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[LuuBluum]

Ah, yes, that. My biggest difficulty with playing the game is just being utterly overwhelmed with migrants. I barely have enough time to plan out the space for one wave before another shows up. I wind up setting low caps at first and slowly incrementing it upwards.

[Stromko]

It feels to me like the main difficulty in Dwarf Fortress (or maybe just what remains once you learn how to play) comes from things that are just tricky, complicated or costly to deal with, an early example being werebeast attacks. Those start happening early enough you're unlikely to have enough competent ranged dwarves to take it out before it enters melee, it's finicky to track down who was bit once it becomes a scuffle, and if someone is bit once you've gone through the process of figuring out who is in fact now a werebeast, well, they're just a lost cause. Eventually I just started turning off werebeasts in worldgen and that was the fix for the issue, but I could see stuff like that causing a lot of frustration for new players in particular.

My point is sometimes losing is fun, sometimes it isn't, it's not an all or nothing proposition, and it's not so much a function of the numbers of the threat as it is the nature of that threat, whether or not you can do anything to plan for or deal with it.

For instance breaking into the circus but misjudging how many jugglers and clowns they had and watching them systematically work through your fortress bringing !joy! to all the boys and girls, that kind of losing is usually fun. Sieges, also a pretty good time one way or another. Things that happen over and over again at random and you can't really do anything about them though, not really fun after awhile, like for instance in versions where tantrums and loyalty cascades would happen a lot, not a fun way to go. I think the difference is whether there's something novel to experience and to learn from, if there's nothing to learn then you're just going to experience it again and again so the novelty wears off.

I'd also say the economy may need some work at some point. At first it's fine, you have to make some effort to get tradegoods flowing so you can get the things you still need after embark, but once you get chugging along you can just buy out every caravan effortlessly, though by then you don't even really need most of what they bring.. Perhaps craftdwarfship, decoration, and materials shouldn't have as large an effect on the value of things as they do, and the generation of certain things (food for example) could be toned down. If the wealth growth curve of fortresses were adjusted of course the breakpoints for when invasions and so on happen would also be adjusted I'm sure, maybe keep migrations where they are since giant migrant waves are a common complaint (although perhaps with the simplified labor assignment system this will be much less of an issue). I just think it might be cool if at some point I would feel the need to expand more industries as the fortress goes, not just the smelters and candy floss makers.

[FantasticDorf]

One really big problem with difficulty: migrants. You get so many of them and you get them so quickly. This has several effects.

In short, it has several bad effects. In my own games I always disable migration, but as default setting I'd say that migration and visitors should be tuned to about 10% of the current size of your fortress, at most. If you have only 7 dwarves in your fortress, getting zero to one migrant each year feels much more natural than getting five.

Yeah i agree with you on this one, migrants are the butt of jokes for years and vaguely we've had a very soft amount of migration control, but it feels like just grabbing buckets of water to save a sinking ship from the tide, or when things get really squeezed, there's no way to counteract a bad few years and wars making the migration situation suddenly drop from 100 to 0.

I've been playing a lot of Songs of Syx on the side, and i really like their mechanics on controlled immigration policy, since its more about management because of the tensions of x doesn't feel comfortable in this region so doesnt want to live outside the capital or animosity between populations. If DF half emulated it by allowing players to admit other races (and mass quantities of dwarves) who want to join from controlled locales by just setting a maximum/minimum number of allowed migrants and checklists it'd probably be more controllable.

In my mind, there's more of a built-in threat slider than a "clock" in the game in terms of how much wealth you generate over time, and how much you buy from caravans, because you have a degree of control over those things. If you're not ready for "big threat," you can take care not to generate too much wealth as you make your preparations for big threat, e.g. by using low-value materials or sticking to utilitarian items or the like, and also not to export too much valuable stuff. This lets you tell the game to some extent how much threat you think would be fun or exciting or whatnot at that time. To me this system is already really really elegant, one of my favorite in any game really [...]. It also feels sort of like cool RP to me to do—laying low and building in secret, or being brash and confident and showy, make lots of fancy art and having a rowdy tavern and so on.

Interesting. I never thought of DF in quite that way before.

How should this interact with embark location, if at all?

