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[k9wazere]

I tend to pick this game up every year or so, play a bit and put it down. I never get particularly good at it, but on the flip side, I see it from the perspective of a newbie each time, rather than a pro :p

Firstly, of course, it's a great game (you don't need me to tell you that). It offers a very unique experience (still).

But there are gripes. Niggles. Things which ultimately stop me playing.

#Firstly, and this may simply be my ancient hardware: every fort tends towards FPS death by year 5. I'm not sure why. Too many stockpiles? Too many animals? Too many zones? Or just too much morerer. Either way, by year 5 we're crawling along.

#Second, also by year five I'm literally snowed under with micromanagement. Is this the essence of DF? Are we supposed to have to micromanage every, little thing? Clothing is a particular bugbear of mine (and probably doesn't help the FPS!). So much clothing literally everywhere. There doesn't appear to be a way to distinguish worn/faded clothing from freshly made stuff, which doesn't help.

Things that have to be micromanaged: Stones (dump, dump, dump). Garbage dumps (let's take this stone from the surface to the dump in the caverns, hey ho!). Seeds. Bags. Seeds in bags. Hauling duties (miners would rather haul than mine). Dwarf happiness (item acquisition; prayer; thoughts in general). Animal training (seeds stuck in cage traps grrr). Food production (or stuff just rots). Clothing (argh!). The military (boy, oh boy).

I don't want to sound like I hate the game, but micromanagement eats time and burns the player out before they even get to the fun stuff.

#3 The military, esp time to setup and effectiveness.

(My most recent fort ended with a FB eating everyone. Actually, I banished the werepanther before the fort's collapse, so he could spread chaos in the outside world. For the rest of the dwarves I simply watched the slaughter, laughing grimly. Because by that point the micromanagement had eaten away at me so much I hated almost every one of them. They deserved it. Especially for the clothes littering.)

a) Copper is useless. If your fort has only copper you may as well restart. Copper doesn't seem to protect from, nor harm, any serious threat (like a FB). Looking in the combat log I was a tad depressed to see all the military dying in one hit (bite or scratch -> head flies off in an arc!). Maybe this FB was particularly impressively massive or strong, but one-hit kills were the order of the day, in full copper uniform.

b) Training "Armour User" is nearly impossible. I don't even think I need to expand on this, do I? Unless I'm doing something seriously wrong, none of my forts have ever had a military with Armour User above Adequate or something useless. Even when Weapon/Shield is at legendary (especially then, because in sparring everything is then blocked/parried). Dodge is similarly difficult to improve.

#4 The military UI. Seriously, the equip screen. How many times I look at dwarves allocated a full kit. Then, on inspecting the dwarves themselves, see they are missing half their items. Sometimes the items allocated are inaccessible. Sometimes the dwarf just has this insane urge to be a wrestler, and to hell with weapons and armour. Those ones don't live long. But the game doesn't tell me they are carrying or not. Just that they are allocated. So I have to look at each one and resolve individually why they don't have what they should.

#5 Burrows. The spam from dwarves that are placed in a burrow (for their own protection) and still have some hauling or labours enabled. I don't want to turn them all off, but that means living with "item inaccessible" or "drop off inaccessible" spam for the whole game. It would be so nice if stockpiles could respect burrows, and didn't continually want items the dwarves can't get to.

Sadly, burrows in general tend to break the game if you use them a lot. A particularly nasty consequence is a dwarf in a burrow repeatedly cancelling a vital task, meaning a non-burrowed dwarf (who could do it) never gets the chance, and the task itself is then unable to be completed. Not great when that task is "bring water" to your hospitalised dwarfs (a bunch of whom then die of thirst :p)

So, that's that for now. I'll pick up DF on Steam when it's out and continue to enjoy the game sporadically.

The thing with DF is that I tend to know what I want to do with it. But instead, the fort has its own ideas of what it wants from me. It wants a micromanager :p

But I can only micromanage for so long before it just wears me down, and I wonder (genuinely) why I'm putting so much effort in, just to see the dwarves inevitably plummet into depression, run around naked, refuse to arm themselves, and then get eaten. Sure they made a bunch of useless artefacts, and my nobles had me place Armour Stands in literally ever corner of every room. But that really wasn't what I wanted to do, that was what the fort made me do.

