If you are the kind of person who enjoys this sort of idea idea, and you have two hours free and want to laugh so hard you cry, go get a warm beverage then put "Boatmurdered" into the Googles. Short version: there are few games where the physics engine allows you to unleash Biblical disasters as emergent behavior and have it be a viable strategy.
* Orbital Magma Cannon - Build a roof over the world, with hatches remote controlled by levers every few squares. Pump magma up there. When enemies come, use your lever to open the hatch above them and drop magma on their heads.
* Sacrificial Trade Depot - Don't know what to do with all your caged goblin prisoners? Tired of waiting for your dwarves to take their stuff one sock at a time? Build a tower above your Trade Depot, then drop prisoners onto the depot. They die from the fall and all their goods are ready to trade. You may want to at least take their weapons first / station some nearby military to clean up any survivors.
* Underwater Depot: A great combination with the sacrificial depot is to create a drowning trap at the Trade Depot. If you make sure to have a hatch to close the top (and another hatch at the bottom to drain things, both with remote control levers), you can drown anyone or thing that goes into the depot. Including, say, the elven traders. Their caravans get a little too snobbish over the trees you cut down, anyhow and this way you can get all their stuff.
Random thoughts / snippets / whatever while reading through it:
17th Malachite, 1052: A farmer tried to organize a party in the statue garden when everyone needed to be working, so I locked the bastard in there. I hope he enjoys partying alone.
I've had little sleep in the past two days, and must retire for tonight. I have quite a bit of work to do in the upcoming season, mainly outfitting our soldiers with steel equipment, setting up improved magma crafting centers, and managing our food supply. I hope that the coming summer proves to be favorable to Boatmurdered.
Keyboard Fox posted:
Dude! We have FIVE METRIC FUCKTONS of prepared food! We're not low on food!
Locus posted:
Oh. Prepared food? So these are some kind of dainty fancypants dwarves that don't sit in the dark and gnaw on cold mushrooms?
That seems undwarflike.
TouretteDog posted:
It's dwarf bread, man. The cat peed on it, and it doubles as a lethal throwing weapon.
I'm trying to read through it, but it looks like gibberish.
It's a succession playthrough of a game called Dwarf Fortress. It's something of a city simulation and has been cited as part of the inspiration for Minecraft. You start by generating a world based on some parameters for climate, geology, etc. Then you pick a location in the generated world and embark with seven dwarves (spending points on their starting skills and equipment) to establish a fortress there. You build up your fortress to sustain and defend itself, attract immigrants, trade with the outside world, or whatever in-game project you decide to undertake (people have also devised logical circuits in Dwarf Fortress and used them to construct small computers).
Do players really build all that, or does the ingame AI make those decisions?
The player issues work orders, which are then claimed and fulfilled by individual dwarves. So where to dig and where to build various things is player-directed, though the dwarves may have a bit of leeway as to how and when they do it.
That seems undwarflike.
Every world is different, so there aren't truly any universal characters, but the community (probably with some help from the developer) has more or less decided on the personality of the generic dwarf based on their behavior in game.
> Do players really build all that, or does the ingame AI make those decisions?
The AI controls the dwarves, the players issue directions. The ASCII is a bit hard to read, but there are plenty of graphical tile packs. I like Phoebus right now, but Mayday & Ironhand's graphics are also nice. Look for something called the "Lazy Newbie Pack" and then at the tutorial threads if you ever want to get started.
Also, you can lock doors and such. It won't stop building destroyers or thieves (kobolds), but everyone else will just sort of walk up to it and wonder what to do. Dwarves can only destroy doors and other stuff when they go crazy, which tends to happen if they're unhappy enough.
> Jeez, the fortresses can become pretty massive.
Actually, that's pretty small, these days. This was also done on an old version that had maybe 40 levels to dig through. New ones are more like 200 unless you change settings. Oh, and there's a magma sea at the bottom. Magma is very Fun(TM) so more than a few players (including me) have constructed gigantic pump stacks with ~100 iron pumps powered by perpetual motion devices that pump magma up near the surface where it can be used for traps / forges / Fun(TM).
That game is a succession game (everyone plays for one year, taking over for the last person, so they may be surprised ... and appalled ... at how people before them have been running the fortress).
The comment about dwarf bread being a lethal throwing weapon is, sadly, true. But everything is (was?) a lethal throwing weapon: the throwing skill was completely broken. You could throw anything (and I mean anything) that you could actually hold at someone and have it be deadly once you had enough throwing skill.
Anyhow, the jokes get a lot funnier when you understand how the game is played. For example, there once was a weaponsmith who ran outside to grab a sock someone had dropped outside. He got ambushed by a kobold who had a copper knife. The kobold attacked him and cut his finger a tiny bit, then ran away. The weaponsmith hobbled back to the fortress, making a big deal about his minor injury. Then he decided to faint from the pain while on one of the weapon traps near the entrance. Normally, dwarves can walk over their own traps just fine. But if you faint? You get chopped to bits by the trap. At least he's not in pain now. I set up a coffin for him.
As for the comments about the elephants, they used to be deadly (as were carp... yes, the fish... it's now an in joke). So he trapped one of the elephants who had been killing folks in a cage trap, then traded it to the humans. Due to yet another bug, any animal that had killed dwarves could be "tamed" and yet it would continue to attack dwarves who believed it to be "tame" even as it was killing them and who wouldn't fight back. So, that elephant they gave them was dangerous...
