While drugged up to the eye balls after a cold nearly took me out I've been messing about with the Dwarf Fortress like Gnomoria. For those who like DF but really don't like its (lack of) graphics or are frightened by its depth, gnomoria makes a good alternative. Sitting at something like a cross between DF, Settlers and Minecraft it's still essentially in Alpha and its does cost a little, there is however a demo that plays for a few in-game days and there's plenty to do.

Its not without its problems. A very unintuitive interface causes frustration and the bugs seem to pile up the longer you play. It is however quite a lot of fun.

Official website is here: gnomoria

Download the demo here: demo

Its available via desura

And I'd advise reading this start up guide on the wiki

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did you just say Dwarf Fortress?
could i be any more sold on this game already?
is the answer to both of the questions yes???

...yes. yes it is

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ュ~ちゃんgamer.jp Pinky: true genius
ュ~ちゃんgamer.jp Pinky: doesn't make sense
ュ~ちゃんgamer.jp Pinky: till you're senseless

I tried Dwarf Fortress. I did well, then we got attacked and all died. It was depressing :c

I'll try this, and I hope to avoid another massacre.

Looks good, dwarf fortress looked a bit daunting to me.

Ohai Cardboard

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!

Enjoying this so far, despite not knowing what they fuck they're doing half the time

One bug I'm noticing is that when idle the gnomes cause a huge amount of lag... keeping the little fuckers busy helps.

Some tips, find some flat land, dig down to level -7 that's usually the first full rock bed and hold coal and copper, good place to start.
Plant all three types of trees and take cuttings of everything you can
Wall yourself in before the end of summer year 1, open the wall to collect bodies and allow gnomads in.
Make torches fast, if you have to build a smelter and assign a gnome as a blacksmith.

Don't worry about deaths, you'll loose a lot when you start but it gets easier and they tend to get replaced.

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I have a feeling my days are short, I'm in the 11th day of fall with 12 gnomes. I have a military of two and my miners were killed and their best replacements are err not very good, so I have little copper. They're also refusing to move any new furniture, on the upside there's plenty of sausage.

Would advise peole to keep a tab on all the tasks you've set, because it can get very messy when people are bleeding or hungry and they're all prioritising on moving lumps of dirt around instead.

How do you choose where they put crates an barrels? They just seem to dump them in any stockpile that allows them..

I know that in Dorf Fort you could designate stockpiles to only contain certain things. I don't know how it is in this game though.
This just makes me want to start playing DF again, but I'm afraid I'll have forgotten how to play it properly.

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'Belgium, a country with many homos also have a pedophile party as far as i know.' - Violetblood

Took me a while to work a few of these out.

Crates and Barrels, I build a lot of stockpiles and choose very carefully what I put in each one; drinks in one so its only barrels say, or seeds so its only bags. Adjust how many containers go into each stockpile to force them to place what-ever is next in each pile.

Building stuff seems to be on a low priority and if you don't have beds often the builders wont move stuff in place because the get tired to quickly. That is assuming you've designated a spot for it anyway.

Injuries are dealt with in the order they're received having a stack of bandages at all times solves the problem of gnomes bleeding to death.

12 is fine but I do recommend you wall yourself in and your farm land, goblin fighters get harder and harder to deal with, keep a guard area near the wall and open it two days in the season.

As for the miners, they'll get better the more they dig and on the first day of every season you have a chance of a good miner turning up.

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Damn that's a really tedious way to handle containers, I hope they do something for that. Would like a little more info on what you have and don't have in stock aswell, very irritating to go through all the drop down lists to see if you have some copper, would be good if the contents of a stockpile popped up when you clicked on it.

Well they have a nice designated dorm with plenty of beds and a statue, could just be a bug, they will only take torches from the workshop and place them but no more tables. I did always consider walling myself in, it's not really ideal land for it though, there's no flat land.

They all starved to death in the winter, and when the population dwindled down to 6 gnomes, so did the demand for food, but instead of consuming what was left of the supplies, or butcher the last few yaks like I told them to, they idled in the Hall instead until they died. Might sound like I wasn'y assigning them, or setting up the professions properly, but no they just gave up.

Thank god for Gnomoria, honestly the only thing that my crappy laptop could run from a hospital bed.

Updates for anyone that's interested have included military training and a complete squad overhaul (with perks and ranged weapons).
Building updates like replace wall and floor making it easier to lay things out. Also the selection tool now gives a tool-tip detailing how much has been selected making it a lot easier to lay out your fortress and its rooms.
Shortcut keys can now be applied to everything.
Combat pauses the game and move the view to where the enemy was spotted making the rampaging gollem you didn't notice a thing of the past
Its also much more stable.

Junco, gnomes can give up when there are more dead than living.. its happened to me recently.

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Haven't played it in quite a while, I like those improvements though, kind of annoying finding fights after they had long finished.