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Disclaimer
The game is a work-in-progress and is available free to download in “alpha” form (current release as of this writing v0.31.12). So anything written here is subject to change.
Background
Promotion of the game seems to be primarily through word-of-mouth, and has successfully attracted a solid dedicated fan base. I imagine if you are reading this review out of curiosity for the game, you have probably already seen some of this online content, maybe some u-tube video or fan-forum. Personally I saw the link posted here [geekurl= http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/56498/item/1340802#ite...] at VGG and became curious.
Stability
I played using Windows XP as my operating system, and the game runs fine. I have a AMD Turion 64x2 duo processor, which I assumed would be more than adequate, seeing the small size of the program, but at some points during the starting setup and saving the game, there are some very long (1-2 minute) pauses where nothing seems to happen. I assume the game is compiling data or something. I have also read that when lots of creatures (many hundreds) are on the map or severe flooding occurs (snicker, snicker) there is some game lag. So if that bothers you, look for even more processing power. The game has no autosave feature. It crashed on me once, and I lost an early fortress that way. So it is important to remember to save the game occasionally, maybe once every time the season changes. But overall I would call the game stable and playable on my system.
Game Description
The game (currently) uses an ASCII-based graphic display ala “Rogue” or “Nethack” with two modes: Fortress mode and Adventure mode (I say currently, because some fans have already generated 3D modeling for the game, and there seems to be a lot of mods and scripts available for tweeking the game).
Before I go on, let me just say that the display doesn’t bother me at all. It is good that a game designer is dedicated to content rather than flashy graphics. Sometimes I think this has been lost somewhat as many games have come to rely on graphic-dependent appeal. If the game idea takes off, cool graphics can always be added later. It is also interesting to think that with the popularity of games being developed as iphone apps and such on the rise, this type of simple graphics interface might experience a revival. I like.
Fortress mode has some elements similar to the “Sim-City” genre with a bit of “Lemmings” thrown in, in that you need to build up a whole viable “city i.e. fortress” (using tunnels, rooms, staircases, workshops, pumps, mills, etc) economy from scratch using little creatures that need to be directed at every step of the way by being told what to do. Anyone who played the old 1990’s game “Sim-Ant” might also see some remote parallels. Many catastrophes and challenges await (some game induced, some from insufficient player experience or planning). It has a lot of depth (astounding really) for such a simple interface, being almost entirely open-ended as to how involved a player wants to get in developing their fortress. This is the primary reason why the game has generated so much interest I think.
Adventure mode is included more as a “feature” than a primary game experience according to the designer. It allows you to “explore” the world, including any currently active or previously abandoned player-generated dwarf fortresses. This mode is very similar to Rogue, with I think the added flair of not just being limited to a single dungeon to crawl. Great idea! Personally I tried it and got bored quickly because all I could find to fight were groundhogs, but maybe I just didn’t give it a chance. I won’t be reviewing this part.
Game Duration
The game can end often ends very abruptly with some in-game unforeseen catastrophe (dragon attack, hostile goblins or elven armies, clever engineering scheme gone wrong and inadvertently filling the fortress with magma, etc). These events, whether they result in the demise of your fortress or not, are a big part of the fun. Thus real-world game duration for a single fortress can last anywhere from several hours to several months depending upon the fortress’s capacity to cope with disaster. As far as victory conditions go, the game is pretty open-ended (i.e. there are none, other than survival = a win). Generate lots of in-game wealth and brag about it in a game forum. Make a mega-fortress and then make a video to post on the web. Write a short story outlining the history of the rise and fall of your heroes. Create some engineering marvel with magma vents and water traps. You decide.
Difficulty
Learning to play “casually”, I would say is “involved” but do-able, while really mastering the game (i.e. building and managing a massive successful fortress over a period of centuries) I would rate as “grognards only need apply” as it will eat up many weeks/months of your free time. The actual in-game “survivability” difficulty level is determined by the site to settle. No trees? Water source frozen? Nasty local fauna or goblins for neighbors? Underground aquifer to cope with? Fell beasts climbing out of that cavern? All these things make establishing a fortress more challenging.
My first fortress that really got off the ground (ie I didn't do something stupid fun and decide to abandon it in the first year) was located in a very mountainous site with only about 20 trees. Wood is an all-important material for making beds for the dwarves, as well as the material of choice for barrels and bins. These quickly got chopped. So I needed to cope by getting a smelter up fast and producing metal to forge. Then new settlers started arriving, and I didn't have enough beds. Then I started running out of barrels to store food and my supplies were dwindling fast... sounds like a normal day at the Dwarf Fortress.
But I get ahead of myself...
