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[Damiac]

A. There are a lot of threads where people say the game isn't challenging enough.
B. There are also a lot of threads where people say certain parts of the game are a major annoyance: IE assigning jobs to an army of migrants, or managing your food and barrel stocks.

Typically, the popular community response seems to be "Well how can you say B, and then go and say A?"
In other words, it seems to be a popular opinion that much of the "challenge" of DF is figuring out the difficult interface, and the more annoying menial tasks that have to be performed, like managing migrants.

The point of my post is to say that the game of dwarf fortress is not figuring out how to play dwarf fortress.  I feel that for many in the community, they like that DF is difficult to learn and play, because it makes them feel special that they were able to learn it.  Therefore any efforts made to make it easier to play are cheapening the work they put into learning the game.  In other words, making dwarf fortress easier to play does not make dwarf fortress easier.  It makes it more accessible.  Overcoming boredom and frustration is (I hope) not the intended metagame of DF.

So I'm gonna say something that will probably make a lot of people here mad: Being able to play dwarf fortress does not prove you are super intelligent.  It doesn't take amazing brainpower to learn and play this game.  It simply takes time and effort. All that time and effort spent learning the game is simply a barrier to the game itself.  The game would be better if it were easier to play.

The game of dwarf fortress is where you take 7 dwarves, and carve out a fortress, expanding and fending off your enemies, while amassing wealth and even more enemies, and eventually building a thriving mountainhome.  That will be expanded in future releases, but even just that is a hell of a game.

The game of dwarf fortress is not where you press 'u', scroll through to find the dwarf who isn't doing anything, and assign him a job.  It is not where you get the dreaded message "A new wave of migrants has arrived", and in a time consuming and boring process, assign each one a job, with no way of referencing who has what job, and what jobs have already been assigned, and which jobs are needed.  I continue to use migrants as my point because they are, from the point of view of the game itself, a great boon, and a sign of progress of your fort.  However, from the point of view of the user and the interface, they are a 10 minute exercise on trying to remember what jobs you need done, and what jobs you already have assigned.  Thank Armok for dwarf therapist...

Now, make no mistake.  I love the depth of the game of dwarf fortress.  I wouldn't want to simplify the game in any way.  In fact, I'd love to see more complexity, which it seems like I will continue to get in future releases. However I would love to simplify the interface.  If it were possible to just think of what I want my dwarves to do, and have them do it, I would be thrilled.  The interface is simply a (necessary) barrier between the player and the game.

TLDR; Dwarf fortress is not a way to prove you are a more evolved gamer than someone who plays COD or WOW, or whatever other mainstream game is popular to hate on.  Dwarf Fortress is an amazingly deep and complex game, which stands perfectly well on its own two feet as a great game.  The interface need not be some form of hazing to seperate the "true gamers" from the dreaded "casuals".  Toady isn't making this masterpiece for gaming elitists to show off their e-peen.

Also, thank you Toady, for such an amazing game.  You are truly an inspiration.

[Pyro627]

certain parts of the game are a major annoyance: IE assigning jobs to an army of migrants, or managing your food and barrel stocks.

How are either of these even remotely complicated? I can understand the former if you're not using DT, but managing food stocks?

[Anathema]

I agree with the general idea, but let my nitpick a few particulars. Frankly, you are a more dedicated (or more intelligent, or whatever) gamer if you figure out the interface, it is a challenge unto itself. I agree though that it shouldn't be that way, and the game itself - the part you get to play after you figure out the interface - would be more enjoyable if the interface made it more accessible.

My argument would be this: you shouldn't feel like an intelligent pro gamer just because you mastered the challenging interface (and then breezed past the relatively easy gameplay underneath it), you should instead feel like an intelligent pro gamer because you mastered challenging gameplay (accessed through an easy, intuitive interface). The former is where we're at now, and I can't fault people for patting themselves on the back for mastering the admittedly difficult interface, but I feel like DF will be better off the more we move towards the latter.

[i2amroy]

Not quite sure what you are getting at here.

If the point of this is just to state that DF is cool, then sure, I agree with you.

If the point is to claim many people here feel "superior" in some way because they play DF then I'd have to disagree with you. Sure some people here might feel like that, but I'd be willing to bet that the majority of the people here do not.