[Shonai_Dweller]

By year five my fortress is mostly running automatically.
Are you making use of the manager?

I'm not playing with Dfhack or Therapist and it's certainly possible to get everything running. Perhaps make it a goal for your next fortress? My current population is 127 dorfs. Main thing I'm micromanaging is execution of the prisoners.

Food, booze, military, smelting, weapons, musical instrument crafting, hunting, etc. Dorfs just get on with it.

Oh, I had to jump in to get emergency beds and soap made when my tavern brawl erupted into a mini-loyalty cascade one time. That was fun. A few battered limbs and they're all friends again now.

Also, install 47.05 for much easier stress management.

[Starver]

I love the micromanaging, I must say. (I also love the subject title, BTW. Shows that you know something about DF. )

It's no Progress Quest (which I also have enjoyed, though not for the same reasons). You have to put some thought in, though that thought could be put into more preparation to make less messing with later.


I'm not going to address all the (in some ways, perhaps, reasonable) points in the OP, but I will say that I dehaul the joblist of my miners as soon as they are earmarked for hauling (along with any other non-mining task). One quick operation (of several key-presses, of course, or a limited amount of clicking if I've fired up Therapist yet) and then the dig-type designations and a bit of burrow management is usually all I will do (and only the former being necessary) for the most part.


And I must use those burrows differently, it seems.


Still, I know I'm a little strange, even in this community, in my playstyle. I'm not invalidating your thoughts, just sayin'.

[Thisfox]

 I'm guessing you always play with the (practically unlimited) standard population. Limit the population. If you limit the fort to 70 souls, and the baby and child count gets limited too, and eat the animals you aren't using, then you will not die of FPS death in 5 years, and after a few years, your micromanagement requirements will drop to very little, as everything can be programmed through the dorfy little manager, to happen automatically. That said, I like the micromanagement myself.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I'm guessing you always play with the (practically unlimited) standard population. Limit the population. If you limit the fort to 70 souls, and the baby and child count gets limited too, and eat the animals you aren't using, then you will not die of FPS death in 5 years, and after a few years, your micromanagement requirements will drop to very little, as everything can be programmed through the dorfy little manager, to happen automatically. That said, I like the micromanagement myself.

And note that you've turned off sieges by limiting your pop to less than 80. Not much fun, but at least you can turn them back on by raiding though.

Micromanagement is a valid playstyle, one many enjoy, not micromanaging is another, give it a try.

[Mysterious Tree]

You can try to make your own race. I play with my custom snake people and they are fun to play with as they aren't alcohol dependent and have natural high master skill in dodging, biting, and ambushing with an adequate reading skill. Also forgotten beasts can be easily dealt with by locking them inside the cave they spawn in and letting them die from their wounds as they continue to fight with the wild life (I don't know how this has worked this well so far as most are building destroyers but I'll take it). Titans on the other hand are a bit more difficult but so far due to the natural skill these snakes possess they can fend off web spitting snail titans unless they're caught by surprise (in total around 50 casualties with all of the stress deaths included, that was the first and worst titan so far). I must also note that this fort was created in 47.04 and stress was never much trouble until so many died because of that snail after which I eventually just executed the red and purple stressed people to avoid more tantrums which worked surprisingly well and also stopped the constant crime reports of disorderly conduct. This fort is now in 47.05 and is now almost a decade old (around 8 years now) with 137 people and a stupid amount of livestock feeding off of dark grass safely underground. Also if livestock is causing FPS issues you can try to keep the pens small so that fights break out more often and more die and then just dispose of the corpses. And now on a finishing note, if you have a good tavern and temple where everyone can fulfill their need for worship and talk, the negative thoughts of drinking nasty water or sleeping on rough cave floors can be easily put in the shadows of all the blue and green thoughts. The only thing that might be annoying is the personality changes from these things as many are negative changes but this is not that bad if stress levels are low. These are probably not the only issues but it does work, at least for me.