Learning to Play
First, I watched a fan-made online tutorial (see here [geekurl= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZUS2h-Yzc][/geekurl]) to see if it looked like something I wanted to try. After a few webisodes I figured “what the hell”. So I downloaded the game to check it out. I basically followed along with the tutorial, duplicating it step by step in my own game. I also consulted the dwarf-fortress-wiki and occasionally the game’s official web-forum to gain some deeper insights to certain questions. One thing to note: the tutorial was made using an earlier version of the game, so a few things have already changed (most notably searching for underground rivers as a site choice and setting up/equipping your military).
Any potential player following these same steps would, I assume, at this point either have lost interest already or become seriously curious. For those who persevere, all told it is not too difficult get a simple fortress up and running (survival of the fortress is another thing).
My first real challenge was trying to figure out how to irrigate my farm plots (not shown in the tutorial), that resulted in me inadvertently flooding my entire fortress. OK, abandon that one and set up floodgates FIRST next time….. this is how the game goes, and is reflected in the motto “losing is fun”. If you can’t handle this type of event with a laugh and start over, don’t play this game.
Gameplay
The pre-game starts with world-generation. This is done automatically. Without mod-ing the program, you can’t control any settings. But it is interesting to watch. The program generates a HUGE world randomly (over 700 regions, which I assume to mean the 180x180 space “local” maps), complete with mountains, cliffs, valleys, rivers, forests, caverns….. and rock substrata. That’s right. Both above and below ground are entirely generated down to the last tree and ore deposit. Then, it proceeds to populate the world with several competing civilizations of humans, goblins, elves and dwarves and run a 1000-year sim where these civilizations expand and fight one another. This generates an in-game history called “Age of Heroes”. My first world included some 25,000 historical figures, 50 sites, 270 civilizations (factions?), 700 structures and over 250,000 historical “events”. Wow. This is why I can see the Adventure mode having lots of potential. This is just the first taste of the potential depth of the game. The world is saved and you exit back to the main menu.
You then choose to play in Fortress mode or Adventure mode (I will only review Fortress mode). In Fortress mode, you then need to choose a site to settle. Since the world is so huge, the game includes a “site finder” that helps locate the best suited locales according to a half-dozen user-specified criteria. Once chosen, you can then either dive in with a default group of 7 dwarves having preset skills and equipment, or you can choose to completely customize your expeditionary force. You then are whisked to the site previously chosen with a message about the weary journey and best wishes for success.
You start off pretty much immediately burrowing into the ground, chopping trees, setting up workshops, etc. The site you’ve chosen will often largely facilitate or even dictate the initial layout of your tunnels and structures. Some kind of a vision or idea as a goal concerning fortress layout is helpful. Your 7 dwarfs only cover the basic skills needed to become self sufficient in food, water, shelter, defenses and equip some kind of proto-military. You need to do all these things as quickly as possible.
Once you’ve gotten the basics covered, you need to start thinking about producing something viable to trade (metal working, crafting stone, gem cutting, leather working, etc). Each “industry” has some kind of a limited “tech tree” of workshops, and each requires raw materials as "fuel". So if you want to forge armor, you need to first set up a wood-furnace to produce charcoal and chop trees for fuel. Then you need to mine coal and build a smelting-furnace to process the coal into coke using the charcoal. Then you need to find and mine some metal ore and smelt it into bars using coke at the smelter. Then you can rework the bars into armor at a metal smith workshop (hopefully you remembered to bring an anvil). It is all about time-management, resource management, and “skill” management, with a bit of “spacial management” as well, as the efficiency of your fortress layout is obviously very important.
All of this is done by issuing player-generated general work orders, and your individual dwarves choose to respond (or not) according to their skill-set, whether they are hungry or sleepy, lazy, etc. These orders can sometimes (often) require nit-picky detail on the part of the player. Good or bad, this type of nit-picking is a recurring theme throughout the game, and I imagine will turn off some potential gamers. Figuring out why the dwarves are not doing what you want them to or improving their efficiency in carrying out the orders is part of the frustration fun.
As your fortress becomes more developed the layout increases in complexity. Location of doors, stairs, tunnels, workshops, storage areas, finishing, engravings, chairs, beds, cabinets…. in short everything…. needs to be specified by the player. New dwarves arrive (maybe twice yearly, randomly generated) to be integrated into the general workforce. Their numbers might overwhelm the existing infrastructure/economy if you haven’t planned properly. But generally these new arrivals also bring new skills to complement and expand your fortress economy.
As the game progresses, merchants in trade caravans start showing up from neighboring civilizations at various times of the year. These traders can bring in badly needed supplies or equipment, as well as generate an opportunity to sell some of the stockpile of manufactured goods your fortress has been hopefully producing. Once again attention to detail is almost overwhelming here, with just about every item in the game available to trade right down to socks and thread.