If your point is that the user interface is horrible then yeah, even Toady agrees with that. But he is also right in that there is no point in rewriting UI's that are going to probably be rewritten soon anyways. If you compare the ones that have been rewritten with the older ones you can see that he is making the ones he views as being closer to the "final" product more polished. Did you know that the mouse works on the military screen for purposes of selecting dwarves and other tasks? It's easy to see that Toady is making the game UI better as he is going along, but there is also no point in improving ones that he is going to be rewriting anyways.

[AutomataKittay]

I don't find the challenge of DF in the interface. What's the challenge with it, to me, is just the sheer variety of things that can go wrong, and just general complexity of having a lot of things to do, rather than the interface. Though managing dwarves could be done better, it's never been a major problem for me. I still don't understand the complaint about complicated interface, other than things are keymapped a bit strangely.

And I don't see anyone negging people that uses Dwarf Therapist, which's used to help manage the swarms and check things out, other than the rare purists that thinks walling things out are cheating

Now, a challenge of DF? Evil tundra/glacier embark, and being unlucky. That'll flip some tables

I don't really feels superior to anyone, though, my girlfriend thinks I'm nuts because I can put together a complicated workflow, and make it work, not because I've mastered DF. Though being able to tell about what happened in Legends Mode and occasional goblins trapped between trees amuses her

That say, I still would thank Toady for making such a detailed and excellent game.

[Calathar]

So I'm gonna say something that will probably make a lot of people here mad: Being able to play dwarf fortress does not prove you are super intelligent.  It doesn't take amazing brainpower to learn and play this game.  It simply takes time and effort. All that time and effort spent learning the game is simply a barrier to the game itself.  The game would be better if it were easier to play.

Dwarf Fortress isn't "hard" once you learn the interface and the basics of the game (that's why we have challenges/mods), but like you say it does take time and effort.  And things that take time and effort are often thought of as hard.  So no, playing dwarf fortress does not prove you are super intelligent.  But it does prove that you possess patience, a work ethic, and the ability to learn (learning how to get around the new bugs that crop up after every release).  So there should be at least a little pride to learning how to play Dwarf Fortress.  There is a certain attitude among DF players - something that many gamers who play COD or WOW don't have. 

I think the amazing community here on the forums is enough proof of the uniqueness of the DF player anyway.  And as far as the interface goes, the vast majority of posts on this forum have to do with gameplay issues, not interface issues, so I would regard learning the interface as a minor part of the game.

[Damiac]

My point is not to complain about the UI.  It's also not to bash the playerbase.  It is rather to provide a reminder of what this game is really about.  It's based on common responses I see when people suggest things like making migration waves easier to handle (Typical response: "I thought you wanted DF to be more challenging?!? Part of the challenge is dealing with migrants")

I'm sure most regulars on this forum can come up with their own examples of this.  I am just pointing out that a challenging interface does not make a challenging game.  Mastering a challenging game is rewarding.  Mastering a challenging interface simply lets you access the game.

So go ahead and pat yourself on the back for mastering a difficult interface, but do not insist that the interface must remain challenging because it's "part of the challenge of DF". 

[kuki]

I agree and I would love to see dwarf fort with a massively intuitive and rapid interface. As much as I love the game, the huge amount of work it takes to use the current interface is not remotely commensurate with the moderate power and versatility it offers. It lets me control a good bit more than your average game, for FAR more button pressings and list readings.

I know little about interface design but as someone who spends a ridiculous amount of time on a computer my gut tells me the DF interface could have been made to be far easier to use from scratch... it is basically a roguelike-like interface, when that is really more or less wildly inappropriate for the number of controls and things you need to manage in fortress mode, despite a roguelike-like display being an excellent format for the game itself. Just the basic notion, that that is how you are going to make the interface for a game like dorf fort, results in gameplay consisting of thousands of keypresses where hundreds of mouse strokes and clicks would suffice.

Is it really that hard to add mouse support? (genuine question) It would make things a lot easier, just to be able to mouse over things instead of K- or V-ing over them, or to be able to click on menu items instead of arrow-keying through them. Or -+ing. Or /*ing. Or page-updowning. Or not. Actually the inconsistency in menu controls is probably my least favorite part of the interface, beyond even the lack of mouse support, because I can't use muscle-memory to remember how to scroll through menus.

