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[Andir]

That's all well and good, but you can't even buy the stuff from other regions at an exorbitant price.

Then the problem is that you can't buy it. The ability to, say, buy glass blocks and melt them down for your own glass items is reasonable and should exist.

Personally, I'd love to see the economy of the world take off a little better.  If you need flux material, you should be able to tell your tradesman you want to buy flux at XXX per unit and caravans will automatically send word to who they visit and possibly buy/sell goods to profit.  It would be like what like X did with bases.  You could set prices on goods and trade ships would buy/sell goods from/to you.  If you needed any resource, you could "post" a request on the trade board and caravans would attempt to find you goods.

[nenjin]

I question if we would be enjoying the same game we are now, if Toady had an actual team working with him. I mean both better, and worse.

[nenjin]

Loving the combat changes I'm reading. The combat window really gives you a sense of how much is happening, where you had to visualize most everything except projectile vomit and dismemberment.

"I had a dragon fight some lions, and after a little bit of dragonfire and close combat, I ended up with a dragon covered with the gramatically-in-progress "lion melted fat spatter"."

Awesome.

Also..

# Small creatures are now able to take on larger creatures by pecking away at their bodies, something which was impossible in the old version.

    * Thanks to the material rewrite, though, a well armored knight will fare without many problems against 20 groundhogs.
    * Multiple small attacks will have a cumulative effect

In some ways, 20 wardogs bringing down a badass troll sounds even more likely now. Assuming troll skin isn't the equivalent of chainmail.

Also, wrestlers exchanging heat values. Lulz.

Oh my sweet jebus. The new attributes are exactly what I was hoping for. I could keep posting stuff out of that list all day, it's all just so amazing. The new appearances that change over time, the new interplay between body size, weight and performance.....my brain can barely handle all the awesomeness. We can now flay creatures! Does this mean we can stop butchering, and just start flaying our livestock, and have skinless animals walking around our fortress? (Those that survive the bleeding, anyways.)

Shouldn't that 'doc list be in a sticky somewhere? I know it demystified a lot of what Toady has on his own update list. I didn't really understand the scope of the materials changes until I read the second one.

The standard amount of layers (around 15) has been scrapped and increased dramatically, upwards of 50-100 layers.

Well shave my beard and call me an elf.......50 to 100?!?!?!?!?! Does this mean z-levels or something else? Because 100 z-levels in a map....the mind boggles at how much data this adds to each individual game. 

[LostEnder]

Limping in a day late and a dollar short, as I don't have time to read all 80 pages of this thread, but I'll give my feedback anyway.

For me the ASCII was a bit of a problem, mostly because DF was my first game with that sort of interface style.  I was able to work through it, but I still prefer to use graphics packs. It's not really the looks that are the issue, but it adds another layer of complexity to an already overwhelming game.  I realize that this is being looked at as part of the presentation arc, so I won't harp on it too much, but I do think that it would be a good idea to prepackage an official version with a tileset of Toady's choosing or design.  Ideally it would be something like Crawl does, with a ASCII exe and a tiles exe.  This wouldn't take a lot of Toady's time, as I'm sure that most graphics makers would be thrilled to have their work included, and would yield significant increases to the incoming player base.

Another thing that turned me off was the complexity of setting up your game options in general.  Most people are unwilling to reach into the game folders, crack open a text file, and start swapping values.  Even a simple "Setup" main menu option that opens the init.txt file over DF would be a significant improvement, but a proper ingame menu would be optimal.  I think that the d17 version is going to do a lot to help this as well.

Another thing that I would like to see is more mouse use.  The mouse input code is already in the game as part of the designation tool, but I would like to see the mouse used on the main map as well, to select tiles for the k and v views as well.  This could be a step towards adding a mouse driven menu system, which really ought to be part of the game already.  I don't imagine that it would be significantly difficult to define boxes over the current menu, so that you can click to select the options.  Combining these two to allow you to define activity areas, constructions, and place workshops with the mouse would make the game more accessible to the people still starting out, while still keeping the speed of keyboard shortcuts for advanced users.

Also, while this wasn't much of a problem for me personally, many people can be put off by the sheer complexity of starting your first few fortresses.  Genning a world, picking your site, picking your starting gear all become easier once you know what you are doing, but in the beginning, it's pretty easy to screw yourself over.  A simple play-through tutorial scenario would be a great help to get people into the game.  It'd be difficult to do this with the (hopefully) frequent version updates, but I think it could be done if you made it sufficiently broad in scope.  Ideally, I'd like to see some/all of the youtube tutorial topics translated into in-game scenarios, but that would probably have to be a dev item of its own.

