One thing that’s hard to tackle is that “Dwarf Fortress” is a supremely complex game – it’s a gestalt of a lot of apparently unnecessary, redundant, and time-wasting systems. It seems like a waste of time to model an individual personality for each dwarf, to use a complex injury model instead of hit points, to model ten thousand years of world history before you generate each fort, etc. – and, if you look back on the Dwarf Fortress forums, you will find literal decades of people complaining that Toady was wasting time working on all those things when they thought he should have been doing [X] instead. But the net result of all those things is that you get emergent unique behaviors in every fort that tell a story.
See, e.g., Boatmurdered: Dwarf Fortress - Boatmurdered . If you look at what happened in that Let’s Play, the eventual fall of the fort was a multi-step process:
- Raids by enemy goblins and swarms of feral elephants become too much for the fort to handle via standard combat
- Player designs an engineering system to flood the outside world with lava when a lever is pulled
- That in turn starts fires which accidentally get out of control
- the out of control fires cause a mood spiral which causes everyone in the fort to go insane or berserk
That’s a great story but look how many different systems are interacting there! You have the swarming elephants because of biome and environmental mechanics. You have flowing water/lava mechanics. You have engineering mechanics. You have spreading fire mechanics. You have mood happiness/unhappiness and relationship mechanics. Almost all of that’s pure background stuff – the only part the player has direct control over is the engineering (even dwarf mood is controlled only indirectly).
If Stonehearth is going to approach that kind of experience, then the Dev team has to spend a bunch of time working on building background depth in ways that will initially seem pointless. The conversation and appeal systems may seem like Sims-esque wastes of time, but happiness and sadness systems are an additional gameplay loop that feed into combat, fort maintenance, etc. (“my soldiers are too sad to fight”, etc). as the Boatmurdered example demonstrates.
That said, yeah, I went back and looked at the kickstarter goals and I would like my baby mammoth and maybe even my baby dragon. Model an elephant and reskin it with fur and that’s a two for one!