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Vargus Daelstrum · Adventurer Joined: 08 Jan 2007 Posts: 98

Anyone ever played this? Its an insanely detailed fortress building/rpg game. Steep learning curve, but pretty fun too. I was going to post a huge summary of it, but then got lazy and decided people who didn't know what it was could just google it if they wanted to Razz

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Sara Delan · Sage Joined: 08 Jan 2008 Posts: 579

Flash game? Online? What's the dillio?

What's the d-d-d-deal?
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Vargus Daelstrum · Adventurer Joined: 08 Jan 2007 Posts: 98

Ek, I'll just post the wall of text I wrote then decided to take away due to longness. There's another game added in there too, for extra longness.

Dwarf Fortress
This one is probably my favorite of the two, due to the insane amount of things you can do. There are three modes in this game: Legends, Adventurer, and Fortress Mode. Before you can play any of these modes, the game has you create a world. You can either have it randomly generated, or shape it in any way you want, from elevation levels to amount of evil lands to whether or not rivers erode cliffs. Every world that is made creates its own history, and you'll never have a world that is similar to a previous world created.

In Legends Mode, you can look up every detail in the history of your world. You can find out why an elf has become king of your dwarven civilization, or how orcs managed to destroy every other civilization in the game world.

In adventurer mode, you can play the role of a single human, elf, or dwarf. You can then explore around the map, fight monters, take quests, etc. What makes this different from any other hack and slash is that you can get into extreme detail when you fight. For example, when I was fighting a speardwarf with my wrestler, I first chose to grab his spear with my right hand, and once I wrestled it away from him, I made quick work of him by stabbing him in the chest and puncturing his lung. I then threw the spear in the direction of a crossbowdwarf who was aiming at me, knocked him unconscious, and then ran over to him and strangled him to death. The guards of the town eventually overwhelmed me though, and I died. I then looked up the events that occurred in the Legends mode, and saw that the guard that had killed me had become a legend among his people, and had eventually become king.

Fortress mode is definitely my favorite of the three. In this mode you start out with seven dwarfs, and proceed to make a fortress. The amount of things you can do in fortress mode is immense, and the only true limiting factor on how you build your kingdom is your own imagination. I began to write about one of my fortresses whose only entrance was about 40ft in the air and straight through a waterfall, but this paragraph soon became waayyy too long. There are no premade designs for anything, you simply have your miners dig into the earth at a design of your choosing, and/or have your architects create buildings of your own design above ground. Once your fortress accumulates enough wealth and your population grows, goblins will begin to siege your fortress once every game year or so, and destroy it if you didn't train your military well enough or set up good enough traps.

This game is incredible in the amount of detail it has. What I wrote down is just a small summary of what can happen. Also, the game is normally in ASCII, but some have made graphics for the game, the most detailed being a separate client which translates your game into isometric graphics. The game has a steep learning curve, but if you're able to get past that, you'll find that its a very fun game Smile

. Btw, the game is completely free. Here is the website: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Haven and Hearth

Haven and Hearth is a java based mmo that starts you out in the middle of the wilderness, and tasks you with not dieing. First off, food is important in this game. You can starve to death. In the beginning, you would usually survive by catching rabbits and eating wild blueberries, or if you're lucky and start out in a light forest, you can eat apples picked from apple trees. You can then build a shelter by taking boughs from a fir tree to create a lean-to, or chopping down trees to build a cabin. As you begin to explore the land around you, you will find wild fields of wheat, carrots, tea leaves, onions, and various other food stuffs which you can then harvest and plant in fields of your own making. You will eventually find others around you, who may be friendly, or may be trying to steal from you, or even kill you. This game is perma-death, so once you die, you're dead for good.

As you progress in the game, you can find metals, build bigger places, etc. You can eventually form with others to build cities and trade or fight with others. Perma-death and the ability to kill anyone anywhere makes this game interesting imo. Politics can get pretty heated, and even turn into simply groups of people raging because their character died, but since I'm not involved in any of that, its pretty amusing to sit back and read posts on the game's forums full of stories of deceit, backstabbing, etc.

The game is much more simple than Dwarf Fortress, but is still an OK game for casual players. And it is free, too, which doesn't hurt Razz

. Forums are here: http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/

Haven and Hearth has updates weakly, and Dwarf Fortress is going to have a much larger version come out in a few weeks. Dwarf Fortress is made by one person who lives off of donations, and Haven and Hearth is made by a lawyer in training and his college roomie. Both are pretty fun seeing that they don't have some huge developing team like the commercial games of today. If you know a fun indie game, go ahead and post it here Razz

. And oi, I've never written a post so long. Sorry for making you read so much >.<

Teh Glouris Lrod Kujabis · Transcendent Spammer Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 5740

Alarin sent me this ages ago and I've had it sitting open in my tabs for months. :S

http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/

Some of the stuff that can happen is hilarious. There are stories of like, super elite dwarves throwing a tantrum and killing entire settlements, and whenever the player tries to make a new settlement, that super elite renegade flies from offscreen and kills your new settlement because that crap saves across fortress building, or something. Also, a good way to deal with your cat overpopulation problem is to make kitten steaks out of them. And then there are overly hardcore Carp which will kill your fisherdwarves...

Vargus Daelstrum · Adventurer Joined: 08 Jan 2007 Posts: 98

Haha yeah, I've had a kobold siege where they unlocked the doors to my fortress, and suddenly a farmer and 20 of his kids flew out to go haul something to a stockpile. THEN, a human siege arrived, and I had to draft my farmer (who was also working as my woodcutter, so he had an axe with him :>), which led to him hacking up humans on the way back to safety, the whole time his children running around him getting torn to pieces. He and one or two of his kids made it back, and I checked their moods fearing the worst, but they were all ecstatic and uncaring of the loss of children because they had a nice dining room.

Ceinwyn ab'Arawn · Transcendent Spammer Joined: 13 Dec 2004 Posts: 5017

Grignag · Sage Joined: 19 Nov 2007 Posts: 500

Vargus Daelstrum · Adventurer Joined: 08 Jan 2007 Posts: 98

Yeah, its a pretty great game. A new version is coming out in a few weeks too, which revamps armies etc and makes wars between attackers and defenders more interesting. There'll also be caves throughout the underground that if you dig into unprepared, hordes of monsters can storm into your fortress and reak havoc =D.

Vidish · Adventurer Joined: 14 Aug 2009 Posts: 43

I cant get the number pad hotkeys to work. My laptop doesnt have one. but it looks like a good game.
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Grignag · Sage Joined: 19 Nov 2007 Posts: 500

It is a bit slow paced. At very least at the start. Took me forever to figure out how to designate various areas for digging/chopping and then which workshops did what. Now to figure out how to make coal and i'll be home free.

...that and trying to figure out how to make them mate. Have sex you rock hewing midgets! ....or do I just carve another one out of stone?
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Vargus Daelstrum · Adventurer Joined: 08 Jan 2007 Posts: 98

You can change your key bindings by pressing the escape button and going to options.
And, dwarves only mate when married, and for that to be done they need to be around each other for a decent amount of time in a meeting hall. But, once that's done they can tele-mate, so the couple doesn't necessarily have to be around each other. Also, it takes around 12ish dwarf years for a baby to grow up, and they're pretty useless until then (Besides small jobs like hauling or being shields for militia-moms).