Anyone tried Dwarf Fortress?

[Skyrage]

Well then, as customary whenever I visit a community and now that there's an off-topic area - I'll have the opportunity to spread the word about Dwarf Fortress...actually, I'm just gonna copy/paste from the Taleworlds Forum (which by the way quite a lot of will head this way now that someone actually mentioned Battleships Forever there)

Anyway - Dwarf Fortress - although this is a copy paste from well over a year ago most of it is still true albeit the game itself has changed tremendously since then:

It's a really funny little game - mind, the graphics are ASCII based.

Basically you can play 2 modes (so far) - one which is the most developed one where you are supposed to maintain and expand a dwarf settlement and do what dwarves usually do, namely dig in a big mountain, gather minerals and metals and craft items and generally accumelate riches and so on...and of course defend against foes one way or another...

Second part is an adventure mode which isn't that sharped out yet but still relatively fun.

Despite the game being extremely small, it will still take anywhere between 5-30 minutes to create a world - depending on how good your computer is...and yeah, it's that complex.


If anyone's interested, here's the site:

www.bay12games.com/dwarves

EDIT:

And here's the Wiki for the game which contains all the need-to-know info:

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Main_Page


As an extra note, this thread that I posted over in the Taleworlds Forum last year is still very alive and has currently...lesseee...118 pages at this point.

[Himura.Kenshin]

I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago from the Penny-Arcade forums, but never got around to playing it o.O

[Winged Cat]

I've played it. Lots of people like it, but my take: lame game is lame.

WAY excessive micromanaging, not much in the way of help (your dwarf is flashing a down arrow? You'll just have to guess which of 10 different things that means - and it's probably an 11th you didn't even know existed), suicidally dumb AI (and you can't give direct orders to anyone; you have to assign them jobs and flag certain areas for certain activities and hope they figure out a good order to do them in instead of spending most of their time running around from one end of your cave to the other), attention to detail that gyrates from the excessive (this dwarf's right foot is thirsty? What about the rest of him?) to the unrealistically sloppy (one regular-sized tree's worth of wood can burn for months or years without additional fuel, setting aflame all who come into contact with it, and filling the cave with smoke all the while), and a built-in auto-lose (even if you do everything else right, in the end you're forced to dig up adamantine, which starts a timer after which your outpost just goes poof - I'm told the developers are starting to think about removing that, but that it was ever in in the first place is a fail).

The game says "Losing is fun". It isn't. It's a monotonous, pointless drag - unless you want to see just how thoroughly you can screw things up.

[Cerebrus]

I've played it and I liked it, but I'm too tired right now to address all of Cat's points. However, there isn't an auto-lose anymore.