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[Pvt. Pirate]

it's also almost impossible to reset your flooding chamber and not have trees grow everywhere in there and you can't have ramps/stairs everywhere to prevent plant growth.

Trees and plants will also not grow in stockpiles, even stockpiles that are set to take no goods. It's probably a bug, but it's handy.

the problem with this is that it's a workaround that needs a real ingame solution.
it'd be better to be able to place soilfloor manually and have dorfs clean off mud from stone floors.

[HisDFGF]

I know this thread has been around for a while, but I wanted to drop my two cents in here because I haven’t played but a handful for forts since I started playing a couple years ago.  My first fort went better than it had any business going, honestly.  I don’t know how I managed to make it so long, but I still ran into some frustrating issues along the way.

The first thing was the inconsistencies with how you scroll up and down through various menus.  Sometimes it’s +/-, sometimes it’s the arrow keys, sometimes it’s something else.  Sometimes you can scroll through pages with / and *, and sometimes you can’t. I assume that the UI will be undergoing some changes for steam, but I just wanted to mention it.  Consistency helps with a game this complicated.

Since my first fort actually went fairly well (I survived the first werebeast because it got distracted killing all my animals), it went on for something like 10 years before I abandoned it.  In the meantime, stress was certainly an issue.  It’s not very intuitive to understand what your dwarves need sometimes.  I know there’s a thread for that, so I won’t go on about it here.

When I did finally abandon my fort, it was for two reasons. The first was FPS death.  I don’t know a lot about what causes the FPS problem, but a lot of folks talk about excess items laying around being part of it.  That’s understandable to some extent, but it doesn’t seem like it’s an intentional game mechanic to force the player to use magma and atom smashers to keep their frame rate up.  If excess items and bodies are related to FPS death, I think that the inherent rate of decay should be addressed.  Someone many posts ago said something about making the default embark zone a 3x3, and I definitely agree with that.  It’s much easier to manage the FPS on smaller embark sites in my experience.

One other problem with my first fort was that I ended up with a vampire being elected mayor.  I was unable to use the Justice system to remove him in any way, even after he was caught red handed.  Of course, there’s always many other (fun) ways to deal with such a problem, but I know that, as a new player, I expected to be able to handle it within the Justice system designed into the game.  I imagine other players might have the same thought.

Any other issue that frustrated me enough to quit for a while was a bug in one form or another.  Bugs are all over the place, which is understandable with a game this complex in alpha.  Fixing the bugs will go a LONG way, I think.

The military is also a problem for all the reasons folks have listed here.  I believe having some control over their suicidal tendencies would be nice, because it’s really frustrating to just hope for the best.  I’m not sure why there isn’t an option to try to make peace.  Other bugs with the military system are listed throughout this thread.

One other thing that me and the bf have talked about extensively is that players coming into this game don’t always have a good concept of what it is.  It’s a “see how far you can get” game.  There’s no end to it.  It’s intended for you to lose and start again instead of a “design the fort and run it forever” game.  Perhaps having something to mark progress (like the age of the oldest fort or wealth of the richest one) could help players feel a sense of progress?

Anyway, I just wanted to share a few thoughts.  Apologies for repeating what others have said or making this post so long.  I just know I haven’t played this game long, so I still remember what it was like being a noob.  I hope the Steam release goes well!

[Bumber]

-Feels like a cap on migration wave size would be helpful. Maybe with a default of ten ? I'm a fairly experienced player, been playing since 40d (though intermittently) and I still have trouble with huge migration waves. A new player's frustration could be bigger.

I actually got reasonably-sized migrant waves in my latest fort. Anybody else experience this?

Maybe I just started accepting performance troupes before the big one hit.

[Pancakes]

A way to view current fortress needs / wants would be nice for new players and veteran players alike. By this, I mean an alert, such as how petitions are displayed or how combat / sparring / hunting / missions are displayed.

In a menu like this, it could display things such as:

    "A small number of our hamlet's citizens [View list of citizens here] want new clothes."

    "A great deal of our city's citizens [View list of citizens here] want more food variety."

    "All of our outpost's citizens need alcohol!"

    "About half of our mountainhome's citizens [View list of citizens here] are very pleased by the library, "The Geared House"

This could be explained in-game by dwarves talking to the current head of the fort about issues they're experiencing.

[feelotraveller]

One other problem with my first fort was that I ended up with a vampire being elected mayor.  I was unable to use the Justice system to remove him in any way, even after he was caught red handed.

Yes, impeachment should be possible, but it's not... 

[isitanos]

To save the noobs, the most important thing is to ensure that basic things work in an intuitive way, so the poor new player doesn't spend most of his* time wandering about in confusion, wondering why nothing works despite him having followed basic common sense.

Note also that by asking for money up-front on Steam, you're creating bigger expectations for a bug-free game than for something you're distributing for free with the option of a voluntary donation. So if you want to be in good terms with your new, bigger customer base, I think that bugfixing will need to be done more often and more consistently than once every two years, with basic systems staying broken for 5-10 years.

