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[Makbeth]

So I think I've got what enjoyment I could out of this version of DF, and am going to take another break from it and wait for the next major version.   Some things I would like to comment on:

Adventure mode sight lines:  As far as I can tell, the adventurer is the only unit in the world with any distance limit to his line of sight, in light or dark conditions.  If a creature is loaded and not occluded from view by an obstacle, it can see you.  I'm guessing that implementing sight restrictions on other creatures is something Toady plans to do, but then why only apply them to the player, even temporarily?  Why not make it all or nothing; have everyone's sight restricted or no one's sight restricted?  Either way, everyone would follow the same rules.  In any case, if DF is supposed to be realistic, then why not do away with the restrictions completely?  Seeing everything that's loaded is still only seeing a fraction of the distance that it is possible to see in real life.

Broker trade job priority:  On the one hand, this still seems to be unfixed; but on the other it seems not to matter whether you have a trained or untrained dwarf doing the trading now, so that's nice.

Burrows:  Getting dwarves not to go places is still a nightmare and the one of fastest ways to lose interest in playing dwarf mode.  Haulers sometimes seem to not even pay attention to burrow restrictions, actually leaving the burrow and going outside during sieges, even after all items I could find outside were forbidden.  Again, it would be great to have a forbidden area traffic zone that actually forbids dwarves from going somewhere instead of increasing the pathfinding cost, as if there's a wall.  Burrows have been suggested for this purpose, but as demonstrated here, they don't work nearly well enough.

Necromancers, werewolves, and vampires: Are awesome, and it would be great to see more features like this.  Although it would be nice if altering the vanilla secrets and curses were possible, instead of only being able to add new ones.

Towns:  Great, but run really slow where the domestic animal population has exploded.  Also, while there's all the mini-forges and figurines for sale that I could ever want, weapons and armor are often not even available in shops.  And there's been two occasions when an item I bought failed to appear in my inventory, and wasn't in the stockroom either, so I basically got robbed by the merchant.

Evil Biomes:  Had a lot of fun and Fun in a half-neutral, half-evil embark, but fully evil embarks are something that I can't imagine being playable, even without the freakish weather.  A time interval between death and reanimation that takes into account the "when I get around to it" approach of the dwarves would help, or at least basing the speed of reanimation on how evil the biome is.

Ghosts:  Would be great if the dwarves would properly entomb remains instead of leaving them in the halls indefinitely, tomb space or no, forbidden or no, accessible or no, idlers or no. 

Minecarts:  Unfortunately, didn't stick with any one fort long enough to build the power plants needed for the rollers.  They sound cool though.

Where to stand when building walls:  Was the best part of the whole version, mostly because it shows that some of these old bugs really do get fixed.  Designating walls and then simply watching the dwarves build them sensibly felt really good.

Stone drop rate:  Love that stockpiles are usable upon mining them out now, but mining out entire limestone mountains to make enough steel for the army seems like it needs adjustment.

In summary, it's better than 31.xx,  but it continues the trend of features that are only partly implemented, with the implemented part causing problems and the missing part containing the means to deal with those problems.  Again, I know it's a work in progress, but I think some things would be better left out entirely than half-done like this.  It's a great simulator, but the decisions being made about what to include and not include make me wonder if it will really be a great game by 1.0.  There are lots of games out there that are good simulators but not good games, and I'm thinking DF is headed in that direction.  It is fascinating to play around with for a while, but the fun wears off quickly and soon it just becomes tiresome and chorelike.

I am familiar with the standard responses that the more passionate members of these forums make when anything less than neutral is said of the game, and to them I say yes, I know.  This is my impression of the game, it's not quite favorable, and I hope that it might do some good.  No need to flame me, it's been done before and I probably know what you'll say already.  Toady has asked in the past for criticism, and I'm giving it without trying to be rude.  Please respect that.

[MrWiggles]

I never really consider the dorfs getting stuck to be a bug. Its was expected behavior, it was just bad behavior.
---
I'm also not sure how ToadyOne can implement full features. The game is very tightly intertwine on itself. Necromancer for an example, for them to be fully done, still require a fair bit of work, with two invasive combat additions and rewriting, and how entities claim their sites probably being the largest. But it touches on a great deal of many other things. For example, for Armies to be roaming on the game map, and for battles to continue after world gen, so Necromancers can get new stock of dead bodies.

So yea, I dont know how ToadyOne can get around having half finished features. I suppose he could just write a lot of place holder that he'll have to toss out, but why? The feature they're written for, wont act correctly, since its using placeholder over actual content.

[Makbeth]

It's not that there's half finished features at all, it's that some of them seem completely unnecessary and have a huge negative impact on gameplay.  The three-tile player line of sight in dungeons opposed to the functionally infinite one for npc archers, for example.  Why put that code in at all if it wasn't the right time?  It only affects the player, in only that mode, and only creates fake difficulty.  It does nothing good.  Should have been left out till Toady gets to torchlight.

[MrWiggles]

That is an interesting case. I'm not sure what is really going on there. It could be how the NPC disseminate information between themselves, or it could be a hold over from how an entire Population would recognize you as hostile, and know where you are.

[Putnam]

You don't need rollers for minecarts, you know…

[Makbeth]

The wiki says you need rollers if you're going uphill, otherwise the cart will roll over whoever is trying to push it uphill.  Or at least, that seems to be what it's implying.  Is that the case?

[Putnam]

The wiki says you need rollers if you're going uphill, otherwise the cart will roll over whoever is trying to push it uphill.  Or at least, that seems to be what it's implying.  Is that the case?

No.

[crazysheep]

The wiki says you need rollers if you're going uphill, otherwise the cart will roll over whoever is trying to push it uphill.  Or at least, that seems to be what it's implying.  Is that the case?

No, I believe you may have misread the wiki information, or the wiki information was poorly written. From the wiki, "A minecart set to be guided is not affected by rollers at all". It also says "dwarves can not push nor ride an unpowered cart up a ramp.. [snip].. To solve this, the player can either use Rollers (see below) or set the cart to be Guided."

Some further comments of mine on your thoughts:

So I think I've got what enjoyment I could out of this version of DF, and am going to take another break from it and wait for the next major version.   Some things I would like to comment on:

Burrows:  Getting dwarves not to go places is still a nightmare and the one of fastest ways to lose interest in playing dwarf mode.  Haulers sometimes seem to not even pay attention to burrow restrictions, actually leaving the burrow and going outside during sieges, even after all items I could find outside were forbidden.  Again, it would be great to have a forbidden area traffic zone that actually forbids dwarves from going somewhere instead of increasing the pathfinding cost, as if there's a wall.  Burrows have been suggested for this purpose, but as demonstrated here, they don't work nearly well enough.

I've found that using the military alert screen to work better for the purposes of corralling civilians into safe areas. [keystrokes: (m)ilitary -> (a)lerts -> select active/training schedule -> select burrow] Once a good burrow system has been set up to work with military alerts, there is very little that can go wrong [at least, in my fort so far, this setup hasn't failed].

Stone drop rate:  Love that stockpiles are usable upon mining them out now, but mining out entire limestone mountains to make enough steel for the army seems like it needs adjustment.

I reckon one fix for this would be to mod the raws to allow flux stone blocks to be used in smelting. On a (somewhat) related note, somebody here modded their raws to allow tin bars to be used for glazing stonewares instead of cassiterite ore after the drop rate had been changed.

[Makbeth]

Burrows:  Getting dwarves not to go places is still a nightmare and the one of fastest ways to lose interest in playing dwarf mode.  Haulers sometimes seem to not even pay attention to burrow restrictions, actually leaving the burrow and going outside during sieges, even after all items I could find outside were forbidden.  Again, it would be great to have a forbidden area traffic zone that actually forbids dwarves from going somewhere instead of increasing the pathfinding cost, as if there's a wall.  Burrows have been suggested for this purpose, but as demonstrated here, they don't work nearly well enough.
I've found that using the military alert screen to work better for the purposes of corralling civilians into safe areas. [keystrokes: (m)ilitary -> (a)lerts -> select active/training schedule -> select burrow] Once a good burrow system has been set up to work with military alerts, there is very little that can go wrong [at least, in my fort so far, this setup hasn't failed].

That's how I was using them.  Set up a burrow to shelter in, and create an alert called Alarm with the burrow assigned to it.  When danger approaches, set Alarm to be the civilian alert.  However, even with all outside items forbidden, the only way to keep dwarves (both civilian and active military) inside was to physically lock them in.  They seemed to be going for the ever-coveted Socks of the Recently Deceased.  Not sure why our experiences are different, but I double-checked everything while it was happening, and I was getting cancellation messages due to forbidden areas, so it was at least partially working.