- Also as a add in, economic sites wrecking your fort's chances of survival, is definitely a location problem, i've speedrun earning a second level noble within the first year, because of goblins and elves speed-colonizing my region and adding nothing to my fortress, which is a bit of a slap in the chops as it makes you vunerable to mentioned existential threats through attached population.

[eerr]

It may be scorned, but I'm still interested in the old update 'Dwarves without practice make only useless items'
*As long as it is optional, possibly per-fort, like a curse?
bring it back as a challenge mode!
-normal,
-50% base junk change,
-100% base junk chance

There are a ton of directions for mods to go.

--custom triggers (boss rush anyone?)
-sieges that happen like clockwork (you already make goblins appear out of nothing anyway)
-sieges that can only occur under normal organic growth (aka realistic)

-world gen setting that makes many extremely dangerous centralized areas. (goblins, towers, humans, elves, beasts)
-world gen setting that generates some extremely isolated biomes, with zero or one enemies
(it's possible with custom world gen already, but these would be a pre-set^)

[Afghani84]

My main issues with difficulty are actually food abundance, trading and migration.

Food production is extremely efficient and quickly becomes trivial, requiring little to no work to feed a fortress no matter the size.

The value of easily renewable resources (e.g. masterful lavish roasts) makes trading fairly trivial since you can quickly buy out entire caravans with little difficulty even with a minimal fort.

Migration though is what, in my opinion, actually impacts the difficulty the most. If the migration was more reasonably paced and your dwarves weren't as easily replaced the difficulty would change drastically.

Absolutely agree with this!

Feeding your dwarves needs to be harder and trading/item prices have to be reworked. It's unrealistic that you can buy out entire caravans with a few meals. Trading should always force you to make meaningful choices with limited ressources. Whether that means decreasing dwarven productivity (not having so many items to trade), readjusting item prices or increasing the profit margins of traders...i don't care. But something has to change here...

My biggest gripe (and a good way to increase difficulty) is with migration.
I believe the growth rates that fortresses currently experience are detrimental to the game. For new players it is quickly overwhelming to manage that many dwarves. More importantly, the large number of "throw-away" migrants completely devalues families and kids and also makes me care less for individual dwarves since there are so many of them so quickly. From a storytelling perspective, I prefer to have fewer dwarves that you stronger identify with. That way you care about your dwarves more both emotionally (since you know the dwarves and their families more intimately) and logistically (since you cannot simply replenish from an unending stream of migrants).

I understand that some players may prefer faster growth, so a slider or some kind of setting for migration would be ideal. Perhaps you could set it as a percentage of your current population (same way as you can already set percentage caps on children in your fort).

Personal side note: I'd LOVE an option in the base game to start with only a single dwarf and then slowly build my own kingdom from scratch. 

[LuuBluum]

Finally, and this kind of hurts to admit, but food has NEVER been an issue in 3d DF, unless you simply forget to brew. This really, really dates dwarf fortress, as new players are coming from games like Rimworld or Stardew or any number of other farming sim-types where the meat of the gameplay involves working with seasonal growth rates and balancing labor for the best production rates, and other complex tasks. None of that exists in the current DF, and would add a natural, player-action derived win/loss state of starving vs. not starving, due to player failure.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

this is being said with all the usual caveats of realism vs. game balance, since some natural locations IRL would easily support entire fortresses via simple foraging

It honestly hurts to see new players realize how simplistic and non-challenging the farming is. It reveals how much of a mythology has developed around this game's supposed difficulty, and so I think that represents a strong starting point for attempts to balance.

If I recall, in some FotF reply a while back, proper cooking with recipes and whatnot was intended to be a part of the dances/songs/etc. update but didn't make it in. Hopefully Toady gets around to a food/cooking overhaul at some point, though as far as farming is concerned there's a FotF reply saying that it'll probably have to wait until after the map rewrite.

Alright, I stand corrected: recent devlog states that farming was in fact adjusted!

Though hopefully Toady doesn't forget about surface farming and adjusts that, too.

[Bumber]

If goblins always make demands before attacking, doesn't that just give you a warning to turtle your civilians?

[FantasticDorf]

If goblins always make demands before attacking, doesn't that just give you a warning to turtle your civilians?

Atleast it properly correlates to what the intentions of the army might be. But yes, there's that risk run of giving players too much time which is completely within the sphere of success fatigue or 'gaming it'.

