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[SalmonGod]

I've been playing Dwarf Fortress for a couple weeks now.  I finally feel like I understand most of the interface (even the military!).  I'm truly fascinated by and loving this game right now.

I find the reports screen rather frustrating, though.  More so than any other menu.  I LOVE reading the combat reports.  The detail is so impressive (lastnight I had an axeman take a swing and sever the hair on a dark strangler wrestler's thumb...).  They're just such a chore to try and decipher.  I like to read, allow 10-20 steps, read, and repeat just to keep up with things as they're happening.  Maybe I need to go about things differently somehow, because I've looked and seen no other complaints about this.  I just find it incredibly difficult and time consuming to figure out which entities received updates to their combat reports and it's also not always clear which ones are related and in just what order things are happening from one creature to the next.

For example

Squad #1 (Urist McBlah) is fighting!
Dark strangler wrestler is fighting!
Squad #1 (Urist McWhatever) is fighting!
Dark strangler wrestler is fighting!
Dark strangler wrestler is fighting!
Squad #3 (Urist McSplosion) is fighting!

In order to discover that both Squad #1 are in fact attacking the same strangler while one of those soldiers is getting harassed by the other two stranglers, I have to look at every single creatures update screen one at a time and cross-reference updates in my head to match things up and figure it out.  Then there's Squad #3 who has taken no actions since last time I looked at him, but I still have to check to figure out that only the top 5 creatures on the list have been updated.

It's possible that I'm missing something, but I've done plenty of searching and found nothing to make it easier.

I have two suggestions for making this much friendlier.

1.  Make a single, centralized report screen that scrolls every report that is generated in chronological order.

2.  Include a list of entities on the side (ordered by most recent report?) that have recently generated reports, and make them ignorable, so that the stuff I care about doesn't have to be drowned out by the merchant caravan's horse getting slowly tortured and mangled.