Out of curiosity, has anyone else here played Dwarf Fortress?
For anyone unfamiliar with DF, it's a city management and adventuring roguelike set in a procedurally generated fantasy world. In many ways the game is the antithesis of modern game design; it eschews graphics and user friendliness in favor of complex gameplay and a fastidious attention to detail. By default, the game displays the world with ASCII graphics (i.e. letters and symbols), though one can use a graphics pack to see the using graphical tiles and there are utilities outside the game that allow folks to view their forts in isometric and 3D views. Once one overcomes the game's learning curve, the game offers extremely rewarding gameplay with plenty of emergent gameplay, where no two play-throughs are the same.
At world creation, the game first creates the world based on tectonics and weather patterns and then simulates hundreds or thousands of years of history, tracking the many thousands of creatures and civilizations and their achievements and downfalls. The game tracks the history of every remotely significant individual, from pantheons of gods to the lowliest peasant whose only historical contribution was to wind up squished by a giant. By tracking world history, the world is designed to feel "lived in" by the time the player starts his or her adventure. For instance, a dwarf may carve a trinket that commemorates the ascension of a particular dwarf to the leadership of a civilization hundreds of years ago, or a powerful troll may boast of its many lurid deeds before battling an adventurer.
The two main game modes are Fortress mode and Adventure mode.
In fortress mode, the player oversees a colony of dwarves. For a colony to be successful, it needs defense, shelter, natural resources, industry, and trade. This is accomplished by assigning jobs to one's dwarves and designating tasks, such as dig here, guard here, butcher this animal, or build X number of barrels at this workshop; and they'll perform the task so long as the tools and resources needed to complete the task are available (and they're not on break or rioting). While each embark consists of seven dwarves, as the fortress prospers migrants will immigrate to the fortress, babies will be born, and traders will arrive periodically to trade.
However, a fort's prosperity will attract the unwanted attention of nefarious goblins, sneaky kobolds, and mighty monsters. They will seek to steal your dwarves' goods, kidnap and enslave their children, and sack your fort. Those are not the only challenges a fort faces; dwarves need food and drink and are prone to moodiness (and insanity), aquifers can prevent miners from finding stone and metal (and if one isn't careful and digs in the wrong spot, aquifers can flood a fort), magma is both useful and dangerous, cats will overpopulate and jam doors with vermin, there are things deep beneath the earth (where the greatest riches lay) that are best left undisturbed, and sometimes the dead don't rest...
Adventure mode is a roguelike RPG in which one creates a character and travels the world, visiting villages, exploring caves, and slaying animals, monsters, and villains, all the while recruiting companions and collecting treasure. As an adventurer uses particular skills, he or she will become more proficient at those skills. However, should he or she sustain a major injury such as the loss of a limb, a severed nerve, or a collapsed lung, the effects of those injuries will greatly hinder the adventurer throughout his or her adventure. Staying true to roguelike convention death is permanent, so sometimes its best to retire one's adventurer in a town; one can always unretire him or her or pay them a visit with another adventurer (and I believe they can immigrate or even attack one's fort, though I haven't seen this first hand). Beware the night.
Adventure mode melee combat is handled by selecting how to attack (i.e. stab or slash with a sword, kick, bite, etc.) and what body part to attack. Ranged attacks only require the player to select one's target after pressing the fire button, as do throwing attacks. The effectiveness of one's attacks are dependent on one's skills, positioning, the material of one's weapons, the opponent's skill, and luck. Dodging and blocking is handled automatically and is determined by one's stats and armor/shield.
Dwarf Fortress is available for free and has been in active development for a number of years (I'd say there's about one major release every year or so followed by bug patches). There is also an active modding scene and while the game is singleplayer, some folks play "Succession forts" where players pass around a save file and take turns running a particular fort. The game can be played at a casual pace; fortress mode is played in real time but can be paused at any time while adventure mode is turn based; both can be saved and quit at any time. I only scratched the surface of the game's features in this overview. Should anyone wish to check DF out, I'll link the game's webpage, wiki, a New York Times article about the game, and the graphics pack I'm personally currently using:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/http://dwarffortresswiki.org/http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=57557.0Just some screenshots from my current fort, to show what the game looks like (with graphics pack):
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So with that overview out of the way, yesterday I had an exciting time with DF. A goblin army arrived riding giant rats, cave crocodiles, and giant olms to besiege my fort, so I ordered the civilians to head underground while I positioned my militia by the entrance with a handful of crossbow dwarves on the battlements (about half of whom were mothers carrying babies in one hand and a crossbow in the other). Of course, my militia was under-equipped and outnumbered and the goblins brought cave crocodiles and trolls to batter down my fort's doors so hiding wasn't an option.
The crocodiles battered down the entrance and my militia met them head-to-head, most of the militia was killed quickly, though a speardwarf and swordsdwarf managed to hold the line while the marksdwarves peppered the trolls with arrows (and a coward hid in a side room, refusing to join the battle). The goblins then feinted a retreat, luring my militia outside where the trolls and goblins overwhelmed them. The (one-eyed) speardwarf charged a goblin mounted on an olm and all three fell into a river where the goblin and dwarf died while another dwarf was killed by trolls, leaving only one swordsdwarf standing between the goblin army and the fort. A goblin severed his left foot.
I should mention that aside from the handful of marksdwarves, the rest of my fort consisted of civilians, about half of whom were children and babies.
The one-footed swordsdwarf became a hero, rolling out of the way of the goblins' finishing blows and cutting them down with his steel short sword. He then crawled to the trolls (who were sort of stupidly staring at the marksdwarves) and head-stabbed each one in turn before succumbing to pain and collapsing in a pool of mixed blood. However, the remaining goblins decided to retreat, having seen half their army killed (many of whom were killed by the swordsdwarf). The day was won, the hero patched up, and the fort continues to survive, though I doubt it could survive another attack should one come anytime soon, since the militia currently consists of a lone one-footed swordsdwarf and a few marksdwarves. I think I'll have to dig a moat around the fort and try to set some traps down before the next attack, but I'm especially concerned about sneak attacks.
