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Comment by gosu | Hacker News Reader

I actually got bored towards the end of my first game of DF because it was too easy.

The interface adds a lot of illusory difficulty, but that's not an issue for people used to reading manuals. On the other hand, when you're not wrestling with the system, there's not much fair challenge. When your underground fortress is filled to the brim with traps and completely self sufficient, no one is ever going to touch you unless you handicap yourself.

Once I had my base built out the way I wanted it, there wasn't much left for me to do. Kind of reminds me of how Minecraft feels once you've built a satisfying shelter, but I think that Minecraft's music and FPS perspective can motivate people to keep playing for the sake of creativity. With DF: sure, it's fun to imagine my fortress and all, but then I might as well move away from the keyboard and just do the whole thing in my imagination.

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I am not sure exactly what your game is but it seems that you are simply not challenging yourself. The DF economy is such that if you get your fortress running well towards the end of the game there is a pretty large surplus. This is in order to allow you to have extra manpower for interesting projects.

So you should try to do some interesting things. Here are some ideas:

- build and train an army so that you can actually fight the goblins instead of just waiting behind the traps. This will allow you to get more caravans which will result in some more interesting things happening.

- try to dig deeper. Interesting things will happen. You will probably need a trained army for this as well.

- try to do everything you can to make your dwarves as happy as possible. This happiness will help you if you attempt one of the two things above.

- try to build a large engineering project, such as pumps to bring lava to the surface, etc.

Furthermore, I should note that it seems you have taken a lot of care to make sure your embark site is as easy as possible. For many (probably most) sites, it is not even possible to be self sufficient while being completely closed in. So if you are bored try starting on a more difficult embark site. Or you can just try a random site.

In relation to "dig deeper" -

It's easier to simply drop a fortress on a hypothetical foe attacking from underground than it is to kill them all with a finicky army prone to wandering about near magma til they catch fire.

For this reason I tend to dig out one fortress to drop and another fortress for living in.

Survivors can of course be dealt with appropriately.

I played in a similar manner, and had 0 fun after a point.

Which is when the entire "losing is fun" part of the motto clicked for me.

After yet more introspection I personally drew a parallel between me playing safe and how I approached many other things in life. And in this game, the result of playing things that way were directly clear - utter boredom.

All I had left were mega challenges. So either I play to build something vast, such as a new Morul, or I forego all those cheesy advantages and just let my fortress run and fail, and see what stories come out of it.

edit: of course my experience may have little value to helping you find any fun with the game, I strongly recommend playing without cage traps and danger rooms.

This drastically increases the challenge and the resultant successes and failures are usually enriched for it.

Wait, so which direction did you go in real life?

I find myself trying desperately to return to utter boredom.

This is an amazing reply.

I'm not sure if cage traps have been properly gimped (yet), but a year or so back they were capable of trapping dragons and similar mini-bosses. It's a real fourth-wall breaking feeling when you accidentally capture a dragon in a (presumably) tiny cage made of wood.

(I see from the wiki that under some conditions the dragon may burn through the cage, but still...)

Nope, not gimped.

I used webbed cage traps to trap some 6 FBs, one made of fire iirc.

Give me enough land and enough cage traps and webs, and I'll trap almost everything that can move.

If you ever find your Dwarf Fortress game to be too boring, keep digging deeper. There are many sources of entertainment located far underground.

I must mention that actual gameplay challenges (aside from megaprojects) do diminish considerably even when taking the "deeper stuff" into account. I once did a speedrun for wiping out hell; it took about 4 hours. There are many unbalanced game mechanics that make it possible and also pretty easy.

> I actually got bored towards the end of my first game of DF because it was too easy.

In that case I give you a challenge: make some soap.

There are some broken aspects to the game: that cage traps can catch just about everything and that all walls are impenetrable to invaders are two of the most obvious. If you abuse these, it is not hard to make the game too easy.

You can always just embark in more challenging areas so that you don't have the luxury of preparing a nice impenetrable fort for your first wave of hostiles...

Unless I'm mistaken, your first complaint was fixed a couple years ago. Though to be honest I haven't played the game since that was fixed, and I never really learned the new combat system.

If it's too easy, dig deeper.

The fact that DF makes you want to get away from your keyboard and use your imagination is perhaps its most incredible feature.

I felt this too when I played. I felt that the primary challenge was the interface itself. It wasn't that the game made it hard for me to figure out what the right thing was. That game made it hard for me to figure out how to do what I wanted.

Difficulty depends entirely on you. You can easily wall yourself in, build a couple farm and game pretty much can play itself.

Just don't forget to fuel your dwarves with booze from time to time

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