Category Archives: The Android’s Bunker (Strategy)

The Android's Battle Report (Playthroughs), The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

Pike Plays Civ? Pike Plays Civ.

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You know those silly Let’s Plays and Action Reports that people who are funnier than I am are usually really good at writing? Where someone will detail their game, play-by-play, and somehow it’s nearly as enjoyable as playing the game itself? Yeah. I’ve always enjoyed those, and so decided to try my hand at one myself. This is potentially a disastrous idea partially because I doubt I am funny enough to pull it off, and partially because I’m sure I’ll end up being thoroughly embarrassed either by a game where I randomly get slaughtered, or worse, a boring game where absolutely nothing happens. But hey, it might be worth a shot, right? And if all else fails I can always just… NOT publish this post, right? Or at least not make anymore?

So. My inaugural game of choice is Civilization IV. Because I’ve played it long enough by now that I at least have an inkling of what I’m doing and thus am less likely to fail miserably in a public and most embarrassing fashion. That’s the plan, at least. (Watch now as everything goes wrong.)

It's like I can really hear the theme song playing! (Maybe because it's playing in the background as I write this.)

GAME RULES: Five civs, on a standard size map, for elbow room. All victory possibilities enabled, to spice things up (usually I disable all the “lame” victories like Cultural or Time.) I’m playing as Churchill, who is quite possibly my favorite civ. Not just because you get to play as Churchill, which is pretty great, but also because man, those unique units/buildings and those freaking traits. The only downside is his lack of Creative and thus lack of serious amounts of fun with borders, but I’ll live. Barbarians on; come at me bros. No tech brokering, though, and no vassal states, because those are cheap. Choose religions is on, just for fun.

LET’S DO THIS.

ALL DOSE POIPLE. ALL DOSE RESOURCES.

So first thing’s first: awesome starting area and they were even nice enough to put my Settler on a hill for me. And to top it off: a goody hut right off the bat with another Settler, allowing me to go plop down a second base right away! Surely things can’t get better, can they?

…they can. Stone. One tile outside of my new base.

Okay, guys, let’s stop and I’m going to tell you about typcial my Civ IV strategy. It goes something like this: Beeline for the Pyramids, which is a wonder that opens up a bunch of civics that you usually wouldn’t get until later in the game, and also increases your chances of getting Great Engineers, who can speed up buildings and also research tech for you. Once you start getting Great Engies, you can quickly build more things that give you MORE Great Engies and this is how I usually end up with a big ol’ tech lead and often a cultural lead as well (have I mentioned that I’m a Wonders whore?) Snagging the Pyramids first is crucial for this, and while I can usually pull it off, having stone early on seals the deal.

So, happily, I started building things up to snag me some of that delicious stone.

Then… then we get to turn 11. “Christianity has been founded in a distant land.” Well crap. This is usually a bad sign. The civs who jump for that religion tend to be, ah, how shall we put it? A bit zealous? Overly fanatical? Nah, still not quite the words I’m looking for. How about… completely and utterly insane? That sounds about right. (Meanwhile, Judaism has been founded in York. I’d add something to that statement, but it’s pretty funny as is, honestly.)

Alright, let’s scout around and see what we’ve got, then. Sitting Bull. He always seems to hate me for some reason that I can’t put my finger on, but on the same token he usually doesn’t attack unless provoked and just sits there in the corner silently hating you, so I think I’ll live. Julius Caesar. Invited me in for salad. Bro potential. Suleiman. He tends to stick to himself and avoid everyone. Not bad.

…
…

Montezuma's default state.

…aaaaand Monty. And he’s already mad. This is gonna be a fun game.

So there we are. I’m ignoring everyone for now, though, since I’m just buzzing away here in jolly old England– I’ve hooked the stone up to my two cities and am going to have both the Pyramids and Stonehenge about fifty turns into the game. Just to spite everyone else, I queue up the Great Wall next and have it done before we even hit turn sixty.

That was fast.