There are a number of things that I would like to see content-wise, like balancing and various features, but the dev list covers much of it.  I think that the points above would significantly increase player retention and help expand the DF playerbase, with minimal development time committed. This would bring more cash in, and make it more likely that we will see V1.0 at some point.

[nenjin]

In total agreement with every point you listed Ender. That would be my ideal list for targeted updates to increase DF's popularity with the less adventuresome gaming population, and what would mostly enhance my enjoyment a great deal. Some serious attention to presentation, codifying the options within the game itself, a thorough play through tutorial and increasing the amount of mouse interface.

The mouse interface especially would make many things (trading, dumping stone scattered in your work areas and more) a lot less tedious to undertake. 

[valcon]

That I can't pick berries in adventure mode.

I can light them on fire somehow with my nonexistant flint and tinder, but, I can't pick them and eat them?  GRR.

[darkflagrance]

My new pet peeve is balance.  Dogs are not as fast as dwarfs.  I don't care how frightfully experienced a dwarf is, it does not outrun a dog.  Now, I've never seen a kobold, but in my humble opinion same concept applies.

You could help get this fixed by suggesting in the Arc mod thread (or whatever it's called in the Mod section) that contributors make an effect to find the relative speeds of their animals translated into DF numbers.

[zwei]

...Another thing that turned me off was the complexity of setting up your game options in general.  Most people are unwilling to reach into the game folders, crack open a text file, and start swapping values.

...

Also, while this wasn't much of a problem for me personally, many people can be put off by the sheer complexity of starting your first few fortresses.  Genning a world, picking your site, picking your starting gear all become easier once you know what you are doing, but in the beginning, it's pretty easy to screw yourself over.  A simple play-through tutorial scenario would be a great help to get people into the game.

It is easy to fix this for tutorial authors: You can generate world and embark (save on embark), maybe fiddle with options.

This gets rid of complexity of genning world, picking embark location and seting up embark. For new players, it is reduced to just loading game.

It also allows tutorial authors to know what players are going to face.

[Thanshin]

Then I will just make "fake moats" which are filled with lava once goblins channel in . Ah, lots of fun in future.

I meant goblins stay in the surface but dig a channel to redirect a river into your fortifications, to drown all dwarves. Exactly how I would do if I had to kill a fortress.

They could also bring in some terrariums with carps, to throw in the channels.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

THis may sound weird or trivial, but for me, it's messing up dig projects and being unable to "fix" the problems because you can't engrave constructed walls.

I like big polished engraved forts and if the digging goes wrong and I can't fix, have to start over from scratch, and sometimes I've invested too much time to do that, so I stop for a while.

[nenjin]

That's why I plot the guts of my fortress out before anyone starts digging, and expand it a pre-planned section at a time. Doesn't stop me from making mistakes, but I make fewer.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

That's why I plot the guts of my fortress out before anyone starts digging, and expand it a pre-planned section at a time. Doesn't stop me from making mistakes, but I make fewer.

Yeah, I do the same thing. Still, though. Last time it happened it was actually a physics mistake -- I was trying to put together a dual magma/water fountain that would make obsidian in midair above my entrance, but I misaligned the spouts, it made a drizzle castle instead, and I didn't have the heart to re-do.

[Shadowfury333]

The big thing that confused me at first was with build. Since I'm mainly familiar with RTS games, I assumed that the build menu would contain stuff to build. However, when I tried to build something, for example a door, I got the error "Needs Door". At this point, I was completely confused. "What do you mean 'Needs Door'?" I thought, "that's what I wanted you to build. How I build this if its existence is a requirement for its construction?!" Eventually I realized that "Needs Door" meant "Needs Constructed Door in order to be placed". I also realized that most buildings on the top level of the build menu were furniture, and most buildings that could be built like RTS structures were workshops, one level down.

[nenjin]

What is and isn't a sub-menu threw me at first too. I was like "Oh furnace. It must just be "a furnace" since this is just "a table."" Wrong. Same thing with constructions. It took me my first fortress to realize I could build deconstructable stairways.

The build menu should be reordered, with sub-menus at the top, and should be identified as such, like "Furnaces Menu" "Constructions Menu" ect...

[Puzzlemaker]

The User Interface.

 

The right order:
 

Most of the complaints here stem from the user interface.  I don't mind the ASCII as much as the horrible un-intuitive user interface.