Is losing inevitable?

[programmed.messiah]

Hey DF community,
So in Rimworld (I know, babies version of DF) losing is part of the story, but victory is also attainable. In DF, is the game just simply to keep your fortress alive until the story teller eventually (and inevitably) kills you?

[Catteus Of Mars]

never have heard any fortress "living happily ever after" usually the bigger the fort gets more likely something to go wrong and usually its TERMINAL.

[Xenai]

Well, there is no story teller. You can with skill and luck (and probably a thousand plus hours of experience at least) have a fortress that lasts for however long you can be bothered to play it. But there is no victory condition if that's what you're asking, other than any you might set for yourself.

[kara_buga]

Not necessarily. You can build a self sufficient strong fortress with advanced military and with the right strategy best the worst of opponents. But where is the fun in that. I'd say fps death is inevitable rather.

[klaxas77]

well the big issue with DF is what does it mean to win? you really need to set your own goals. this version kinda sets up that becoming a mountain home is "winning" but the game never stops really. the simulation just keeps running. maybe you dont care about that. Winning to you might be erradicating a necromancer. or killing the king of your own civilization, or building a massive cistern out of marble to collect the water from a nearby waterfall.

winning is whatever you want it to be. but even if you do win. the simulation keeps going. you can even die, and start a new fortress in the same world, the same simulation and just keep going.

[LaChouette]

There is no such thing as a winning condition in Dwarf Fortress. You rise and fall, as does your civilization. It is possible to not lose. But you'll never "win".
You'll just keep going, learning new mechanics (I've been playing for a decade and I have never used minecarts, despite knowing how fun they can be), building ridiculous projects until eventually you either decide to retire your fort and start another place, or crumble under your hubris by accidentally flooding everything with lava.

[Excellion]

There is no real win condition in dwarf fortress, beyond what the player defines as a win condition.

I'd say most forts either:

- Die early because the area was to dangerous or the fort was simply not prepared for an incoming invasion, titan or the like.
- Enters a death spiral due to some oversight (Forgetting food production, not closing a door and suddenly having an entire goblin army in the main dining hall and so on).
- Die due to FPS death. Dwarf Fortress is very CPU heavy and very old forts tend to slow down significantly. This can be mitigated somewhat by lowering the dwarf population, not creating unnecessarily items and building a fort where pathing is efficient.
- Get abandoned because the owner loses interest because the fort is stable or because they want to build something new in a more dangerous area.

You can absolutely build a fort in very dangerous area's and survive pretty much indefinitely provided you don't make any major mistakes while managing it.

[xX_COD_KID_Xx]

I don't see it as losing I see it as a fortresses story. One of the first forts I built years ago was thriving I had a military mining Adamantine killing goblins with internal defenses building bridges in the underground caves then I dug too deep. At the time I was trying to keep myself free of spoilers and in the end of the 160 dwarf's only 6 managed to make it out. In a desperate last act of revenge to keep the horrors contained in the doomed fortress and with the forest surrounding me burning down to ash my dwarfs channeled the river into the fortress flooding it. After the dwarfs witnessing what they have they abandoned the fortress to ruin. Something like that happening is a lot more interesting than having your fortress die of FPS death.

[The Former]

Theoretically. It's just less and less likely the longer you go, as I understand, because expansion breeds danger eventually. On top of that, there's the armies of foes and legendary monsters that roam the map, potentially to your fortress' demise.

[gchristopher]

You just inadvertently called out one of the biggest differences between Rimworld (which started with the Rimworld dev talking about their idea on the Dwarf Fortress forums, incidentally), and Dwarf Fortress.

Rimworld was built from the ground up to be a game, with that dev's favorite gameplay (heavily connected to the military/buildy bits from DF) highlighted, and has game balance and such built into the storyteller algorithms.

Dwarf Fortress is this crazy simulation where everything is modeled from as basic principles as it can, and then a game sort of emerges. Once you know the game really well, indefinite survival is very achievable even in the harshest of environments>

So the literal answer to your question is like others said, theres's no "win" condition built into the game, because it isn't even a "game" in that sense. It's a story simulator where you can see all these little lunatics living out whatever crazy situation you've put them into, in a world that has no preordained plot or carefully tuned game balance.

Things just happen, and you do have to make your own wins, or even better, be surprised by what happens and end up feeling immense achievement accomplishing a goal you didn't even know existed, until you learned that you can kill an army of goblins with, say, a semiautomatic crocodile shotgun.

[Ice]

DF is not about winning or even losing, it's about learning, adapting and building your own stories.

Build a fortress and see how long it can run, get invested in the dwarves that live there. Set your own goal and build your own requirement for a win.

My goal is killing every single elf in the world

[OgichiGame]

It's inevitable if you keep playing. There isn't an endgame, unless you make one up for yourself, so eventually something just goes wrong.