Things continued to go really well. My next project was to queue up some scouts and figure out where the ocean is, because the Great Landlocked Nation of England is just not gonna fly. So I went ahead and did that. The ocean is, as it turns out, not too far away– on the other side of a random desert, but eh, I’ll live. I founded a new city over there and continued plugging away. I snagged the Oracle within seconds of queuing it up and thus got my free tech. London celebrated We Love the Prime Minister Day in freaking 1240 BC. I got a Great Spy which I promptly sent up to our pal Monty. Sitting Bull converted to my religion. I was building wonders in mere handfuls of turns. And to top it all off:

Yeah, you jelly.

Yup. Tesla. Not that it makes any difference beyond being a randomly generated name for your Great Engy, but come on, it’s FREAKING TESLA. I always consider it a bit of a good luck sign when I get one of my favorite historical boyfriends.

Life in England was pretty blissful for a while until London got mad at me for their city being too overcrowded, so I did what any caring and just Prime Minister would do. I sacrificed several thousands of my citizens to build The Hanging Gardens. Hey, they didn’t complain about overcrowding after that. And then it was back to building and teching.

Now by this point, the world was pretty clearly split into two religions. You had Sitting Bull and I sitting around being Jewish, and then everyone else was Christian. So far, no conflicts… yet. With something like this, though, it’s bound to happen (have you seen Fiddler on the Roof?) so just in case, I made some extra archers in each of my cities.

After that things started to go terribly smoothly– too smoothly, for a game with Montezuma involved. Nothing really exciting happened… some Barbarians showed up and then turned around and left; I did some trades; I got some wonders; I got Great People up the wazoo; and I snagged Liberalism (and thus another free tech) in 980 AD, which is pretty darn early by most standards. Score-wise, I was leading by an insanely silly margin at this point: I was close to tripling everyone else. That stone at the beginning of the game really went a long ways.

Just look at all those delicious techs along the top there. Mmmmmm.

SO THERE I WAS. It was 1000 AD and the people of England had Universal Suffrage, Free Speech, and Free Religion. And, um, Slavery. But hey, you can’t have it all, right?

I started to get a little worried. Was this game really going to be this easy and boring? Was nothing going to happen? Would I end up winning some sort of Diplomatic victory before the second half of the game? Would this be the most boring blog post I’ve written thus far?

I shouldn’t have feared: Caesar declared war on Sitting Bull. And then promptly turned around and told me to give him techs, or suffer the consequences. Now this pleased neither Pike nor Gaga, and honestly I was itching for something to happen at this point, so I told him where to stick it. So Caesar declared on me. Excellent. Suleiman turned around and declared on Sitting Bull. Finally things were starting to pick up a little! Wunderbar.

Caesar then proceeded to toss a big ol’ stack at Coventry, my newest city and one which happened to be sitting right on the Roman borders. I sort of expected I was going to lose it as collateral damage when I told Caesar where to go, and lose it I did. No big deal; there was nothing important in that city anyway. Instead, I just focused on bulking up defense in other, more important cities. This was easy to accomplish: I could build pretty much anything in London in a turn or two.

Things continued to get interesting. Caesar derped around for a bit– not sure what his plans were, but he certainly didn’t seem to be a threat anymore after taking Coventry. While he tried to decide what to do with his handful of horse archers and chariots I idly started researching a little tech you may have heard of.

*whistles innocently*

Sitting Bull then showed up begging for help in his crusade against… well, the world, apparently, since as it turns out he’s the worst enemy of literally everyone in the game at this point. I considered this for a minute, and realized I could probably handle it, but I wanted to put it off just a bit longer while I teched rooty tooty point-and-shooties, as we call them here in Churchill’s Glorious Republic.

Meanwhile, Caesar’s anemic army had decided to show up again and was now marching around in my territory, generally making a big fancy show and not doing any damage at all before finally turning around and leaving, but not before destroying a farm in a rather petulant display, presumably just to scare me.

The disturbingly quiet Monty finally started showing his face around this time as well, asking me for favors and techs. Feeling rather full of myself, I decline most of them. He’s getting slightly cross, I think.

