Can you 'win' at this game or is it a dwarf destruction simulator?

[bcasner50]

I'm on the fence about buying this game, the complexity scares me a bit. And the stories I've read are all about bad things overtaking colonies and such. Makes me wonder if a successful functioning Dwarf Fortress is possible to make?? Not a troll post, I'm seriously wondering. If i can get to a functional colony I'll buy it.

[Mr. Tastix]

There's no end goal like in RimWorld, if that's what you're after. You can survive a very long time, practically forever if you're good, but a new player is likely not going to get there.

You can turn off hostile enemies on world creation which gets rid of a large chunk of the things that'd kill you but dwarves can still suffer from random accidents or interpersonal relationships.

[Bagel]

It is absolutely possible to make a thriving colony, however as there is no way to necessarily 'win' dwarf fortress, you will eventually start new fortresses no matter if your previous one was destroyed by demons or if you just grew bored.

[Harmonica]

Success is kind of meeting your own goals which might naturally become more and more ambitious, so yes eventually a fort might take on something too big or run into a surprise which is very challenging, leading to its downfall.. but then you learn from the process and go again.

At first you might just try to survive the winter, then a few seasons, then once you're an old hand at the basic surviving part you'll get stuck into whatever interests you like metalworking or farming or whatever, and maybe have some adventures with all sorts of different things happening. The game encourages you to keep scaling your ambitions but it's totally upto you whether you do or not.

Yes it's possibly to create a functioning self-sustaining profitable fortress that is the envy of every other. Bar the gates and retreat into the mountain and so on... but what if... what if...

[Robert]

You can definitely make a self-sufficient functional colony which can last hundreds of simulated years, or longer. Even with hostiles and invasions enabled, there are tricks (well, exploits of the game mechanics if you will) which make it possible to ignore them completely and only confront them when you feel like it.

As for an end goal... for the most part you set your goals yourself, like building a megastructure fortress which takes many generations to finish. And there _is_ a kind of endgame content which is crazy hard to beat, but I won't go into spoilers here.

[Excellion]

Originally posted by bcasner50:

Makes me wonder if a successful functioning Dwarf Fortress is possible to make?? Not a troll post, I'm seriously wondering.

It is.

A well designed fortress can generally survive indefinitely, provided the player pays attention and makes no fatal mistakes. Mistakes are relatively easy to make though - more than one fort has crumbled due to the player not paying attention to the mood of their dwarves, or due to accidentally leaving a route open into their fortress when in invasion arrived.

Getting there will take time though, and you should very much expect to see your first few forts die in flames. (Even more so if you avoid advanced tactics and spoilers on the wiki).

[Vivisectus]

You definitely can make a long-lasting, functioning fort. But there will be curveballs! Beware the were-giraffes... of doom!

[Blueberry Muffins!]

Living to a ripe old age while making historic contributions to the glories of your civilization is not easy, but it's certainly doable. If you're not going for glory a modest, thriving fortress is much easier. Not easy, but easier than say driving the Necromancers from your civilization's Eastern borders, or waking and defeating nameless evils, or hoarding and defending riches vast enough to attract armies.

[Infinite Being]

The solution is: don't sweat it. There's a reason why "Losing is fun" is the tagline. Eventually your fortress will either crumble to ashes, or you'll build a fort so badass that nothing can touch you, so you'll grow bored with your complacency and just retire the fort and start from scratch.

Heck, I'd argue your fort imploding in a blaze of glory is the best part. One of my most-recent forts in the Old ASCII version died out because riots broke out after Dwarven Justice sentenced a grieving widow a beating because she was throwing violent tantrums due to her depression. Chaos erupted shortly after the woman was beaten, as my dwarves began to tear each other apart. I'd like to imagine there was some sort of internal strife in my fort, like one side who thinks she didn't deserve her punishment, while the other side believed she needed to be punished, and the arguments quickly turned violent. Now, "Castlescorched" stands as a completely hollow shell of its former glory.

So don't worry if your forts don't work out. Just try again and enjoy the ride.

[FlyingTorcensoredWhale]

If you get to the point of the Fortress being big, powerful, successful and stable and you've done all the megaprojects you wanted with it, you will inevitably move on. That's sort of a "win condition", but at no point the game will give you a big "YOU ARE WINNER" plaque to commemorate that.

You'll make a world. You'll play around with it, until you will get bored with it. And then you will move on to the next world. Make it younger. Make it smaller. Make it less populated. Make it more populated. More harsh. Less harsh. With more resources. Or less resources.

You are making your own goals and when you think you've achieved them, you move on. Considering the sheer complexity of the game and it's systems, you won't run out of things to try any time soon.

[bcasner50]

Thanks all, buying it now!