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[Howando]

If you are of a mind to undertake megaprojects or start in a haunted biome adjacent to some angry elves, or your games regularly involve cracking the deepest caverns and opening hell, I think the game is probably a lot easier now.  Necessary things like exceptional furniture all over the place and mist generators  in your meeting halls, in order to protect against the tantrum spiral that comes from half a dozen dwarves seeing their comrade ripped limb from limb, aren't essential in order to make it past the 2-3 year mark.  When the undead came in (although they got nerfed), those unkillable horse-hair things were probably a bit of a challenge but people were already modding the game to create badder baddies anyway.

I'm not one of those players, though I have played since .31. I've never been particularly effective and tend to get caught up in the micro-management.  It took me a long time to figure out how to keep the dwarves fed, drunk and happy in even trivial embarks, and then how to incorporate fortress defences and some form of military, and how to manage multiple industries and get metalworking running before everyone kills each other.

I have a lot more experience now, but even so I can appreciate that DF has become a lot easier to play, and especially for newbies.  Aside from the wiki and tools like DFHack and DT, which are necessary to make the game even playable for some people, possibly the biggest change in difficulty is the emotion system.  Tantrum spirals killed a lot of otherwise perfectly viable fortresses because of one mishap, but having said that it does seem that they're a bit too unmoved by things now and I think it's too easy to keep everyone happy.

Another big deal was multi-tile trees, giving you an almost infinite supply of wood and fuel even in a sparsely wooded areas.  As well as raw material they also provide huge amounts of brewable food, reducing the need to have really got your farming sorted out right away.  Without that it's relatively easy to find yourself with no booze and your 20 population has eaten all the plants they just harvested.

So basically the amount of work and effort you have to put in to preventing things completely falling apart before the second or maybe third caravan is significantly reduced, and it's much more forgiving if you make a mistake in your planning and preparation that would otherwise be catastrophic.

[Fleeting Frames]

About the emotion system: "Unmoved" depends on what you're comparing to. For example of being moved: I accidentally served baby kebab in my volcanotop fortress, and I'd get notifications that the mother has cancelled one job or another: in emotional shock half a year after the fact. (Near refuse/corpse pile, now that I think about it....Well, I never buried the baby, I guess?)

And certainly, the keas prove dwarves to be incredibly self-destructively vengeful - perhaps unrealistically so, even when you compare them to vengeful historical figures of ours, and not every german is hitler, nor is every american johnson, nor is every russian lenin.

But tantrum spirals? I've had both members family and friends die IRL, and not once did I go nor see anybody else go berserk on that and start punching through the skulls of their friends and family. None of the violent conflict I've witnessed has resulted in death, and all actual physical fights have been focused on the intended targets.

Yea, I know that all of those probably happen(ed) somewhere somewhen. But from my background, "unmoving" is not a descriptor I'd give to the mother who drops items in her hands when reminded of the baby who died in her arms.

[Sanctume]

Don't forget the universal clause, "needs alcohol to get through a working day" that apply to every dwarf.

[Dyret]

Depends on which undead you mean, when they were super empowered beasts or earlier than that when they refused to die ever in evil biomes.

In a way I liked both, whats bad is the hair and skin that cant be killed in my opinion.

The super empowered beast ones. I mean, they hit like railguns, were impossible to hit, and came in groups of like 500. Either one of those is is fine, two is a rare and welcome challenge for your omni-legendaries, all three of them at the same time is just way too much.

[Melting Sky]

This is tough question. Dangerous bugs, particularly of the pathing and fps death variety seem to have been gradually driving up the difficulty level over the years for "good" players who are otherwise very unlikely to fall to actual intended in-game threats which have certainly become much less dangerous with time.

I love DF and I hate to ever bad mouth it, but this is the one trend I really do find troubling in this game. Losing a fort to your FPS plumeting to 3 by years 6 just because you happen to have a map or fort feature that glitches the path finding on fliers, livestock or liquids or because you haven't atom smashed the 20,000 filth splattered items on your map is a MUCH less satisfying way to go out than because some hulked out vengeful elephant has become a legendary God of battle by mauling half your fort to death.

I think I even preferred the old tantrum spirals to the random buggy faction ones we have gotten more recently. At least with the old school tantrum spirals there was an obvious if often ridiculous chain of cause and effect where as the weird faction stuff I have run across recently just tends to come out of nowhere due to internal glitches in the faction system.

All in all I would say the difficulty level has decreased for players who don't know what they are doing but increased for players that do. Now if you fail to make a farm, you can just gather all the free food that falls out of trees. On the other hand those same trees might just end up randomly collapsing through the top 7 floors your fortress

[Sefarian]

Personally, I feel like a lot of the unintended things that made the game more difficult by accident have gone away, which has made the starting/growing phases of fortress life a *lot* easier by virtue of not needing a fairly complete knowledge of the game to get past those phases. The game is more forgiving of ignorance now. At the same time, mature threats to a fortress haven't really been addressed or developed yet (beyond that which has been present since at least v34, anyway), in that dealing with threats to a mature fortress (sieges, megabeast attacks, HFS, etc.) are the same as they've ever been, which makes the difficulty seem lower for those of us who have already been there, done that, and got the T-shirt.

