On the topic? Some of the military and health care bugs irritate the hell out of me. I kinda wish Toady had a bug "limit" of some sort and would keep bugs under a certain level. That said I understand the need and focus of implementing new features before fixing a part of the machine that may get rewritten later. My only question is...how many years can we expect the game to be very bug ridden? Can we expect a full bug fix focused cycle within the next year or two to exclusively fix bugs until it truly is in a more polished Beta state? Am I going to have to wait 10 more years before the ecosystem of bugs is eradicated or shrunk to a reasonable level?
Yes.
Toady loves adding things to the game. Thus we get Minecarts when there are still bugs with the military and health care.
He'll fix these bugs eventually, but in the mean-time he'll add a bunch more features which will add new bugs.
As for the point of this thread:
What really pisses me off about DF is trading. There's no way to just tell the game send every mug-like object to the Depot. There's no way to tell the game to send a bin with 7 Mugs and a Scepter to the depot, but leave the scepter in the stockpile, when your Mayor's banned the export of scepters. You've got to a) ignore the Mandate and pray you remember to sell everything but the god-damned scepter, b) hope the chump who hauls the bin to the Depot was not important, or c) stop using the bins that make running a fort that exports 500 mugs a season a viable option.
There's no way to tell which («Troll Fur Sock») is decorated with bone and which decorated with wood, so means you can't know which one will set off the Elves. Unless you go to the individual screens of every item of clothing dead gobboes drop.
There's no way to tell the game which items in a trader's list you're interested in, so you have to carefully read through the trader's list every time you do a trade, otherwise you might might buy the Echidna Blood barrel when you need Booze.
Important info about items is not easy to find. A cage with a tame roach in it looks just like an empty cage, so you just have to know that a certain proportion of your empty cage purchases are useless. If you're in a freezing Biome the same will apply to your barrel purchases, because a a Tower Cap Barrel with Frozen Echidna Blood in it is identified as Tower Cap Barrel.
You can view the contents of any of these items, but if you're a trading fort you're gonna do three or four trades per caravan, and you're gonna have 15-20 'empty' barrels and cages to view each time.
In general the biggest problem with DF is the interface. Building a simple tower requires all kinds of orders, placed in exactly the right order (or the corners won't be right), and when you're done you can only see one z-level at a time. My trading problems were caused by the interface. A lot of military problems would be easier to live with if Miners and Treecutters were noted as such in the interface, so you could tell not to make them soldiers. Getting consistent behavior across the interface would reduce the learning curve significantly.
Unfortunately interface work's the stuff Toady is most reluctant to do. He'll do bug-fixes, and add features, but he does not seem eager to go through all the numerous lists in DF and rationalize them. I can't say he's being irrational when he does this (it sounds like a lot of extremely unfun work), but I can always dream he'll do it eventually anyway.
Nick