As for the minecarts, shame I didn't know that.  Maybe I'll give it a try.

[Mr Frog]

I do agree with all of the things that you've listed, though I personally have managed to keep a fort going on a pure-evil undeading biome for a reasonable time period (it seems to be a function of how quickly you can get your dwarves indoors and a corpse disposal system set up), though there is a definite risk of any given death triggering a cascading feedback loop of zombies making more zombies making more zombies.

None of it's really been enough to turn me off DF, though -- it's not enough to significantly disrupt my game experience. I'm personally fine with Toady focusing on the more simulation-y aspects of the game, as Fort Mode seems pretty fully-featured to me (in the sense that it's not missing anything major -- there are some things I'd like to see added, but there aren't any gaping holes). As long as it doesn't disrupt the game itself, I'll be fine.

I think that DF should be okay as a project so long as there aren't any more 31.01-esque fiascoes where everything breaks at once and it takes several months just to get things to a playable state again (I should note that it did eventually become playable again, despite being an absolute clusterfuck of new, broken systems and old, newly-broken systems to begin with). The recent bugfix cycle has given me hope, as it saw several long-standing issues finally handled when I'd given up on them ever being fixed.

So long as Toady doesn't add any new major mechanics without serious thought beforehand to avoid the possibility of adding something flat-out unworkable (and he's done a good job of that so far), I think it should work out fine in the end. I do wish that he'd be more thorough in making sure everything works properly and completely before making a release, but whaddayagonnado :\

Anyways, you get one cookie for expressing negative opinions without getting bitchy and another for managing to make me think at 3:00am.

[GreatWyrmGold]

So I think I've got what enjoyment I could out of this version of DF, and am going to take another break from it and wait for the next major version.   Some things I would like to comment on:

Okay, first off: Why is DF now dull? I don't think you're doing it right. You're not supposed to survive, you're supposed to create.

Adventure mode sight lines:  As far as I can tell, the adventurer is the only unit in the world with any distance limit to his line of sight, in light or dark conditions.  If a creature is loaded and not occluded from view by an obstacle, it can see you.  I'm guessing that implementing sight restrictions on other creatures is something Toady plans to do, but then why only apply them to the player, even temporarily?  Why not make it all or nothing; have everyone's sight restricted or no one's sight restricted?  Either way, everyone would follow the same rules.  In any case, if DF is supposed to be realistic, then why not do away with the restrictions completely?  Seeing everything that's loaded is still only seeing a fraction of the distance that it is possible to see in real life.

Most of this is fine, but how far you can see isn't relevant for LOS. What's relevant is how far you can see and distinguish stuff.

Burrows:  Getting dwarves not to go places is still a nightmare and the one of fastest ways to lose interest in playing dwarf mode.  Haulers sometimes seem to not even pay attention to burrow restrictions, actually leaving the burrow and going outside during sieges, even after all items I could find outside were forbidden.  Again, it would be great to have a forbidden area traffic zone that actually forbids dwarves from going somewhere instead of increasing the pathfinding cost, as if there's a wall.  Burrows have been suggested for this purpose, but as demonstrated here, they don't work nearly well enough.

Burrows only restrict jobs, not pathing. That might or might not change in the future, but something to let you restrict pathing wil be.

Necromancers, werewolves, and vampires: Are awesome, and it would be great to see more features like this.  Although it would be nice if altering the vanilla secrets and curses were possible, instead of only being able to add new ones.

The second part is sensible.

Towns:  Great, but run really slow where the domestic animal population has exploded.  Also, while there's all the mini-forges and figurines for sale that I could ever want, weapons and armor are often not even available in shops.  And there's been two occasions when an item I bought failed to appear in my inventory, and wasn't in the stockroom either, so I basically got robbed by the merchant.

Still a bit buggy, but it's a big release. Also, bear in mind that most shops are there to tailor, not to adventurers, but to townsfolk. It'll probably be tweaked so that every non-pacifistic civ's towns all have at least some weapons and armor, but until then just wait a bit.

