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[Makbeth]

Perhaps I spoke too soon.

So, was playing Assassin's Creed Brotherhood for a bit, and the game seemed to be out to convince me it was made by people who just didn't care.  Mission objectives failed to spawn, my character interprets controls in questionable ways, and a race mission created difficulty not by choosing a difficult-to-navigate course, but by putting Leap of Faith points directly in the shortest path between checkpoints, so instead of jumping from rooftop to rooftop, Ezio dives into a street-level haystack.  That last one is was the sleaziest of all; abusing the movement mechanics to make a race harder; the fakest of fake difficulty.  The developers may as well have come out and said "Alright, we have no talent, and we're not even going to bother hiding it now".

I decided that these side missions for the guilds, which for the most part are far more buggy or poorly done than the main missions, were just a waste of time and to stick to the main story missions in an attempt to actually enjoy the game instead of get annoyed by it.  Then I remembered the When in Rome mission during the Banker sequence, and decided there wasn't much difference, even some of the main story missions are pretty badly put together.

I then realized that the last time I'd had fun with a game was DF, despite all the problems I listed with it.

So yeah, DF may be in alpha and herding dorfs can be one of the most aggravating endeavors one can imagine at times, but it still manages to be more fun than some of the crap that the AAA game industry calls work.

At least Toady acknowledges the problems with his game, doesn't pretend it's finished, and continues working to fix those problems instead of kicking the thing out the door with a $60 price tag.

[Double A]

And there's no DRM. It's almost as if he likes his fan base.

[bombzero]

-snip-

aye, but the sad part is you still have a ton of clueless people who go right along and buy the 60$ failed abortions called finished games by the major companies. shit, even companies I relied on for good games for the past few years are starting to suck. Bethesda being a fine example there, followed closely by a few others. What I REALLY dont get is how stuff like CoD stays popular.

[RanDomino]

If I have to say one thing about 34.xx, it's this: Bins.  Why can't the Dwarves just leave them in the stockpile and just go grab the object unless they're getting at least two objects in one trip?  I suspect that it's because getting each object is a separate task, but that doesn't account for the fact that they occasionally do grab more than one thing per trip...

Burrows: ... 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.

Really?  I've never had a problem with this.  Actually, scratch that- active military will ignore burrows to run outside and Pickup Equipment, but the fix for that is to just temporarily remove that one from the squad.
Make sure you create a burrow, define the area to be just what's inside your walls, set it to be CIV in the military screen for the Alert, and switch to the alert when danger shows up.  It's not a lot of steps but, yeah, it's one of those things that you have to do exactly right and in the right order or everyone's dead.

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.

I'd love to see more Necromancers (I stop worldgen around year 80 or it takes forever and too many civs get wiped out).  Something needs to be done about werecreatures in fort mode- they stay in wereform for literally one day and it's always been lethal.  Maybe it should never warn about werethings, unless a transformation is witnessed- so if a dwarf gets attacked, they (and you) would think it was just a 'regular' monster and go about their business... at least, until the next full moon.  Hope they're not in your meeting hall!  Ooh, and then they should prioritize leaving the map and establishing a lair- especially now that entities are fighting over sites.  yes, this is how it should work.

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.

I've only had this problem once, with a corpse found during a reclaim.

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

They need to be drastically less complicated, at the very least.  I've tried repeatedly and still can't get them to work.  Yes, I've read guides and watched tutorial videos and so on.  I think they just hate me.

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.

Most annoying but in 34.11: "Urist McOblivious cancels Build Wall: Location blocked by himself"

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.

Too bad about the nonsensical arbitrary limit of three wheelbarrows per stockpile, especially since my minecarts are cursed.  And the boulders weighing a million pounds really messes with my fey moods when someone decides they need three blocks of Hematite directly from the mines, no, not one of the 90 in the foundry that's two levels down and around a corner...

[Makbeth]

If I have to say one thing about 34.xx, it's this: Bins.  Why can't the Dwarves just leave them in the stockpile and just go grab the object unless they're getting at least two objects in one trip?  I suspect that it's because getting each object is a separate task, but that doesn't account for the fact that they occasionally do grab more than one thing per trip...

I've actually resorted to deleting my cloth stockpiles in two different forts when it comes time to make candy wafers, because otherwise some hauler keeps taking the bin that has the strands in it, and cancelling all the wafer tasks.  I'm not completely sure whether the old way or the new way is better.

Burrows: ... 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.

Really?  I've never had a problem with this.  Actually, scratch that- active military will ignore burrows to run outside and Pickup Equipment, but the fix for that is to just temporarily remove that one from the squad.
Make sure you create a burrow, define the area to be just what's inside your walls, set it to be CIV in the military screen for the Alert, and switch to the alert when danger shows up.  It's not a lot of steps but, yeah, it's one of those things that you have to do exactly right and in the right order or everyone's dead.

Seems to be working better in my current fort, don't know why.  But in my last one I did all that stuff and civilians kept going outside.  It was maddening.

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.

Most annoying but in 34.11: "Urist McOblivious cancels Build Wall: Location blocked by himself"

Yep, had that one a couple times.  Usually requires cancelling the construction and ordering it again.

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.

Too bad about the nonsensical arbitrary limit of three wheelbarrows per stockpile, especially since my minecarts are cursed.  And the boulders weighing a million pounds really messes with my fey moods when someone decides they need three blocks of Hematite directly from the mines, no, not one of the 90 in the foundry that's two levels down and around a corner...

The maximum wheelbarrow limit is so low that I think it almost makes wheelbarrows useless;  My stone stockpiles fill up much faster without wheelbarrows than with them.  An exceptionally poorly thought out feature.

[Sutremaine]

The wheelbarrow thing is weird. I'd expect it to work something like barrels, where you can reserves some for use with the stockpile and leave the rest to be grabbed as needed. Instead you need a bunch of 6-tile stone stockpiles (6 because having a stockpile full of wheelbarrows seems to cause problems) feeding into a minecart stockpile, and then once they're in this central location you can start treating them normally.

[Makbeth]

What I was hoping wheelbarrows would do is move multiple items to the stockpiles to be put into bins, not just moving one heavy item at a time, or having dwarves carry the bins around.  That would have solved a lot of problems and kept most of the problems with the current system from arising so I'm not sure why this implementation was chosen instead.  It makes no sense.

[FearfulJesuit]

I do agree that Toady shifting gears for a bit from simulation development to game development might be a good thing.

The question is, how do we make it more of a fun game?

[MrWiggles]

I dont think we have the capability to judge how thought or not thought out a particular feature is. We dont really know why 3 wheel barrows was decided on as the limit. Maybe there was some complicated postman route issues that arise with wheelbarrows or maybe the wheelbarrow issue couldnt be fully done because animal powered hualing wasn't implemented and this is a compromise or maybe there an underlying stacking issues that gets exasperated the more wheel barrows you have and 3 is the current number the interwoven systems can handle.

I'm reminded of the Milking Animals Problem. For a long while the community was kinda of dumbfounded why we simply couldn't milk cows or any large mammals. It seemed from our end to be a pretty straight forward addition. However, what allowed Cows to be milk, was an entire invasive and new system that was much more flexible and cover great deal more cases.