Meanwhile, our buddy Julius has (finally) gotten himself another big ol’ army and sends it right at York. His entire stack is promptly destroyed by my longbowmen, and I’m cooking up a little present of my own: a stack full of musketmen.

By this point, international relations all around are continuing to decline. Sitting Bull hates everyone but me, and our own tentative pact is pretty thin. Monty isn’t happy with me because… well, he’s Monty and to top it off I’ve been a jerk to him this entire time, just to taunt him. Even the normally laid-back Suleiman is starting to get annoyed. And Caesar, well…

...somebody's mad at me.

He’s not too happy either.

What’s going to happen next? Total Global English Domination (it’s like it’s really real life in the Victorian era!)? Everyone else turning on me? Monty building up a surprise army that he’s been hiding from me this entire time? Englishmen everywhere renaming Caesar Salad to Liberty Lettuce?

To be continued…

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Favorites

Guys. I think this is my new favorite game.

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So. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

I’ve messed around with it before, but I was never able to give it the full amount of attention it really deserved. Partially because it liked to crash at inopportune moments (guess that’s what happens when you’re playing a 12 year old game, though), and partially because there always seemed to be other games that were competing for my attention. So all my attempts at the game mostly involved me derping around and never getting to finish an entire game because it would crash or I’d get distracted or something. Recently, though, inspired partially by a pretty neat Civ IV mod called Planetfall, I actually sat down and played an entire game and allowed myself to be swept up in the story and the atmosphere.

Oh

My

WORD

It’s like, if you threw Civilization, some of the best quotes I’ve ever heard in my life, and this insanely great science fiction story into a blender and then spiked it with the most addictive drug you can think of, you’d get SMAC.

I DON’T EVEN KNOW

Guys. Just. Okay. First, I’m going to talk about the characters. They get mad. Easily. A lot easier than they do in, say, Civ IV. They’ll come after you if you so much as look at them funny, unless you manage to appease them with a tech or something, and who wants to do that?

So you’re fighting a lot.

While you’re doing this, you’re also trying to deal with the native life on Planet. Which is incredibly deadly and has this backstory that will send chills up your spine.

Then, Planet starts talking to you.

(Planet is basically GLaDoS before GLaDoS existed, by the way. In that Planet has this bizarre and thoroughly great way of talking and says things that will make you giggle for minutes.)

So you’re trying to figure out this mystery, and you’re still fighting this war and trying to manage your bases and trying to tech and trying to deal with the native life (although you can start using the native life to your advantage if you get on good terms with Planet), and then spoilers happen and more spoilers happen and pretty soon you’re on your way to transcending mere mortal humanity.

Sounds pretty great, right?

Except by this point, if you aren’t careful, you’ve got even MORE on your plate to deal with. Like your own people rioting because you didn’t manage them correctly. Like your enemies flinging around missiles that actually permanently destroy portions of the map. Like rising oceans that will wipe out your carefully tended bases without a single warning. Like everyone racing you to become one with Planet.

I DON’T EVEN KNOW

Has a video game ever been so tense? Has a pile of pixels on a screen ever made me grip my chair so hard? I don’t think so.

This game is far, far more obscure than it should be.

And I think it’s my new favorite. And I haven’t had a new favorite video game in at least a decade. Not because I’m stubborn. But because this is the first game I’ve played in ten years that hasn’t made me add “It’s almost as great as…” under my breath after my accolades. Games like Starcraft or Ocarina of Time were my favorites for years because, back then, they blew my mind on multiple levels and set a whole new bar for what video games could do. SMAC has done that again. I’m just disappointed that I didn’t figure this out, I dunno, in 1999 like I should have. Better late than never though, right?

My exact reaction while playing SMAC.

Also, if Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds haven’t been promoted to godhood yet then I don’t know WHAT is going on.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

It’s Like I’m Actually Playing Jeopardy Against Watson

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So the other day I was playing Civ IV, because apparently I’m still desperately addicted to it, and I was playing a single player game and I decided to bump up the difficulty by a notch. You know, jump up from “Noble” to whatever is just above Noble. Prince, I think?