(Many things that are said here are the same for dwarfs as I copied the entity.txt text for dwarfs into the entity.txt file for the snakes and then changing it ever so slightly to better fit them and the creature.txt file is also pretty standard and doesn't differ much from dwarfs.)

[Schmaven]

Spoiler: Quote (click to show/hide)

#Firstly, and this may simply be my ancient hardware: every fort tends towards FPS death by year 5. I'm not sure why. Too many stockpiles? Too many animals? Too many zones? Or just too much morerer. Either way, by year 5 we're crawling along.

I'd say crawling by year 5 is an issue with your computer or with playstyle, as there are many people who enjoy reasonable FPS for many decades of fortressing.  Do you tend to have a lot of animals?  Having a large herd is very bad for FPS unfortunately.

Spoiler: Quote (click to show/hide)

#Second, also by year five I'm literally snowed under with micromanagement. Is this the essence of DF? Are we supposed to have to micromanage every, little thing? Clothing is a particular bugbear of mine (and probably doesn't help the FPS!). So much clothing literally everywhere. There doesn't appear to be a way to distinguish worn/faded clothing from freshly made stuff, which doesn't help.

Things that have to be micromanaged: Stones (dump, dump, dump). Garbage dumps (let's take this stone from the surface to the dump in the caverns, hey ho!). Seeds. Bags. Seeds in bags. Hauling duties (miners would rather haul than mine). Dwarf happiness (item acquisition; prayer; thoughts in general). Animal training (seeds stuck in cage traps grrr). Food production (or stuff just rots). Clothing (argh!). The military (boy, oh boy).

It does take some time to set up labors, and the manager, but it's worth it if you want clothing / food / booze production to happen on its own.  I assume you're training dangerous animals in cages because you can also train them on chains, which don't get seeds stuck anywhere, but pose the risk of mauling your trainer if for instance you are training dragons and they revert back to a wild state. 

Spoiler: Quote (click to show/hide)

#3 The military, esp time to setup and effectiveness.

(My most recent fort ended with a FB eating everyone. Actually, I banished the werepanther before the fort's collapse, so he could spread chaos in the outside world. For the rest of the dwarves I simply watched the slaughter, laughing grimly. Because by that point the micromanagement had eaten away at me so much I hated almost every one of them. They deserved it. Especially for the clothes littering.)

a) Copper is useless. If your fort has only copper you may as well restart. Copper doesn't seem to protect from, nor harm, any serious threat (like a FB). Looking in the combat log I was a tad depressed to see all the military dying in one hit (bite or scratch -> head flies off in an arc!). Maybe this FB was particularly impressively massive or strong, but one-hit kills were the order of the day, in full copper uniform.

b) Training "Armour User" is nearly impossible. I don't even think I need to expand on this, do I? Unless I'm doing something seriously wrong, none of my forts have ever had a military with Armour User above Adequate or something useless. Even when Weapon/Shield is at legendary (especially then, because in sparring everything is then blocked/parried). Dodge is similarly difficult to improve.

I think judging armor against how well it does against were-beasts, goblins, and other regular sized hostiles would give you a better idea of how well various metals work.  For example, I've seen FBs 1 shot kill dwarves in full masterwork steel armor.  I've had no trouble getting legendary armor users in all my squads.  It just takes time.  I set them to train all day every day and then one day, they're legendary in armor user, dodger, fighter, hammerer, etc. 

Spoiler: Quote (click to show/hide)

#4 The military UI. Seriously, the equip screen. How many times I look at dwarves allocated a full kit. Then, on inspecting the dwarves themselves, see they are missing half their items. Sometimes the items allocated are inaccessible. Sometimes the dwarf just has this insane urge to be a wrestler, and to hell with weapons and armour. Those ones don't live long. But the game doesn't tell me they are carrying or not. Just that they are allocated. So I have to look at each one and resolve individually why they don't have what they should.

If you don't already, setting their uniform to replace clothing gets around potential item slot conflicts that would prevent them from donning certain armor pieces.

