Dwarf Fortress Succession Game - call for interest

Would you like to play in a THN Dwarf Fortress Succession Game?


  • Total voters
    16
  • Poll closed .

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
Dwarf Fortress: a game building or digging a marvel of Dwarvish construction while constantly teetering on the brink of disaster, often involving magma, beasts from the deep, or perhaps an army of darkness or two.

I'm interested in setting up a succession game of Dwarf Fortress (henceforth just referred to as DF) in the fashion of noteworthy, possibly even famous, games found in other places.

To be clear, this is unlikely to start 'til October so I'm just canvasing for interest and perhaps giving a few poor souls a chance to watch their first few forts crash and burn spectacularly before they get involved in this one.

I imagine we'll use rules somewhat similar to Boatmurdered but I absolutely insist that we use a graphical client: in particular, the one from Mike Mayday otherwise I will go stark raving mad and flood the forum with magma out of spite.

Oh, and part of the fun is posting updates on how it's going so that everyone (who cares) can participate in staring in abject horror at the insanity of it all.

Interested? Vote in the poll.
 

Zooggy

Junior Administrator
Staff member
Hoy, :)

Pardon the curiosity, but, what's a succession game?

Cheers,
J.
 

Nanor

Well-Known Member
A succession game is where we take an in game year each and do what we will to the fortress. It continues in a rota so when your year is up, you upload the save so the next person can download and play on.

Also; hells yeah. :)
 

Panda with issues...

Well-Known Member
Someone needs to teach me how to play and install it.

I knew that I'd get you with that Boatmurdered thread Ronin...

It just took this long for the bullet to hit...
 

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
A succession game is where we take an in game year each and do what we will to the fortress. It continues in a rota so when your year is up, you upload the save so the next person can download and play on.

To elaborate on what Nanor kindly and accurately provided:

Dwarf Fortress is a game with no way to win but many ways to lose. This is because it's a simulator rather than a game. But as a simulator of dwarves building a fortress it has many different facets and a surprising depth. D will tell you how the UI sucks (it does, but only in a 1970's text adventure stylee) and others will tell you how the game is arcane (in the text-only version especially, but we'll use the "graphical" client).

It is probably the only game that lets you do battle with legendary elephants by trying to funnel molten lava from the depths of a volcano onto their heads and then killing them and many of your dwarves with super-heated steam.

It's quite quite mad. But cool.

I'll start the fortress so people will have to put up with my choice of site and starting equipment but I'll probably play it somewhat safe so that we're not totally crippled (or at least not deliberately) so that the next person in line can take over the save game and carry on from there. The updated save will pass from person to person until either the fortress implodes or we get bored. The former is far more likely.

Someone needs to teach me how to play and install it.

Happy to help with that. There is newbie tutorial for the old version that should at least cover a bunch of the basics, though some names may have changed to protect the innocent.

Really, though, no one can be told what Dwarf Fortress is. You have to see it for yourself. </Morpheus>

It just took this long for the bullet to hit...

I knew of Boatmurdered beforehand but I'd not realised they'd chronicled it. I was almost rolling on the floor by StarkRavingMad's reign... :rolleyes:
 

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
All he did was swear like it was going out of fashion

It was the wholeness of it. It's something that makes more sense when you know what's happened, technically, to get into that sort of mess. Well, or maybe it's just me being totally mad. :D
 

Xarlaxas

Active Member
I'm interested in the "whinging about the UI" corner, I'll give the videos that Psi linked to a shot as I've started up the game a couple of times, got confused and scared, then quit, got a graphical interface, was surprised to see there was a camel in my group, then dug some holes in a mountain-face, then quit, of course I'd make the effort if it's for you guys but you can probably expect some accidental horror during my reign. . . .
 

Xarlaxas

Active Member
For me it's both, the rogue-alike graphics meant I couldn't figure out what anything was then found with a tile-set knowing what it was didn't help when I couldn't figure out how to do anything.
 

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
To clarify: by interface I don't mean graphics. I mean interface.

Yep, I'm pretty sure I knew what you were getting at. Nested menus with arbitary keyboard shortcuts with no mouse interaction and a control interface that vi would have been proud of on a VAX terminal in 1994.
 

Xarlaxas

Active Member
They do really need to work on the UI at some point, would make more of the difficulty of the game based on building a good fortress and economy over not knowing how to order your dwarves to butcher cats for food!
 
E

elDiablo

Guest
I am saying "Yes, but I'm new to this" as I've not played DF for a while now, and I haven't read the rest of the thread yet. So, you know...
 

Zooggy

Junior Administrator
Staff member
Hoy, :)

a control interface that vi would have been proud of on a VAX terminal in 1974

Fixed! Also, this made me giggle... :D

... until I downloaded the game and tried it out. Now, it just makes me cry... :eek:

But, you know, yeah, on board. :D

Cheers,
J.
 

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
If I get chance over the weekend, I'll make some suggestions for things that people who have never played before can do so they don't get a 4 year old fortress that simply causes them to implode.
 
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