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[TranquilRiverGiant]

I think the recent UI improvements are great. It's totally undesirable
for a new player to be dissuaded from learning the game because they
can't figure out how to build stairs or make a military.

However, I don't really that a game being easy is itself a
virtue. Arguably the Souls games are the most popular mini-genre right
now. Not only are they hard, but most them IMMEDIATELY throw the
player in the deep end - some kind of terrifying miniboss they have to
defeat. Iudex Gundyr from Dark Souls 3, for example. As a new souls
player I was killed again and again until finally I got half of health
down and then proceeded to be pounded into the sand by the surprise
snot monster. Also the first werewolf thing (I think) from Bloodborne,
the Tree Sentinel in Elden Ring, and others. Bosses that can
repeatedly destroy new players and suprise experienced ones. All of
these games have 'git gud' type of encounters that players get stuck
on but don't seem to resent, they seem to enjoy and focus on
them. People love these games, and they are literally the best-selling games
right now.

Indeed, most stories you here about games are the amazing ways in
which people died or lost. In Skyrim, people don't really talk about
how they easily killed a wolf they encountered on the side of the
road, but lots of people talk about getting bashed into the sky by
giant. They rank the different enemies by difficulty, etc.

Dwarf fortress has a great, long tradition of this kind of thing! Most
of the early stories were about !FUN!, as we all understand it. It's
what brought me into the game 10 years ago and I feel that not only is
it good to keep up with tradition, but it's what will bring more
people to the game with the increased UI accessibility. There are many
casual, peaceful games out there that people really love, but that's
never been the type of game that Dwarf fortress is. It's a game where
you make detailed decisions on precisely how you dismember your enemies.

I think noobs should absolutely get overrun while they are still
figuring out how to play in year 1. I think the game should brutalize
new players, and suck out their innards, and they'll love it!

> Should [invasion triggers] be based on population? Maybe traded wealth?

It could be a combination of both, traded wealth and population. There
probably should be some notion of "profit" that could be had, taken
from your fortress, in order to motivate invaders. Maybe each
population member could be given a slave value for goblins, and the
elves could do some kind of calculation based on number of trees saved
per population member killed or something. If invaders see more
potential profit than risks put in, they should invade, and maybe some
noise added in. And yeah it would be better if this was based on some
kind of imperfect information, like rumors. This may actually make things
too easy if you are super poor, but then maybe it becomes a natural difficulty
scaling mechanism, with goblins risking less and sending less people to take from
a poorer fortress...

[ZM5]

As a player and modder who started in the 40.x era, I'm definitely in agreement in regards to a game being "easy" not being a virtue. I think the game handles some of the difficulty well enough already, leaving it as a result of player decisions (where you decide to embark, what neighbors you have, what parameters you set up for worldgen, etc.). There's some things that probably are too easy, i.e food production is pretty trivial overall, but I figure that can also be left up to the players since there are mods that make food production harder. There's also adventure mode to consider, which IMO is a chief of "you can be a legendary megabeast slayer, but one wrong move and a relatively inexperienced soldier can kill you with a hard enough knock to the head" - only thing currently bothering me is invisible enemies being undetectable, but that's most likely an oversight.

I do think the concern for a difficulty curve should be secondary to the game's simulation and story-making aspects, though. Would be great to see more of the history events like festivals making it into actual gameplay, but we're probably years away from that.

[Rumrusher]

I feel like ui should be understandable, and gameplay mechanics not a nightmare to deal with.
though like I feel like the idea of the game being hard is more a player by player basis and up to any weird oddities and mechanics that come up.
oh and I do feel like I'm more about seeing new mechanics and features that makes the game interesting than seeing the game become harder for the sake of being hard.
as I felt Dwarf fortress was more a fantasy sandbox you play around in than some obstacle course, where adventure mode is the beach in this sandy analogy.

