Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Azated]

He kicks over the drawbridge and through the open doorway, he scores!

Seriously though, I've been looking for a goal of some sort for a fortress. I'm the kind of person that becomes addicted to a game until I discover as much information as possible, then without a goal I suddenly lose interest.

Unfortunately, I love Dwarf Fortress, but building a fortress gets old after a while. Sure, each fort is different, but the base design is the same. Get dwarves, build barracks, build farms, build dining hall/bedrooms, break into the circus accidentally then laugh as my hard work literally crumbles around me thanks to Urist Mcleverpuller.

Now, I don't mean a goal like 'Build a giant elf made entirely of wood, fill it with living elves, light it on fire and laugh maniacally as they scream their pointy ears off', I mean something like getting two sea serpents and then breeding them, or colonizing hell while the clowns cry out from their slade prisons.

Something incredible, something impossible, something that people have thought of doing but never had the guts/time/will/dwarves to complete.

[Kilroy the Grand]

Make a tower to drop prisoners, then only use thier bones as weapons and armor. Nothing else. No metal of any kind, just bone. Preferably elf bone.

[NRDL]

Make a tower to drop prisoners, then only use thier bones as weapons and armor. Nothing else. No metal of any kind, just bone. Preferably elf bone.

I honestly think some senior DF players have done that already.  A good idea, nonetheless. 

For my idea, you should mechanize your fort, completely, to the point where you can do practically all there is to do with just a lot of levers.  Seal one dwarf up, call him Big Brother, or The Omnipresent One, or something, then make his indestructible room completely self sufficient, with its own farm, brewery, everything. 

The main task of this dorf is to operate all the levers of the fortress, immediately and without delay.  He must have no friends, so deaths won't affect him.  No pets either.  This idea is found on DF wiki. 

Bonus points if you make the rest of your fort revolve, like some sort of cult, around this dwarf. 

[Ieb]

Extra bonus points for the entire fort's fate depending on whether or not the jerk wishes to stop being On Break during a goblin siege and with all gates down.

Start ridiculously stupid forts. Make only soap/ash/pearlash/finest glass crafts/furniture.
Model your fort after it's name. Oceanbridges? Bridge that ocean, dammit! If the fort isn't on an ocean biome, MAKE an ocean by ramping and pumping the underground caverns.

[Miuramir]

Something incredible, something impossible, something that people have thought of doing but never had the guts/time/will/dwarves to complete.

Make an unmodded, fully-featured fort run by dwarves (and clockwork, possibly including immortal goblin timing treadmills). One part of your score is the number of keystrokes (human or scripted) required per dwarf year; lowest is best.  To count as "fully featured" you need to not merely survive, but defeat, at least two sieges without human (or script, utility, etc.) input; in other words a fully automatic means to detect, defeat, clean up, reset, and be ready again for the next one that can run over and over again.  Significant bonus points for defeating a FB or titan with minimal keystrokes.  There should be no particular reason why the fort couldn't last 10, 100, or even 1,000 years; everything irrevocably consumed after the first few years of setup should be infinitely renewable (this includes dwarves, making sure that you're not loosing dwarves faster than they breed, or conversely outbreeding your food & booze production). 

It seems like most if not all of the technical parts to do this have been created in one thread or another, but to my knowledge no one has actually done this.  I suspect that the state of the art would still require minimal intervention to handle unexpected events; you will need to either make very sure FBs cannot get to the "working" parts of the fort or have a way of handling them. 

Interesting variant, which may be more relevant as we get to more of the caravan arc: You have possessed the broker.  Once the initial setup phase is past, you are not allowed any interactions with the fortress except those personally performed by the broker, who can have no other jobs enabled.  This allows full use of the trading interface, and possibly pulling a few key levers (all levers must be set to the broker only) in emergencies.  You may only pass on your "gift" to direct blood descendants of the starting broker, and only on death. 

Inspiration: Various people I follow were involved in the 100 Year Starship Study, which was intended to ask a number of hard questions about what we are lacking in humanity's toolbox to deal with long-term plans on this scale.  There are some obvious similarities to DF's shortcomings in terms of required external intervention.

For those familiar with the Angband Borg, there are some interesting related thoughts; one implication of a minimal-keystrokes-required fort is that those keystrokes could be supplied by an AI script.  As computers become more powerful, running an AI DF in the background (possibly coming to the front as a screensaver during otherwise idle time) becomes more practical.  Aside from the interesting AI challenges, this would be a great way to created worlds to adventure in; let the AI play a half-dozen forts for a few decades (or centuries) each without peeking, and then you'd truly have a world full of unknown wonders and horrors to face as an adventurer. 

[Seraphim342]

Bad idea, dude.  If we make a machine that can play dwarf fortress, after about 10 games it'll be ready to self-replicate and take over the world.

[Kon]

... break into the circus accidentally then laugh as my hard work literally crumbles around me ...

Have your goal be to break into the circus intentionally and kill all the clowns.

[YetAnotherStupidDorf]

This game is sandbox - you make your onw goals. If you need goal dictated by game to you, maybe this kind of game is not for you.

[Seraphim342]

That's my goal. Make even the circus bow before me.

[Azated]

Wow, that's some pretty tough goals. The automated fortress ideas would be incredible, if I had any idea how to actually do any of it.

