I'm here to talk about games that seem simple, but have so much depth Indiana Jones would fear entering it's cavernous tunnels.
Specifically, Dwarf Fortress.
This game is like SimCity meets Evil Genius meets Legend of Zelda.
You start off with Seven Dwarves, you can either play a preset skill set and equipment group, or make your own. Theres literally hundreds of different items, and 30 or 40 skills. You start off against a cliff face, which you must mine in to to start building your impenetrable home. So you need atleast one dwarf with mining skill, and enough pickaxes to sate the number of dwarves you want mining. Any Dwarf can perform any job, they just start off with no skill, so it takes a long time, and the outcome(for goods) is of poor quality. Skills build up as they're put to work. If they lack a skill, you have to manually tell them to add the related job to the list of activities they can perform in a submenu. A good activity to have turned on no matter what is fishing, since you'll need food, and lots of it.
If you decide to manually prepare, you can use tab to switch between the Skills menu, Item Stock Menu, and Start Location Menu. You have a set number of points you can use to upgrade skills and buy items with. You can also remove excess items you have for some more points. Be warned, you need atleast one pick axe and one battle axe for mining and logging. Without these, you cannot do anything. For Start Location, You'll want either Temperate or Cold(Not Freezing.) with woodlands or thick forests because wood is important. Vegetation is useful for early food, you can have idle dwarves go out and gather plants for eating or brewing. The threat matrix is the main difficulty determiner. This is the wildlife of the area. Serene, Peaceful, and Protected are the easiest difficulties. Sinister, Haunting, and Terrifying are the hardest. The harder it is, the more likely you'll be attacked by enemies. It can still happen in Easy areas, but its far rare. More than likely enough time to build up a guard force to take care of them, or traps to crush them before they do too much damage. You can even train dogs to be assist in Guarding, or to help with hunting. Once in game, a letter enters menus and submenus, -/+ goes down submenu listings.
Hid D to bring up the jobs submenu, select mining and get to work. Don't make rooms too big. 7x7 rooms collapse over time without supports. Only 7x7 or larger though, 6x100 can stand indefinitely. For every craft, theres a workshop. You need a Dwarf with the related craft either in skill, or on in their submenu to build the workshop. Workshops allow you to build goods, and useful fortress items like beds, doors, floodgates, weapons, armor, booze(Which helps Dwarves work faster,) clothing, tables, chairs, etc. It's always good to have atleast one Dwarf with decent mining skill, and some others who are decent or proficient food growers, carpenters, lumberjacks, Masons, and Building designers, and a Mechanic. Carpentry and Woodcutting are best to be paired, so that the single dwarf will cut down selected trees, and build furniture should you require him to. Masons are the guys that build your in-fort items, so one of these is top priorty.
Over time, you'll get more dwarves who either come in with a specific skill(First one you ever get is a Metal Smith,) or Peasants(class with 0 skills) that you can build up skills with to give them specific jobs.
For food, you can either grow it, fish it, hunt it, or slaughter it from tamed animals. It all goes bad rather quickly unless you have some barrels, which a Carpenter can make. Barrels are also required for Brewing. The good thing about barrels, when they empty out, you can simply reuse them again. The Dwarves also require water to live, so you should also build a well close to high traffic areas. Wells require Masons and Carpenters to build parts.
Growing requires a water source though, so you have to keep mining in until you come across the underground river. Which will either start flooding the area, resulting in the Dwarves hauling ass in the other way, or just simply do nothing but flow. If it floods, it recedes over time. Once you've discovered the river, you need to put a floodgate right next to it, build a channel leading to another floodgate, which will be used to mud up a room where you can grow crops. Or drown excess dwarves. YOU decide! Once thats done, you'll need a lever, which requires Mechanicsms from a Machinist Workshop. You'll also need mechanisms to link the floodgates to the lever to that it opens them. You'll need 5 mechanisms, 1 to build the lever, and 2 for each link.
Thats the Fortress Building mode in a nutshell. Keep building, delving deeper, getting better ore, stones, and gems to make better weapons, armor, furniture, and parts.
Adventure mode, you start off completely itemless. But in adventure mode, anything can become a weapon. Even a decapitated Wolf's Head. You just go around, looking for items, armor, weapons, and riches. You can even find Fortresses that you've built in the Building mode.
Legends mode is simply a lore kind of thing. You need to play Adventure Mode to unlock most of the story for the world you've generated, and if you find your fortress, details of how things went from a Dwarves perspective will be listed in here.
Why is this a "Deceptively Complex" Game? Because all the graphics are done in ASCII.
This game has a ton of depth, and a very brutal learning curve. You will fail horribly for many fortresses you attempt to build, getting significantly better with each one.
Here's an example of a Fortress that takes an extreme amount of skill to build, at an extreme zoom out:
Eventually you'll come across a wall of Adamantite, this is the end of the game pretty much. If you decide to keep digging to the edge of the screen, a fire breathing demon gets released and he rampages through your fortress. Your dwarves can kill it, if they're good enough. Or you can abandon the fortress, find it in Adventure Mode, and kill it yourself, getting the best weapon in the game.
You can download the game here: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
It's freeware, so the lockdown mods can't touch this thread.
This wiki will help you learn those very confusing menus, as well as offer different tilesets to make your dwarves look more dwarfy. I really recommend getting a tileset other than the stock one, because it'll be a lot easier to tell things a part.
http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Main_Page
When you generate worlds, it can take a while. First world I made had about 50 rejected regions before finishing, the second took over 200.
