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:	post by DestroyYouAlot at 2007-11-16 15:33:03

Arillius and I are both hooked on this dumb game. Literally the most complex game I've ever come across, hands down; developed by two brothers with a LOT of time on their hands. It's 1 part RTS, 1 part Roguelike RPG, and 1 part The Sims, only with dwarves. The idea is that you're in charge of a group of dwarves setting out to found a new dwarf fortress (hence the name).

First the game generates a world. Literally, a WORLD, first fractal terrain (with actual geologic epochs and erosion and volcanic activity and such), then it seeds civilizations and they fight for dominance over a thousand years or so, and then you come in. You pick an area to found your hold in - preferably with a good mix of terrain types, and several neighboring civilizations to trade with - and you're off.

The game starts you off with 7 dwarves (har har); you need to buy them skills (things like carpentry, masonry, mining, craft skills like stonecrafting and weaponsmithing, and people skills like negotiation, comedian, and appraisal) and equipment (you need food, alcohol - the dorfs don't like to drink water, and work slows down without alcohol - picks to mine with, an anvil for building a forge, weapons and armor, livestock, and seeds to grow crops).

They appear on the mountain (or wherever you put them) with a wagon full of stuff, and from there you can only control them by a) selecting which type of work each individual dwarf will or won't do, and b) queuing up jobs by mapping out where to have them mine, where to stockpile food and lumber and such, and what to build. The dwarves decide for themselves what jobs to tackle in what order, and will take their own time to eat, sleep, drink, have parties, whatever. Once they all have their job preferences set up, you can just queue up a bunch of jobs and leave them to it; the ones that get done with whatever they're doing will just take on any open hauling jobs available.

The terrain is all top-down view, and you only see one "slice" of the land at a time, but it all exists in 3d for the game logic - water flows downhill, objects dropped off cliffs end up at the bottom, etc. The whole mountain is there for you to crack open, with realistic geology, so you'll find sedimentary stones near the surface, metamorphic way down deep, etc. There are veins of different metal ores, gems, and other useful stones in among the "junk" stone (which you also use for construction). (If you go deep enough, you can find adamantine threads - and balrogs. Kind of a double-edged sword.)

You have to have trees to cut down, both to build with and for making charcoal to run the furnaces and ash for fertilizer, unless you brought some along with and are prepared to trade for it later on. You need water to fish in and for power (water wheels make more power than windmills), so you want a square with a stream or river in it. You want plants to gather (for food and for seeds to plant with.) Animals roam around the map; you can hunt these for meat, skins, bones, etc., or catch them live and train them as pets and guards. Monsters wander around, too, whether just passing by or living in the area. (I had a real problem with a chasm full of troglodytes and giant spiders in one game.)

The dwarves all have likes, dislikes, and moods, assigned randomly at creation, and if you look at their preference screen, you can see a) how happy they are, and b) why. Good working conditions, a leader with social skills, friends, pets, marriages, possessions and surroundings can make a dwarf happy, while deaths, bad smells, lack of places to sleep and eat, and lack of alcohol make them unhappy. They'll marry, have kids, adopt pets, make friends, and all of that. Once in a while, one goes into a "strange mood," takes over a workshop, and starts demanding materials. If you provide them, he'll produce a special artifact, and gain legendary skill in his trade. If not, he'll eventually give up, go insane, and either a) throw himself off a cliff, b) starve himself, or c) go berserk and start attacking other dorfs. (Artists are so temperamental.)

You arrive in the spring, and you need to have trade goods ready for the first fall - that's when the first dwarven caravan shows up to trade. You can make trade agreements - the things you request with a high priority will have a better chance of being on the next caravan, albeit at a higher price - and they'll let you know what things they're looking to buy. The dwarf and elf caravans will show up regardless, but the humans don't come until you build a paved road (wussies). After the first caravan, you'll usually get a wave of migrant dwarves come to join you, and then you're off and running.

Once you have the basic needs taken care of in your excavation (sleeping places, meeting halls, carpenter and mason workshops, food stockpiles, etc.) you can start getting creative. If water isn't easily at hand, you can build machines to transport it; you can build traps and hook levers or pressure plates to different mechanisms, all kinds of craziness. I had a huge aqueduct system set to fill up a cistern with screw pumps powered by a water wheel. Traps are necessary, because you get kobold thieves and goblin child snatchers coming by once in a while (ususally with a caravan). But the only real assurance is to assign dwarves to a military squad; you can give this waypoints for a patrol, station them in one place, or just let them wander. Off-duty dwarves will drill in a barracks, although there's a chance of injuries occurring when this happens.

And, yeah - the entire game's in ASCII. There are graphical tilesets available, but it's still pretty much NetHack on crack. Friggin' amazing. Try it out, get hooked - I recommend it highly.

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