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[Tinker Thinker]

That is to say, I figured out why I prefer Dwarf Fortress to most other games:
It isn't frustrating. Things will happen in a variety of ways, never the same way twice, and so you don't feel too bad about yourself if that latest siege gets you, and you feel genuine triumph if you win, because you succeeded on skill, not rote memorization of what happens next.

Let's take the game that brought me this epiphany for example:
Medieval II: Total War.
Spoilered for rambling and not terribly important.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For those that aren't familiar with it, it is a Turn-based strategy campaign with real-time combat capabilities.
I was playing as Scotland, and after a lengthy slog through the British Isles (hampered by the Pope swearing he will excommunicate me if I ever lay a finger on one hair of an English head), and the Pope calls up a crusade. Seeing my chance to get the Pope off my back for a while, I sign up my crown prince (whom I hate) to join the crusade. Against remarkable odds, he gets all the way across the world map and takes Jerusalem without much effort. Yay!
I'm surrounded by Egyptians, but with the cheap and powerful crusader troops I should be okay. So I take Gaza and Acre. Throughout my expansion I am churning out the maximum number of priests to convert the holy land to Catholicism and make it easier to control. Then an Imam from Egypt (the former ruler of Jerusalem) shows up, and parks next to my town. My unrest goes through the roof right into riot territory; this is their ability. I manage to hold Jerusalem for about ten turns before the town finally rebels and throws out Edward (who, despite my wishes, became a king before he could be killed in battle). I retake Jerusalem two turns later (one to siege, one to assault), and the cycle begins again. I am now at over 70% Catholicism in Jerusalem, but there is always an Imam at my doorstep and it is always near riot levels of unrest. So, I commission assassins. Lots of them. This is when it began to get frustrating. I finally manage to produce a halfway decent assassin for a starter (3/10 assassination skills), and I order him to attack the Imam - about 10% chance. Deciding these odds were poor, I go sabotage buildings and assassinate minor generals all the way to 8/10 skill, and now I have 30~% odds of killing the Imam. Deciding these odds aren't bad, I prep a save scum and set my assassin to work.
Death Tally:
Assassin
 - Died 42 times
 - Escaped without killing 7 times
 - Succeeded 0 times
So I gave up, and set him to work on some easier targets.

At the same time, due to the high concentrations of Islam about,
I had a bit of a heresy problem amongst my priests. I set them on each other to try to weed out heresy. This backfired, and I had a full-blown heretical cult underway. The odds were always in the 20-40% range of success, and I never managed to execute a single heretic. Then, one of the priests who hadn't done anything at all and had just sat around preaching managed to be promoted to cardinal. I set him on a weaker-faithed heretic, 55% odds, succeeded on the first try. Next turn, the next heretic was 66%, success. 58%; success. 70%; success. And so on.
In short, the 'odds' in Medieval II are 0-50% = 0% ; 51%-100% = 100%
It got frustrating, really quickly, because there was nothing I could do about the Imams due to them being impossible to assassinate, and couldn't get into a fight due to the need to maintain my garrisons at max because of the Imams. To top the problem off, Jerusalem reached a new population mile marker, and to upgrade the city to keep them happy I needed 4800 florins (currency), which I never got in the forty or so turns from when it was ready to upgrade to when I gave up. Which made the unrest in Jerusalem worse, and made the place rebel more frequently. Why didn't I get the florins? Because the building assistants were too busy upgrading other infrastructures to leave more than 100 in my coffers (and I did everything I could to reduce their expenditures short of stopping them outright), so the money I could spend fluctuated between 3900 and 4200 florins.

Frustrating. Everything was doomed from the start. No. Fun.

tl;dr
Medieval II sucks due to the circular problems (need a to get b, need b or c to get a, c is impossible) that occur, and how everything pretty much plays out the same.
DF rules due to the well-evolved infrastructure and the randomness and variety of *effective* solutions to problems available.

I have now confirmed that there are three games on my shelf that are in the same genre as Dwarf Fortress that I would actually play now (I have a lot of civilization-level/fortress-level strategy games), and this is because they are enjoyable and nothing at all like Dwarf Fortress.

Anyway, has Dwarf Fortress ruined other games/proven itself way better than other games to anyone else?

[Lord Dakoth]

Ha, yes.
It completely destroyed Warcraft III and Rome: Total War for me. Neither of these games have elaborate death-traps.

[Lordinquisitor]

Don`t hate on my beautiful Medieval 2.. Pls just don`t. 

You can`t really compare Dwarf Fortress and Medieval- At least not now.

However, Dwarf Fortress pretty much ruined Dungeon keeper 2 for me. And it killed many other games, too, because i coulnd`t stop playing it for quite a while. And now it even brought me into rogue likes. *sigh*

[Kilo24]

Well, it's the first attempt I've seen with a decent shot at success of making an extraordinarily deep simulation (let's ignore Battlecruiser 3000 AD, shall we?)  Having the developer be able to hunker down and truly get into complex systems is very, very good.  The standard approach towards video game production prohibits such a strategy, unless it was built into a good engine and passed around (which is something that happens with mainly graphics code these days.)