Spoiler: Quote (click to show/hide)

#5 Burrows. The spam from dwarves that are placed in a burrow (for their own protection) and still have some hauling or labours enabled. I don't want to turn them all off, but that means living with "item inaccessible" or "drop off inaccessible" spam for the whole game. It would be so nice if stockpiles could respect burrows, and didn't continually want items the dwarves can't get to.

Sadly, burrows in general tend to break the game if you use them a lot. A particularly nasty consequence is a dwarf in a burrow repeatedly cancelling a vital task, meaning a non-burrowed dwarf (who could do it) never gets the chance, and the task itself is then unable to be completed. Not great when that task is "bring water" to your hospitalised dwarfs (a bunch of whom then die of thirst :p)

So, that's that for now. I'll pick up DF on Steam when it's out and continue to enjoy the game sporadically.

The thing with DF is that I tend to know what I want to do with it. But instead, the fort has its own ideas of what it wants from me. It wants a micromanager :p

But I can only micromanage for so long before it just wears me down, and I wonder (genuinely) why I'm putting so much effort in, just to see the dwarves inevitably plummet into depression, run around naked, refuse to arm themselves, and then get eaten. Sure they made a bunch of useless artefacts, and my nobles had me place Armour Stands in literally ever corner of every room. But that really wasn't what I wanted to do, that was what the fort made me do.

I'm no good at burrows, so yeah, they're more trouble than they're worth most of the time.  I usually just replace the nobles who make unreasonable demands on my play style, either forcing a vote after an "unfortunate accident" or just planting another dwarf in there from the Nobles screen.  The issue with just peacefully replacing them is that usually that same dwarf is re-elected if they're still around.  But there's an announcement for that, so you can just immediately replace them again if you needed to keep them around the fort for labor or other reasons.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Note that most of the time when people think they've experienced FPS death too early, they actually haven't (unless playing on really old/failing hardware). There are a lot of pathing bugs which can suddenly kill your frame rate. Get rid of the factors causing the framerate drop (moody dwarf stuck in tree, pastured dog trying to join a raid, pet trying to path through a locked door, etc) and framerate goes back to normal.

My current fort is 6 years in, it's slower than it might be, but still chugging along playably. 147 dwarves (yeah, 20 more turned up despite the danger), a ton of visitors and a puppy-splosion going on. Gotta fix that. Bunny-splosion on the way if I'm not careful too. Eat more, dwarves!!

(The other case is when people obsess over the FPS number because LNP turns on the fps monitor by default. Kill that. Play until it actually is unplayable.)

[Moeteru]

I usually follow the same pattern of picking the game up for a while, getting irritated by bugs and unfinished features, then dropping it for another 6 months until I get the urge to play again.
I tend to run with a low population cap (~50) and let my forts grow slowly through natural births, so FPS death isn't a huge problem for me.
Many of your micromanagement problems can be solved, albeit with some effort, careful planning, and abuse of borderline exploits.

• Stones: set up a quantum stockpile fed by 3 wheelbarrows. Your dwarves will gradually clean it up without any need to micromanage their activities. The same goes for gems and anything else which you find cluttering your fort. Just remember to disable the use of bins/barrels in any quantum stockpiles.
• Garbage dumps: quantum stockpiles can help here too. You could even build an automated trash compactor (atom smasher) using minecarts and a raising bridge. There are also options in the orders->refuse menu to auto-dump various types of garbage.
• Seeds. Bags. Seeds in bags: I tend to just mass-produce bags and make my food stockpiles large enough that I can ignore the problem.
• Dwarf happiness: so far 0.47.05 seems to be much better in this regard. I'm playing on the edge of an evil glacier which rains "loathsome goo" and I haven't been paying close attention to my dwarves' needs, but none of them have more than zero stress.
• Food production: a 3x3 farm plot and a few egg-layers is usually all I need for food. As long as your food stockpile is big enough it's more or less a build-and-forget operation. If you want to automate brewing and cooking you can use the manager. Just don't do what I did and let all your turkeys die of old age without letting any eggs hatch.
• Clothing: okay, yeah, this is where the automation gets a bit complicated. Assuming you have a good supply of cloth and don't mind a bit of waste it is possible to fully automate both the disposal of old worn clothing and the production of new clothing. You can even filter by quality level.
  Spoiler: Diagram (click to show/hide)

  
  The stockpiles with refuse enabled will cause any clothing placed in them to rapidly decay. Sometimes your dwarves will throw good perfectly good clothes in the refuse piles, but if you've got a silk farm (strongly recommended) then you'll have more cloth than you know what to do with anyway. This system will get rid of any damaged clothes as soon as the ownership flag gets cleared, meaning that standard manager orders work correctly to keep a certain number of new clothes in stock.

