Welcome to 1055

In the year of our Dwarven Lord 1055 I was approached in the mines by a rather desperate looking fellow.  Setting down my pick a while to hear him speak, I only catch the end of his phrase: “So I’m leaving you in charge.”  I reach back for my pick and grunt, “Good,” before getting back to work; and there is a lot of work to do.

Simple, effective, food is found both by the dining hall and sleeping quarters

Looking over our living arrangements, I quickly realize that the planners of this place had not listened to the Dwarven Philosopher ThunderClaw’s Treatise on Decentralized Living.  It was time to educate them.  I quickly set down a bold new plan to deal with Barracks and Dining for our few remaining troops.  Additionally, I order the masons to pave over the stairs to the “Under Dark.”  That’s a headache for another Dwarf.

EarthDance 1054

1st Granite 1054

I have just been put in charge of Earthdance.  It is spring, and we are hungry.  There is nothing to eat in this entire fortress, nothing to drink.  No wells.  Nothing but river water.  Too many dwarves rotting in the sun.  We have mad dwarves running amok and I’m fairly sure there’s still a loose goblin somewhere.  Our fortress is vulnerable to attack in the winter when the river freezes.  And I’m hungry.

I’ve assigned a few dwarves to gather the plants near the entrance.  It’s not much, but it’ll be something.  I’ve also assigned more to the farms.

5th Granite 1054

I knew there was a loose goblin! He ambushed my dwarves as they were cleaning up and emptied his quiver on them.  He slew Thikut Lolorritas and Udil Agsalmonom with silver arrows!  He shot and then bludgeoned to death Iton Unnosaban, our bookkeeper. More corpses to pile with the rest.  So many dead.  Thankfully he ran out of arrows before the militia got there.  They cut him in half.

I did a Bad Bad Thing.

Let me start by saying I am not a “pro-caster.”  I don’t cast professional Starcraft matches and I am not qualified to.  To be a good pro-caster, you need to have a good feel for what it is people want to see, know what’s going on, and to do it in real time.  When you see Tasteless on GomTV, or Day9 run the King of the Beta, you know instantly these guys could be sportscasters for baseball just as easily as Starcraft.  They know what’s going on and how to bring that to the audience.  One of the things that has irked me about the release of Starcraft 2 is the number of people springing up to claim to be “pro-casters,” when they really don’t have the experience or skills to pull it off.

Earthdance year 1052, Autumn and Winter

(First of all, this is out of sequence, something which is entirely my fault for not writing this up in time.)

Upon examination of the fallen leader “Macha” Besmarilral’s possessions, it has been discovered that contrary to prior belief, he did keep journals of the latter half of his reign, and here they are.

Autumn

Autumn has begun with a goblin attack on the fortress. I decide to sound out our militia to deal with them. This was a mistake. Our militia has now fallen, and the goblins are camped outside.

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Here are the goblins, attacking our militia

1 Year of Power: Exerpts from the diary of Ushrir “Alex” Gatinstukos, Temporary Leader of Earthdance

Introduction

The Year 1053 is at its end; Two leaders have ruled this fortress before me, and now I just finished my year.

My Name is Ushrir “Alex” Gatinstukos, and here I present you some excerpts from my diary of the last year.

1st of Granite 1053

Even if I’m not around for that long, having arrived with the greatest influx of dwarfs has its advantages; I, “Alex” Gatinstukos have been challenged to run this fortress for 1 year (Okay, I did some complaining, and they challenged me to do better).

2nd of Granite 1053 (early morning)

After getting out of bed, I knew I couldn’t back out on this challenge and had to accept it!

2nd of Granite 1053

I’m currently checking out the fortress, looking around for things that I’ve missed while I hadn’t this heavy responsibility. (What was I thinking this morning?)

