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Author Topic: Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?  (Read 1158 times)

Arkansan

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Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
« on: August 03, 2013, 08:20:26 PM »
Just curious, I have been dumping a decent amount of time in it lately. Took me a few tries to get past the learning curve, but it is a pretty neat game once you get past that. The adventure mode is cool too, gotta love a game where you can throw a shoe so hard it causes an opponents skull to explode.

talysman

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Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
« Reply #1 on: August 03, 2013, 10:24:50 PM »
I mostly play fortress mode. I try adventure mode every once in a while, but usually there's something horribly missing... like I find monsters before I can find a reasonable weapon, or find all sorts of weapons but no food, water, or animals.

Unfortunately, my computer is old and is desperately in need of replacing, so fortress mode tends to get bogged down before I get everything finished that I want finished. It even gets too slow to wait for unstoppable enemies to finish slaughtering everyon. So I tend to start new fortresses a lot.

Arkansan

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Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
« Reply #2 on: August 03, 2013, 10:57:54 PM »
Yeah DF suffers from a nasty case of frame rate death if there is too much going on. I actually started off playing adventure and ended up playing fort mode much later. Once you get a grove going adventure mode gets better. My usual approach is to find a fortress as they always have armor laying around that seems to cause no penalty for lifting, stick near rivers for water and easy food kills. Also for the love of god always go for archers first in a fight, nothing sucks like building up a badass only to get one shoted by some piss-ant bandit with a bow or crossbow.

I have a hard time getting a decent military going in fort mode. I do well to survive the first siege. Also I only ever find fucking copper, goblin weapons cut right through that shit if they are basically anything but copper.

Imp

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Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
« Reply #3 on: August 04, 2013, 12:00:54 AM »
Yeah, I've played a good amount of DF though I've been on break from it for six months or so.

Getting defenses up before the first attacks hit is really the main challenge of fortress mode. A good, cheap defense to start with is weapon traps each loaded with several spiked wooden balls. These do a decent enough job on goblins. Use the copper for maces, hammers, crossbows, and shields, skip armor for the time being, and make your military hit the goblins after most of them are hurt from the weapon traps. That should be enough to defend your fortress for now.

There are other ways to construct even more foolproof defenses, but they are less fun.

Doom

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Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
« Reply #4 on: August 04, 2013, 01:18:58 AM »
I turn my fortress into a trap monster, setting up killing zones that grind up goblins by the horde.

I never have any luck with the military, every once in a blue moon I'll get a guy who can use a bow or a sword or something, but I never have been able to figure out the stupid-complicated training and army system. I wish the programmer would just do something simple and be done with it, instead of warping to different too-complicated military rules with each iteration.
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talysman

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Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
« Reply #5 on: August 04, 2013, 01:30:22 PM »
Yeah, I haven't really gotten the military going. I can generally put together a squad or two, but I seem to have a problem getting them to use the weapons they are supposed to. I keep having marksdwarves trying to wrestle goblins.

I do more traps than military. I really like serrated green glass disks. If I'm lucky enough to find a volcano, I can make a bunch of those quickly *and* set up a magma trap. If the leader of a siege gets killed by a trap early on, the rest of the goblins seem to give up and leave.

Also, sometimes the elves bring tamed, dangerous animal to trade. Whenever possible, I snag something like a jaguar and post it as a guard at the main fortress interest, to stop thieves and snatchers.

KenHR

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Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
« Reply #6 on: August 10, 2013, 06:17:53 PM »
Love it, love it, love it.  I've played it since there was no z-level.  Despite that I'm no expert at the game.

I've donated a few hundred bucks to Tarn over the years in appreciation for the hours upon hours of fun and obsession.  Mrs HR enjoys watching forts-in-progress at times, too.
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Arkansan

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Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
« Reply #7 on: August 10, 2013, 07:00:22 PM »
My wife enjoys watching forts in progress as well. She enjoys watching video games in general but finds DF particularly interesting, she has even fired up adventure mode a few times herself.

talysman

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« Reply #8 on: August 10, 2013, 07:28:02 PM »
I'm a new convert to the DF Hack add-on. In particular, some of the new gui enhancements: planning mode, the guis for autobutcher and workflow manager, and the in-game equivalent to Dwarf Therapist. Makes everything a hell of a lot easier. Also, the auto vein mining feature is great, too.

I had a fatal error in the game recently and opted to move all my saves out and start new worlds/fortresses. Tried out actual mine cart routes (instead of the quantum mine cart routes) and got the hang of that. For the first time, I'm trying out steel production; I usually just stick with iron. One thing I can't seem to automate is coke production; not sure why. I guess I just have to occasionally queue up a repeating task at the smelter.

Daztur

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Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
« Reply #9 on: August 13, 2013, 03:59:28 AM »
Don't have the brain for the actual game but am going to run a D&D campaign inspired by the Boatmurdered DF let's play starting next month, should be fun...