site banner
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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats