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[femmelf]

Hey,

As you can see from the profile, I joined here way back in 2010ish. It's been a bit since I played. I stopped right around when vampires and werecreatures were new and before railroad carts really happened. Considering getting back into it, but unsure, because it's been so long. Some questions:

1.) What are your impressions of the new steam game? Worth the time investment?

2.) I'm sure there are new features, what have I missed?. A.) Are they optional (can I turn off vampires/necromancers) or B.) "should they be optional?"

3.) Mods. I remember Stonesense from forever ago. Are there decent mods? Any good ones? 3d visualizers like Stonesense (or is the graphical update cool for you guys?).

4.) Is the UI improved? (I actually got used to it back then with the keyboard commands).

5.) It's been a few years. Anything I should / would want to know?

I appreciate your time. Thank you.

[Panando]

I was in the same situation. I bought it immediately upon release.

It's definitely more accessible. At the moment the UI is overly mouse-centric with few keyboard shortcuts but this will likely improve. The UI is seriously shitty in places like the lack of sensible sorting of lists of creatures but it's not totally game-breaking.

There are some mandatory mods that improve the UI and icons, like some genius decided the "cancel squad order" and "disband squad" icons should look nearly the same. I don't need to list the mandatory mods: on the Steam Workshop just sort by "most subscribed" and subscribe to everything in the top 4 and check out the top 20 or so for mods that do things like add missing graphics.

DFHack is also essential of course, it fixes some annoyances like adding confirmation dialog for things like disbanding squads and adds a bunch of features.

I think that relative to when you stopped playing, taverns, guild halls, libraries and stuff should be new. They are good features.

There are some very glitchy and half complete things too, like the villains feature is only half complete, this is where there are schemes to steal your artifacts and stuff. You can interrogate residents and visitors and lock hem up in the dungeon, but it's only half complete. Of course there will still be bugs you are familiar with from playing a decade ago.

Necromancers can easily destroy your game by grinding it to a halt if you don't intervene with DFHack, they can be a source of entertainment but it's much safer to kill them on sight especially if you aren't willing to cheat with DFHack. Necromancers and vampires also can be removed from worldgen by changing some values.

Overall the overwhelmingly positive steam reviews do not lie. Most people are going to enjoy Dwarf Fortress premium and get value from money out of it. The main question would be whether to buy it now, or to wait longer. In favor of buying it now, mods and DFHack have already done many easy fixes, in favor of buying it later: there is still tons of stuff that needs to be patched by the devs so it should get better with time, though I wouldn't hold out for hope of the development pace not continuing to be relatively glacial, even with more devs working on the game.

[JRHaggs]

I'm a veteran (by no means expert) player, and I can recommend the Steam version with very few reservations.

If you love DF, you love DF.

As Panando says, there is a lot of mouse clicking. Lots of the past's broken stuff is still broken. Some things are fixed. Some things are broken in different ways. And there are some very cool systems that are still in their infancy. But, for me, it's still the most engaging and wondrous game (or whatever) available.

It looks marvelous though. One can even recognize individual dwarves from their sprites, which, I think, is really something.

[Bumber]

Enemies can jump and climb now. Trees are 3D, and can shed fruit or nuts that you can gather. There's new HFS scattered around the world and underground. This gives access to procedurally generated metals, which are not quite as good as the the blue stuff, but better than steel, IIRC.

v50 is lacking keyboard support, legend export (for 3rd party viewers), and adventure mode. You'll have to stick with v47.05 for that.

[Chief10]

I also started playing ~2010, so a few things that stand out:
- Military training is *much* faster now. Enemies are still very dangerous for civilians, but you can actually get legendary fighters within a few years
- The world continues to run outside of your fort. You can see a world map of other sites and interact with them by raiding.
- The 3D trees. It really adds a lot of atmosphere by making your dwarfs seems dwarfed (heh) by the landscape.
- There are now many new room types and a "locations" system. This basically means you can add taverns, libraries, temples, guildhalls. Functionally they aren't super important, but it massively expands role-playing value. If you setup a tavern, you can get civilian visitors of all races that come and hang out. You also need at least a few temples to satisfy dwarf praying needs.

The steam version is incredible. Yes, there is a lot of mouse clicking, but the screen that lets you see a dwarf at-a-glance is a game changer for getting to know your dwarves better. I just think it's much easier to get relevant information quickly which makes it a much more engaging game. Some current known issues:
- Marksdwarves are once again a bit broken. You have to follow some very specific steps to get them working.
- There is an issue where the caverns will fill up with hundreds of hidden animal people. It can impact FPS.
- There aren't hotkeys for everything, but there definitely are hotkeys for *most* things. I suggest rebinding your hotkeys to keys that make sense for you.
- Adventure mode hasn't been released yet.

I highly recommend the new version, it's a masterpiece. None of the outstanding bugs are game breaking.

[Quietust]

If you're not sure whether you want to buy the Steam version, just download the Classic version and try it out - aside from using ASCII instead of fancy graphics (and some minor UI glitches which should get fixed in future updates) and not having background music, it's more or less exactly the same.