The game includes lots of random events and occurrences. Some are catastrophic as noted above. Others less so, like craftsdwarves becoming possessed by a “strange mood” and producing an artifact of extreme value. Sometimes, whether through neglect or intent, dwarves will get unruly and start breaking things. Goblin thieves attempt to make off with infants or treasure. In your digging, you might discover a vast underground cavern full of rare minerals and nasty beasties. These events I quite liked and found they generally add spice to the game.
One fortress I started was located next to a huge waterfall dropping down into a canyon. I got the bright idea that this is where I wanted to make the entrance to my fortress: straight into the rock face of the waterfall. If I could shut on- and off the water, it would make a really cool deterrent against attack. But you can't just dam a river in the game, you need a dry river bed. So I started burrowing channels and tunnels at the top of the falls to divert the river long enough to build floodgates. And things started going wrong... drastically wrong. A dwarf somehow got caught in the river flow and was sucked into my diversion tunnel. He was trying to get out, but the water-flow kept on sucking him back in. Then other dwarves started showing up, I think to collect the debris in the tunnel and THEY got sucked in as well. Oh my...
Overall, there is a lot of tongue-in-cheek stuff that can happen to your dwarves as they build the fortress. Its all part of the fun.
User Interface
The interface and menus are all text-based linked to hotkeys. The ASCII display I can handle. The keyboard commands I can handle. The menus are, quite simply put, at best awkward and in some cases badly designed. They are the most obvious reminder that this game is still in its “alpha” stage of development. Sometimes certain keys used to navigate through one menu won’t work in another. So you need to learn the quirky key commands. Ergonomics were obviously not an issue, as “esc” is probably the most prevalent key used in the game (being located in the far upper left of the keyboard is very awkward) and the “shift+< or >” used quite a bit as well. Why use the “shift” key at all? Issuing a new command generally zooms the cursor back to the center of the screen, rather than maintaining its position. So you end up having to move the cursor often back to the same spot repeatedly, which is unnecessary and frustrating. Also the message window only has 20 lines of text visible, which makes browsing large lists tedious (even if you expand the window to fill the screen, only 20 lines of text are displayed). There is not much available in terms of menus that give you an overview. A lot of info concerning the individual dwarf’s skills is not readily visible and you really need to dig down (pun intended) into the menus (sometimes more than one) to find the information you need. This requires micromanagement attention to detail of epic uber-grognard proportions as your fortress grows (turning on and off individual menu items, let alone keeping track of it all). Until these things get fixed, in my book this constitutes a game-killer and makes large fortresses management a tedious chore.
Summary
I had a lot of fun in the early game when I only had a few dwarves to manage and even learning the game is challenging and fun. Imo, in the current version with the menus the way they are, managing 50+ dwarves becomes a tedious chore, and quickly cooled my enthusiasm. This made me get bored long before I got anywhere close to a “win”. But to each his own. This game has a very solid fan base, so it obviously scratches some itch for some people even in its current state.
My final word would be: I am going to wait and see how the game gets developed before really getting exited about it. With a better interface (meaning an improved menu structure that allows managing the dwarves to be less work and more play), I see the game’s appeal broadening greatly. The random world generation is REALLY cool, and you would think in this day and age would be a standard feature in most games. If they could integrate Rogue-like dungeons into it somehow, the whole Adventure mode part might take off as well. Maybe sometimes it just takes a game developer to think outside the box for that to happen. Overall, kudos to the designer, and I wait to see where they take it.
Edits: Corrected some grammar and added the link.
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Some additions I learned after a while of playing:
a) During world creation you can stop and start playing whenever you want. So play in a 25 years old world or play in a 2.000 years old world. It is a choice between monsters and civilization.
b) If you want to dig deep don't use the keyboard to designate the mining areas but use the mouse to select the points and the keyboard to navigate through the layers.
c) Irrigating: Search a normal lake and dig to it (not through the last wall). Then build a room next to it by channeling it, so you have a room that is below the sea. Now do the same a level below the newly created room and so on. Number of rooms depending on the size of the lake. So you get kind of stairs of potential farming plots looking like the Hanging Gardens. To unleash the water first smooth the wall and then engrave fortifications. This will let the water but no monsters through. This should flood the "steps" of your farming area leaving enough mud for the rest of teh game - and the last "step" will be your source of fresh water.
d) Having half your expedition troops killed by single werewolf during the first minutes is really crap fun. I like the detailed (if also a bit stiff concerning the grammar) combat descriptions. Reading how my leader tries to dodge the werewolf only to have his head bitten off... well... Some months later the other dwarves even carved this into the walls of his tomb. Way to remember him!