I suppose I could use a series of pressure plates to detect sieges. Maybe I wall off the map except for a long tunnel with some kind of long-living animal chained to the end. One pressure plate just short of the animal closes of the drawbridges to my fortress, and opens a second tunnel to the edge of the map. When the siegers decide to leave, another pressure plate at the end of that tunnel opens the drawbridge, allowing my dwarves to move about freely.

Alternatively, I could block the tunnel and flood it, but I'd have to set up some kind of timer in order to drain the tunnel and lower the bridges again. Possibly a few Z levels of grates underneath the tunnel, so that the water flows through the area at the perfect speed to allow enemies to drown. When it hits the bottom, yet another pressure plate drains the tunnel and drops all of the goblinite into a conveniently placed melting stockpile. I don't think there's any way to automatically designate all metal items to be melted, so without any input, that's as far as it gets.

For a lack of booze, a pressure plate near a water source would open a fishing zone to ease some of the strain on the plump helmets. As for a lack of food, since I don't know how the dwarves calculate pathing when they search for vermin to eat, I'll just have to ensure that it never runs out.

The breeding would be a little difficult. I've never had a single dwarf grow to adult in any of my fortresses. Maybe I could segregate the females into one section of the fort somehow, so that the babies don't get perforated by goblin arrows. Accidentally, of course.

Come to think of it, the idea wouldn't be all too difficult. Once the basic fortress design is constructed and all the plates in place, it should be able to run completely automatically without any further input. It'll be a pretty dull fortress, but It would run for thousands of years.


Well, I suppose I'll get started. Further updates to come.

[Joey]

Breach the circus, stun the clowns, trap them all in cage traps, hoard elves, when there are sufficient elves have them kill all the clowns.
Another idea could be creating a megaproject, perhaps a lever controlled magma cannon?

The options are pretty much only limited by FPS and your imagination.

[Azated]

Another idea could be creating a megaproject, perhaps a lever controlled magma cannon?

Someone's already done that. It worked, it just didn't fire very far.

[Pokon]

With a very creative usage of borrows, make two sets of dwarves: Those who live aboveground, and those who live underground. The dwarves above will live in little happy houses, and are supplied food and metals from the underclass below, which runs the farms, makes the trade goods, and fights of terrors of the deep. Keep a very well trained military and a few big animals on the surface, but let the underground-dwelling dwarfs live of spare goblinite to fight off the creatures of the deep. As a whole, nobles and skilled laborers, along with a skilled military lives on the surface, while the slums below have everyone else.

Dwarfy: Keep both groups from ever seeing one another to the point of having no cross-group friendships.

SuperDwarfy: Mod in two castes that have opposite skill sets that can be found from birth where it shall live.

Extrasuperdwarfy: Breach hidden fun stuff while the town above is being seiged: try to figure out who will fall first to determine what caste is better.

[monk12]

!!SCIENCE!! is always a fun way to spice up a fort.

Specifically, I'd invest some time in studying Loyalty Cascades. The short version is that you attempt to make your fortress an enemy of your civ- to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever managed to get an entire (or even sizable) fortress population to be considered enemies of the parent civ. Note that you can't really use the military in such a fort, since they tend to turn on all the other traitorous bastards in their squads when activated.


On another note entirely, have you tried adventure mode at all? It's rather entertaining for the combat mechanics if nothing else, and it's come a long way from the 40d Genocide Simulator. Next version should have all kinds of new and exciting things in it to boot- I know I'll be rolling up an adventurer before I play a fort when it comes out.

[Azated]

With a very creative usage of borrows, make two sets of dwarves: Those who live aboveground, and those who live underground. The dwarves above will live in little happy houses, and are supplied food and metals from the underclass below, which runs the farms, makes the trade goods, and fights of terrors of the deep. Keep a very well trained military and a few big animals on the surface, but let the underground-dwelling dwarfs live of spare goblinite to fight off the creatures of the deep. As a whole, nobles and skilled laborers, along with a skilled military lives on the surface, while the slums below have everyone else.

Dwarfy: Keep both groups from ever seeing one another to the point of having no cross-group friendships.

I think I might just do that. It couldn't be too difficult to add that in to the autofort I'm making at the moment.

!!SCIENCE!! is always a fun way to spice up a fort.

Specifically, I'd invest some time in studying Loyalty Cascades. The short version is that you attempt to make your fortress an enemy of your civ- to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever managed to get an entire (or even sizable) fortress population to be considered enemies of the parent civ. Note that you can't really use the military in such a fort, since they tend to turn on all the other traitorous bastards in their squads when activated.


On another note entirely, have you tried adventure mode at all? It's rather entertaining for the combat mechanics if nothing else, and it's come a long way from the 40d Genocide Simulator. Next version should have all kinds of new and exciting things in it to boot- I know I'll be rolling up an adventurer before I play a fort when it comes out.

I've only heard of Loyalty Cascades once before, so I have very little knowledge of the concept. I might have to test them out in another fort.

I've played adventure mode a little bit and I like it. This is going to sound really un-dwarfy, but I usually play an elf spearman. Every time I play them, I can kill everything with my default equipment. It surprised me the first time when I killed all the night creatures that came after me, and I've been an elfman ever since.


As for the autofort; I'm about to begin automating everything. I've had a few minor setbacks though, the worst being an alligator killing about half of my dwarves, with a further dwarf drowning in the river.