What game are you currently playing?

Man I've put over 650 hours into EU4. I tried HoI and never got super into it, but plan to go back sometime.
EU4 is really good, especially once you figure out what is going on. Victoria 2 is also pretty good, but an order of magnitude more of that "I have no idea what I'm doing".

 

I thought the story took a nice path; it wasn't the usual story anyway.

I do admit though: When the final fight was over I totally surprised, as I expected there to be a round 2 at least

I thought about that so often, but so far didn't try it.
And can't even entirely certain say why.

 

Yeah there is a LOT of depth in Eu4... the way trade & stuff works is a bit involved. But if you manage to learn all about it it is really fun to try to optimize.

 

I love Rimworld! Have you ever tried out Dwarf Fortress?

I absolutely love Crawl. What have you won with? Two of mine have been with a GrEe and one with a MiBe.

For those who don't understand the above, in the game, the most important choices for you are your species, their profession, and the god that you worship. There are a variety of synergistic builds, and which is best or easiest is generally always changing. The learning curve in the game is substantial, and it rewards absolutely cowardly play.

 

I know you weren't asking me, but both those games are fantastic. I haven't played DF in a few years now, but put a lot of time into it prior to that. Rimworld I'm still playing.

Man I'm so terrible. I've won 3 times out of roughly 3500 games. MiBe [stuck with Trog], DsCj [Veh], and I had to go ask the IRC bots what my last one was: DsWz [Veh].
I've been in Zot a few times with other characters, and ended up dying. I play basically the complete opposite of cowardly. And it kills me basically every freakin' time.

 

Oh man. Get this: it's FREE. It's kind of like Rimworld, but in a fantasy setting with a much less pretty form of graphical interface.



I mean, the graphics are not the standout feature, but what IS the standout feature is more complexity than any game I've ever seen. The lead programmer said his inspiration was making a full simulation of a Tolkien story.

Let me explain - so let's say you start a new game and start building your dwarf fortress. You've got seven dwarves and a wagon, complete with supplies. Your first step is to dig into the Earth and start building a fortress for your dwarves. You've got to build them beds, doors, tables, workshops, farms, and most importantly a distillery for the alcohol that they need to get through every day.

Each dwarf has allegiances and bonds to other dwarfs. You can look at them and see their emotions, what they prefer in food, decorating, clothing, weapons, whether they're a good leader, diplomat, trader, warrior, etc., their family history, their religious affiliation, etc.

The world you inhabit has creatures to hunt, train, farm, minerals and veins of minerals that you can mine, trees to log, and then caverns underneath the earth filled with all manner of strange creature (don't dig too deep though).

Your dwarfs can start trading with human, elven and dwarven civilizations that will bring you items and negotiate trade treaties with you. If you build a tavern, adventurers will stop by your fortress and bring you tales from distant lands.

Once your fortress starts accumulating some dwarves and wealth, dwarves will start producing artifacts, carving statues, building decorations. You'll need to manage tasks, set up a dwarven law enforcement, rooms for noble dwarves, and traps and barracks for your military. Because not long after goblins and forgotten beasts start to invade your land.



Combat is equally detailed, with the engine keeping track of each part of the combatants anatomy, resulting in flying body parts being strewn across the ground. If it happens in a haunted biome, the different parts will even reanimate and start to attack people.

This all combines to create amazing stories. Oil Furnace is a well illustrated, typical game experience: Oilfurnace — Tim Denee

It's honestly hard for me to stress how much I love this game.

 

I recommend checking out the Lazy Newb's pack:

Utility:Lazy Newb Pack - Dwarf Fortress Wiki

and playing through with a tutorial:

PeridexisErrant’s DF Walkthrough — PeridexisErrant's DF Walkthrough

Like literally you need to do everything in this before you can really have fun with the game, but it's so dang worth it.

 

Has Rimworld gotten better? I love the idea of a science fiction based DF, but it was pretty empty when I first started.

Yeah, ditto. Everytime I've won it's been like a peak experience, and I tell my fiancee and she just doesn't understand. Vehumet and a caster is just awesome. I've never had much luck with demonspawn, but I know they can be incredibly powerful.

 

One of my favorite Dwarf Fortress anecdotes is the "Thermo-nuclear catsplosion".

So there is this 'problem' that some players run into: Cats, unlike every other animal, cannot be assigned as pets. They choose their own owners. That is, they will just claim a human themselves.
To understand why this is problematic, you need a bit of background.