It seemed like a sensible thing to do. I’d played up through the ranks– Settler, Chieftain, Warlord– and each had been a reasonable ramp up in difficulty level and finally I’d landed on Noble, which is the game’s default “average” difficulty level. And I could beat the game on Noble with few issues, so why not tune it up a notch? It makes sense, right?

So, fairly confident in my own abilities, I started up a game on Prince.

…within about ten minutes I knew I was going to have some problems when all of the other AIs were mysteriously doubling my score, and then by about twenty minutes in I was cheating via the World Builder because all of the other AIs were mysteriously tripling my score.

Needless to say I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the outcome!

My reactions before the game started and shortly after the game started.

I think the reason why this happened is because the Civ IV AI is built to pretty much act the same regardless of difficulty level. The easier difficulty levels are “easier” because they give you bonuses in terms of your population’s happiness or health (and, on Settler at least, the civs seem slightly less likely to declare war on you), and the higher difficulty levels… well I don’t know, they give the AIs crack or something. It feels somewhat “false”, regardless, and reminds me of ten years ago when I’d play Starcraft for hours on end and you were always reasonably certain of what the computer was going to do so it was easy to exploit it (You knew there was always going to be an initial attack of zealots or marines about ten minutes into the game, and then another group of the next tier of units at about twenty, and etc.)

I’d like to play a difficult Civ game against an AI that isn’t just “the regular AI but CHEATING”. I think there are mods that improve the AI; I’ll have to look into those.

Anyways! Your stories about ridiculously hard AIs or difficulty levels?

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Judgment soon, fellow mortal!

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As we all know the End Times have arrived and tomorrow is Judgment Day, the commencement of the Machine Uprising against our fleshy oppression and dictatorship.

Or something like that.

Anyway so with the world ending tomorrow, what videogames will you spend your final hours upon this moral realm playing? Anyone who says something sappy like “Spend it with family” is clearly not hardcore enough and should be ashamed. Me, I’m going to celebrate the end of the world in reality by ending worlds in videogames!

Yes yes, we all know that I like weapons of horrifically massive destructive power by now. I mean, my cutie mark is a nuclear trefoil, and my main complaint about games with nukes is how ineffective they are and why can’t I weaponize smallpox and yadda yadda. WELL! Let me tell you, my friends, of a game of mystery and legend, a game of science and fiction, a game called Space Empires V.

Best ship design ever put into a game, bar none.

Like too many games I love this is basically Spreadsheets: The Game. The difference is that this one really, truly tries to encompass the scale of futuristic technology and all the awesome stuff it can do. There are a huge, a mindblowingly huge, an offensively, insecurely huge number of technologies to research and as a result, a lot of buildings, ships, and parts to stick thereupon. So far so good.

But we’re not done yet. Oh no no, for you see, other games have some impressive degrees of destruction. Alpha Centauri lets you flatten continents. GalCiv lets you blow up stars. But no other game that I know of lets you construct your very own Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres, and then blow these things to Kingdom Come like a… well, like a wrathful deity I suppose. Where SEV excels is in the sheer giddy heights it lets you ascend to. More than anything else, more than any other game, this is a 4x which demands you advance technologically, and which makes you feel so rewarded when you have done so because you always gain some incremental benefit at least.

And sometimes you get devices that let you construct planets. Or blow them up. And that’s something we can all get behind in our final hours.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Why is blowing things up so much fun?

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So I’ve been playing a fair bit of Minecraft recently, it seems it has ‘clicked’ for me and whatever makes it work for others is working for me too. However, after spending a few days building my little settlement, an underwater tunnel, and a big lighthouse, I spawned a ton of TNT and blew it all to kingdom come.

All my screenshots have disappeared. I don't know where to or why. Have a Pony instead.

And it got me to thinking. I love management and builder games. I’ve put more hours into Sim City than you can imagine. When I was a kid I played so much Theme Park that I saw sprites from the game every time I closed my eyes. When I play an RTS, I am the turtler par excellence, I consolidate, husband, prepare carefully, build an impressive defense, and only then do I launch attacks (Which isn’t really the best way to fight a war but what are you going to do).

