Ok, I’ve downloaded and played it. Absolutely mindblowing! The learning curve is through the roof and there is just so much of it to learn. It simulates just about everything a dwarven world should have. The development of a single individual citizen is far more complex than most roleplaying games have for their protagonist—even down to getting attached to a specific weapon (object, not class!)
The way the community defines ‘Fun’ is amusing too. It seems to involve the forcible discovering new ways to be utterly obliterated. Unfortunately I haven’t had much ‘fun’ yet even with a respectable civilization going along. But that’s because I did a lot of research on the low to mid skill level risks and worked damn hard to prevent them—quite a challenge and fun in itself.
I play this. It’s definitely a game where having a rationality-focused outlook is helpful, and my impression is that it’s useful for learning rationality as well.
Dwarf Fortress is in some ways a ridiculously complicated game, and it’s also an alpha and thus buggy. It’s not always easy to determine what’s a poorly-communicated feature and what’s a bug. Experimentation (or ‼SCIENCE‼, as it’s often called on the forums) is useful in figuring out the difference. Quirks tend to be more emergent than arbitrary, so while there’s a degree of password-guessing, doing so is not nearly as useful as it is in some games. Also, the traits that the quirks emerge from are not always immediately obvious (and in rare cases, not communicated at all without third-party software), so part of the process is figuring out which things are even relevant factors at all.
It also supports a wide range of play styles, including ones that involve doing very little experimentation at all. I don’t recommend it, though, for anyone who has significant trouble imagining things in three dimensions or parsing dense fields of symbols.
I strongly recomend the lazy newb pack to anyone who’s interested in the game—it bundles the basic software with several extremely useful third-party utilities, including Dwarf Therapist, which is essentially necessary to play a fort with more than 40 or 50 dwarves in it.
It’s got a bunch of really fascinating things going with it, but the whole is kinda broken no matter which way you look at it. As a strategy game, it’s chock full of trivial dominant strategies, mostly involving walling off areas, that will turn threats into non-issues, and last I checked the endgame is now unwinnable and slows the game enough to be unplayable in the 2010 version. As a sandbox dollhouse, it drowns you in details of whether the dwarves are wearing socks and what type of wood you want a caravan to bring, and the poor interface makes dealing with this progressively worse as the fortress grows. As a Minecraft-style architecture game, it really needs an integrated 3D visualizer, but you need to resort to clumsy third-party ones.
It really shines at making it fun when your dwarves keep getting mauled and killed in new and innovative ways though.
A lot of the Fun of playing DF for me (years ago) was actually player vs. control system. Trust me, you have plenty of fun to derive from the game before you’re able to successfully implement such a strategy, and I’m not entirely sure how unbeatable they are these days.
Slaves to Armok: God of Blood
Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress
Download here: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Description: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DwarfFortress
Ok, I’ve downloaded and played it. Absolutely mindblowing! The learning curve is through the roof and there is just so much of it to learn. It simulates just about everything a dwarven world should have. The development of a single individual citizen is far more complex than most roleplaying games have for their protagonist—even down to getting attached to a specific weapon (object, not class!)
The way the community defines ‘Fun’ is amusing too. It seems to involve the forcible discovering new ways to be utterly obliterated. Unfortunately I haven’t had much ‘fun’ yet even with a respectable civilization going along. But that’s because I did a lot of research on the low to mid skill level risks and worked damn hard to prevent them—quite a challenge and fun in itself.
… looks like me posting this here put of the singularity by a number of hours...
I play this. It’s definitely a game where having a rationality-focused outlook is helpful, and my impression is that it’s useful for learning rationality as well.
Dwarf Fortress is in some ways a ridiculously complicated game, and it’s also an alpha and thus buggy. It’s not always easy to determine what’s a poorly-communicated feature and what’s a bug. Experimentation (or ‼SCIENCE‼, as it’s often called on the forums) is useful in figuring out the difference. Quirks tend to be more emergent than arbitrary, so while there’s a degree of password-guessing, doing so is not nearly as useful as it is in some games. Also, the traits that the quirks emerge from are not always immediately obvious (and in rare cases, not communicated at all without third-party software), so part of the process is figuring out which things are even relevant factors at all.
It also supports a wide range of play styles, including ones that involve doing very little experimentation at all. I don’t recommend it, though, for anyone who has significant trouble imagining things in three dimensions or parsing dense fields of symbols.
I strongly recomend the lazy newb pack to anyone who’s interested in the game—it bundles the basic software with several extremely useful third-party utilities, including Dwarf Therapist, which is essentially necessary to play a fort with more than 40 or 50 dwarves in it.
Wow! I can see the potential for many wasted hours there. VERY tempting.
It’s got a bunch of really fascinating things going with it, but the whole is kinda broken no matter which way you look at it. As a strategy game, it’s chock full of trivial dominant strategies, mostly involving walling off areas, that will turn threats into non-issues, and last I checked the endgame is now unwinnable and slows the game enough to be unplayable in the 2010 version. As a sandbox dollhouse, it drowns you in details of whether the dwarves are wearing socks and what type of wood you want a caravan to bring, and the poor interface makes dealing with this progressively worse as the fortress grows. As a Minecraft-style architecture game, it really needs an integrated 3D visualizer, but you need to resort to clumsy third-party ones.
It really shines at making it fun when your dwarves keep getting mauled and killed in new and innovative ways though.
That is somewhat of a game breaker for me. What on earth is the point of a strategy game when you only need one unbeatable strategy?
A lot of the Fun of playing DF for me (years ago) was actually player vs. control system. Trust me, you have plenty of fun to derive from the game before you’re able to successfully implement such a strategy, and I’m not entirely sure how unbeatable they are these days.
That cartoon is brilliant!