[Talvieno]

I learned to play Dwarf Fortress over a decade ago, when it was a lot harder, without help from any guides or the wiki. It was rough - with many lost fortresses - and almost put me off of the game on my first attempt. My first death was because I drowned my starting wagon mining into a lake. My next one was because goblins swarmed over hills and ignored the z-specific walls I had erected (and I finally figured out the game had multiple Z-levels). Then I suffered another death because I couldn't figure out how to farm. These three deaths were "avoidable" and were a result of not understanding the UI. Difficulty from the UI is not a good thing (and I say this as a purist that enjoys playing the game right out of the box, full-on ASCII with no dfhack or mods) (although I love the art in the steam version and can't wait to play it).

My first "real death" was a beautiful tantrum spiral where an insane dwarf from a failed mood rampaged through the fortress on a killing spree. I hadn't planned out any containment methods, even though I knew this could happen, and by the time I managed to contain him, the damage was already done. Thrown and exploding kittens, dwarves strangling other dwarves, and one dwarf committed suicide in the well, poisoning the water. As the chaos unfolded I was horrified and amazed. Today, with the skills I have now, I could have probably saved the fort, but back then I felt helpless, overwhelmed, and mesmerized. This is what I'd consider "good difficulty". I had time to prepare, but I prepared inadequately. The loss was my fault, not the game's. I understood that at the time. That moment, watching my fort dying one dwarf at a time, I found myself thoroughly and irrevocably hooked.

But I don't think difficulty for the sake of difficulty is necessarily a good thing.

Evil biomes were introduced with the syndrome updates and naturally I went there as fast as I could. Unfortunately, after repeated deaths I eventually decided that some of the biomes were just "too evil" to attempt to settle - specifically the ones that combined the lovely effects of thrall clouds and instant zombification. It wasn't so much that I couldn't figure out a way to combat it - because of course I could - the problem was just that I didn't have time to prepare because the effects started almost immediately. If you don't have time to prepare, it isn't "fair" - it's the game's fault I lost, and not my own, and that's just not very fun to me.

Despite this, I'm still a hardcore proponent of "losing is fun". After all, that makes for the very best stories! I just think you should always have time to prepare - perhaps a year to really get things strapped down - but after that, all bets are off. Give me tantum spirals, give me rampaging dragons, give me goblin sieges filled with angry beakdogs! I want famine, I want zombies, I want unforgiving elves. I want to build my forts up to tremendous heights, and watch their inevitable tumbles into the gloomiest depths of despair. I want to see my forts die to the last struggling dwarf. I love the sieges, and the risk/reward of "should I try to save these migrants?" In fact, if anything, I'd love if after a prolonged siege, goblins brought in either their version of Grond - the massive battering ram from Lord of the Rings - or an elite squad of battle-miners to dig at random into the depths of the fort, to breach at a random location (although, perhaps, your dwarves might hear them mining if they happen within something like five tiles of their location, to the same effect as "The tile is too warm to dig" with a screen relocation). Right now you can survive for basically forever just by walling off your fort - perhaps partially because dwarves' personalities are much more stable now (it's been a long time since I've seen a good old-fashioned tantrum spiral).

Of course I wouldn't be against a specific "easy mode" you could choose for your fortress at the beginning of the life of a particular fortress. Some players just want to build creatively - and I do too! I've built towering castles, deep luxurious halls, and my favorite was a triple-barreled minecart shotgun in the middle of a frozen glacier - and I know that sometimes it can be annoying to build when you have zombies wandering around. Simply select "Easy Mode" as one of the startup options and you could turn off raids, sieges, kobolds, poison clouds, necromancers, and whatever else. I'm sure a lot of people would like that - especially newer players. But don't take my Hard Dwarf Fortress away. I need those beautiful stories. 

[qualiyah]

I don't know that I'd say the game should be very hard, but I agree it should be hard.

Only a certain type of person is going to be interested in Dwarf Fortress to begin with. That person is probably going to be looking for a challenge, given that that's what Dwarf Fortress is famous for. No point in trying to gear the difficulty level towards an audience that won't buy the game anyways.

