It's also a problem as more Fortress Mode stuff gets integrated into Adventure Mode, however...
Let's say you want to be a (to pick a totally random job) clothier in Adventurer Mode, and play as a normal townsperson. Unlike Fortress Mode, where you just tell a clothier to weave clothes together ad infinitum until the day the fortress self-destruct cave-in lever is pulled, in Adventurer Mode, you have to actually sit there and collect cloth, punch the "weave fabric" button, and then go sell that cloth...
As I was saying before in other fora, this is the sort of thing most games put a mini-game in to make interesting, but DF does not have any such infrastructure set up to handle that sort of thing.
Nope, just macro your way through it, that's all you can do. Just go watch TV while your character goes through the motions of work.
Now consider the way that some people have been eagerly awaiting "making a fortress in Adventurer Mode!" You have to manually tell everyone what to do, they may or may not follow commands, you have to manually go look at everyone to make sure it's being done. Your command-giving is context-sensitive, and as such, not easily macro-ed, and you have to micromanage every moving part in the system by hand, because the one thing about Adventurer Mode is that it's even MORE micromanagement-heavy than Fortress Mode.
Don't just sit there dreaming about how cool it will be to have a first-person perspective on running a fortress, consider how you actually will have to manage it through an interface. You think the Fortress Mode interface is bad, wait until you have to do all of that through manually chasing down each dwarf and looking, speaking, and writing down information on each and every dwarf in every part of your fort just to figure out what the heck is going on.
The same often goes for Fortress Mode stuff, as well. People only like to think about adding some random thingy into the fortress, but they don't stop and consider how they will be able to see and interact with their new thingy in ways that are meaningfully different from what they already have.
Consider when eggs, wool, and (non-vermin) milking were added in, alongside grazing. What changed? You basically got more ways to get food and clothing. You already get free infinite food and clothing from farms. Since food is such a simple concept in the game, currently, any source of food is as good as any other, so it's really only a matter of which one is easier to manage. Milking is manually intensive, and wool is not only manually intensive, but requires grazing, which is itself manually intensive with the pastures to the point that neither one is worth bothering with. Eggs, meanwhile, are considered "almost cheating" because it's more free food without any sort of real effort short of setting up the nest boxes. Even then, farming is easy to the point of being a fire-and-forget industry, itself.
Compare that to vampires - now, you have to search your migrants for a possible "sleeper agent" that seeks to undermine your fortress from within! THAT changes the way in which you play the game. You don't have a different way of looking at the game, per se, but that's also part of the point, in that it makes it harder to track the suspects down.
This is a large part of the reason I was arguing such a complex case on the
Improved Farming topic - we need to fundamentally break up the way in which we generate, use, and look at basic resources if the game is ever going to enable the sorts of complexities people are going to want out of the game.
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Topic: What do you think dwarf fortress be like in the future? (Read 5915 times)