I mean, sometimes that happens. I've not really had rowdy dwarves myself somehow, usually something else kills me first.
It will more often than not turn into a massive free for all, rather than a mob riot.
The game is really not about strategy, but it is about micromanagement. Inevitably every fortress falls to shit though and part of the fun is watching it all burn.
i have fond memories of a fort that i had that had at least five people fall down the well in the middle of the tavern due to fights, a gigantic pile of corpses outside of said tavern filled with the bodies of residents and guests alike, a mix of victims of bar fights and goblin attacks, as well as a resident cave crocodile that just chilled in the main hallway and occasionally killed dogs and dwarves for food while people just tried walking around it.
That's every game of Dwarf Fortress, don't worry about it.
They are not literally programmed to do so, but they are very short tempered, moody and fond of alcohol so it is not uncommon to have small scale riots during harder times. These riots can also easily spin out of control to fortress ending civil wars;
Dwarves have extensive family trees and histories, social networks and every dwarf has relations going from nemesis to besties which either come from their history or are formed during interactions with others.
A fort which has been stable for a while becomes a powder keg when these social networks and families become more ingrained in themselves and entrenched against the others. Small fights can become family feuds, and it is not uncommon that the social structures of a dwarf fort are on edge after a while. At this point, the wrong person's death or a drunken altercation can cause a fortress to spiral into a civil war between the dominant families and social networks: Lost an important well liked person during a siege? His son struck by grief might get too drunk and throw a fight with a guy from family B, family members of B get upset and retaliate against other members of family A , which causes family A to retaliate etc etc... If tension is high enough this can break out into a civil war which tears apart your entire fortress. Death of a relative might be a extreme, but literally anything can potentially be the catalyst for such an event.
Dwarf riots getting out of control is a integral challenge of the game once you get your fortress past the early stages, and I myself have lost dozens of fortresses to these tantrum spirals/loyalty cascades. Managing happiness of dwarfs is extremely vital to the survival of your fort, since it is one of the few defences you have to prevent these tantrum spirals. (Though I have now grown more fond of building a control vault manned by a vampire that can put the entire fort on lockdown with floodgates, which sometimes can slow down the tantrums enough to prevent serious damage.)
You are starting to persuade me
Eh, in the current version relationships are rather bugged, so this sort of thing is less common. People don't marry or form friendships in playerforts atm due to problems with how dwarves socialize, so you rarely see such complex social networks having much significance these days. In practice I see more of simply individual dwarves getting upset due to unpleasant things like not having enough time to pray to the god of metals or seeing one too many severed goblin toes. As a fort goes on, more and more dwarves have experiences that change their personalities that make them more susceptible to stress, and more and more of your dwarves independently start becoming haggard and start being unproductive or intermittently violent. This tends to cause the fort to peter out as more and more dwarves are unable to take the pressure, and you're forced to expel or execute the offenders, reducing the productivity in your fort. This is all getting tweaked before the big wait though, since villains update should fix dwarf social networks and rebalance stress, based on what toady has said.
I once spent so much time designing a pit to throw goblins down that I neglected to notice a troll walking down my main street beating the fuck out of my entire population and ripping all my doors off their hinges. It only stopped because the remaining half of my fortress banded together with the drunk guest bards in my tavern to dogpile the troll and throw it down a staircase.
You get used to these kinds of things as you play.
I hate to disagree but the fun is frantically trying to fix all the horrible stuff that happens even when you're doing everything perfectly. And it'll only get worse. You used to be safe with just a wall, then they added climbing. A moat used to save you, then jumping was added. Toady wants to add tunneling enemies eventually
I don't think this is a thing, this was just a planned idea he hoped to add eventually.
it's kind of there with how ambassadors spotting traps works, barely
Watching a fort die is FUN, hell, the tagline of the game is Losing is FUN. One time I struck Adamantium like 20 levels down,but forgot that mining it opens a gateway to hell. My fort didn't even have a military, so all my dwarves and dwarven children were hunted down by demons and slain.
It's also fun to see how ghosts of dead dwarfs can get living dwarfs into a crippling depression before they kill themselves.
If there are people here who like Dwarf Fortress stories I came across a dude on youtube who does decent videos imo and even draws pictures to go with events or things. Not sure if this dude has been mentioned before.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaifrB5IrvGNPJmPeVOcqBA
I love me some Kruggsmash, he deffo deserves more views!
I feel lame in that my most favourite DF story is that I happened to embark near a pesky necromancer who was completely shit at his job. My fort was chugging along as usual and I was big into fishing, suddenly the necromancer appears, raises the dead and then fucks off. Only problem is, nobody has really died.. infact the only dead things are mussels and all that remains of them is mussel shells. So basically this necromancer did fuck all apart from come to my fort and raise countless empty mussel shells that COULDN'T BE FUCKING KILLED yet couldn't do any damage either. So my fisher dwarfs literally walked back to the fort surrounded by dozens of empty shells just nipping(?) away at them while my hunter dwarf bashed away with his crossbow to no anvil. At best it pissed my dwarfs off.
In the end I was dealing with endless hordes of shells. I had to shut down my fishing industry and I watched in horror as outside there was endless wave of shells chasing the wildlife and pestering any traders that came my way. In the end the necromancer got himself killed by being swarmed by dogs, many many dogs, all while his creations desperately tried to defend him best they could. The lag killed my fort and I never saw a siege.
Unkillable parts being raised is a real problem with the necromancy system - looking at you, [hair of horse]. Toady tries to fix it here and there, but it inevitably breaks and happens again. In situations like that, I'd honestly justify using DFhack to purge them.
He has nerfed them already by fixing the pulping system and nerfing zombies in general. Undead hair, limbs, mussel shells etc are quite easy to kill with blunt weapons, but hordes can still be dangerous.
