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[flameaway]

So, I've been fooling about with this game for about a year.  Grinding through the learning curve; pure stubbornness really.  Having forts die over and over again; seems like a different reason each time.  Hell, I still spend way more time reading the forums and wikis than I do trying to play the game.  Of course there is also all the time lost dreaming of the marvelous things I'd build if only I could get a dwarf to move a rock block when I wanted the dwarf to.

Then a few days ago, I'm flipping through the interface moving minecarts, piles of X clothing, fending off goblin sieges with my rather minimal, yet scarily functional, military and actually building the stuff I planned to build.  The hospital heals dwarves (more or less); there's magma forges and proper armor for my troops.  There's wells and farms; misters, querns and dragon skulls and suddenly ten years of game time have passed and all the dwarves are in the green and I'm thinking about setting up a train set on the main level to play with. 

Whoa! What the hell happened?  Suddenly I got DF game...?

Of course, lets keep things in perspective.  I'm not playing in a threatening environment --  it's a wilderness embark and I haven't delved down to the caverns yet.  But really it's a lot of fun now, just moving stuff around and actually accomplishing things instead of having to figure out which keys to press in order to accomplish things that won't work anyway.  And I'm still finding game features, which is a total hoot. 

Now I need to work out some macros to help alleviate some of the micro management detail.

So, anyway I want to ask; how was the learning curve for you folks? For me, in ways, it was character building, I suppose; I really just had to set my mind on being patient.  Ultimately though, I think it's the effort required that makes the game rewarding. DF is honest in this way:  You actually have to do the work to get a rewarding experience.  This sets it apart from most other gaming experiences, at least in my view, where rewards come easily through grinding or solving a few puzzles.

Which means that, for me, progressing through the DF learning curve has been worth the effort.

[Telgin]

I had a moment where it just sort of clicked to me that I got the game too.  Before that I was spending a lot of time flipping through menus looking for keys to press and trying to figure out why thing X was or wasn't happening.  After a few forts it was as if a veil was lifted from my eyes and it all just flowed.

It took me until about 5 game years into my third fort to really get the hang of it.  All told I'd probably played 20 game years to get the point of really understanding the game.  Much of that time was spent figuring out how the military worked, since it was reasonably easy to get a fort to survive, even if it was very inefficient.

So, it went something like this for me:

Fort 1: Followed the wiki tutorial to the letter.  I was very lucky and my first embark had hematite and bituminous coal, so I was able to make steel equipment for my militia and everything according to the wiki.  The fort survived and had a population of perhaps 80 by the time I abandoned it.

Fort 2: Tried playing less with the tutorial and just by experimenting.  Had magnetite but no coal, but I was still able to create a good military.  I spent this fort exploring how military squads, equipment and schedules worked.  I also did a lot of other experimenting, such as trying to build a magma pump stack for a magma moat.  I wasn't too successful with that sort of stuff, but I learned.  Fort got up to over 200 population by the time I abandoned it due to FPS issues.

Fort 3: I accidentally embarked in a peaceful area, so I got plenty of time with this fort to learn a lot more about how to set up efficient workshops.  This was an above ground fort, so I learned a lot about construction work.

By the time I'd finished the third fort, I was surprising myself at how well I understood the game.  That came largely from reading the wiki a lot early on, as well as lurking here a lot, but there's no substitute for the practice of playing a few games.  I never did try to just throw myself at the game and learn the hard way though, I think I'd have been too frustrated by that.

[MaxMoore]

I don't know how it happened. I am still learning all the time. My first fort was supposed to be easy in peaceful so I could learn the mechanics. No military needed. I got rid of everything but food, booze, and tools (no anvil). The fort died due to a tantrum spiral because I couldn't build a forge and I didn't foresee/know how to prevent the unfortunate series of events about to unfold. I used the wiki a lot after that. I like the amount of problem solving required in this game... why are they whining now? Oh, they're dying. Why are they dying now?

[PDF urist master]

i am the same sort of situation, except it somehow took me two weeks

[mirrizin]

I was schooled on roguelikes (NetHack, TOME, Dungeon Crawl) so I was already used to games that reward patience and a strange ability to memorize ASCII characters (or whatever the tileset is called.) And I'm used to games that are capricious if not malicious by design.

