So I fucked about with it because I thought it looked interesting...but its way complicated. I really don't want to watch ~7 hours of tutorial video just to have an idea of what to do, especially when they're already slightly out of date. I've dug a few holes and such, but I'm not sure how to make my dwarves do what I want then to do half the time
You don't. You tell the fort what needs to be done and the dorfs automatically assign a dorf to do it. Sometimes it doesn't get done for a variety of reasons.
Well here's my problem, I started digging my fort, started chopping down trees, designated spaces to drop off lumber, have my fisher dwarf fishing, and my carpenter dwarf set to build a couple of workshops (one woodworking, one fishery) He started, then randomly stopped - there's no indication why or anything. He's just hanging out at the half deconstructed wagon doing nothing - he's not tearing it down like I asked nor is he finishing anything else. And there's no message anywhere saying why, everyone else is working busily away, but this little f-er is sitting on his ass. Maybe he misses his princess?
Hell I'm going to give it another shot on a real PC (instead of my netbook). Downloaded a better graphics pack and I'll make sure to read the wiki a bit more this time around. It certainly looks MUCH better with this graphic pack installed. I'll post later if I get anywhere with it over the next day, I usually really like these kind of games.
This game looks amazing, I still haven't had the time to get into it (it's got quite a learning curve). One of my friends at work plays it, plus I've read quite a bit about it... the level of detail in the simulation is brilliant.
http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/ The best AAR ever done to this game. It's piss your pants hilarious at times.
So I made my first *real* fortress and experimented with stuff like floodgates and the like - made my first underground farm by draining an above ground lake into a huge tunnel I'd made, worked like a charm. A few of my dwarves got mirthful and a few of them made some cool statues and stuff - had rooms for everyone that had any real skill, dug down to the first level of the caverns and generally was doing fine. So naturally I abandoned them and went into adventure mode for kicks (my fort was very poorly laid out I think) My chickie died fighting a few dwarves haha. Much better this time around, learning how to do stuff is pretty fun, I still have yet to dick around with military, but I expect to do so this next time. edit This AAR was hilarious!!!
Ok, I've played enough that I'm a least somewhat comfortable in surviving a year. I'm in, even if you just want to pass a map back and forth ehrie, as I'll probably learn something. My current fortress is up to something like 30ish dwarves, I've started a military, walled off my compound (I was planning to move it all inside, but the walls seem to work pretty well...made a moat and a retractable drawbridge to keep out the nasties and let in the caravans. I've got 3 nobles (a surgeon, a broker, and a militia commander/diagnostician) My magma smelter and forge is up, but I haven't really done much with them but to equip my military, I got some jewelers and gemcutters in my last wave of homeless so I'll be fashioning some decent trade items for the next caravan. Went entirely farming, which has worked somewhat well enough to feed everyone, though I did have to rely on the winter caravan to keep food on the table (the good thing about farming is that I can't seem to run out of booze). Had a couple of theives - raccoons and kobolds - but now that I have the moat I haven't had to worry about any.
Sounds good faisent. Let's do an aar here and maybe become internets famous. We can each do a year at a time until Fun comes to the fortress.
Coolies, I'll be completely honest in that I've abandoned four forts before much in the way of "fun" happened to them - I thinking I'd rather do something slightly different and restarting. I've never had a seige for example, and my longest fort has only been going 3 years (and not a single caravan and immigrants stopped coming after year one, so something was weird there). I have a feeling once we hit the 50+ dwarf cap and start getting raiders, we'll be quite knee-deep in fun by the end of my year. But I'm really keen on how you might do things - start us off, we can always upload to this thread... Right now I'm trying to make an obsidian factory and build on this cool volcano I've discovered, if I get things working (even partially) I'll upload so you can take a look.
I was sitting right at 19 dwarves at the end of my first winter on this fort. First immigrant wave jumped me to 43!!!??! 14 farmers now, gah I think its time I explore military
Make a cistern and some underground farms. You think you're safe now? Wait until the horde comes for you.
Have any of you guys tried .04 yet? I don't really want to lose the mayday graphics going to it if it doesn't do much to fix military. I did *finally* get some crossbowmen training with actual bolts and not just swinging them around like clubs - had three seiges show up at the exact same time in my last fort; was actually far less ugly than I thought it would be (10 steel-clad axemen that had been training for a few years + 10 crossbowmen) The carnage happened when my "bridge over the magma pipe of doom" was accidentally removed while everyone was crossing back and forth on it cleaning up all the miasma-producing body bits...5 or so dwarves went plunging to their ummm...drownings (along with all the mess at least) kicking off a nice tantrum-spiral. I only lost 4 dwarves (+4 or so injured a bit) to the seiges - sadly the fisherdwarf and her baby were plugged full of arrows at the pond (baby dead instantly, fisherdwarf crawled back home and died in her bed). Finally starting to get military figured out now - just in time as I found you can't drop a bridge on trolls - it will just magically float above the lava with troll-power or something. Nifty fact blue troll blood + red gobbo blood = brown nasty blood pools.
