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As someone who is aware of DF but never played it, I am curious about how the game actually works. I am roughly aware that it is a very complex simulation that
by Rudism 10y ago
As someone who is aware of DF but never played it, I am curious about how the game actually works.
I am roughly aware that it is a very complex simulation that exists under an ASCII art and menu presentation, but it's not clear at all to me how gameplay actually works. Does the game more or less "play" itself and allow you to nudge things in different directions to observe the outcome, or are you responsible for micro-managing all of your dwarves' lives?
- BEEdwards 10y agoTwo basic modes, Fortress and Adventure. Fortress is a base management sim, you don't directly control anything, you issue orders and then drwarves take those orders and do them in their own time. Adventure mode is a rougelike with in a deep world.
- erikb 10y agoAnd as mentioned in the article there's Legendary mode which is basically a magnifying glass for the results of the world generator. Apperently people use it just to see what happened during world generation, maybe even using the results as inspiration for other media like pen&paper RPGs. So there is the option for the ant farmer as well.
- civilian 10y agoYou might try Rim World--- it's the sci-fi spiritual sibling of DF, and it has a similar "task" system. It's been awhile since I've played DF, and I only have about 40 hours in it, so some of this description might be off. :) The idea is that you do specify where dwarves will build items (like beds, tables, workstations) and you also specify zones (stockpile food here, grow mushrooms here) and provide orders (chop all trees in this area). But _then_ you tell the dwarves what kind jobs you want them to do. You tell the cook dwarf that they're allowed to cook, haul, and maybe they're allowed to farm too. The cooking stove will have a job order that says: "make X meals" or "make meals until you have X many" You tell the mining dwarf that he's allowed to mine and haul iron ore only. You tell the construction dwarf to build stuff. And then the dwarves manage their own days. They "work" 10ish hours a day based off of what tasks are available, and they eat/drink/hangout the rest of the time. You never actually have to micro manage them, you just set up rough guidelines.
- sethish 10y agoYou're doing a fair amount of requesting a dwarf to do a job. But you aren't usually commanding a particular dwarf to do a specific job at a specific location. Simcity is reasonably similar.