In RimWorld, you can install some slightly (read: extremely) overpowered turret mods, plus a moderate amount of save scumming, I can make my colony last pretty much forever (until I am bored hundreds of hours later). Are there techniques enabling similar playstyles with Dwarf Fortress?
During world gen, you can set the number of sites, (which includes goblin camps and the like), the natural savagery, and the number of beasts to very low, and set mineral abundance as high as possible
As a beginner, you want the threat to be as low as possible (serene or calm), the climate to be warm, NO AQUIFER, and make sure that there's iron-bearing ore and coal. In such a situation, the worst you need worry about are some of the late game !!FUN!! sources, which are only really relevant if you delve too greedily and too deep.
I think you just have to set your own goals. Maybe you want to get a population of 1000 before death, or maybe you want a fortress to last 100 years.
If you're not very good, then your goals can be very small, and get larger.
To mix some metaphors, the house always wins, but can you make par for the course, or "justify your seed" (to use the tennis term I picked up from Infinite Jest)?
- Fill a tunnel with traps.
- Embark in a location with no enemies. But maybe instead with undead.
- Set up a lava chamber above your entrance hall, and a remotely triggered floodgate…
- Close the doors on your enemies, and have archers on walls above them.
- Create a “danger room”, make an OP army.
There’s no shortage of ways to survive, once you dig into a few of the tools.
You can pick extremely peaceful biomes to settle in.
You can learn how to use traps and drawbridges (completely overpowered).
You can learn how to make perfectly self-sufficient farms and trading crafts.
Once those are in place I've never lost a fortress to anything but boredom.
In DF random things will happen (sieges, monsters, etc) but they don't cheat to get to you, with one glaring exception. If you have a path from your stuff (people or objects) to an enemy the enemy immediately knows it, scouting out the most-hidden paths instantly. To be locked down you need to have a raised drawbridge that actually blocks access.
Turn on seasonal saves and replay when you lose, until you think you've lost in a cool and epic enough way that you'd rather remember it that way than restoring. But play out the fails for a while - often it's easier to recover than you'd think.
This new release has added some additional difficulty settings that makes embarking on a peaceful adventure much easier. In particular, there are explicit difficulty settings that can be changed while in-game, and you can do things like disable different kinds of attacks.
It is possible to turn off all attacks on your fort.
The great thing about DF is that after the initial difficulty of figuring out the complex interactions, it is actually an easy game in many respects. If you look at the ratio of the amount of work you have to dedicate for necessities in comparison to the total work your fortress is capable of producing, well this ratio is actually the lowest for any city builder I am aware of.
Even if your fortress reaches 200 dwarves (the usual maximum), you can still feed it with 2-3 farmers, 1-2 cooks and 1-2 brewers once you get them all experienced. You can have one experienced dwarf working on trade goods that will produce enough wealth to get you anything you wish to buy from the caravans. One clothier can make all the clothes your fortress needs.
You do not have to fight invaders or monsters if you really do not want to. There is a way to seal off your fortress and make it impenetrable ... and then you just wait for the invaders to leave. But it is not that difficult to create a well armed, armored and trained military to head off any invading force.
There is a complex stress system, but really it is not that difficult to keep your dwarves happy and free of stress.
So once you have figured out all the possible pitfalls and how to avoid them you end up with this fortress that has massive amounts of spare production capacity.
So you start doing fun stuff: building megaprojects, or trying to make the most beautiful and expensive objects and pampering your dwarves with every possible luxury, or making a powerful military and seeking out and fighting the monsters, etc.
When they say losing is fun, losing happens in a couple of stages. First, when you are newbie you just kind of hit all the possible pitfalls that the game has for you. Ware-wolves, (or ware-tapirs), vampires, goblins, dwarves in strange moods going mad, goblins, underground monsters, necromancers, ghosts, drunken guests in your tavern, etc.
And then you learn about them and how to deal with them. So then you get to the second stage of losing is fun. This is when you have a safe and prosperous fortress and get kind of bored so you embark on a grand and ambitious project, that turns out a little too ambitious and your entire fortress ends up flooded with lava.
Or you get a military so powerful that you decide in hubris that you can face off any challenge and go to a place where really no mortal dwarf has any business going.
But this second stage of fun losing is entirely optional. You can have a happy and prosperous fortress for as long as you want, once you have figured out the game.