I really wanted to love banished, and I did love it for a while, but I found that once you learn how to create a stable town, you can apply almost the exact same strategies in every single game played no matter what the land looks like, as well as every time you branch off to expand an existing town into a new piece of land.
The mods didn't really do anything for me either, I felt like they just increased complexity and unbalance without really adding challenge or fun.
I haven't ever actually played dwarf fortress, but from what I've read, the inherent unpredictability of the world, your dwarves, and other creatures seems like nothing that any other game can even dream of.
I've tried Dwarf Fortress and I had some fun with it. In the beginning it felt impressive in many ways. There are so many little features and it's really cool with all the things (geography, history, religion, ...) which get generated. But after a while I somehow feel all the randomly generated stuff feels a bit hollow. I guess it's mainly because you generate an intricate world populated with people who display very little in terms of own motivations or agency.
It's difficult to tell a story when all the characters involved seem apathetic to actually partaking and shaping the story beyond going through their daily routines and doing what you tell them to do. Sure, rulers will demand a fancy office and issue a ban on the export of some random item and miserable dwarves go berserk. But that's about it.
There's an entire subgenre of games trying to make less ambitious, prettier versions of Dwarf Fortress. Banished, for instance. You could argue that even Minecraft attempts to be a 3d dwarf fortress, where you control your one dwarf.
The extra effort in the UI tends to leave far worse games than Dwarf Fortress though.
Towns is a stripped-out Dwarf Fortress done shittily with somehow even worse UI. For that sort of game you're better off playing either Dwarf Fortress or Gnomoria, which is also simplified compared to DF but has a much better UI.
I spent significant time in DF in the early part of 2010s, but in the end found that it's just too much to micromanage - the game (at the time, at least) didn't offer much help with it, and after awhile, all the clutter really got in the way.
If you like this kind of game, but would want something not as demanding, try Rimworld. Out of all dwarffortresslikes (I don't think that calling them Dward Fortress clones is fair), it's got a good amount of polish, reasonable 2d graphics (nothing too fancy, but looks nice) and most importantly, you don't feel as if you have to manually tweak every little thing. You still can, you just don't have to.
Yes you did a much better job of describing my feelings on the game. The systems are very simple and show it leaves nothing more than randomness and an almost complete lack of emergent behavior that happens in Dwarf Fortress.
At some point story generators are barely games and more like tools or toys. Dwarf fortress doesn't have a ton of replay value as a fortress manager. Maybe five or six attempts to make a stable fortress but i could spend hours just tweaking the world gen parameters and looking through the legends mode.
And I would argue that Dwarf Fortress is no exception at all. In all of my time with the game I've enjoyed the idea of the game more than I actually enjoyed playing it. This is the player side of the simulation siren song. The more time you spend with it, the more you understand how it works, the more you realize how incredibly unbalanced it is.
The game's legendary difficulty is entirely due to the impenetrability of its user interface and systems. When you actually finish getting through all the tutorials needed to learn how to play the game it falls flat on its face. It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste.
Dwarf Fortress may be a fine simulation and an interesting study in systems and a great conversation piece but it is not a very good game. It is like the Great Salt Lake of games: a hundred miles wide and a few feet deep.
Well, Dwarf Fortress's scope is... impossible to match. I struggle to think of any game with even similar complexity. Making a Dwarf Fortress clone would take many years, however culling down the feature set (and the depth of each features) to the actual "fun bits" at least makes it possible. So it's not even cutting the breadth of features, but also their depth. No need for complex climate or economy simulations, etc. No need for insane descriptiveness of objects (save for artifacts). It's a lot of complexity that reduces its appeal to a lot of folks (though caters very well to a specific targeted audience). Dwarf Fortress with a touch interface and cute graphics won't magically broaden it's appeal -- the core game needs to be streamlined and no longer be daunting to newcomers.
For example, no massive world at worldgen with full history and legends. Most people don't want to deal with complexity, they just want an embark site to start in and get to work on. It takes a lot of time to create those things that the majority of folks would never notice or appreciate.
There's a lot of satisfaction with gathering/growing food, building basic shops and homes, defending against threats, creating a trade industry, and a bit of dungeoneering. However one of Dwarf Fortress's strength is it presents a lot of competing interests -- where you need to weigh building defenses with industry, etc. Plus the occasional "oh shit" moment where the game attempts to stomp on your sand castle.
DF seems amazing but the learning curve is so steep it's discouraging.
I've yet to find a base building game that feels fair and does not put so much pressure on the player. Tried Prison Architect but my prison got burnt to the ground because guards were on strike (and they announced it 3 hours before while it takes 5 hours to be able to offer them a raise). Tried Oxygen Not Included but the water behaves SO erratically that my whole base got flooded because one of my minions stepped on the wrong tile (and it seems like the water keeps on expanding like a gaz, not like a fluid) and they were all frozen. Tried Don't Starve and Banished, and these felt so unfair (I hate dying because I didn't plan for something I couldn't guess 140 turns before).
Base Building Games are hard to program, I agree, but I don't feel they should be hard to play and enjoy.
But the game pales in comparison to the beauty and replayability of Dwarf Fortress. I've been playing DF for 5 years and I still feel like a novice. Toss in modding and the game goes even further.
I understand your point of view, but I'm sad that amazing and well-designed games like Nethack and Dwarf Fortress don't get a fair shake because they're fixed width tile games. DF is a simulation game of stunning proportions.
It has loads of bugs as well -- the DF community finds them charming, but personally I quit after a while because I found them annoying. Planning my fortress around bug exploitation felt dirty; trying not to exploit them made the game seem like a job.
I never really tried DF, only read some tutorials about it. I have high expectations for this port, but at the same time, I'm worried that the learning curve will still make this game unpleasant to play because it takes too much time.
Factorio is also an excellent game, but I don't play the mods for the same reason I would not play DF. Too much things, and often the game design is a bit hairy for no good reason that would make some sense.
Well - you CAN order your dwarves around. It's just ludicrously complex.
You can also manipulate world-gen so you have an easier time of it (making the game essentially Harvest Moon with occasional killer fish), but where's the fun in that?
The main reason I've pointedly avoided trying Dwarf Fortress is that it feels like a game where you can get noticeably better results through micromanagement than through high-level management. (For instance, "something bad would happen to that dwarf, but I can avoid it by reassigning that dwarf to different tasks".)
I tend to feel that way about Factorio, but I strongly don't about Dwarf Fortress (or Rimworld). Both of those games are story generators. It's about the things thrown at you and the ways you cope--or don't, which is also fun--with the unexpected while building something you think is cool.
Dwarf Fortress in particular doesn't care about optimization (either of code or of your play). Build what you want. Figure out what you think is cool and do it. There are, literally, no goals other than the ones in your head.
Is there a way to play Dwarf Fortress that involves less losing? (maybe mods or some settings?) I know the slogan is "losing is fun", but to me it really isn't.
In RimWorld, you can install some slightly (read: extremely) overpowered turret mods, plus a moderate amount of save scumming, I can make my colony last pretty much forever (until I am bored hundreds of hours later). Are there techniques enabling similar playstyles with Dwarf Fortress?
The mods didn't really do anything for me either, I felt like they just increased complexity and unbalance without really adding challenge or fun.
I haven't ever actually played dwarf fortress, but from what I've read, the inherent unpredictability of the world, your dwarves, and other creatures seems like nothing that any other game can even dream of.
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