It's already somewhat common for a newbie to get frustrated because they're a few years into a fortress and nothing is happening, and where are the hilarious disasters they were promised? Too little difficulty can be just as frustrating as too much, if it means you're just bored and wondering what the point of the game is. You want folks to get the occasional catastrophe that makes a good story.

[Muz]

The core philosophy of DF has always been "Losing is fun!"

The nice part of DF is you could more or less set your difficulty level, and the cost of losing isn't too high. I think Rimworld or something like Gnomoria doesn't quite capture the fun of losing. Rimworld just puts more on your plate until you can't handle it. DF seems to hit you smack you when you least expect it; fairly often it gets you when you think you're clever or invincible. The defeat is surprising yet inevitable. Early on, you're making a moat and flood your own fortress. Mid game it's some form of neglect that was completely avoidable, rather than something like Rimworld just gradually ramp up the difficulty.

There's roguelike losing too, which I mostly dislike, because you've invested a lot of time and effort to get somewhere, often doing very repetitive things after each death. The roguelike genre is often playing very defensively and slowly, with some extremes where you stay on a specific, safe level to farm xp/items. Souls is fun because the cost of losing isn't very high.

[Talvieno]

There's roguelike losing too, which I mostly dislike, because you've invested a lot of time and effort to get somewhere, often doing very repetitive things after each death. The roguelike genre is often playing very defensively and slowly, with some extremes where you stay on a specific, safe level to farm xp/items. Souls is fun because the cost of losing isn't very high.

DF is "roguelike" in the sense that deaths are the end and you have to start over, but where roguelike deaths are often completely anticlimactic (ah, you zapped yourself with a wand by accident or drank the wrong potion) DF manages to make "deaths" incredibly dramatic. When you flood your fort, not everyone dies - they die in the ensuing tantrum spiral from the survivors. When goblins raid, you lock some of your dwarves away in the caverns and manage to survive until the troglodytes do you in. That's the part I love about this game. Forts go out fighting. The complexity of the simulation helps with that.

[BlueManedHawk]

So i think that one possible solution to this problem is difficulty presets in addition to all the toggleable triggers, ranging from "very easy" to "nightmare", and including some special ones such as "many werebeasts" or "no necromancers" or whatever.  The default one should probably lean towards the easier side, but this preset selection should be obvious enough that the oldies coming for the new stuff will be easily able to get back to something tough.

[TranquilRiverGiant]

Very pleased with the recent devlog. I feel as though I've tugged on a thread of the universe and it has vibrated back at me

[Rumrusher]

Very pleased with the recent devlog. I feel as though I've tugged on a thread of the universe and it has vibrated back at me

That recent devlog had me asking 'so what would you get for even accepting the demands of elves then? like if you go through all that work pleasing them the reward probably better worth their new challenging ire... and I hope it's better than getting their exotic pets, like learning how to harvest grown wood items or something.'
like now I wonder how does this also affect modding and the other factors to the game? Like is this a hardcoded factor to elven sites that any civ that has elven traits mod wise will now be harder to deal with by default?
Will civs that make elves playable now have to deal with the ire of their own civ for how many logs they get? Given the player can't really mod in grown wood items as far as I know.
Like I'm not against elves getting new tools it just I hope the tools can be used by the player in any means and not just some 'hard mode difficulty spike for fort mode players to feel challenged by that you could toggle and change when that spike would factor in' and just that.

Though the trade option for goblin sieges being just 'give them an artifact' does open some hope for a 'open a trade agreement for dark fortresses' that might lead to some interesting migrants if toady goes down the route of 'you get migrants from other entities that you won enough favor for (or conquest).'  Though I do wonder will toady make it so the elves notice the cavern fungus trees while making a tree headcount and make a comment about those being exempted for 'you can't kill them in away that matters' or something that gives a player an idea that 'hey we notice you're avoiding the surface'.