Category idea - Mountainhome%?
1 year ago

The current categories are, frankly, underwhelming - no offense to the creators or runners, but I think we can agree on that. They are, excepting Goblin Siege, a short, simple race towards an immediately achievable goal. My idea is kind of self-explanatory - become a Mountainhome as quickly as possible. This is a solid, non-arbitrary goal (it's an explicit goal in-game, with its own screen to track progress and everything) that would require the runner to actually engage with the game mechanics on a somewhat meaningful level and (theoretically) create an enjoyable run with more depth and nuance.

Your architecture, roads, and offerings must each reach a certain respective wealth value for the Monarch to migrate to your fortress, therein making it a Mountainhome; the offerings are specifically notable because the caravan must safely leave to deliver the offerings, adding another layer of complexity. This involves significant interaction with the game's mechanics, while (unlike other categories) having lots of room for breaking those mechanics apart. Routing, strategy, optimization - yknow, speedrunning bullshit. Most importantly, the ultimate goal is just far enough away to allow the runners some creativity.

In a game specifically without built in goals, I feel this is one of the few, perhaps only, goals for a run that isn't arbitrary, is supported in the game, and could result in a category that's actually pretty enjoyable to run and watch. DF is about to enter a golden age with the Steam edition, so a category with some appeal to runners and viewers would be huge.

Obviously, I can't say for sure how good the run would be until people are actually trying it out. But DF needs new categories bad, and after thinking on it for a while it's the best run I could think of.

One note, the Monarch will alternatively just come once you have adamantine, so I think if there were a category like this, it would be served well by being sorted into Mountainhome% - Adamantine and Mountainhome% - No Adamantine, or somesuch.

Cephamazios, HexTree, and athatet like this
Thailand

100% agreed. This game sorely needs something that feels like an Any% category, that people can compete on, route for, discover strats, etc. The current categories just don't do that. And what you've described fits the canon well, it's even better than Rimworld's 'Any%' (which is to just run across the map to the spaceship and launch it).

Edited by the author 1 year ago
Etelä-Karjala, Finland

I did a little test run, managed to get to Mountainhome in about 9,5 hours with next to no optimizing, including not optimizing for fps. In in-game time this was early spring of 129 (started at 125), which I'd say is acceptably short. As in, I won't die watching the runs when reviewing.

Quick overview of my "strategy": Pocket-sized world, Short history (to ensure there are plenty of Dwarves to immigrate), Very Low number of civs, Medium number of sites, Very Low beasts and savagery, and minerals Everywhere (probably won't hurt). A very safe world overall. Then I just started playing as normal, read the wiki as I played, and tried to learn everything there is to triggering the monarch's arrival quickly. I didn't dig for adamantine this run, I'll test that method in another run. I couldn't grasp any good strategy from the wiki's info, and I think a lot of the data is incomplete/old. There's definitely room for !!SCIENCE!! here.

I ended up just going for as much wealth as possible, since I didn't really perceive a real threat in the world. I didn't notice a real increase in the amount of migrants, even with the whole fort producing spiked balls with any materials available, and basically all my food and alcohol was from trading. The wiki states that the monarch requirements should be viewable after having "reached a certain wealth", which very vague and it'd be nice to know what the value of wealth is.

If there even is a value that is, I was at over 1 000 000 created wealth at one point + some 500 000 wealth I had thrown in offerings and trading. I'm quite skeptical there is a wealth trigger currently, considering the wealth requirements for the monarch are only 15 000 in architecture, and 5 000 in offerings. The requirement tracker did show up at some point though, may have been the Metropolis rank, may have been just the population, may have been the many new hillocks that were founded nearby, might have been my promotion to a County. Hard to say. But I can confirm that the offerings made before the requirement tracker became visible didn't count towards it.

tl;dr I'm absolutely down for running this, and there's a lot of theorycrafting that can to be done here.

HexTree likes this

Im going to try this, in a near time im going to have a lot of free time so if discover anything ill report imidietly so stay tuned.