Dwarf Fortress has the potential to truly change gaming, especially if the modding potential is realized.  Gaming is still too much attached to the idea of stories in the style of books or movies stapled onto a game environment forced into linearity.  The other games out there "solve" that by not including a coherent story, because making it actually good will be bloody difficult.  But Dwarf Fortress defies traditional development philosophy and will change the future.[/trailer voiceover voice]

I'm a little unhappy that it's not open source (mainly so it can be very modular later on, when it gets really good), but Toady does have good reasons for keeping it close to his chest.  I'm quite happy with it as it is, and think he's doing an excellent job.  The information that he gives us through the devlog, the podcasts, and answering questions does wonders on insulating us against the release drought.  The UI is poor, but it's hard to imagine a tight, well-designed UI that won't have to be scrapped later on (though a good intermediate UI still might be worth it to attract in more players.)  Toady's gone overkill on so many aspects that it'll be hard not to imagine an unparalleled game when everything finally comes together.

But, that's the future.  DF right now is a very good sandbox game, but too directionless to be one of the best games around.  If we're counting the promise that Toady's eagerly at work fulfilling, though...

[Chewykittens]

I was a casual rouge-like player and strategy player up until DF, When it was downloading I thought it was gonna be another rouge-like, when I started playing I said "so it's like angband 'sept you build the dungeon..." Then I found out it was more comparable to civilizations covered in crack.  Hell, life seems dull and non-dwarven  compared to real life.

[Tofu]

[Redacted]

[XSI]

First off, I think enemy game sounds too harsh, it's all just games, I'd say competitor games(Since I've started to associate "Enemy" with "Pull lever", and I wouldn't do that to any game that at least tries.)
spoiler for my random typing which always ends up just being rambling.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 I'll bring up empire total war. It's fairly nice, but as the OP said about the 1-50 = lose, and 51+ is win is even worse there, the game seems to completely ignore everything when it has to decide, and it felt like it was rushed(Several bugs, some of which I would describe as the only reason I save every 5 seconds). And even then, every game is almost the same if you play, the same tactics are always used, the same things always happen.

Dwarf fortress does not have anything like this at all, everything can change, everything can be influenced, and every time you play it is different. even for an alpha there are next to no bugs that pop up while playing, and it seems you have to actually look for bugs to find them. You can build structures as big or small as you want for purposes you choose, instead of having to select from a list of pre-made structures for a pre-set purpose like all rts games out there. You choose what your military wears, instead of picking pre-set units. and for once, you don't have ~10 nameless workers that somehow supply massive armies with everything at the same time, always at the same rate, everything in the game can be effected by the skills of Urist soapmaker's skills, or lack of skills.

The world is not like it always is, you're not always exactly the same team in some war you can't care about, just look at the way the players treat the elves, they are often killed because what the players want, not because the game just says "This is your enemy". Soon(Next version?) we might be able to actually start wars over things, meaningful wars, not just the random killing that always happens just because goblins are evil. The wars happen because Urist child, son to urist armoursmith and the urist mcmason got kidnapped. It's not random plot holes devices, it's actually something that means something.

TL;DR version:

Dwarf fortress does things right where most other games go wrong.

[Skorpion]

Yes.

Because, frankly, while I love games with a solid story to them, and driving around or shooting people, or exploring underground ruins while looking at the pretty scenery, I always come back to DF because it's just so damn rewarding.
Also, because it runs well windowed and in tandem with Firefox and IRC and IMs, so I can surf the net while playing it.

[Flying Carcass]

Heh, I remember in one of my Medievil 2 campaigns the Pope declared a crusade on Jerusalem and the Muslims declared a Jihad on Jerusalem at roughly the same time. So instead of fighting each other the Crusaders and Jihadists teamed up and conquered Jerusalem together. Yay!

[Sensei]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but this seems more like a rant about the biased Random Number God in Medieval. And yeah, shoddy RNGs ruin their fare share of games.

[Tinker Thinker]

@Sensei: You're not wrong, but you're not right either. The problem with the RNG is that, due to that bias, you don't get remarkable or unlikely events. No enemy can possibly field an assassin that can genuinely take down your king, nor can you do the same except with outrageously good luck (that is, several assassin-vulnerability events stacking on one king that has actually left his castle for once). So, since everyone starts with the same equipment and abilities every time, you very quickly find everything always going the same way. Without human guidance, England will always run roughshod over Scotland, the Turks will be annihilated by Byzantium, and Egypt will forever hold Jerusalem.
In Dwarf Fortress, not only are things highly variable from initial conditions, but the random element continues to assert itself.