Hair is extremely easy to kill. Your info on necromancy is out of date.
What a beautiful sentence.
Honestly, I feel like undead parts should waste away on their own, so smaller things would break down ASAP. So yeah, corpses moving around for months makes sense, but hairs and arms should rot much faster and thus become non-entities in hours/days.
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/tutorials-and-mouse-support-could-make-dwarf-fortress-on-steam-vastly-easier-to-play/
About time.
Holy shit yes now i can finaly learn how to cut trees
I'll most likely buy the steam-version. But i've got a feeling i'll end up playing it the old way again before long.
New devlog
Life is beginning to settle down again, though we have quite a few rewards to work on, so there'll be intermittent delays - we'll eventually get them all sent out! My internet computer died a few days ago, but I managed to salvage the hard drive, so aside from a lost day, no serious damage there. I'm back working on schemers and should have another log on Wednesday or Thursday about the week's work (that time of the week works best with the rhythm of the week's work, as it stands.) To get out of world generation, I still need to finish the plots I mentioned just before the big announcement, do some more work with compromise methods and the intrigue skill, mess a bit with criminal organizations, handle counterintelligence, handle supernatural villains, and tie up some expository loose ends (mostly around historical event text, xml, etc etc.) That's not *that* much, given all that we've handled to this point. We'll see how far I get this month!
Here are all the parts of the PC Gamer interview I did at GDC (I posted the first one last week): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
And the aforementioned next-log
I finally pulled together all of the corruption techniques and goals into a single place along with skills, personality, and the relationship variables (love-hate + trust + loyalty + fear + respect), and... it seems to be working out. It was spread out and disjointed before, so I wasn't able to get the villain's decision-making to consider every factor reliably. Now it's much more compact. The current set of corruption techniques, which is looking more final as we slowly wrap world-gen up: intimidation, asserting rank, blackmail, flattery, exploiting religious sympathies, promising to take revenge on an enemy, and direct bribery. These are used to corrupt position holders variously and to gain new agents.
The villain or their agent chooses a technique based on whichever one they think will provide the best outcome, but if an organization has not been penetrated or the agent isn't good at their job (intrigue, judging intent, etc.), their assessment of which technique will work can be incorrect (by design.) For instance, they might think a bribe is a good idea, but if they are a terrible judge of character and have nobody inside the target's organization, they might not realize that the target is not greedy and not in debt. But if the target were greedy, or in debt, and the agent has an insider and a good judge-intent roll, they will correctly assess bribery as a useful possibility. It'd be nice to remove more of the rolls from the system, but we don't have enough data and getting there might be hard, especially in world generation where so many parts need to move quickly. It is good enough for this venue; there might be a few additions for the fort or adventurer villains if it starts to feel too rough.
Generally, the moments of intimidation, flattery and bribery from the previous blogs, now have cleaner and more unified modifiers based on skill, personality, and the relationship variables (e.g. intimidation is more successful if the target fears the villain already, and flattery works better if the target trusts them) and can be selected more intelligently, with the ability (upcoming in a bit) to expose most of the factors in the decision-making to legends mode. A wholesome rewrite, and we can check off that bit and move to finish the final mundane plots and do some necessary tweaks to criminal organizations.
You know, one thing about the new look Dwarf Fortress on Steam will be having - as opposed to the old, symbol-based layout - is still uncertain to me.
What happens to the procedurally-generated creatures, like Titans and Forgotten Beasts? Will they just have an ambiguous icon accompanied by a more detailed text that describes them? Because AFAIK there's a lot of different factors in generating a procedural creature, and I doubt it would be easy to replicate every single one of them visually.
They're doing modular sprites, you can already see this with hair color and equipment in the mockups they have on the steam page. The plan is to do the same with beasfts. In general it's pretty much just an animal with some colored covering (feathers, fur, etc) or material (glass, stone, etc) which could be managed with a simple hue shift, and a specific number of eyes, limbs, or tails, and something
Dev leg
I've finished the final non-supernatural plots for villains to employ now. As stated last month just before all the excitement, these are corrupt imprisonment, framing, snatching, sabotage and directing wars to their enemies. They also include intentionally corrupting the government of an enemy (rather than targeting based on location or current assets.) The most complicated plot here was snatching, as it involves the new hideouts and also the disposition of the hostage afterward. They can obtain a ransom (depending on the position and family of the hostage), imprison the hostage for a period, or just murder them if they run out of ideas. If the villain holds a particularly strong grudge and is vengeful and cruel, they might torture and/or sell the hostage (depending on their values and which civilizations are around). So, that's kind of bleak. One bright side is that personal prisoners have a chance to escape now (it is harder to escape from towers, especially those with dungeons), including those taken by night trolls.
Most of it is bleak, though. Corrupt imprisonment and framing are similar to each other, but the first requires the villain to either personally hold or have influence over the leader or law enforcement of a civilization, while the latter involves excellent intrigue skill use against those same position holders as well as the target. If successful, the target (either a grudge or somebody else to be neutralized) will be charged with a crime and receive whatever punishment is due for it, from exile to imprisonment or execution. The villains make sure to check the laws first before they attempt to use either of these techniques.
Starting wars, also bleak, involves corrupt leaders, advisors and generals associated to civilizations with which the target civilization is currently at peace. Skilled intrigue here can disturb diplomatic relations, though I didn't set aside a lot of time to get into specifics there (we need to finish sometime!) Similarly, sabotage is a bit thin, but if successful, the agent harms the abstract 'account' of either a grudge or the company/guild they are a part of, which does have an effect on them (I didn't yet do actual building destruction.) Now we can move on to our criminal organization tweaks and counter-intelligence.
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