It Ethically Wrong to Technologically Exclude Brazilians From the World Wide Web?
• The "Third Way" in the Abortion Debate or, "Pro-baby-killing, anti-women's choice"
• Can Demographic Models Accurately Replicate the Behavioral Oddities Present in the NESing Subforum? or, Why are NESers all whiny Losers?
• Handling TV Censorship Appropriately or, Banning All-Ages Programming, Mandating Prime-Time Pornography
• Are video games the sole and only cause of society's ills? or, "Would you rather save a billion lives, or allow people to indulge in murder-simulators?"
• And many more!

I don't know how to finish this joke and it kind of sucks so I'm going to hit the "Post Quick Reply" button now.