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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2738 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Are you familiar with Dwarf Fortress?

Regarding RPGs, many old-school roguelikes probably count. Ancient Domains of Mystery is one.

Dwarf fortress isn't that difficult unless you pick a deliberately harsh zone (with aquifers). It's just has an impenetrably bad UI. At least it used to, now there's a steam release with a more polished and pretty UI, and I'm looking forward to try!

Well now we get into the territory of "what does difficult mean".

I'm making the distinction between a hard to control game and a hard game where you know the controls.

To learn the controls is to spend a couple of afternoons on the wiki and learning key sequences to rival vim's, as well as memorizing what some of the characters mean in the odd and low resolution display. Once we're past that we get to the actual game.

My point is the fact that Dwarf Fortress has a reputation for being hard strikes me as odd. The game is involves managing an incresingly large populations of citizens that sort of have free wills, but will mostly execute the tasks that you ask of them. The game is quite forgiving with things like food abundance and storage. It's easy enough to train an army in DF that's effectively unstoppable, in RM it's a struggle from start to finish as gunfights get constantly harder.

By contrast RM is much easier to pick up and understand what's going on the screen. The lack of a z axis helps. However it's a harder game because acquiring, cooking and keeping food fresh is a struggle. Gunfights are always tricky as the enemies get harder as your colonists get better guns. In DF you're fighting goblins with trash bronze weapons or elves with wooden ones, fodder for the smelters!

To get some extra difficulty there's a literal hell deep below but getting to that point is a test of patience as the game gets inevitably slower, multiplied by your ambitious projects requiring more labour. All single threaded of course so all your fancy newfangled 60 core processor can do is remind you of Amdahl's law.

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