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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, I can't wait. I got burned out with RimWorld recently (it's cool but it's not fun for me; I have been following and supporting the project since Early Access) and I've waited for accessible Dwarf Fortress for ages.

I enjoy ASCII games (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead [1] is surprisingly easy to get into in ASCII mode), but the obtuse UI of Dwarf Fortress was a little too much effort to learn. I hope the Adams brothers get some well-earned financial stability with this incredible endeavour. They are some old-school software craftsmen, devoted to the art of excellent game design for the sake of it, money be damned.

And I can't wait for the next Kruggsmash [2] series, now with actual, beautiful sprites to pair with his beautiful drawings.

EDIT: Kruggsmash is currently streaming his first look at this new version! https://youtu.be/sByxI7UX5-g

1: https://cataclysmdda.org/

2: https://youtube.com/@kruggsmash

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> I got burned out with RimWorld recently

Yeah. I like RimWorld but it constantly throws ridiculously powered raids against my startup village no matter what difficulty settings I use. It's a story generator... but the stories aren't really that varied in my opinion.

RimWorld raids are actually ridiculously easy to defeat.

The problem is that there are two ways to play RimWorld which will lead to very different results there.

A.) You do what "makes sense" to a normal human being dealing with a real situation.

B.) You know the algorithms and minmax.

If do A.) the game can be incredibly frustrating as you watch the colony you spent hours carefully building go down in flames despite the fact that you seemingly did nothing wrong.

In contrast, if you do B.) the game becomes so dead easy that you can't even impress other players anymore by starting alone, naked, as a tribal, on an ice sheet - with one leg!

Have you ever wondered why RimWorld likes to throw that "Imperial Deserter" quest at you right at the beginning of the game?

A.) people will think "This is silly, how could I possibly defeat an Imperial raid right at the start?"

Meanwhile B.) people are like "Sure, no problem. I can build a wodden trap corridor on day 1 which will kill the entire raid before they can even see a single of my pawns."

Also note that RimWorld raids are scaled according to colony wealth and number of pawns in the colony. Thus if you are an A.) player you are probably accidentally signing your own death sentence by e.g building fancy bed rooms for your pawns. Or givign your craftspeople chairs to sit on while they work..

I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make it a less frutstating experience for A.) players. Cheesey tactics like kill boxes which exploit the stupidity of the AI, and seemingly non-sensical decisions like not letting your colonists have chairs, should only be required at the highest difficulty level IMO.

> starting alone, naked, as a tribal, on an ice sheet - with one leg!

Francis John on Youtube basically did this recently. He talks a good bit about the math of the game, and he minmaxes his minmaxing. You could just spend all your time cheesing the game, or you can cheese it when it doesn't really affect whatever narrative you are trying for in your playthrough. There are materials in your environment that ding you even if you don't gather or process them. There are materials that ding you less once processed. Knowing what's what mean you don't mine a mineral formation until you need the material.

If his camp wasn't constantly attacked by giant furry creatures he would have probably been toast. The RNG kept throwing him meat and cold weather clothing materials. He had to kite them but then real hunters of megafauna kind of do the same thing. He fed his animals meat that the humans would not eat (namely, the flesh of dead raiders).

Anyway, I think if you want to understand Rimworld 'physics' more, that series is probably a decent starting place. But he also makes no bones about how frequently the game is one or two clicks away from war crimes.

I've mostly just gone back to Oxygen Not Included and make do without narrative and variation that I kind of wish were there.

Francis John is very entertaining! He sets up engaging challenges and then plays them with energy and joy.

I'm not surprised he's done so well with the minmaxing, he mentioned in one video his day job is a network engineer :)

Exactly! Route B turns into a tower-defense game, and for that reason I try to play by A for more enjoyment.

The raids compensate for their dumb AI with sheer size. A smarter AI could be more challenging but use fewer soldier. And maybe the AI could adapt its tactics...like once they learn there is a big wall outside your fortress, then maybe they should park themselves outside and call sappers for support or air droppers to arrive first. Maybe the game could introduce cannons to counter wall building. And to prevent cave dwelling, maybe there could be some crucial supplies that spoil such that it is essential to have some trade, and so enemy armies instead of doing a dumb assault could instead do proper siege warfare to conquer you by depriving you of crucial supplies until you die of starvation, thrist, disease, like was done for most of human warfare history.

>And to prevent cave dwelling

There's... there's something already implemented to prevent cave dwelling. Some things, actually. Just keep living in the cave, you'll meet them eventually.

And, yet again, it's a dumb slapdash bandaid to discourage playstyle Tynan doesn't like.

Which are even easier to deal with. Even if you ignore baiting them to spawn in a single room which you can just set on fire you just need 3 well armoured melee pawns stacked up on a door maybe a couple more if you need to rotate tired pawns out.

I've had raids employ artillery and air drops against my walled compounds. Not sure if it's the computer adapting to my build, it's possible that it's just a late (or mid) game raid variation.

The computer isn't adapting to your build, the designer of the game is. The game just has a list of events it randomly picks from (and if you save scum, you can see that because it'll give you a different event). But the random events have been updated over time as Tynan tries to come up with countermeasures to the tactics players have developed.

> I've had raids employ artillery and air drops against my walled compounds.

Not only that, but the only defense against artillery is to build in a mountain. There isn't otherwise a defense against artillery except to go kill the artillery before it starts pounding you. And good luck doing that when you're outnumbered ten to one...

Mods!

You can have mods that warn you of incoming raids. Mods that add point defense laser turrets, suck it enemy artillery! Mods that add magic, so you can send your fire mage out to huck a fireball the enemy siege outpost and cook off their ammo, or call down a firestorm and watch the chaos. Mods that make tamed animals rideable so you can root out their artillerymen with a cavalry charge. Mods that add drop ships and bombing runs so you can counterbattery them before they even get set up, and so on and so forth.

If you build inside a mountain, however, then the bug infestations can target you, and they're even worse. It just seems that the only story the game is good at generating is the one where you die, and that gets boring. There isn't any clever emergent behavior happening there.

> It just seems that the only story the game is good at generating is the one where you die

but ... that's dwarf fortress' motto too! (even if it's not 100% accurate)

What Dwarf Fortress has going for it is that the simulation is so much deeper than Rimworld that it has a much more expressive range of emergent behavior that allows it to tell other stories, too.

Feels a little harsh tbh. I think you get at least 100 hours in to the game before you start to have exhausted all the scenarios. That's well over the amount of gameplay you get out of most games.

Just shoot them with artillery before they shoot you with artillery.

The best defense is a good offense.

My defense against artillery is to take my 200+% movespeed sanguophage royal to meet them with an aerodrone salvo, then longjump back to base, suit up, and prepare to man the doors in the killbox, while my other colonists unload excessive amounts of minigun fire at the raiders.

There are plenty of ways to solve each challenge the game throws at you.

Follow the Ukraine model, when out numbered 10-1 attack supply lines and attack artillery with drones or HMMRS.

There are no supply lines! Raiders are defying thermodynamics, throwing more bodies at you than the depopulated desolate planet with the nearest settlement days of caravaning away ever had. You can't destroy them where they live, you can't make regions safe, you can't see their raiding parties coming. They just spawn out of thin air because you made a nice statue.

Artillery is the defense against artillery. By endgame I usually have at least 10 mortars and it's are for them to get 1 built before I've wiped out enough stuff that they just launch an attack instead of using artillery.

> I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make it a less frutstating experience for A.) players.

Yep. The problem is some people want to play like A but the game seems balanced around people playing like B.

Dwarf fortress lets you opt into a lot of this madness with their biomes. You still survive in a friendly biome if you're playing like A.

And no, hand tuning every aspect of the game isn't a good option. By that point you've lost most of your players. There should be an easy default option.

Biomes are key to mediating DF difficulty. The B players can go find haunted biomes, on which shorn animals' wool comes to life and tries to kill you.

Yes, the charm about DF to me was about how the game really made very few concessions to things like "reasonable difficulty level", "balance" or "progression". If you settle on a place with no flux stone, you don't get steel (except through trade or other interactions with the world). If the procedural generation says there should be undead whales, there will be undead whales, and it's up to you to come up with an answer to that - the game in no way guarantees there will be one.

Rimworld difficulty modes function exactly like you described. Raids scale 1:12, based on which of the default difficulty settings you pick, and can be disabled outright.

> RimWorld raids are actually ridiculously easy to defeat.

Yeah tell that to my 5 pawns with bows or maybe pistols looted from a previous raid when they're attacked by 50 raiders or a mech drop or whatever...

> Meanwhile B.) people are like "Sure, no problem. I can build a wodden trap corridor on day 1 which will kill the entire raid before they can even see a single of my pawns."