I think, having played this off and on for a year or so, that if your goal is to have a reasonable game with reasonable challenges, it's not incredibly hard. Someone else mentioned the wiki tutorial, and I find that if you follow that to the letter it's almost too easy, and the rest you pick up by trial and error.

Now, like the OP, I'm playing pretty exclusively in "Reasonable" biomes. No undead. No freezing or scalding. Iron ore on site. By DF standards, you could say I'm spoiled. And you're probably right. Here's a thought:

For these luxurious locations, there needs to be something...more. Something Dwarfy. Something worth looking at. I now regret somewhat having used the tutorial because when I start I have to work twice as hard to avoid recreating the same  staircase-centered, vaguely cross-shaped layout that's the most reasonable. I want to do something that is still functional, but perhaps more interesting or beautiful to behold.

I think I'm going to play my current fortress (worksack, where you can't swing your pick without hitting a magnetite cluster laced with bituminous coal) until it becomes a monarchy (which I think it will if I remember to bribe the dwarven liaison sufficiently) then let it go to hell, so to speak, because it's what I always did on Sim City when I got bored with a game. Or maybe I'll just save it and start something new.

But it's hard now because once you build a very standardized, efficient, survival-oriented fortress that can comfortably house over 200 dwarves with (usually) fewer than 10 casualties per year, it's a hard pattern to break.

That, or I should embark next to a necromancer's tower, but zombies are icky. Hmm...

[snjwffl]

For these luxurious locations, there needs to be something...more. Something Dwarfy. Something worth looking at. I now regret somewhat having used the tutorial because when I start I have to work twice as hard to avoid recreating the same  staircase-centered, vaguely cross-shaped layout that's the most reasonable. I want to do something that is still functional, but perhaps more interesting or beautiful to behold.
...
But it's hard now because once you build a very standardized, efficient, survival-oriented fortress that can comfortably house over 200 dwarves with (usually) fewer than 10 casualties per year, it's a hard pattern to break.

That, or I should embark next to a necromancer's tower, but zombies are icky. Hmm...

I felt the same way after a while.  That was fixed with two minor changes:
1) No using dfhack's "prospect" command, before or after embarking (since I had become quite dependent upon it).  Additionally, I enforce the spirit of this rule with a "no mulligan" policy: if the embark site isn't what I expected, too bad.
2) No turtling.  This includes not sealing the caverns after breaching them (and I like to breach them by my first autumn).

Those small changes have given me much fun, Fun and (thanks to three goddamn flying fire-breathing forgotten beasts in a row) heaps of !!Fun!!.

[VerdantSF]

I was in a similar boat.  Lots of starts and stops, then everything just sort of clicked.  Probably the biggest change in my play-style was accepting architectural mishaps and persevering past the deaths of favorite dwarves.

[WanderingKid]

I have never seen a group of owl-corpses lay waste to my fortress quite so quickly.  That was brutal.  LancedNuts didn't even make it to summer due to the open-air aquifer pierce I performed.

[Iceblaster]

The learning curve for DF for me, was more of a 'OH GOD WHAT DO I DO' that, when I had actually gotten to playing it it was as if I had been playing with the keys for a few days beforehand. While I wouldn't say I'm just a fast learner, I am probably one of those who learns better with hands on experience rather than being told what to do and how to do and how high to jump and when.(Probably why school doesn't work for me )

[shadenight123]

I tried getting into the game on and off, my 'tries' ranging in the year-span of not touching the game-thing. Then, one fort died of thirst when the alcohol finished.
I hadn't built a still, because I didn't know the English term 'Still' meant 'Brewery'.
I just saw them dying, one by one, of thirst.
My method of holding sieges off was of placing closed doors, and my forts never went up or down even a single Z-level.
Then, after that fort of thirst died, I looked at the wiki.

Now I can DF.