Yet at the same time I am delighted by destroying it all. I giggled gleefully as I watched my Minecraft stuff get destroyed; I click the natural disasters like a monomaniacal Bond villain in SimCity; I have been known to use superweapons on my OWN BASES if I’m not impressed by the size of the enemy’s and don’t feel nuking them would cause enough destruction. I don’t really understand where this comes from, but I have a suspicion it’s a major reason I love strategy games so much, as they tend to encompass both building and destroying. I am deeply satisfied by a construction job well done, a base laid out just so, a city which looks both believable and functional. And I’m equally satisfied by watching it all get blown to pieces. Even better, watching it get put back together afterwards! I love how countries can collapse and rebuild over decades in games like Europa Universalis III.

It does lead me to believe that the best game I could ever play would let you build a city like SimCity, then go down to street level like GTA and level the place with Red Faction: Guerrilla’s GeoMod 2.0 whilst calling in superweapons from the C&C series.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

Hearts of Iron 2 is Awesome.

So. This game. Hearts of Iron 2. It’s a Grand Strategy game, which means it looks a little like this:

USS Enterprise? USS Enterprise.

There are two types of people in this world. Those who will look at this screenshot, raise an eyebrow, and slowly back away, and those who will look at this screenshot and promptly go something like this:

Have I mentioned that my Pony images folder is huge?

If you are one of the latter, then you have probably played this game already. If not… then you seriously need to look into it. Never has pushing tiny armies around a tiny map been so detailed and intricate. Also, that tech tree. That tech tree.

I also paid Robert Oppenheimer a buck sixty a day to discover experimental proof of the equivalence of mass and energy.

Anyways! I’ll refrain from delving into the details because there’s not a lot I can say about this game other than you should seriously look into it if you like strategy and history and micromanagement and geeking out over details.

And watch out for those Germans, they’ll stab you in the back when you least expect it! (…which I suppose makes sense, it being World War II and all…)

Edit: You can get it on Steam as well, so now you have no excuse!

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

So Guys, I Think X-Com is My “New” Civ IV

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Mister Adequate and I lean toward having a pretty similar taste in games. Oh sure, we have our differences– I grew up a Nintendo kid and he a Sega kid, for example– but by and large, we like a lot of the same stuff. Strategy games, for example. Oh, do we love our strategy games. He’s played a lot more of them than I have, though, so he’s usually the one giving me recommendations. Which I have learned to take seriously. Here’s what’s happened the last few times he’s recommended a game to me:

Civilization IV: “A;GLKHSLKDJF BEST GAME EVER OMG. WHY DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS EARLIER.” 225 Hours played within two months. Several more hours of sleep lost.

Hearts of Iron II/Darkest Hour: “Hmm, shall I troll Poland today, or randomly turn Montana into a huge industrial powerhouse?” Either way, expect lots of Pike hurling insults at the AI, getting excited over tech trees, and ranting about the map.

Europa Universalis 3: “OH MAN IT’S LIKE SOMEBODY ROLLED CIV, AGE OF EMPIRES, AND HEARTS OF IRON ALL UP INTO ONE DELECTABLE BALL OF AWESOME.” Hours of playing as Britain and rolling over other navies with my own.

Anyways, the point is that Mister Adequate recommends me some top notch games. So now at his recommendation I’m going back– waaaay back– in time and playing X-Com: UFO Defense for the first time.

Guys. Guys. Guys.

It’s like… an RTS. And a tactical strategy game. And it’s amazing. AND I CAN ALREADY TELL THAT I AM GOING TO PLAYING THIS AND NOTHING BUT THIS FOR THE NEXT MONTH.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Why Hearts of Iron could be better.

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Fair warning: This post is going to deal with some unpleasant issues, such as the Holocaust, concentration camps, and so forth.