As for the military, I honestly don't find the interface that bad to work with, but I still prefer to rely on mechanical traps rather than dwarfpower when dealing with threats. Thanks to a bug in the behaviour of some building destroyers in the current version (they don't destroy buildings) it's easy to build simple traps using doors which will reliably capture both werebeasts and FBs. Both minecart grinders and pumped magma are horrifyingly effective against the average goblin siege, so technically you could ignore the military interface entirely.

[k9wazere]

Talking of exploits... the quantum stockpiles (which I could/should use more often, tbh) don't seem nearly so much like an exploit to me, as...

...remote locking and unlocking of doors!

As in, the door will lock regardless of whether your sole remaining dwarf is locked up in the dungeon, completely insane, and missing all his limbs. Every time I use that it feels cheap. But likewise, I don't want to link all my doors to levers (ugh).

For me, the way locking a door could work is that locking posts a notice on the door. The next dorf that tries to walk through the door, sees the notice, and locks it. Unlocking it would immediately allow pathing through it, but it would remain locked until a dorf actually passed through it.

Or it could work like a lever does, with a lock and unlock action that causes a dorf to actively carry out the action.

But I have to say, of all the things that feel like exploits (that I use), locking a door is probably on top of that list. It's ridiculously effective, takes zero time to execute, requires no dorf presence (etc).

[Moeteru]

I view the ability to remotely lock and unlock doors as a way to work around the lack of any way to station a dwarf next to a lever with instructions to pull it as soon as they see an enemy. All of my door-based traps would actually work better if I could give such an order since I wouldn't have to micromanage the timing.
Anyway, half the fun of Dwarf Fortress is finding ways to abuse game mechanics for unintended effects. That's how we ended up with things like diagonal water pressure regulators, atom smashers, silk farms, minecart shotguns, minecart drains, etc. Minecarts in particular would be much, much less fun if it weren't for all the bugs.

[Thisfox]

I'm guessing you always play with the (practically unlimited) standard population. Limit the population. If you limit the fort to 70 souls, and the baby and child count gets limited too, and eat the animals you aren't using, then you will not die of FPS death in 5 years, and after a few years, your micromanagement requirements will drop to very little, as everything can be programmed through the dorfy little manager, to happen automatically. That said, I like the micromanagement myself.

And note that you've turned off sieges by limiting your pop to less than 80. Not much fun, but at least you can turn them back on by raiding though.

Any time I want one, I can up my population pretty darn easily. Or permanently set it to 81 dorfs if you want sieges. I'm not saying "leave it at 60 dorfs forever", but it will fix any FPS issues if the fort isn't constantly going-on-250 populationwise.

[PatrikLundell]

You can also lower the siege pop triggers to 2 (50) or 1 (20) in the entity_defaults.txt file if you want sieges in a low pop fortress.

[Schmaven]

You can also lower the siege pop triggers to 2 (50) or 1 (20) in the entity_defaults.txt file if you want sieges in a low pop fortress.

Do you know if those changes apply even to pre-existing saves - for instance, could you initially set it high to avoid sieges, then lower it when you're ready?  Or conversely, start with it low and  increase it if sieges are overwhelming a fort?

[PatrikLundell]

You can also lower the siege pop triggers to 2 (50) or 1 (20) in the entity_defaults.txt file if you want sieges in a low pop fortress.

Do you know if those changes apply even to pre-existing saves - for instance, could you initially set it high to avoid sieges, then lower it when you're ready?  Or conversely, start with it low and  increase it if sieges are overwhelming a fort?

I believe triggers can be changed within a save (you obviously have to restart for it to take effect). I'm only 90% certain, though, so it wouldn't hurt with a definitive answer.