The first piece of this puzzle:
Normal domesticated animal relationships.
- You have your adult animals.
- You may choose whether or not to assign them as pets to some dwarf
- If not assigned as a pet, you can designate them for butchering at any time. This will cause a dwarf with butchering labor enabled to come lead the animal to the butcher table, kill it, and get fat/skin/bones/meat/etc.
- Once assigned as a pet, it is very hard to kill the animal later. It will cause all sorts of problems with the pet's owner's emotional health. Also you can no longer designate it to be butchered, so you are left to various evil schemes. (See below.)
- Those adult animals will have babies, assuming you have both genders present among the adult population.
- The cycle repeats: you may choose or not choose to assign those babies as pets, start over at the top.

The second piece of this puzzle: If you have a TON of creatures on your map, the pathing AI (which triggers all the time; any time a creature wants to move somewhere) will start to consume more and more CPU cycles until the game becomes unplayable.

Is it becoming clear yet? The issue is that once you have a male & a female cat around, they:
- Choose their own owners, so now you can't kill them easily
- They will reproduce.
- The babies may choose a new owner. Even if you immediately designate them for butchering, they may decide to adopt the butcher on the way to the chopping block, at which point the butcher will stop trying to butcher them.
- This eventually results in a gajillion cats, slowing your game to the point of unplayability.

There are various wacky ideas for how to handle this. E.g., build a spike trap and put it right in front of the door to a room where you store food (cats will be drawn there by the rodents & other pests). But make the door not passable to pets.
Hook the trap up so it can be triggered by pulling a lever, inside the food room.
Order the cat's owner (the cat may try to follow them, which is what you want) to go pull the lever repeatedly.
Eventually the cat should try to wander over and follow them (or get at the mice/etc that are invading your food), find the door impassable, and will stand just outside it, getting killed by the trap.
Now the owner may flip out and start a tantrum spiral of death. (That is where one dwarf goes berserk and attacks people, causing much unhappiness, causing other dwarves to go berserk, until everyone is just throwing tables at each other and everyone dies.)

Enter, the "thermonuclear catsplosion".

All of a creatures properties are stored in raw game files on your hard disk. If you edit the cats so that their internal temperature to something ridiculously high, then you re-load your game, and all your cats explode suddenly in a huge wave of fiery death.
E.g., http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/movie-518-nuclearcatsplosion
(Note that this will still cause a tantrum spiral of death, as all the owners of those cats will be extremely upset.)
Don't even get me started on mermaid baby farms (for the insanely valuable bones).

 

Now I'm playing Dwarf Fortress again. Damn you all.

 

Yeah its filled out a good bit.

I like getting stuff when I level up, so end up playing a lot of Ds. Draconians are also fun. My latest runs have been with a DsTm, going with the new 0.21 Wu Jian Council god. They haven't been going so well...

 

I'll give it another go sometime soon. I'm trying to see if I can build a goblin-apult in the front entrance of my fortress right now. :3

I always sigh with happiness when I reach level 14 with a gargoyle. I've tried running DrWz but have a lot of trouble with them. DsTm with WJC sounds really synergistic, I'm surprised it doesn't work out so well. I've been trying to run an octopode transmuter of Cheibriados, but always get them killed relatively early on.

Oh it gets so much weirder.

 

Go to the TVTropes page for it, read up a bit, then look for the story "Boatmurdered". You are welcome.

 

Boatmurdered is hilarious.
If you are reading it keep in mind that it is a very early version of the game. (There were no z-levels yet! I.e., you couldn't dig downward.)

 

If you are... curious... here is a 25 page thread on this topic. Chasing the elusive Mermaid

 

Boatmurdered is the definitive Dwarf Fortress story. There are many that came afterwards, but that was easily one of the funniest.

 

I played and finished "The Bunker", a live action game.
It was... I don't know, really.
A bit dull but also interesting at the same time; it was also short (2 hours? two and a half? With short breaks in between) - but if it would have been longer it would have been only boring and became bad.
Some darker or scary elements wouldn't have hurt either - especially because it's made to look like it would be scary. Which it wasn't.
I got it on a sale for $2 or something, which was okay.
Full price? No way, that would be worth it. Even $5 and I would have bitten my butt hindsight.


Now, I'm back to finishing "Horizon: Zero Dawn".
So far it's not that bad, actually. With the Shield Waver Armour anyway
I'm playing skipping between that and my stealth outfit and it actually works rather well.
I have done 17 out of the 20 main quests; admittedly I ignore any side quests.
If it keeps working like that, I should be able to finally give the back to a friend.
And start yet again on my copy for the DLC... Might wait with that a little though; not sure