At its heart, Dwarf Fortress is an "agents sim". This means it's a simulation within which a number of semi-autonomous units each play a role, doing things "for you". Simcity, for instance, is not an agents sim: the Sims is, though it uses a very small simulation and very few agents at a time. (Is Black and White an agent sim, or do your citizens not really do anything? I'm not sure [but your Creature in that is definitely an agent so given that your citizens do have their own little lives including devotions and sacrifices if I recall which your energy levels depended on then, yeah, Black and White is a kind of interesting agent sim])
If Simcity was an agent sim, when you wanted to bulldoze some trees, you'd have to designate them for bulldozing and then you could watch a bulldozer leave some pen and journey to the trees, presumably taking roads when possible, stopping at intersections, getting caught in traffic, or caught in mud, etc. But Simcity is a Sim (no "Agents", just "Sim") where you have direct control
The closest thing I can think of to Dwarf Fortress's particular embodiment of the agents sim genre is Settlers 2, does anyone remember this game? It's an old game and to be clear agent sims aren't common these days so I don't have a more modern example. You laid down roads for your settlers (like digging paths for your dwarves) and one member of your population would man each intersection, fetching items from adjacent intersections and dropping it on their own if that's the way the item was headed. It wasn't perfect but for instance you could pick out a woodcutter and watch him return a log to his hut, then head back out to the nearest patch of trees, and notice a hauler getting the log from his shop to be turned into planks at another one.
Settlers 2 was not as much fun as it could have been and I really feel it was limited by the Agent Sim approach. It meant the game felt very hands-off like it could run itself. So to keep the temperature up there were AI's building comparable settlements elsewhere in the world whose borders could expand faster than yours if you weren't proactive. Then they'd be likely to have a larger military and you could be stuck for expanding, or get conquered. I believe there was also some cursory diplomacy
Dwarf Fortress is a better agents sim than Settlers 2. For a few reasons:
a) crafting [lacking a source of sand, if i need a window to plug some hole in a class fashion, i need to trade for sand, spend ash or lye on potash, manufacture pearlash at a kiln then keep an eye on my sand stocks so I know when to stop...]
b) open pathfinding [Settlers 2's settlers only took a network of roads you laid down from place to place. In DF they will path find freely over open space]
c) control of individual agents [each dwarf can be given any task and then he trains up at it, a sweet RPG element Settlers 2 was missing]
That's just some examples. I think c) hits the nail on the head, though: Agents Sims are strange games, to be honest, and you have to work to make them good games. One quick way is to combine an Agent Sim with an RPG, two great tastes that taste great together: let your units each be an important individual with his own skillsets and, like in DF, his own personality and approach to the world
Let me give you an example of where DF shines [as an example of a really good agents sim]. I've been tracking two dwarven children in my fort, a fat little boy who enjoys the company of others, and a skinny girl who prefers to be alone and cracks quickly under pressure. They turned out to already be Friends. But in finding this out I discovered the social boy had three times more acquaintances than the anti-social girl. So now I knew this about them.
So when the boy, Tun, threw a party, I wasn't as surprised as if the girl had thrown one. It made sense. When the girl attended his party, it made sense even though she's anti-social, because they're friends, and it made me think, Good for her. The third partier was another child who was already acquaintances with the girl and was a new friend of the boy. I didn't look deep into his personality. I was already getting paid off enough for caring at all about just two children. Meanwhile the adults, none of whom came to the kiddie party, were busy militarizing the caverns where the children had started travelling to the furthest-away wells for some reason, risking Troglodyte encounters, to make it safe for the kids to get a drink. This is much richer than anything that ever happened in Settlers 2.
An agent sim can be a really fun type of game as you watch your little people mill and slowly get things done. "Slowly" is practically a key word, in fact, as this type of game can consume inordinate amounts of time offering little more than the satisfaction of -watching things get done-, knowing things are getting done, and finding they've been done. These games can draw you in for hours and hours of just watching your little people. In fact there was a feature in Settlers 2 which was pointless there but fully implemented: you could track your monolithic, unimportant little Settlers (they had no personality, skills, stats or depth) in a pop-out window that would follow them, zoomed-in, as they moved around your settlement. Other than getting a better look at the animations they played when idle (waving, skipping rope) this didn't offer much at all. Your settlers just didn't do that much.
But how many times have I been trying to follow a specific dwarf who was important to me at that point for some reason, and had to pause when he disappears on a stairway, to figure out if he's headed up or down? Or just lose him completely after he traverses some ramps and have to re-zoom to him with the 'u' screen. If, and this is a big if, if we could have the camera follow a dwarf it would be awesome. This is a pretty standard feature in an agent sim where it's assumed you might take an interest in an individual and want to track him. Depending on the importance and the capabilities of your agents this can be valuable for debugging your fort, by letting you figure out where your agents go and what they do.
Give us dwarven follow mode.
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Topic: Other Agent Games and, Agent Sim + RPG = Delicious (Read 2310 times)