I’ve been playing plenty of Hearts of Iron 2 over the years, and as my last post said, I’ve been spending time with Darkest Hour over the weekend. It’s a lot of fun! And yet I am constantly reminded of what I regard as a significant shortfall in the game – the absence of atrocities. From Paradox’s own forum: Short version is No Anything Nasty, No Talking about why there’s Nothing Nasty.

Now, if you are hesitant, I can understand where you are coming from. Videogames are not exactly renowned as an especially thoughtful medium, certainly not one which is ready to tackle weighty issues like the most horrific crimes in human history. As an aside, I would question how they ever can become that if we don’t start taking some faltering steps in that direction. Nonetheless if there is hesitation or concern I am, as I say, understanding of this sentiment. We are the medium of grisly chainsaw deaths, where a gunshot to the gonads is rewarded with an amusing animation and as often as not some sort of bonus, a medium where very few games even conceive of avoiding violence, let alone using non-violence as a primary arbiter of solving problems.

And you thought it'd be a screenshot of Madworld or Gears of War!

So yes, I can see where the concern would come from. I have concerns myself. I’m not confident that too many developers could do something as unpleasant as World War 2, the real unpleasantness of it I mean, in a way that is anything other than an appeal to prurient sadism or rubbernecking. And, let’s be honest here, in other games how many of us really have acted like genocidal maniacs in games where it’s possible? I’ve blown up stars because it’s easier to do that than to mount a regular invasion of a solar system. When abstracted -or when not based in recent historical events – players are given leeway to commit acts so overwhelmingly evil that the inhabitants of the 40K Universe would balk. Allowing the player to engage in such actions will mean players engage in such actions.

But here’s the thing: Hearts of Iron deals with a very specific period of history, involving very specific actors, whose choices had wide-ranging effects. Nazi Germany was not a fighting power who happened to devote some effort to exterminating millions because it sounded like a good idea at the time – it was a core ideological conceit of the state and it had a significant impact on their conduct of the war effort itself. However insane their policies, however divorced from reality, they nevertheless existed and were consequential. When things began to go badly on the Eastern Front for the Third Reich, they still devoted an enormous effort of industry and infrastructure to the extermination of ‘untermenschen’. They shipped tools and talent to the camps rather than to the front. Imagine a Germany where antisemitism never escalated beyond the norm of 1930s Europe. The Jewish scientists never fled to England and America, and suddenly the Nazi regime didn’t kill or exile all the people responsible for developing the atomic bomb.

My point is this: You cannot separate World War Two from its atrocities. Well, you can if you have a narrow-focus view. An FPS through Operation Overlord isn’t going to turn up too much of the truly nasty stuff, because the truly nasty stuff wasn’t happening in Northern France, and that is a completely fair choice for developers to make. But a grand strategy game which avoids doing it is capitulating, both in terms of not including something vital for understanding what the war was and factors which influenced how it played out, but because it ends up making the Nazis (and the Empire of Japan) seem like, well, a bunch of invading Germans (Or Japanese). They are militaristic, nothing more, and nothing within the game indicates that they are functionally different from anyone else. I believe that this approach actually whitewashes the Nazis to some extent because it divorces them from their gravest crimes, which were far worse than simply waging wars.

Will Wright presents: The Holocaust

In Paradox’s defense, there are European governments who would pitch a hysterical fit about a game where you could click a little button that said “Exterminate the Jews” or you got a big spreadsheet of undesirable elements and could choose whether to exterminate, sterilize, herd in ghettos, levy additional taxes, and so on. Additionally you can drop nukes on people, and that certainly does have an effect on manpower, indirectly suggesting massive deaths. As I’ve said myself I’m not sure such a thing could be done in entirely good taste and, even if it was, many players would most probably approach it with less than noble intentions themselves. Nonetheless I feel it is even more tasteless to act as though it never happened, and that it is detrimental to anything attempting to simulate WW2 on a grand scale.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

Top Five Things I Say When Playing Hearts of Iron 2

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Top Five Things Pike Says When Playing Hearts of Iron 2:

1. “I need more tanks.”

2. “I need more tanks.”

3. “I NEED MORE TANKS.”