Evil Biomes:  Had a lot of fun and Fun in a half-neutral, half-evil embark, but fully evil embarks are something that I can't imagine being playable, even without the freakish weather.  A time interval between death and reanimation that takes into account the "when I get around to it" approach of the dwarves would help, or at least basing the speed of reanimation on how evil the biome is.

Elf. Seriously, though, there's lots of ways people have found to deal with the undead, and not every evil biome has them.

Ghosts:  Would be great if the dwarves would properly entomb remains instead of leaving them in the halls indefinitely, tomb space or no, forbidden or no, accessible or no, idlers or no.

They kinda do.

Minecarts:  Unfortunately, didn't stick with any one fort long enough to build the power plants needed for the rollers.  They sound cool though.

You know you don't need rollers, right?

Stone drop rate:  Love that stockpiles are usable upon mining them out now, but mining out entire limestone mountains to make enough steel for the army seems like it needs adjustment.

So, you like that there's not so much stone...but can't stand the paltry amount of stone you get?

In summary, it's better than 31.xx,  but it continues the trend of features that are only partly implemented, with the implemented part causing problems and the missing part containing the means to deal with those problems.  Again, I know it's a work in progress, but I think some things would be better left out entirely than half-done like this.  It's a great simulator, but the decisions being made about what to include and not include make me wonder if it will really be a great game by 1.0.  There are lots of games out there that are good simulators but not good games, and I'm thinking DF is headed in that direction.  It is fascinating to play around with for a while, but the fun wears off quickly and soon it just becomes tiresome and chorelike.
I am familiar with the standard responses that the more passionate members of these forums make when anything less than neutral is said of the game, and to them I say yes, I know.  This is my impression of the game, it's not quite favorable, and I hope that it might do some good.  No need to flame me, it's been done before and I probably know what you'll say already.  Toady has asked in the past for criticism, and I'm giving it without trying to be rude.  Please respect that.

I understand.

[bombzero]

Stone drop rate:  Love that stockpiles are usable upon mining them out now, but mining out entire limestone mountains to make enough steel for the army seems like it needs adjustment.

So, you like that there's not so much stone...but can't stand the paltry amount of stone you get?

I believe he was referring to how, while the lesser stone drops made dealing with the excess more bearable, it upset all the systems that were previously balanced for the old way. (i.e. flux)

[Mr Frog]

The new stone drop rates barely affect construction and smelting due to blocks and metal bars being produced in sets of four, and most objects requiring raw stone aren't needed in enough quantities for the 25% drop rates to have much impact... except for steelmaking, which eats through flux like candy.

@GreatWyrmGold:

Well, if someone only sort of liked DF-style build-whatever-ya-like games to begin with (which is understandable IMO), I can easily see why some of 34.xx's new annoyances could tip the scale from 'fun when I'm in the right mood' to 'uuggh, why bother?'. I don't believe it's a matter of incorrect approach in this case. It seems to be more a matter of Enjoyment Derived From Activity vs. Effort Expended To Keep Activity In An Enjoyable State, and I guess Makbeth now finds that equation to be unbalanced in the wrong direction for him.

[Quietust]

Adventure mode sight lines:  As far as I can tell, the adventurer is the only unit in the world with any distance limit to his line of sight, in light or dark conditions.  If a creature is loaded and not occluded from view by an obstacle, it can see you.  I'm guessing that implementing sight restrictions on other creatures is something Toady plans to do, but then why only apply them to the player, even temporarily?  Why not make it all or nothing; have everyone's sight restricted or no one's sight restricted?  Either way, everyone would follow the same rules.  In any case, if DF is supposed to be realistic, then why not do away with the restrictions completely?  Seeing everything that's loaded is still only seeing a fraction of the distance that it is possible to see in real life.

I'm not actually sure what the issue is with "sight lines" in version 0.34 that isn't present in 0.31 and earlier - even back in the old 2D versions, Adventurer line of sight was blocked by obstacles and limited by available daylight, and other creatures could see further so they could actually find you without you needing to find them first.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Adventure mode sight lines:  As far as I can tell, the adventurer is the only unit in the world with any distance limit to his line of sight, in light or dark conditions.  If a creature is loaded and not occluded from view by an obstacle, it can see you.  I'm guessing that implementing sight restrictions on other creatures is something Toady plans to do, but then why only apply them to the player, even temporarily?  Why not make it all or nothing; have everyone's sight restricted or no one's sight restricted?  Either way, everyone would follow the same rules.  In any case, if DF is supposed to be realistic, then why not do away with the restrictions completely?  Seeing everything that's loaded is still only seeing a fraction of the distance that it is possible to see in real life.

