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[delphonso]

I asked a few friends and got effectively the same answer from everyone: UI.
So, that'll be fixed soon.
Military UI has been on the list for a while, I think. I quite like the new Adventurer creation menus, perhaps something like that could be implemented? Honestly, I don't even know where to start with the military stuff.

[Inarius]

I like to think to something easy to handle. Like you know, a rpg inventory. You see a little dwarf with small empty spaces for head, cloak, boots, gloves, armor, weapon, etc... You just move with your keyboard, and press space bar to open the "boots" menu, where you can select in one list the "best in slot" desired, and you can also activate the "take anything else if not existing stuff".
You design the whole uniform like this.

I more or less think of the same thing for schedule. Think of an outlook agenda. You just move on a big calendar and tick boxes, and tab to a list of option on a panel on the right.

[Vyro]

These ones are only tangentially related to the topic at hand, but maybe the right person reads them.

I do remember being very confused over minor simple things when I started with the game, which just went into the background after a while. DF sorta gets into your head like this. Anyway.

Leather. Butchering a creature produces a skin. A skin is tanned into a piece of leather. A piece of leather is required for any one job. Ergo, both a dog and a sperm whale produce the same amount of sewing material. Which was just... mindbogglingly wrong at the time; you'd think a game that simulates entire civilisations can tell a dog from an elephant, but when it comes to leather caps, it clearly can not.
How to fix this? Treat skin like ore: one item is processed into multiple material items, which are then used in varying amounts to make clothing. Cloth should also conform to the new framework. That is the realistic way. The right way. Cloth should be treated the same as metal for interactions, regardless of whether butchering a creature will produce a stack of skins like with bones (realistic approach, try tanning all those whale bits before they all rot) or a single 'pelt' that will tan into a dozen leather items (quick approach).

Blocks. I saw where the game is coming from by making a stone chunk process into multiple blocks - you can't fit a round boulder into a square hole but after you cut... ... scratch that, it makes no sense now and my brain hurts. What do we have? Making rock into blocks quadruples its volume; making wood into blocks doesn't change it; making metal into blocks divides volume by 3 (by 4 if you count the charcoal). One unit of raw material or a block is required for any job, so block size is a constant... Bloody hell.
Okay... The block item is an abstraction. An inconsistent abstraction, which is even more jarring. We can have individual toenails but can't count our bricks... Okay. First, for the love of Armok, make blocks consistent. Then the issue can be approached from two opposite ways: either make blocks into actual bricks (with multiple being needed for just about anything), or forbid building walls from raw materials (and make raw stone/wood walls into 'Barricades', a variation of Vertical Bar), or maybe even both. Rename wooden blocks into 'Plank's. Masterwork did have the right idea with their chopping block workshop - lumber should require some pre-processing, just not as much as metal.

I can probably name a couple more logic holes, but these ones I still remember from way back then. The game will be easier on the noobs if it consistently makes sense. Let's be honest: all that intrigue and other fancy world-gen stuff may feel like epic world-building, but it's essentially just window dressing for what actually happens on screen - dorfs building things. I just can't appreciate the fluff if the crunch is not solid enough. Neither will others.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I think "UI, graphics" is by far the most important thing to getting people to play the game. The vast majority of people play games because they want to play games. If they're going to worry about the single person who might just post a review along the lines of  "I just dropped $20 on a fantasy dwarves game and OMG, there are realism issues in the weight calculation formula!", then sorry, just don't release the game at all. It's not worth it.

Luckily I think Tarn and Kitfox have slightly more sense than that.

[Bumber]

Making rock into blocks quadruples its volume

I think this is because only 1 in 4 stone tiles drops a boulder, which reduces the number you have lying around.

[Stadfradt]

funny thing: with minor modification to announcements.txt - add D_D to REGULAR_CONVERSATION and CONFLICT_CONVERSATION - you can actually see stuff....

...it's already part of the game, just not in the default config, because, annoyingly, it fills the reports screen with spam....

Huh.

I still stand by my suggestion, but I do happily concede that there's going to be a balancing act, or more of a sorites problem. Making it as an adviser, as suggested in reply to my original comment, would be handy: A new noble with an advice level setting like the bookkeeper, perhaps? In one of my first forts I turned a hole in the wall into a temple. One day it was packed when a military dwarf went berserk. In another fort, and another temple, I found pieces of dwarf splattered across half the room because someone went berserk and attacked a feisty dog. There was no doing it differently next time because I had no idea what had happened or why. I could have really used a heads-up, but yeah, some sort of filtering would have to happen.

It could offer a good opportunity for the player to actually interact with an individual dwarf if the filter is continually modified through, say, a Bayesian updating process.