4th of Granite 1053 (end of the evening)

Finally done walking around this hole in the ground that is supposed to be a fortress, time to go to bed now, and start working tomorrow. (Too tired now…)

5th of Granite 1053

First day of work and the first thing I do is change around some of the assigned labours of my fellow dwarfs, which allows them to have all the time for what they do the best.
I allow our previous Leader, Chief Medical Dwarf and Accomplished Butcher “Macha” Besmarilral to keep handling our diplomatic relations with the Elves and Mountainhomes, while I focus on the more important things here, like giving ourself a proper fortress, instead of this makeshift hole in the ground

Pax Prime 2010

Welcome to PAX

For those of you who didn’t make it to PAX this weekend, you have my most sincere sympathy; it truly is an amazing experience for a gamer.  From playing Duke Nukem Forever on the expo floor to listening to Scott and Kris talking about making blamimations to watching Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins play D&D, there really is nothing quite like PAX; I highly recommend attending if you find yourself in the Seattle or Boston area.  I’m sure you’ve seen some of the news for Duke Nukem Forever or Final Fantasy 14, but there are a lot of games shown off at PAX.  For those of you who couldn’t make it out this year I thought I might review some of the lesser known titles which were shown off at PAX this year.

Rankings

And knowing is half the battle

There has been a lot of discussion on the topic of Starcraft 2 rankings recently, and I thought we might take this time to sit down and have a chat about them. At their core, rankings seek to address the eternal questions of “Who am I?” and “Am I a man?” and more frequently, “How can I prove that I’m a better person than my friend Bob?”

Throughout the ages, man sought to prove his dominance over his fellow man. This was instinctual ever since we first left the trees for African plains. However, early man lacked the comforts of Battle.net 2.0. Instead, he was forced to resort to cave paintings, local competitions and iCCup. In these days, ranking was not something that happened between you and your 99 friends, but rather a letter grade which was bestowed upon you like a tardy student at the end of 2nd year English.

Earthdance year 1052, Spring and Summer

I'm takin' over!

(This is part of the Dwarf Fortress succession game that members of Gaming.SE are playing. This is the second turn. The first player has yet to write a post to publish here, but his summary is linked to)

So, I have recently been appointed, and by appointed I mean exiled, to this new fort called Earthdance. Which means that after finally making a name for myself and achieving a level of comfort at my last fort, Regoddom, I now have to go through the whole bloody process again. Luckily, the last leader kept a good record of his decisions, even if they weren’t great. I was told to keep quiet and observe at first, so I disguised myself as a Medical Dwarf. Now that I’ve got a good idea of the state of this fortress, I’m taking over.

The Magic Box

Right now, the Magic Box is one of the most interesting things happening in Starcraft 2 game play (5 rax reapers is less interesting based on its straight forward usage).  At its core is the idea that “Hard Counters” don’t really exist in Starcraft 2 and that, rather, how you use your units is more important than what they are.  Those people familiar with using Speedlings against Hellions or Tanks against Marauders have already encountered this strange Phenomenon.

To help you understand this, it’s probably best if I start by explaining what a “Hard Counter” is.  The concept of a counter unit is very much based in the children’s game Rock-Paper-Scissors.  For those unaware of the game, children simultaneously choose one of the three titular elements, each of which wins against another element while losing against the other differing element (same elements are considered draws).   A first glance at Starcraft seems to indicate a similar trend: Hellions do extra damage to light units (which Zerglings are) and can be upgraded even further in this capacity; by comparison Zerglings do not do extra damage to Hellions and, further more, clump up causing them to take additional damage from the Hellions’ AoE .  This would imply to the layperson that an army of Zerglings will lose to an army of Hellions.  Strangely enough, you’ll see many Zerg players actually employ Speedlings (speed upgraded Zerglings) in defense against Hellions.  While this may seem counter intuitive, if the Speedlings can surround the Hellion (thus preventing escape) they are very effective at killing it.

As Day9 might say, “[Hard Counters] deeply bother me.”

So, what is this Dwarf Fortress business?

 

A Day in the Life of a Dwarf

 

By Urist McBlogger

It’s not easy being a dwarf you know. Constantly getting ordered around “dig this, dig that”, “build a floodgate here, release the lava there”. Those nobles, they think it’s easy. They just have to map out an area, by pressing d, then selecting a few tiles. We have to dig it. Have any of them picked up a pickaxe like a real dwarf and dug their way through the rock? No. And the way they treat us… it’s like we’re expendable. Just because we don’t know which side of a floodgate is which!

Now, I know some of these nobles like to claim that managing a dwarf fortress is the hardest task they could ever have been given. But they have an illustrated guide, guiding them the whole way through running a fort. I mean, as long as you remember not to dig too far down through the adamantium, to brew enough drinks for us working dwarves by building your stills, and giving a few dwarves jobs as brewers by pressing q and telling them to brew a drink, life is fine.