I think that if you need a wiki early on to figure out which systems are broken and which workarounds you're supposed to apply, you've already lost 75% of regular gamers. Needing one for more complex systems like pumps is probably unavoidable, but by that point at least, if you've managed to keep the player, he's having fun. Or !!Fun!!.

Some notoriously buggy basic things that would need to be fixed, or cut out of the game when non-essential if the fix can't be pulled off in time:
- Dwarves walling themselves off or falling to their death when building or digging. Will randomly kill noobs' favorite dwarves because they aren't paying attention. Requires egregious amounts of micro-management if you want to build something large. -- This is the main reason I don't play DF on a regular basis anymore and stopped donating, BTW, besides my perception of the game losing flavour and challenge since the 2d versions.
- Armor racks and weapon racks (prime candidate for cutting out, if they can't be fixed)
- Bins
- Military equipment
- Suicidal dodging
- Hospitals
- Nest boxes
- Buckets
- Containers in general
- Anything that you notice that people use DFHack routinely for: cleaning, ...

As others have mentioned I also think that the game scales too hard (too many migrants too fast), and too high by default. Designating individual rooms for 7 dwarves is fun. Designing individual rooms for 100 dwarves feels repetitive and a chore - and then you've gotta take care of burying them, too - at which point I expect players who're not motivated enough to use tools like Quickfort to drop out.
It would be nice if you could get all the features of the game at 25 dwarves or something, and if it was the default maximum unless you ask the King for more migrants.

-----
*use of the masculine to simplify the text while using correct grammar. I'm not implying that girls can't be complete clueless noobs too  .

[Naryar]

-Feels like a cap on migration wave size would be helpful. Maybe with a default of ten ? I'm a fairly experienced player, been playing since 40d (though intermittently) and I still have trouble with huge migration waves. A new player's frustration could be bigger.

I actually got reasonably-sized migrant waves in my latest fort. Anybody else experience this?

Maybe I just started accepting performance troupes before the big one hit.

Granted I use a lot the popcap to keep my fort growth reasonable. But in my last fort my first three migration waves were 3, 3, and 22. And I have a feeling that third one would have been bigger without a popcap of 35.

[PatrikLundell]

A suggestion for newbie friendly settings: When newbie mode is on, give a warning (with an optional explanations for why) when the player embarks within the range of a necro tower (and other sources of necro attacks, if the new haunting grounds also send out raids).
It would be useful for the other embark warnings to allow the player to select to see an explanation for the warning as well (and there would probably be a need to differentiate between the new light and the old heavy aquifers as well, with a mild warning for the new ones, and a serious one for the old ones).

[Quarque]

To save the noobs, the most important thing is to ensure that basic things work in an intuitive way, so the poor new player doesn't spend most of his* time wandering about in confusion, wondering why nothing works despite him having followed basic common sense.

Note also that by asking for money up-front on Steam, you're creating bigger expectations for a bug-free game than for something you're distributing for free with the option of a voluntary donation. So if you want to be in good terms with your new, bigger customer base, I think that bugfixing will need to be done more often and more consistently than once every two years, with basic systems staying broken for 5-10 years.

I think that if you need a wiki early on to figure out which systems are broken and which workarounds you're supposed to apply, you've already lost 75% of regular gamers. Needing one for more complex systems like pumps is probably unavoidable, but by that point at least, if you've managed to keep the player, he's having fun. Or !!Fun!!.

Some notoriously buggy basic things that would need to be fixed, or cut out of the game when non-essential if the fix can't be pulled off in time:
- Dwarves walling themselves off or falling to their death when building or digging. Will randomly kill noobs' favorite dwarves because they aren't paying attention. Requires egregious amounts of micro-management if you want to build something large. -- This is the main reason I don't play DF on a regular basis anymore and stopped donating, BTW, besides my perception of the game losing flavour and challenge since the 2d versions.
- Armor racks and weapon racks (prime candidate for cutting out, if they can't be fixed)
- Bins
- Military equipment
- Suicidal dodging
- Hospitals
- Nest boxes
- Buckets
- Containers in general
- Anything that you notice that people use DFHack routinely for: cleaning, ...

As others have mentioned I also think that the game scales too hard (too many migrants too fast), and too high by default. Designating individual rooms for 7 dwarves is fun. Designing individual rooms for 100 dwarves feels repetitive and a chore - and then you've gotta take care of burying them, too - at which point I expect players who're not motivated enough to use tools like Quickfort to drop out.
It would be nice if you could get all the features of the game at 25 dwarves or something, and if it was the default maximum unless you ask the King for more migrants.

-----
*use of the masculine to simplify the text while using correct grammar. I'm not implying that girls can't be complete clueless noobs too  .

+1 to this entire post.

Imo the two most pressing issues listed here are

1.) getting too many migrants too soon (it also breaks immersion; why does a small settlement of your starting 7 immediately attract hordes of migrants?)
2.) bins - they are badly needed to be able to manage your space, but are broken. I will currently only use a bin if I don't care about using the stored item ever again. And because of the bin malfunctioning, you're almost forced to use quantum stockpiles, which feel like a dirty hack.