Been there, done that. Then my pawns hit their own damn traps and get raided while they're in the hospital minus a leg

> Also note that RimWorld raids are scaled according to colony wealth and number of pawns in the colony. Thus if you are an A.) player you are probably accidentally signing your own death sentence by e.g building fancy bed rooms for your pawns. Or givign your craftspeople chairs to sit on while they work..

Yup, exactly.

> I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make it a less frutstating experience for A.) players.

Yes.

> Been there, done that. Then my pawns hit their own damn traps and get raided while they're in the hospital minus a leg

The StarCraft player in me wants to say: work on your micro!

That being said, I myself am more of an "A.)" player. I got bored with RimWorld after I realized it's more of a puzzle game than a story game. It fooled me longer than others, but eventually, the stateless RNG nature of it becomes apparent.

My pawns never set off a own trap and I started dev mode(cheating) to have some sort of challenge with fine tunes big raids.

(Rivers with mountains are good to defend)

Sounds like you got lucky. Every time a unit passes over their own trap, there's a chance of it misfiring on them.

Yeah, but in my unmodded version(s) they never walk over them. They avoid them.

I never installed mods related to weapons or pathfinding, and yet I had this happen to me. I believe this tends to happen when the only viable path the pawn can take leads straight through the trap.

Eh, did you install any mods? In general the 'easy' playthru's I've done have not been like that at all.

You just articulated why I kept getting really obsessed with, then extremely pissed off at Rimworld. It also didn't make much sense to my why you could build all this advanced future tech in-game but then needed to tame alpacas to leave your settlement...

> seemingly non-sensical decisions like not letting your colonists have chairs

Chairs for workers?? Everyone who’s familiar with Russia’s history knows that automatic cannons should go first (and they did a rather good job in my case). It is non-sensical to let workers have chairs unless they refuse to work without them. Or until all your neighbors are reduced to the status of Canada and Mexico.

Completely agree with everything said here. Because of the way Rimworld is balanced, there is really only one way to properly "play" the game.

> I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make it a less frutstating experience for A.) players.

It can! As the player you can fine tune just about every aspect of the storyteller you might want. You can disable events you may not like, like toxic fallout or sunspots. You can tweak raid sizes, disable certain types of raids, change the impact curves that time and/or wealth have on raid sizes, etc.

I enjoy rimworld and I’m learning quite a lot here, thanks

If you respond the same way to raids every time, it will not feel very dynamic. However, there are a lot of defensive tools you unlock in the mid-to-late game that really spice up your combat. If you want things to feel fresh, try building a base around a few mortar launchers or build things out of stone and give everyone flamethrowers. The possibilities are fairly limitless.

Some people will disagree with me, but you might enjoy the "save and load when you lose a fight" play-style.

I played RimWorld that way and I had a thoroughly fun experience learning the tech-tree. It's arguably not the way the game is meant to be played, but for the casual player, it works

> you might enjoy the "save and load when you lose a fight" play-style.

I've done that. But it gets repetitive when every fight has three or four or ten red pawns for every one of mine.

AI Story director: "And then everyone died. I SAID EVERYONE DIED, THE END"

It's a GRR Martin story generator?

You have too much wealth vs. defenses.

Good and cheap defenses are intermittent walls (which have 75% cover).

That's it, I just got a mail from Steam, it's been released right now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

TAKE MY MONEY FASTER PLEASE

I don't know if you're serious, but they've been taking donations for (literal) decades at this point:

https://www.bay12games.com/support.html

Oh they’ve gotten my money that way too.

^ this is what reddit pollution looks like

Be sure to add the soundtrack so they can take more ;)

I bought the soundtrack for all my family members. I’m sure they’ll love it.

My favorite Roguelike is ADOM -- similarly had problems getting into the DF UI, and kind of burned out on Rimworld (can only make so many hats...). I wish they'd waited until I finished end of year accounting and stuff before releasing this highly addictive game in a new, cracklike format, but enh, I can just not sleep.

For those curious, I recommend you do not buy the "Ultimate ADOM" release. It is pretty but was not even nearly half-baked before being abandoned. Go for the original one, "ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)", which has ~unlimited replayability.

CDDA is unbelievably fun and has good graphic tiles sets available. The crafting is incredibly deep, and the whole game lends itself very well to exploration and creating your own story.

I wonder if CaptnDuck will stream something. I remember both enjoying his tutorial videos back in the day, as well as being utterly convinced them that I need not ever bother with actually trying to play Dwarf Fortress myself

https://www.youtube.com/user/captnduck

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