Regardless, I'm a woodworker not a game designer, so I'm well out of my depth by now ^_^

[Putnam]

Having to learn how to assign nobles before you get the tutorial guy seems a bit... off. Should probably just sort of be a thing adjustable in the options somewhere.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Having to learn how to assign nobles before you get the tutorial guy seems a bit... off. Should probably just sort of be a thing adjustable in the options somewhere.

Agreed. There may be a slight weird feeling when a Dwarf of the starting seven (presumably the expedition leader) starts giving "you" advice. Because, who are you? Where are you? Who's this dwarf talking to you? And how is he talking to you while he's floundering in a murky pool having been attacked by a log?

But that's easily just hand-waved away. Just don't worry, better to have advice than not, right? 

[delphonso]

The game Contact on the DS had several characters look at the screen directly and address you. They read the profile name on the system, so they already had a good guess at your real name. I've always been oddly fond of that weird interaction.

That was far from the topic, but you know...

[Libash_Thunderhead]

I've been playing since 2006 so I can now play without 3rd tools.
But I only play Fortress mode, which I learned to play long time ago.

I think the game lacks a Tutorials mode, or tips. Although there are tons of videos and articles out there, it doesn't mean everyone wants a cookie-cutter game play, or read a wall of text.

"Your dwarves have no use of the wagon, press q and select the wagon, then press s to dismantle it."
"Your dwarves are running low on booze, build a still before they are forced to drink water... press w to open the workshop building menu, press l to select Still, blahblah...."

Also whether the player gives up or not depends on their prefered play style. Personally, I don't really care about each dwarf. It doesn't matter to me if that some of them go insane or turn up dead, because I can always get new immigrants, and there are more than enough jobs to turn noob dwarves into legendary craftsdwarves. But I know some players who have an obsessive interest towards Dwarf Therapist and won't play the game without it, I can only guess why.

[feelotraveller]

Yeah the massive number of immigrants makes for too easy mode.

The UI discussion is frankly irrelevant and would not happen if people bothered to read the OP:

We are aiming to fix as much of the UI and graphics issues as we can going into the Steam release coming up after the Villains release, so this question isn't so much about that.

The question is rather in what way has the game been designed that causes problems (like the Tarn's realization that Werebeasts were arriving much earlier than they had intended) for new players.

(I think the mention of Leather is useful feedback - if I had a dollar for every time someone has posted "don't bother producing leather it's not worth it, just buy it from the caravan" I would be very well off.)

[Manveru Taurënér]

Seconded on the leather bit, one of my biggest pet peeves right from the start of playing, and while not necessarily something that'd make a big difference to noobs or others it'd add to logical consistency and first impressions somewhat. The more stuff that simply "makes sense" the better ^^

[Hyndis]

Different size animals already product different size bone stacks. Some very large animals can produce stacks of 100+ bones, and a crundle might produce a stack of only 4 bones.

If this same system could be done with leather that would solve a lot of issues with size, though leather would need to be stackable like bones, and also used up only one at a time also like bones. That stack of 100+ bones can sit at a craftsdwarf workshop for a long time while you're making bone crafts or bone bolts, using up 1 stacked bone each time the job complete.

While we're on this topic, metal and size is bizarre and inconsistent.

Some items can be crafted and melted down to generate extra metal. Some items require immense amounts of metal to make, and when melted down produce hardly anything at all. Metal vanishes and appears without rhyme or reason. Unless a new player reads the wiki or inspects the raw files they won't have any clue why metal magically shows up or magically evaporates.

[Shonai_Dweller]

And they won't read the wiki because...?
It's not like this is preventing them from playing the game. Many complex games have mechanics that are hard to understand without further research. And yet new people play them. Some even enjoy the research. Others shrug and don't care. So long as they can play dwarves Vs gobbos fantasy site building.

If they try to play the game, fail and don't understand why, then it's an issue that should be solved by the Steam release.

If they rage quit and demanded their money back because they couldn't calculate the metal smelting formula themselves and refused to ask on a forum, play the tutorial, read the manual (one day) or check the wiki then, sorry, probably wasn't the game they should have been playing in the first place.

Yes, it's illogical and should be made better, but that's an issue for the suggestions forum or bug tracker.

[PatrikLundell]

It can be noted that when an artifact is made with a bone component, the whole stack of bones is used...

And sure, the metal melting yields are bizarre and open for exploits and some gotchas, but a newbie would have far more important issues to deal with. Both leather and metal melting ought to be fixed for regular players, eventually, but these issues are definitely cutting floor material when it comes to newbie improvements (but would definitely be candidates for parallel regular update content during the Big Wait and beyond).