[Dragonborn]

I'm trying to remember the difficulties I encountered when I first started played.  The only things that come to mind were being confused over the different types of staircases, and how easy it is to make ramps unusable.

One thing that I didn't see mentioned in this thread were keas and how much chaos they can cause immediate after embark.

I could be over exaggerating how big of a deal it is, but man, for a bird that supposedly only exists in New Zealand in real life, why on earth are they configured to spawn in as many biomes as they do?  The wiki says that they spawn in any temperate forest, temperate shrublands, and mountains.  Why so much?  And why can a tiny bird be capable of stealing heavy objects like anvils or weapons?  I could see them being able to steal lightweight items like cloth and gems, but not anything that isn't nailed to the ground.  It's so aggravating to start a promising embark in a nice forest and then realize you've got keas to deal with. 

I don't know how much new players have complained about it or encountered it, to be honest.  It's not as fortress-wrecking as early visits by were-beasts, but it's still aggravating, even for long time players.  There's really no defense against when it happens immediately after embark except to dig a hole and a mass dump everything you brought before a kea steals your anvil.  A new player wouldn't know to do that, nor should they be expected to think that there's actually a risk of a tiny bird flying off with a heavy anvil.

[PatrikLundell]

Keas are sure annoying, but they're not fatal to a fortress (apart from when their Vengeful Thoughts" spam generation drives the dorfs mad), and so I'd consider them to be the type of surprises that you should have (they don't need to be present everywhere, though). The loss of equipment sure is annoying, but you can easily buy replacements from the caravan (assuming you're not playing as a truly dead civ without neighboring elves and humans, and newbies shouldn't play dead or "struggling" civs).

[Pvt. Pirate]

Keas are sure annoying, but they're not fatal to a fortress (apart from when their Vengeful Thoughts" spam generation drives the dorfs mad), and so I'd consider them to be the type of surprises that you should have (they don't need to be present everywhere, though). The loss of equipment sure is annoying, but you can easily buy replacements from the caravan (assuming you're not playing as a truly dead civ without neighboring elves and humans, and newbies shouldn't play dead or "struggling" civs).

keas wouldn't be as bad if they couldnt steal your only anvil and escape with it.
the mechanics of theft have to be fixed.

[CyberianK]

1.) getting too many migrants too soon (it also breaks immersion; why does a small settlement of your starting 7 immediately attract hordes of migrants?)
2.) bins - they are badly needed to be able to manage your space, but are broken. I will currently only use a bin if I don't care about using the stored item ever again. And because of the bin malfunctioning, you're almost forced to use quantum stockpiles, which feel like a dirty hack.

Also the default population maximum should be reduced to something like 80 and embark size to 2x2 default.

[HisDFGF]

To save the noobs, the most important thing is to ensure that basic things work in an intuitive way, so the poor new player doesn't spend most of his* time wandering about in confusion, wondering why nothing works despite him having followed basic common sense.

Note also that by asking for money up-front on Steam, you're creating bigger expectations for a bug-free game than for something you're distributing for free with the option of a voluntary donation. So if you want to be in good terms with your new, bigger customer base, I think that bugfixing will need to be done more often and more consistently than once every two years, with basic systems staying broken for 5-10 years.

I think that if you need a wiki early on to figure out which systems are broken and which workarounds you're supposed to apply, you've already lost 75% of regular gamers. Needing one for more complex systems like pumps is probably unavoidable, but by that point at least, if you've managed to keep the player, he's having fun. Or !!Fun!!.

Some notoriously buggy basic things that would need to be fixed, or cut out of the game when non-essential if the fix can't be pulled off in time:
- Dwarves walling themselves off or falling to their death when building or digging. Will randomly kill noobs' favorite dwarves because they aren't paying attention. Requires egregious amounts of micro-management if you want to build something large. -- This is the main reason I don't play DF on a regular basis anymore and stopped donating, BTW, besides my perception of the game losing flavour and challenge since the 2d versions.
- Armor racks and weapon racks (prime candidate for cutting out, if they can't be fixed)
- Bins
- Military equipment
- Suicidal dodging
- Hospitals
- Nest boxes
- Buckets
- Containers in general
- Anything that you notice that people use DFHack routinely for: cleaning, ...

As others have mentioned I also think that the game scales too hard (too many migrants too fast), and too high by default. Designating individual rooms for 7 dwarves is fun. Designing individual rooms for 100 dwarves feels repetitive and a chore - and then you've gotta take care of burying them, too - at which point I expect players who're not motivated enough to use tools like Quickfort to drop out.
It would be nice if you could get all the features of the game at 25 dwarves or something, and if it was the default maximum unless you ask the King for more migrants.

-----
*use of the masculine to simplify the text while using correct grammar. I'm not implying that girls can't be complete clueless noobs too  .

Yes, yes, yes.

[janamdo]

Imagine also the language barrier(Dutch for me) : for deciphering the  screens : take the caravan entrance with all those screens..how to handle this sequenze to make a full profit from it.
Note: don't play DF is you are not speaking fluently
english  ..makes it harder