[GoombaGeek]

Sorry, I'm so used to the interface it's hard to get these threads.

:I

[kuki]

Sorry, I'm so used to the interface it's hard to get these threads.

You can't possibly mean that! Are you joking? I ask because I have noticed that you tell jokes, funny jokes.

I play so much dorf fort it's easy to see that the interface would eventually become effortlessly easy for me to use. Because of an insane amount of practice. I don't see how I could ever lose sight of how much work it takes to get used to it, or how many keypresses I am still going through, relative to any other computer program that requires an input of similar complexity?

[Tally]

Admittedly, waaay back in the days of 2D, it took me ages to finally figure out how to designate mining and hence dig into the cliffside right next to me. I felt like such an idiot when I finally figured it out. And learning past that first wall was only a matter of hammering out new designs and strategies from previous mistakes.

The thing that I can't seem to get past, however, is how to deal with all the migrants past the first 2 - 3 waves. More often than not, I assign them to the military, but have them idle while I get enough armor for them smithed, meanwhile working on cooking, brewing, and processing plants, mining for metals or interesting things, making raw ingredients for goods, setting up defenses, training areas, further expanding my fortress, and several other things. The micromanaging in this game is intense and hard to tackle, and with the amount of migrants you get with a vary wide array of skills, I feel the game forces a multi-industry fortress upon you even when you can't manage it effectively.


The game has come a long way, but I do feel that it needs to cut down some of the micromanagement, perhaps by allowing you to set up some automation of the fort's more essential tasks. Settings for auto-brewing and auto-processing (especially quarry leaves, which have no use in their unrefined form) would be highly appreciated.

[AutomataKittay]

There are mouse support for mining and tree cutting designation at very least, which I accidentally found out! I don't think DF's playable with mouse, personally, but I wouldn't mind seeing it promoted at least for those that have difficulity with text.

Mouse support's a lot more complicated than direct text input, that much's for sure. And there're lack of documentation of mouse being used in magmawiki ( I've not looked into the DF help itself). I saw someone mention that mouse could be used in military screen recently, which I've never seen spoken anywhere else. I don't see anything about mouse usage in magmawiki, outside of one of the init file having a setting for it.

The thing that I can't seem to get past, however, is how to deal with all the migrants past the first 2 - 3 waves. More often than not, I assign them to the military, but have them idle while I get enough armor for them smithed, meanwhile working on cooking, brewing, and processing plants, mining for metals or interesting things, making raw ingredients for goods, setting up defenses, training areas, further expanding my fortress, and several other things. The micromanaging in this game is intense and hard to tackle, and with the amount of migrants you get with a vary wide array of skills, I feel the game forces a multi-industry fortress upon you even when you can't manage it effectively.

The game has come a long way, but I do feel that it needs to cut down some of the micromanagement, perhaps by allowing you to set up some automation of the fort's more essential tasks. Settings for auto-brewing and auto-processing (especially quarry leaves, which have no use in their unrefined form) would be highly appreciated.

This I do agree with, at least for the base game. I'm fairly sure Dwarf Therapist or DFhack have those kind of features, but I prefer to do it in-game so I've not used them. It can be pretty rough with bigger migrant waves.

[GoombaGeek]

I'm serious about the interface. Once I figured out how to scroll I didn't have any trouble remembering what did what.

[kuki]

Haha, I just noticed the "what turns you off about dwarf fortress thread." It certainly makes me feel dumb to see that every word I am vehemently saying has already been said 125 pages ago in an official thread. I guess I am just venting.

Thank you for the answer goomba

[Azated]

I'm serious about the interface. Once I figured out how to scroll I didn't have any trouble remembering what did what.

I've never really had a problem with the interface, either. Once you remember the hotkeys, you don't even need to look at it. The military/unit/whatever menus do what they need to do and nothing more.

Sure, the interface isn't great and could be a LOT better, but that's not going to change any time soon. Complaining will get us nothing; we know it's bad, toady knows it's bad, and that's that.

The DF UI is just like anything and everything in life. Put in the time to learn how to use it and you won't have any problems whatsoever.