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[Neruz]

You are in entirely the wrong section of the Internet to be complaining about cats John. That is to say; you are in the Internet at all.

[cerapa]

Cat hatred.

Dude, your the only one not liking the cat. Stop saying you arent.


Anyway, the difficulty curve just like everyone else. And the fact that you dont know what anything is at the start(like rocks and stuff).

[DG]

Ok, despite the name you've chosen to use I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and bite...

No-one could care if you had a fucking Chupacabra jumping on your lap

I like hearing about his cat, it interests me. Now that we've established that there is at least one person who enjoys hearing about Scamps you can stop making the argument or at the very least lose the hostility.

[PsychoBuck]

I like toady talking about his fluffy wuffy kitty scamps. Everyone likes hearing about his fluffy wuffy kitty scamps. Who doesn't like hearing about his fluffy wuffy kitty scamps. It should be a crime not to like hearing about his fluffy wuffy kitty scamps. 

As for what turns me off about DF. It is the limited challenge of an area. Once you tied all your loose ends, there is no reason to keep a fortress up except to torment its inhabitants. Local spawns and invasions ending is a main one for me as what am I suppose to do with my army of champions if there is not to fight. Hopefully, the army arc should fix this.

[Name Lips]

I can see John's point, but only because I know that in Australia housecats are a foreign, introduced species that is devastating the local ecology and causing unimaginable damage. If I was in a place beset by a plague of, say, rats... I'd be pretty annoyed at somebody online constantly gushing about their pet rat. However, he should be able to realize, on an intellectual level at least, that most of the developed world keeps housecats as pets, and has a fairly small population of wild cats.

-----

On-topic, when I first played DF back in the 2d days, I had to overcome the learning curve, but I never saw it as a problem. I really enjoy hard-to-play games, so long as there's a good payoff for all that work -- and the depth and complexity of DF is a huge payoff for me. I like digging my teeth into something that's difficult to learn. I understand that from a mass-appeal perspective, deliberately making a game obfuscated and difficult isn't likely to win over new players, but I'd be lying if I said that I personally didn't really enjoy the difficulty. Just learning to play is a game, a challenge unto itself, and to me that's not a bad thing.

The main thing that irritates me are things like pathing issues, like a mason choosing to go up to the surface and back down into my separate "mining" shaft to get a rock that's technically "closer" than the nearby stockpile on the same level. The upcoming "burrows" should help fix this. Also not being able to specify which items are being worked with -- I'd like to be able to make an obsidion table and throne for my noble who likes those things, but I don't like the tedium of setting up an obsidian-only stockpile and queuing up a bunch of tables/thrones until he finally makes the ones I want. The same thing with jewelry or other decorations - I want to stick that wonderfully cut diamond onto my masterpiece platinum crown - not some random gneiss ring that happens to be closer.

I want to be able to queue up "make iron bars" in the job manager, instead of "smelt hematite" and "smelt magnetite" and "smelt limonite." It's annoying having to count up my raw ores before queuing up my smelting orders. Also, if I want brass, and I have magma, I don't much care if they're making them out of bars or ore, so a "make brass bars from whatever is available" type option would be good.

An advanced option which probably can't be put in would be to queue up a "make suit of steel armor from raw materials" type order, and the appropriate orders would filter down to smelting the correct number of iron bars, steel bars, pieces of armor, and so on until the complete suit was constructed. A pure luxury would involve things like "make 20 suits of steel armor enlayed with milk opals and silver, with menacing spikes in char bone" and have it be done, totally automatically. And then designate these special suits to only be worn by, say, the Royal Guard.

[ManaUser]

For me it's the amount of micro-management, and trying to keep track of a million things at once in general. Of course I realize some degree of that that's an inherent part of this kind of game. But it could be made less painful. Building in something like Dwarf Therapist/Manager/Foreman would go along way to help. Perhaps even better, would be to list who (if anyone) can do each job. For example instead of "Construction inactive, needs Carpentry" it would say:

Waiting for Carpenter:

Urist McCarpenter Drink
Cog McCarpenter Sleep
Bėmule McCarpenter Store item in stockpile

or

Waiting for Carpenter:

No Carpenters Present.

Come to think of it, this is used in one place already, the trade depo tells you what the broker is currently doing. I would love to see this extended to other workshops and constructions.

On a related note, you know how when you look at ore, it tells you what you can use it for? It would be great to have that kind of quick-reference information attached to other objects. It wold help with the learning curve significantly.

[Name Lips]

Just to clarify my desire for more specific workshop orders -- I don't want to remove the way they are now. Sure, leave in the option to just endlessly encrust the closest furniture or make rock tables out of whatever is closest. When you need to crank out a hundred rock coffins or something it would be a pain to have to individually select a separate rock for each one.