Id least like to see the enemy-messenger & fort interactivity be nuanced in a way that it gives slip how many may be waiting offscreen or in a siege-camp to attack you (this information is usually inaccessible) if the initial first wave sent to test your defences fails and they're kept back as a reinforcement of a threat to surrender the fort/do the parley.

[Vyro]

Oh look, an important question from the devs. My timing is excellent.

Difficulty is a huge point of Dorf Fortress, and it is generally all over the place. Most of it is purely technical - you are constantly beset by things like the system's numerous "quirks" and some outright bugs. No garbage management - FPS doom. An FB spawned into your third cave in a reanimating biome - FPS death sentence. Setting up the military to actually train properly. Averting mood spirals. That one stupid "quirk" where any malign visitor can just walk away with any of your artifacts that are not nailed down, with no way to prevent it once it's under way. Putting together a giant project just to remove that zombie arm stuck in a tree that paralyzed your entire surface operations. Terminating a flock of Keas that paralyzed your entire surface operations with their infernal squaking, again. Stole an anvil too, the buggers. Making burrows that do not immediately bury you under cancellation spam. Not letting a pet dragon off its rope. Finding a biome with weapon-grade metals so that you're not stuck buying out -Iron Toy Forges- forever. All of that stuff is purely technical, and once you get past it... the game is very easy. Let me elaborate.

What are the things that outright threaten the survival of your little hole in the ground?

• Food? Most biomes absolutely shower you in natural resources, most of which are renewable at no cost whatsoever. A single pear tree can keep a moderately-sized fort rolling in booze and biscuits for a season. Half a dozen can last you through the year, just order a stepladder or two. A baseline hunter can jam your larder full using only bone bolts, which conveniently come from his own kills. Farming plots just generate obscene amounts of food at no cost once they get going; fertilizer is an afterthought. Drinking water? Who needs this silly stuff? Your dorfs will happily live on a tiny islet in the middle of an ocean, growing weird purple mushrooms in the sand. Booze production should really require water by the way. And speaking of biomes, even a terrifying glacier has a cavern layer that will easily support life. The entire food system is a nonfactor. I don't remember the last time I made a non-lavish meal. In fact, dorfs consume so little that I never bother producing food at all, I just import it. And to add some insult to injury, said lavish meals also break the entire economy over the knee.
• Safety? 90% of the wildlife is somehow content to leave you alone. The other 10% hate you with an inexplicable passion. Bottom line, only Evil biomes are a serious life hazard. What about invaders? A single block of soap can hold back the wrath of hell itself, forever, last time I checked. Talk about a good investment. Turtling also has no effective downsides since, given the point above, most forts are, if not completely self-sufficient, can at least sit out a season behind a drawbridge. A drawbridge hostile siege can do absolutely nothing about. In fact, the biggest threat they pose is to your FPS.
• Boredom? Yes, boredom killed most of my forts. It is a slow and insidious killer. The game is a sandbox that is content to leave you be with no objectives other than your own. Most of the challenges it offers are purely self-imposed. You just make up a gimmick and run with it till you get bored, at which point it is all over.

Now, I am more of a survival technician than a story-watcher. I find the entire world-building aspect of Dorf Fortress very endearing, but mostly pointless since all that epic world-stuff does not really affect the hole in the ground that I dug. My hole is not connected to the world in a meaningful way, not really. Yes, you can have a dozen "volunteers" skedaddle around the world, stealing stuff, but you can't really vanquish a gobbo civ, not entirely. You can't make alliances - they all either hate you or don't. You can't even instate migration policies (although you can boot annoying dorfs with no families now, which is something I guess). In fact, the only thing that really connects you to the world... is books. You can hoard books, mostly for the sake of hoarding books. My most successful fort was The Tower of Ivory, which endeavored to get-acquire all the literary book-treasures on the continent, yes-yes, while constantly adding to the trove ourselves. It was a strong gimmick that lasted me for a while, what with it being an actual tower.

So that's my thoughts on the game's difficulty. All those upcoming difficulty "sliders" are cute and all, but they are not fixing more fundamental issues the game currently has. And that's a lot of issues. It doesn't matter if the game receives a shiny new interface, if it runs exactly as awkwardly as before. It is a good game though, but it can be better.