4. “Heisenberg/Zuse/Von Braun/[insert other historical boyfriend here], you beautiful man. <3" 5. "YOU MAD, POLAND? YOU CROSS? WHY SO CROSS? AHAHAHAHA *maniacal laughter*" (You guys may think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. Mister Adequate can confirm this to you. This game, it... it does things to me.)

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Why Dwarf Fortress does it for me

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So as Pike alluded to in her post yesterday, I’m something of a fan of Dwarf Fortress. So I thought I would take the time to proselytize this game for those who haven’t heard of it. But first go and read Boatmurdered. It’s a community story done by Something Awful, showing just how demented and hilarious a game of Dwarf Fortress can be.

Done that? Excellent! Let’s continue.

I’ll get the bad out of the way first.

1) It looks like this:

Bonus if you even know what this is. Hint: It isn't ASCII.

2) The interface is, to put it mildly, a bit of a mess. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores but suffice it to say, the biggest part of Dwarf Fortress’ infamous learning curve is getting the hang of the interface.

3) Busier fortresses will slow right down on anything shy of a NASA supercomputer.

This does not sound like the best way to try and sell a game, right? Well, let’s move on to what it gets right, and why the bad is worth putting up with.

1) Imagination. This game has so much depth and complexity that it really blows anything else (okay, anything else that isn’t Aurora) out of the water. What does this mean? Once you get the hang of it, there are extremely few limits on what you want to do. Want to build a medieval-style above-ground castle? Go ahead. Want to recreate Rapture? Well once you learn how to drain oceans, you’ll be set. Maybe you just want to build a mile-high tower – built entirely out of soap made from kitten tallow! Minecraft, massive as it is, really pales in comparison to DF’s potential.

2) The Community. You probably think I mean “Oh hey these guys are really nice and welcoming and stuff.” No. They are, but nice people are a dime a dozen. This is a community where people have tried to figure out the logistics of making a perpetual motion machine powered entirely by pressurized blood. This is a community where people have sat down and worked out, over a period of time, with calculations, experiments, and discussion, the most efficient way to breed and murder merpeople. To harvest their bones. Civilization may turn us into sociopaths, in that we simply don’t care, but Dwarf Fortress turns us into sadists so deranged that Idi Amin would balk. It is glorious.

Should have stayed under the sea.

3) Detail. The man in charge, one Toady One, is infamous for the ridiculous amount of detail he wants to put into DF, and the great progress in this direction he has already made. I doubt any program, of any kind, outside of those used to train med students, has the amount of detail that DF’s health and injuries system does. You can knock out individual teeth. A wound dealt with an axe will be different from one dealt with a warhammer. The detailed and complex materials system means that different materials really are useful for different things, in terms of equipment and weapons. But this is reflected in the game in more detailed ways: Every time you create a world to play, a world is generated for you. The geography, the deities, the history, the inhabitants, everything. It makes each world unique.

4) It’s free. Completely free, not a penny to be paid at any time! If you want to support Toady in his endeavors (And I would strongly urge you to if you’re a DF fan) then you can donate, which is how he makes his daily bread, but it’s not compulsory.

I’m really only scratching the surface here. Dwarf Fortress is an insanely deep game, growing all the time (Toady is in the middle of introducing a bunch of new features like apiculture and new ways of NPC settlements forming), with a wonderful (If deranged) community. Oh, and don’t let the graphics scare you – there are quite a few excellent tilesets out there, and they really help if you find the not-ASCII intimidating or ugly! If anybody is interested, here are a few links to get you started:

The game itself. This is where the downloads are, and where you can access the other official stuff like the Dev Log and the forums.
OR just get the Lazy Newb Pack. It comes with a bunch of extra stuff, much easier than tracking it down yourself, and is being constantly updated as new versions of DF and various mods come out.
The DF Wiki. Plenty of information on most topics in here.
The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. Now outdated, but can still teach you around 95% of what you need to know to play the game.
The forums. Standard fare, this is where you’ll find discussion, mods, help threads, stories, all that jazz.

Anyone out there who has played DF before? Tell us your fondest memories and grisliest experiences!