[mirrizin]

For these luxurious locations, there needs to be something...more. Something Dwarfy. Something worth looking at. I now regret somewhat having used the tutorial because when I start I have to work twice as hard to avoid recreating the same  staircase-centered, vaguely cross-shaped layout that's the most reasonable. I want to do something that is still functional, but perhaps more interesting or beautiful to behold.
...
But it's hard now because once you build a very standardized, efficient, survival-oriented fortress that can comfortably house over 200 dwarves with (usually) fewer than 10 casualties per year, it's a hard pattern to break.

That, or I should embark next to a necromancer's tower, but zombies are icky. Hmm...

I felt the same way after a while.  That was fixed with two minor changes:
1) No using dfhack's "prospect" command, before or after embarking (since I had become quite dependent upon it).  Additionally, I enforce the spirit of this rule with a "no mulligan" policy: if the embark site isn't what I expected, too bad.
2) No turtling.  This includes not sealing the caverns after breaching them (and I like to breach them by my first autumn).

Those small changes have given me much fun, Fun and (thanks to three goddamn flying fire-breathing forgotten beasts in a row) heaps of !!Fun!!.

FWIW, I can't seem to get dfhack to work, and while I intentionally pick playable sites, I generally don't mulligan. It could be that I've been lucky in the last few forts I played, one had a surface volcano (because I hadn't tried one before) and the other was rich in iron and coal.

Actually, I lost my last fort (or more accurately got it to the point where I didn't want to play it anymore, though this may be against the spirit of the game) because I made a bunch of steel stuff very early, attracted ridiculous numbers of migrants, and then attracted ridiculous numbers of goblins long before my  army was good enough to handle them.

Far as caverns go, I tend to breach them with staircase from the ceiling, so the only things that would come up must have wings, and don't breach on ground level until I have a squad that can handle them. I really don't think the first cavern is that scary aside from forgotten beasts, and whether you get a flying one or not is a matter of luck.

So, I still think that you can play a pure game and have a reasonable survival rate. My bias might not be that I've had a lot of "easy" forts, but that my latest one happened to land a fantastic site.

[mirrizin]

I've also, now that I think about it, been through a fair number of stupid deaths, and I tend to play like a wimp (by some standards) in that there are cases where a fort would be salvageable and I give up because while it's Fun it was  not necessarily entertaining to try to solve problems of a certain scale. As a more mature player I regret these choices, but being past,'tis what 'tis.

For instance:
Heroic military died due to winter raid and lack of well.
Early raid nearly wiped out fort due to attempt at unconventional layout design.
Forgotten beast made of salt sprays webbing that entraps entire army, then stands in entrance continually breathing on everything (this was shortly after my son was born, and I recall that as being my first fairly successful fortress.)
Lost a game because my laptop couldn't take the overwhelming dataload of a dragon-spawned wildfire.
Realized my wife's computer can run the latest version of the game where my laptop can't (which I think killed a few relatively successful forts.)

I've lost a fair number of mostly stable fortresses because I'd go away from the game for a bit, come back, and decide I'd rather start a fresh one than pick up something I haven't touched for months, especially since I get the most joy out of the early game anyway. I'm currently running a duchy, but sometimes that seems more like work than play, especially when so much of the fortress's activity at that stage is passive (except when goblins show up, and I'm very eager for the next siege.)

So, it's complicated.

A final note, and perhaps a word of advice. When my forts get really successful, I think part of it is that I grow them rather slowly.

[MrCactus]

I've really just got the same thing as you, most of my previous forts failed due to awful, and I mean AWFUL military, I just had no idea how to use it as well as little to no understanding of how some of the buildings worked and the mechanics components of the games, but once I'd read up on all this, my current fortress is going really well, only losing 2 or 3 dwarves per siege, planning on building a huge above ground tower and plenty of other stuff, like you it's really just finally clicked for me, partially cos I've had a hell of a lot of time in these holidays (I'm still at school) to really learn the mechanics and get into it, now I'm pretty much addicted.

[TheDarkStar]

I spent a year of off and on playing, where I usually died to lack of farming or ambushes. Finally, I got how military worked. After a few forts of 200+ dwarves, I decided to start in terrifying biomes and near goblin civs. It's much more fun to be places where dwarves die by the dozens than where nothing interesting happens  .

[Fluoman]

I realised that I had crossed the hardest part of DF when I built my first magma pump stack.