Cephamazios likes this

Ok, i know-how the trigger for becoming the capital works. U need exactly 140 dwarves (it gives you metropolis status). In that exact moment you have option to become capital. In my test run king arrived at 09:08 but it can be optimized (next time ill run to shop for snacks i instead of walking). Wiki says that amount of immigrants you get is increased the more you buy from Caravan. So i recomend In a first year start a massive crossbow industry. They are easy and cheap to mass produce. In my first year i could buy whole caravan just using crossbows. In a near time ill record a run. Btw beacuse it bothers me. How time runs in game depends on fps, mabey we will set some max fps beacuse it can be a problem and it brings unfairness bcs theoreticly the best one is the one who owns best PC.

Cephamazios likes this
Etelä-Karjala, Finland

I added the category now.

Regarding the fps, our cap is supposed to be 100, since that's what the game has on default. There has been a proposal of playing in "hybrid" time, meaning we'd have a normal timer running while in menus/paused + some kind of system to count in-game ticks. We could then calculate the final time off of those.

Alas, I'm not a programmer.

Wisconsin, USA

Hey, I was thinking about starting to run DF. Mountainhome% sounds fun, but it's quite the endurance test! For these newer longer formats, do we have any rules around breaking it up by saving and quitting?

Etelä-Karjala, Finland

We don't have any rules on that, but I doubt anyone would be against it. Suggestions are welcome.

Illinois, USA

nice idea for a category, this is pretty much the experience we had setting up the game from the get go. There's little actual goals except losing, reaching !FUN!, your first siege, etc... Mountain home seemed too distant to me when I was running the game so I hadn't considered it, but 8 hours isn't bad. Given what we know about economy and requirements for promotions that could likely be much faster.

Wisconsin, USA

Oh it can definitely be optimized further. Assuming we don't just find a way to cheese it outright, getting to metropolis status (140 dwarves) before the second caravan would speed it up by a couple hours. I also spent a lot of time making my fortress look nice and didn't set up my basic manager orders early enough. And for reference, the only three tricks I used to get dwarves outside of migrant waves were to attract monster hunters by opening the cavern, attracting scholars by having a library, and requesting workers from the holdings that naturally pop up around your fort.

Etelä-Karjala, Finland

We got a neat dev post on bay12 today! According to Threetoe we'll have to deal with baronies and such in the premium version, so getting more holdings as swiftly as possible seems important. A militarist route might be good here, genociding a weak civilization to conquer their sites to get holdings faster sounds like a good strategy to me.

In addition, there's the cryptic mentions about industry irritating local creatures. Who knows how that'll affect us.

I'm a bit confused by the reliability of the run; if you can get your civilization destroyed, and one of your dwarves is appointed Monarch, I think that's an instant mountainhome. In older versions the monarch would come as soon as you discovered adamantine, but not in the more recent versiosn.

I'm also not convinced that being a metropolis is a requirement for becoming mountainhome.

Other than that, I'm a little confused by the "no changes in init/d_init". I guess changes in the invader cap and temperature can change gameplay, but things like water levels, engravings obscured and pathing costs shouldn't impact the run.

Etelä-Karjala, Finland

I already tested inheriting the monarch from a dying civilization, that did not promote the fort to a mountainhome. Then again, that was advanced worldgen so knowing DF it may have messed with something, or there may be a multiple months long delay before elevation happens. I do encourage testing here if you have the time to spare.

On the metropolis rank, more science is needed; it may indeed be the case that whatever requirement(s) unlock the ability for offerings to count towards summoning the monarch might be all that is needed.

And on the rules regarding file manipulation, it is worded as it is for the sake of brevity. No sane person would want to play without the fps counter involuntarily, so turning it on is allowed, and all the other settings are considered not allowed to avoid having to write an essay about what can/can't be changed. If you wish to have some rules added, and others agree, then they will naturally be added. To hold onto my neutrality I won't fight back against such changes, though I will take part in the discussion.

Illinois, USA

overcomplication / overspecification is asking for problems and loopholes - so I'll just suggesting keeping it as simple as possible, kind of like how the rules are.

in addition, any kind of tech necessary to run the game just creates a barrier to running the game. Keeping it RTA eliminates a lot of hassle.

I'm not a big fan of RTA, since it's going to be dependent on your computer specs, but definitely the easiest. Calendar date also sorta works, but then menuing is free.

Also steam release is probably going to have a leaderboard reset but oh well.

On other speedrunning categories, I did do a strawberries-in-hell% where you had to grow above-ground crops in hell (ended up using prickle berries since strawberries never came), but that was a couple versions back and they fixed the exploit.

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