In my opinion, this is a good thing from a development stand point. The overall difficulty level of building a normal fortress should be fairly consistent in the same conditions, from a game point of view. If you're not making mistakes and doing things right, under normal circumstances, you should be able to make it to a fully developed fortress each time. There are still places that throw a spanner in the works, like embarks near towers, or evil biomes, and that's fine, that's what they're there for, but a player that knows what they're doing should be able to get a fortress from A to B to C when settling an ordinary embark fairly consistently, because they know what they're doing and know how to play the game well. In previous versions, this wasn't always the case, because of unintended difficulty spikes from buggy behavior (tantrum spirals, etc.). Toady is ironing this out, so it's only natural that the game seems easier because of it. It's just the game taking another step in it's methodical march towards stability.

In my personal opinion, I think going forward, that perhaps there should be more variety in challenge by virtue of more types of embark that can make life more difficult. For example, I mentioned Towers and Evil biomes - I think it would be a good thing, for the game as a whole, if more things like that existed, and could stack. A wider variety of additional variables to the embark that could increase challenge or just add in randomness based on where you settle would be a good thing. And just to be clear, I'm not saying all random elements should disappear from non-challenge embarks, either. But they definitely shouldn't be things that could totally crush a developing fortress that is being played out by a decent player - a novice perhaps, but not someone who knows a thing or two about the game.

[dillonsup]

A lot easier. Although it's still fun to watch newbies dig straight into to hell especially that one guy who said he was very careful and smart about it.

[Fleeting Frames]

Heh, yeah, I imagine that moment was kind of a bummer.

"Okay, so demons can't harm me through walls, right? Nothing could possibly go wrong."
*minute later*
"SAVESCUM EVERYTHING"

[tussock]

When I first played there was no auto-butcher or auto-kitchen, so when hunters killed something and bought it home, it would rot in the butcher's shop if you didn't notice, meaning all the food processing areas had to have airlocks to stop everyone going crazy from the stink. You could at least tell the dorfs to stay inside, so they didn't go recover the socks of their dead friend while he was still under the elephant. There had been cage traps for a very long time already, so the game was not hard, but the micro was nuts. It was easy to get the humans and elves to declare war for three seasons having a siege, but it was also easy to not let that bother you.

At some point there was cats everywhere, in every fort, catsplosion, and they were all loved by someone, so every time you dropped a rock anywhere a cat died and the fortress collapsed into a rage of despair at the loss. The game wasn't hard as such, but did often end suddenly in the middle of something.

Then there was caverns, and so I explored them a lot, and I died doing that, which made everyone sad and also want to recover the socks of their dead friends because I hadn't figured out burrows yet. I'm not sure when the civilian alert came in, but that was handy when I found it. Burrow 1: Safe. Has much less magma flow and automatic atom smashers and controlled flooding than the rest of the place.

For a while there was a fort with undead outside, I didn't embark on evil terrain for a long time after that, as it made dorfs crazy to see them, or fight them, and even the best outfitted dorfs would get horrible injuries once the undead skilled up.

Puke. There's old saves that are very green. Everything is covered in puke. The rain you see, it made dorfs puke. Which spread by walking, which made dorfs puke, because of all the puke. The entire surface was green, over the snow. There was also a lot of trolls at times.

Water got better somewhere along the line, I built grand water traps for invaders to wash them all into the caverns from just enough height to make them easy for the military to train on, after walling them all off, naturally. Everyone had permanently-broken fingers, but not many died of it. I think I ended up drowning most of those forts, it was around the time combat-speed came in and there was bugs made actual military work tricky, so if someone did get inside because I forgot to lock a door somewhere it was just easier.

I think dorftress actually got harder all the way along. It's automated in a lot of places but the production chains have exploded and you have to make soap of all things (wood, furnace, ashery, bucket, plot, farmer's workshop, quern, jug, soapmakers, a dozen different stockpiles ... oh, someone got hurt already, arghghgh), there's much worse things turn up than mere elephants and bronze colossus, and over-production of food isn't all that much easier to deal with than under-production now that we also have fashion and worship and more alcoholism problems to manage (and bards that want to leave right now even though it's a bit undead outside and I have no military yet and why are there so many missing dorfs).

It's just I went from being happy to be able to take on a couple goblins without losing half my fort to finally figuring out how to handle building destroyers without cage spam (after they overloading my cages in a couple forts) to building massive enclosures for grazing (and figuring out the new tree problems and getting it mostly automated) to claiming the caverns and trying to pick the right squad of heroes to take on each megabeast as it turned up (masterwork steel spears are awesome, by the way) and now I'm routinely magma-diving from day one so I can set up my early stocks down there and still make deep irrigated farms along the way for a laugh.

The Liaison drowned while running from the undead recently, but I don't think that'll be a problem, they used to never give you a new one, now they keep sending them and keep getting annoyed at you letting them die. I mean, I'm not ready to wall in the whole surface, there's too many trees, and the edges are tricky with the season changes, plus the river complicates things. I really should've started with an aquifer, that simplifies so many things on the surface.