Really a great game. 
Don't forget to 'read' this graphical session report. 
EDIT: Oh, and I learned about the game from one of the biggest news sites of Germany: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/games/0,1518,709374-7,00.html
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I will have to try that irrigation technique next time. I first tried setting up a bucket depot next to the pond and having the dwarves dump water by hand into a hole burrowed down to my farm plots. This works, but it takes a long time. I then settled on tunneling from my farm plots to the water source without breaking through to water. I installed a floodgate controlled by a lever and a wall grate there. I would then channel in from the top and start the water flowing to the floodgate. Opening and then closing the lever again quickly allowed me to let in just enough water to flood the area to farm while preserving the pond for turtle fishing.
The combats are definitely fun.
And yes, that is the link I was talking about in the review. I had forgot to add it (did this with the edit). Thanks for reminding me.
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Oh, also a great great really great (long) text is this project. It is kind of a PBEM. Some forum members played one year each, always continuing the fortress the previous player has left for them and describe this in a kind of diary way with a lot of screenshots. It is hilarious!
Continued the experiment with the untamed wilds (see werewolf + leader above). The first expedition was completely destroyed by two ogres. I then sent a second expedition to reclaim the fortress which was a mess when they arrived.
Fast as hell they began to reclaim everything and I built a channel under earth, filled it with water and constructed a bridge on it that could be retracted, so that no oger might again enter the fortress.
This went well for a while, but before I could get the whole engine starting an Ogre appeared. Again. I send my master marksmen to kill him from a safe distance. But that idiot forgot his bolts and was killed within seconds. I had to retreat deep into the fortress and seal myself in. Food was running low. People started to get strange.
Reinforcements/migrants arrived but found no way into the dungeon so I started to carve a new entrance around the Ogre. But I forgot about the aquifier. The whole dungeon was flooded and while most dwarves are now trapped between an angry Ogre and a flood without any kind of food one dwarf is left down in the dark stockpiles and can't come out because all corridors are flooded. I don't know how long he will stay sane but I will try to safe him!
Another important thing:
- If you build stockpiles under earth you most likely will end with a stockpile that is still full of rocks which block the usage of the biggest part of the stockpile. To get rid of them declare a garbage zone ('i') next to it, it only has to be 1x1 or 2x2, something small. Then press 'd' 'b' 'd' and mark the whole stockpile area (except those fields where something valuable has already been dropped). Your dwarves will then begin to carry all those rocks to the small garbage area. Afterwards press 'd' 'b' 'c' (not so sure about the 'c') and reclaim the garbage lot. This allows your dwarves to you those rocks for crafting or whatever else they are planning.
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My fortress ultimately failed. My fault, what was I thinking settling in a haunted area? I then tried the Adventurer mode and was back in WTF-land. After a bit of reading I got the hang of it and even found my king who told me to go to my old fortress and kill an Ogre. Oh yes, I remember that bastard. Has killed over twenty of my dwarves, at least five of them children. So I sought another Hammerdwarf and started my journey. After killing a lot of wolfs (good training) I reached my old fortress. And behold, what a mess. Corpses and clothes everywhere.
After a while I found the old entrance which was guarded by an Ogre. We attacked him and wounded him badly so that he started running. Before we could follow him another Ogre jumped us. We killed him off and followed the bloody trail of the previous Ogre through the snow. He didn't survive long.
Then the journey in to the depth of the fortress began. A shame that I failed to produce anything of value during my reign in the dungeon so there was nothing special to be found. After killing a third and fourth Ogre in the old quarters I noticed that I had killed the evil Ogre. Even took his head off. So I went back, happy that I had survived with only bruises.
When I look around my old farm plots I was jumped by yet another Ogre who managed to knock me unconscious. Had to take some heavy punches before my fellow helped me out (he is a bit slow). In the end we managed to kill him but I was bleeding like hell. Walking was nearly impossible and I collapsed very often on my way out. But in the end I reached my king and received my reward: yet another Ogre to kill...
... after that: kill a dragon. Right now I am deep in a cavern in search for this dragon and only his cries throught the tunnels have been heared yet and a mutilated Troglodyte corpse is proof of the dragons existance.
Yes, it is fun.
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Yes, the stockpile thing is covered in the tutorial. I don't like to use it much though, because it seems more like a bug to me. Instead, I locate my first batch of storage rooms in the loam/sand/clay layer just below the surface where there are no rocks. Gradually I expand rooms and tunnels into the bedrock, giving my dwarves time to clear out the rubble, all the while producing a steady stream of stonecrafts to convert the rubble into cash.
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Posted Wed Aug 25, 2010 12:36 am
