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> It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste.

I'd say that the point of this kind of open-ended simulation game without a clear goal is not to "win" since there is nothing to win, but to create your own challenges.

I've played a lot of these games and from Civilization II to Dwarf Fortress, just winning by using the game weaknesses has always been very uninteresting, but building a world-class city-state on an island or an above-ground wooden fortress without digging, for example, are challenges that you can create for yourself and that make these games interesting to play.

Since they are single-player, I find just "mastering the game" to maximise end-game score to be quite pointless, but that's just how I feel of course.

A sandbox by itself is uninteresting but a sandbox plus imagination is unlimited fun.

Dwarf fortress has gone from its niche to sort of cult appeal.

In the process the ability for more familiar players to emphasize “losing is fun” is lost.

It has always been trivially easy to close all the entrances and build a safe fort.

The fun aspect is always from willingly tolerating discomfort and engaging with what the system throws on you.

Fundamentally, DF doesn’t have a win condition. By defining one as having a running a fort, the experience will be less than what the game offers.

Sounds like the problem is that you basically cheated your way into boredom by reading all the tutorials and player guides first. The most fun I ever had with DF was just going in blind and thrashing about trying to discover how everything works which generally resulted in spectacular failure. The fun of a complex system is in learning how all that complexity works. Once you know everything about it it loses its appeal.

> but it is not a very good game

You can not like a game without saying that the game in general isn't good. It's been around for more than 10 years, and seems to be getting more and more popular, not less. The community grows, and development continues. Countless of people do find it fun, which is the most important part of a game, otherwise you won't play it.

By most metrics, Dwarf Fortress is a good game, despite its impenetrable UI and UX.

We'll also see how well received the game will be by mainstream gamers once they're done with the new UI, as it'll attract a bunch of new players then.

You should really try Rimworld. He took the concept of Dwarf Fortress and perfected it. The systems are incredibly well balanced, and there is less of an emphasis on "industrialization", and more of an emphasis on scheduling of tasks for your workers. So that even once you have a fully functional colony running that is able to overproduce food and fend off any attackers, you then have to deal with the interpersonal and personal emotional issues between your workers to keep things stable.

I really think those two games are in different genres. DF isn’t about perfecting some kind of dwarf version of a factory. It’s computer assisted world building. The point is to create interesting history, locations and items which you then recount as stories or you explore in adventure mode. I’d like to see DF grow further with more interaction with the world. It would be amazing to eventually have something capable of building an entire fantasy world with that you could then explore.

For what it’s worth, I feel the same about Eve Online. You hear these amazing, rich stories of political intrigue and massive battles but I’ve found it incredibly tedious any time I’ve tried to get into it. I do think there’s something powerful in these engines of story creation, and maybe this is some of Twitch’s appeal, but a lot of these games aren’t for me. I guess the Odyssey would have been a bunch of walking about if you were there.

The concept of Second Degree Fun applies here, although I think it should be called second order fun. Semantics aside, first order fun is something that you enjoy while you’re doing it. Second order fun is something that may be unpleasant or boring while you’re doing it but turns out to be enjoyable to recall or tell others about after the fact. A lot of life falls into the latter category.

>The game's legendary difficulty is entirely due to the impenetrability of its user interface and systems.

It's also a cultural legacy left over from early versions that were more challenging but less open ended simulations.

In particular, farming required setting up an irrigation system, which required exposing your fortress to a river that occasionally spawned hostile creatures which would disrupt farming. Coupled with winters where farms went fallow, it was much easier to lose a fortress for want of basics.

Additionally, there was a progression involved where access to better metals meant digging deeper and exposing yourself to additional hazards generated from fratures deeper inside the mountain.

Most of these dangers went away in the newer system, and what other dangers were added can often be avoided more easily.

With that said, the older versions also had a lot less replayability. Once you knew what you were doing, each fortress mostly played out the same, but it did make for better progression for someone new looking for a challenge.

> It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly.

At that point it turns into a big-system management game with a variety of mechanisms to trip you up, starting with the raids and megabeasts attracted by wealth, vampire infiltration, cranky nobility, and other ways that your system turns self-destructive.

That doesn't make it a great game — it can be incredibly tedious — but, it sounds like you played until you reached prosperity, and just declared the first 1/3-of-the-game-tops as too easy.

Every game is going have some aspect that is out of balance, and if you leverage it enough then sure it’s going to be easy. I remember might and magic 3 you could work your initial party to an old age, then fire them all and keep their earnings, then pimp out your new party with platemail and magic swords. It made the game super easy and boring, but that was my fault for playing that way.

If you’ve found a way to play the game that isn’t fun for you, just don’t play that way. Add a restriction for yourself to make it more interesting.

But the stories it generates though.