Specifically, Dwarf Fortress.
This game is like SimCity meets Evil Genius meets Legend of Zelda.
You start off with Seven Dwarves, you can either play a preset skill set and equipment group, or make your own. Theres literally hundreds of different items, and 30 or 40 skills. You start off against a cliff face, which you must mine in to to start building your impenetrable home. So you need atleast one dwarf with mining skill, and enough pickaxes to sate the number of dwarves you want mining. Any Dwarf can perform any job, they just start off with no skill, so it takes a long time, and the outcome(for goods) is of poor quality. Skills build up as they're put to work. If they lack a skill, you have to manually tell them to add the related job to the list of activities they can perform in a submenu. A good activity to have turned on no matter what is fishing, since you'll need food, and lots of it.
If you decide to manually prepare, you can use tab to switch between the Skills menu, Item Stock Menu, and Start Location Menu. You have a set number of points you can use to upgrade skills and buy items with. You can also remove excess items you have for some more points. Be warned, you need atleast one pick axe and one battle axe for mining and logging. Without these, you cannot do anything. For Start Location, You'll want either Temperate or Cold(Not Freezing.) with woodlands or thick forests because wood is important. Vegetation is useful for early food, you can have idle dwarves go out and gather plants for eating or brewing. The threat matrix is the main difficulty determiner. This is the wildlife of the area. Serene, Peaceful, and Protected are the easiest difficulties. Sinister, Haunting, and Terrifying are the hardest. The harder it is, the more likely you'll be attacked by enemies. It can still happen in Easy areas, but its far rare. More than likely enough time to build up a guard force to take care of them, or traps to crush them before they do too much damage. You can even train dogs to be assist in Guarding, or to help with hunting. Once in game, a letter enters menus and submenus, -/+ goes down submenu listings.
Hid D to bring up the jobs submenu, select mining and get to work. Don't make rooms too big. 7x7 rooms collapse over time without supports. Only 7x7 or larger though, 6x100 can stand indefinitely. For every craft, theres a workshop. You need a Dwarf with the related craft either in skill, or on in their submenu to build the workshop. Workshops allow you to build goods, and useful fortress items like beds, doors, floodgates, weapons, armor, booze(Which helps Dwarves work faster,) clothing, tables, chairs, etc. It's always good to have atleast one Dwarf with decent mining skill, and some others who are decent or proficient food growers, carpenters, lumberjacks, Masons, and Building designers, and a Mechanic. Carpentry and Woodcutting are best to be paired, so that the single dwarf will cut down selected trees, and build furniture should you require him to. Masons are the guys that build your in-fort items, so one of these is top priorty.
Over time, you'll get more dwarves who either come in with a specific skill(First one you ever get is a Metal Smith,) or Peasants(class with 0 skills) that you can build up skills with to give them specific jobs.
For food, you can either grow it, fish it, hunt it, or slaughter it from tamed animals. It all goes bad rather quickly unless you have some barrels, which a Carpenter can make. Barrels are also required for Brewing. The good thing about barrels, when they empty out, you can simply reuse them again. The Dwarves also require water to live, so you should also build a well close to high traffic areas. Wells require Masons and Carpenters to build parts.
Growing requires a water source though, so you have to keep mining in until you come across the underground river. Which will either start flooding the area, resulting in the Dwarves hauling ass in the other way, or just simply do nothing but flow. If it floods, it recedes over time. Once you've discovered the river, you need to put a floodgate right next to it, build a channel leading to another floodgate, which will be used to mud up a room where you can grow crops. Or drown excess dwarves. YOU decide! Once thats done, you'll need a lever, which requires Mechanicsms from a Machinist Workshop. You'll also need mechanisms to link the floodgates to the lever to that it opens them. You'll need 5 mechanisms, 1 to build the lever, and 2 for each link.
Thats the Fortress Building mode in a nutshell. Keep building, delving deeper, getting better ore, stones, and gems to make better weapons, armor, furniture, and parts.
Adventure mode, you start off completely itemless. But in adventure mode, anything can become a weapon. Even a decapitated Wolf's Head. You just go around, looking for items, armor, weapons, and riches. You can even find Fortresses that you've built in the Building mode.
Legends mode is simply a lore kind of thing. You need to play Adventure Mode to unlock most of the story for the world you've generated, and if you find your fortress, details of how things went from a Dwarves perspective will be listed in here.
Why is this a "Deceptively Complex" Game? Because all the graphics are done in ASCII.
This game has a ton of depth, and a very brutal learning curve. You will fail horribly for many fortresses you attempt to build, getting significantly better with each one.
Here's an example of a Fortress that takes an extreme amount of skill to build, at an extreme zoom out:
Eventually you'll come across a wall of Adamantite, this is the end of the game pretty much. If you decide to keep digging to the edge of the screen, a fire breathing demon gets released and he rampages through your fortress. Your dwarves can kill it, if they're good enough. Or you can abandon the fortress, find it in Adventure Mode, and kill it yourself, getting the best weapon in the game.
You can download the game here: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
It's freeware, so the lockdown mods can't touch this thread.
This wiki will help you learn those very confusing menus, as well as offer different tilesets to make your dwarves look more dwarfy. I really recommend getting a tileset other than the stock one, because it'll be a lot easier to tell things a part.
http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Main_Page
When you generate worlds, it can take a while. First world I made had about 50 rejected regions before finishing, the second took over 200.
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