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[zetsfinetoo]

I'm a new df player and has never touched the ascii version, but I played the steam 50.11 version a lot and there's some things that I think spoil the player's experience and I wish were different. Some of these were probably suggested already, rejected already or were removed from the game, it's hard too know, this game has too much history.

Block destroyers. I wish there were creatures/forces that aren't controlled by player that could destroy walls/blocks. I know there's creatures that can destroy doors/bridges/windows etc., but since everything you can get on the surface you can get underground, you can just wall off and forget about intruders, which is lame. I wish sentient species like dwarves, humans and goblins could use picks to mine natural or player-created blocks, animals like moles could dig soil, and large creatures like dragons could destroy walls/floors. Maybe different materials can have different durability, like enemies that can destroy wooden walls can't destroy stone ones, and those who can destroy stone can't destroy metal. Maybe blocks can have quality which determines the durability of the walls that are made out of them. Maybe walls could be reinforced with metal, making them unbreakable, but it's expensive, so the player has to choose where to reinforce when just starting out the fortress.
   
Door forbidding. Similar to walling off, forbidding the door stops most enemies from passing through it. First, it makes sense than your dwarves can't go through the door if you forbid them to, but why would enemies listen to your orders? And if it's not "forbidding" exactly, but more like locking, then why are there no lockpicking skill? And why one flimsy wooden door can stop the whole army or a giant? Also, why can you forbid the door instantly as a player, rather than having to create an order and send the dwarf to lock it, like in case of lever pulling? What kind of divine intervention is this? This combined with invincible walls allows the player to ignore any above or underground threats and makes the game less challenging and "fun" compared to what I've heard about it before playing myself.
   
Dead body reporting. It makes little sense that you know if one of your dwarves died as soon as other dwarf sees it. One of the problems is that is makes the vampire report a dead body as soon as they drain the victim of blood, allowing player to pause the game, recenter on the corpse and see exactly who the vampire is without intrigue/interrogation/investigation. I think it would be better if dwarves had to report the dead body to one of the nobles before player gets the notification. Dwarves report the location of the body, but only if it didn't fall into the very deep chasm or if it wasn't carried away by the river, for instance. And dwarves report which dwarf the body belongs to, but only if it wasn't mangled or if all the flesh hasn't rotten away, something like that.
   
Other stuff.
   There's no quality for drinks and cut gems in game, but there's low/high quality alcohol and badly/masterfully cut gems in real life.
   Vampires have different and easily distinguishable skin color, killing the intrigue and investigation, you just know who to isolate even before new migrants have reached your fort.
   Mist generators are unreasonably effective since all it takes for a dwarf to forget about dead child, sleeping in dirt, having no clothes etc. is to walk through the water.
   For some reason, everyone, including whales, giants, titans, dragons etc. are dwarf-sized, which is 1-tile big. I guess changing it would be a lot of work and would break the game and it isn't too bad, although it's strange that some colossal monster can squeeze through dwarven tunnels just fine.
   Dwarves with zero skill, in let's say weaponsmithing, can for come reason make standard quality weapons right away. Wouldn't it be better if dwarf could do the job only if they have a least dabbling skill level, to acquire which dwarf has to learn it from other dwarf or read about it? It would make starting and migrating dwarf skill matter way more as well as increasing necessity of libraries and guildhalls.

[zetsfinetoo]

I would also like to mention that creature size doesn't translate well into creature's deadliness. Each creature has size/volume in game which you can check on df wiki, and largest of them are comparable to, for example, 5-10 story building, and you would expect that colossus can just step on a dwarf and crush them into a pile of flesh, giant can throw a dwarf 100 tiles away, forgotten beast can bite off dwarf's head, dragon can brush off steel spears like toothpicks, making the fight with these monsters instantly lethal, no matter what armor dwarf wears. In general, finely equipped and trained military squad can dispatch most threats, even when the threat should be no match even to 50 legendary skilled adamantine equipped dwarves. Dwarves fighting megabeast should be comparable to ants fighting a dwarf, which would not only be realistic according to in-game creature size, but also motivate players to utilize rangers and other creative means of defense. In my opinion DF isn't difficult enough in terms of gameplay, threats and enemies. The amount of knowledge you need/lack is what makes it interesting, but once you learn the game, it becomes rather dull and unchallenging.

And its strange that dwarves can damage/sever any part of especially large creature's body when the size difference is supposed to let dwarves only reach creature's ankles at best.