First off, Adventurer LOS has been pretty much the same since >2d, it's a placeholder as far as I recall. Second; The view grid couldn't be increased beyond 80x25 tiles previously though, so the problem has been slightly alleviated. No need to complain about it this much, it's not a real detriment to adventurer mode since the grid would still be blocking your view [which typically extends beyond that] and not being able to see in the dark is a far more realistic option to what you're suggesting.

Broker trade job priority:  On the one hand, this still seems to be unfixed; but on the other it seems not to matter whether you have a trained or untrained dwarf doing the trading now, so that's nice.

My brokers usually drop whatever they're doing to trade unless they're crafting something. That's also why you make your broker stop working once the trading is needed.

Burrows:  Getting dwarves not to go places is still a nightmare and the one of fastest ways to lose interest in playing dwarf mode.  Haulers sometimes seem to not even pay attention to burrow restrictions, actually leaving the burrow and going outside during sieges, even after all items I could find outside were forbidden.  Again, it would be great to have a forbidden area traffic zone that actually forbids dwarves from going somewhere instead of increasing the pathfinding cost, as if there's a wall.  Burrows have been suggested for this purpose, but as demonstrated here, they don't work nearly well enough.

You're doing it wrong, sorry. Burrows have worked great for a while now. You just have to end the burrow at a reasonable place, such as before your drawbridge, or maybe even make a burrow that consists of the fortress proper and set it on always and never have to worry about straying dwarves again. It doesn't make it so jobs outside the burrow aren't created/taken, it simply stops them from leaving the area, which is what kills them.

Necromancers, werewolves, and vampires: Are awesome, and it would be great to see more features like this.  Although it would be nice if altering the vanilla secrets and curses were possible, instead of only being able to add new ones.

If anything I want more vanilla secrets, such as magery or some such. Something to balance out the EVIL that is the entirety of the world.

Evil Biomes:  Had a lot of fun and Fun in a half-neutral, half-evil embark, but fully evil embarks are something that I can't imagine being playable, even without the freakish weather.  A time interval between death and reanimation that takes into account the "when I get around to it" approach of the dwarves would help, or at least basing the speed of reanimation on how evil the biome is.

Walls+Hatch Covers, also embark with a Mace/Hammerdwarf to dispense holy justice. Make sure you do not rely on a butchery/hunting industry in these biomes, as corpses/refuse/body parts equals more zombie. I spend the first couple months of an evil embark making sure I have atleast 1 dwarf dedicated to security and another to dumping the bodies in the ponds. It's a pain in the ass currently though to kill undead for good, and Toady realizes it. That's why he's been screwing with them dramatically every half year or so for the past 3. They're tough to balance right.

Ghosts:  Would be great if the dwarves would properly entomb remains instead of leaving them in the halls indefinitely, tomb space or no, forbidden or no, accessible or no, idlers or no. 

That's weird, because this has never happened to me at all across the years of versions, not even once. So you're doing something wrong.

Minecarts:  Unfortunately, didn't stick with any one fort long enough to build the power plants needed for the rollers.  They sound cool though.

Covered. They need work though, I don't use minecarts at all since a wheelbarrow+hauler squad makes the transportation much quicker. Now if there were no wheelbarrows, minecarts would gain true functionality.

Where to stand when building walls:  Was the best part of the whole version, mostly because it shows that some of these old bugs really do get fixed.  Designating walls and then simply watching the dwarves build them sensibly felt really good.

Neat right? Though I still wish I could tell them which side to build it from at the start of construction if I wanted to. Even after the change I'm using suspended walls to direct them which side to build from.

Stone drop rate:  Love that stockpiles are usable upon mining them out now, but mining out entire limestone mountains to make enough steel for the army seems like it needs adjustment.

The new drop rates need to be adjusted for ores. Atleast in regard to Miner skill affecting the drop rate of vein ores, as 'Legendary' [misnomer in current version IMO] Miners getting >5 pieces of hematite from a huge vein is less than Dwarven.