But I'd like an additional option for virtually all workshops to create individual, special, custom orders. Have this dwarf use these materials to make this item -- which would be queued up along with the regular orders.

[darkflagrance]

For me it's the amount of micro-management, and trying to keep track of a million things at once in general. Of course I realize some degree of that that's an inherent part of this kind of game. But it could be made less painful. Building in something like Dwarf Therapist/Manager/Foreman would go along way to help. Perhaps even better, would be to list who (if anyone) can do each job. For example instead of "Construction inactive, needs Carpentry" it would say:

Waiting for Carpenter:

Urist McCarpenter Drink
Cog McCarpenter Sleep
Bėmule McCarpenter Store item in stockpile

or

Waiting for Carpenter:

No Carpenters Present.

Come to think of it, this is used in one place already, the trade depo tells you what the broker is currently doing. I would love to see this extended to other workshops and constructions.

On a related note, you know how when you look at ore, it tells you what you can use it for? It would be great to have that kind of quick-reference information attached to other objects. It wold help with the learning curve significantly.

And also, when the workshop is built, it continues to list the activities of construction enabled workers.

I see the most use for this when you've finished your megaproject and are trying to get your legions of former-migrant-peasants-turned-mason-conscripts into something useful - figure out who they are just by viewing the Mason's workshop.

[zwei]

Just to clarify my desire for more specific workshop orders -- I don't want to remove the way they are now. Sure, leave in the option to just endlessly encrust the closest furniture or make rock tables out of whatever is closest. When you need to crank out a hundred rock coffins or something it would be a pain to have to individually select a separate rock for each one.

But I'd like an additional option for virtually all workshops to create individual, special, custom orders. Have this dwarf use these materials to make this item -- which would be queued up along with the regular orders.

I would love this.

You can do this already with locking dwarf in room with workshop and material stockpile, but that is quite a micromanagement feat.

Workshop orders could be imporved a lot.

My pet problem is amount of orders: you can either set order to repeat ad infinitum or you can put several items of same kind in queue, which maxes at ten item. I would love to be able to say to workshop "produce X of this".

And then we are back at standing orders: Keep producing X if stockpile Y is not full. Keep producing X if there is less than 500 of X...

But that is not something that makes people quit because microing production happens quite late in fortress lifecycle.

[Rozenbuddy]

Well, a long long time ago my bro showed me this game. I looked at it and thought it was the matrix or something.

Later on, I revisited dwarf fortress to figure out the wonders, and succeeded. (with the help of hours on the wiki, of course.)

But what bugs me now is, why can't you make beds from stone/metal/cloth? Or maybe stone/cloth metal/cloth? because i have a fortress in a place where there are scarce trees, forgetting about beds... I am armed with only stone and metal. Against the world.

[darkflagrance]

Well, a long long time ago my bro showed me this game. I looked at it and thought it was the matrix or something.

Later on, I revisited dwarf fortress to figure out the wonders, and succeeded. (with the help of hours on the wiki, of course.)

But what bugs me now is, why can't you make beds from stone/metal/cloth? Or maybe stone/cloth metal/cloth? because i have a fortress in a place where there are scarce trees, forgetting about beds... I am armed with only stone and metal. Against the world.

I also don't really understand why this is. I've assumed it was somehow a balancing issue, but I can't really imagine how.

[zwei]

Well, a long long time ago my bro showed me this game. I looked at it and thought it was the matrix or something.

Later on, I revisited dwarf fortress to figure out the wonders, and succeeded. (with the help of hours on the wiki, of course.)

But what bugs me now is, why can't you make beds from stone/metal/cloth? Or maybe stone/cloth metal/cloth? because i have a fortress in a place where there are scarce trees, forgetting about beds... I am armed with only stone and metal. Against the world.

I also don't really understand why this is. I've assumed it was somehow a balancing issue, but I can't really imagine how.

It forces you to access sufrace on maps with forests or for trade on maps without them. Otherwise you would be able to turtle without any issue.

It is no much different fro not being able to create mechanisms from something else than stone.

[Rozenbuddy]

But is it dwarvely?
metal/wood/bone/shell mechanisms,
metal and cloth/stone and cloth/stone/metal beds,
ECT..??

[Quantum Toast]

Personally it's mostly just my dwarves' love for trapping themselves with walls or channels that bugs me. You wouldn't expect it to happen more than about 50% of the time, but it's almost guaranteed unless you do something to prevent it.

[UseBees]

i ♥ the ascii graphics. the only problem i have with the game graphics-wise is that the tiles aren't square by default.
the only problem i ran into when i started up was, well, starting. it's so difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do from the post-embark. luckily, i had a friend who taught me how to play, and i have, in turn, taught three other people how to play.
we love you guys, and you're amazing game!
keep it up