Actually, I like ASCII graphics. They are, in a way, good looking, but most of all they are -simple- and describe simply and straightforwardly what is happening. You can't say the same of other ancient graphics (some pixelated sprite were totally impossible to decipher, whereas everything is equally clear in ASCII).
But yeah, the redundancy of up down left right / * + - umkhUMKH pgup pgdown is awful. The num keypad can help a bit (in adventurer mode for instance), but that doesn't cut it.
I, like everyone, had a hard time to figure how to get started. But I must be one of the rare dudes who actually managed to get started with the online manual, so it's not totally useless. Of course, for advanced features, the wiki was really helpful.
A few random things now :
- Someone on the forums said something that I liked a lot : "Make surviving the winter an accomplishment again". That's SO true. The only fort I had a problem with was my first one... I didn't managed well my resources and effectively got a food shortage during winter, with dwarves hunting vermin and all. It was FUN. Now the main threats to my forts are the goblin ambushes, who manage to kill a hauler or a woodcutter from time to time.
Food is overabundant,
Weather or temperature has no effect whatsoever on the dwarves,
Stuffing 2 or 3 golden statues in a dining room is enough to keep the whole fort happy,
Goblins sieges are a joke,
Traps are overpowered,
A simple moat can drive anything off, from a goblin army to a dragon,
There is perpetual motion wheels and magma proof wooden walls,
Marksdwarves act like they're wielding a machine gun, etc.
Surviving the first winter isn't any harder than surviving the 15th summer actually.
* Also, the AI. It's pretty good right now, but the pathfinding drain computer resources like there's no tomorrow, the dwarves have arbitrary ideas about which side of a wall they should be in front of when it come to mining / engraving / building / etc., they also have this strange North-West priority (IIRC, but it may be SW or something else), meaning than anything in the NW of the map will be prioritized, even if there's work in the south of the fort and the NW job is at the other end of the map.
* Dwarves have also the lower sense of duty and accomplishment I ever saw. Even dwarves that have the related personality traits will drop work as soon as they feel a bit hungry / thirsty / drowsy. It's especially annoying if you consider that :
- They will do that for every task, regardless of the importance. IIRC, dwarves endeavor a bit more at rescuing people or following military orders, but that's won't stop them to stop working at the worst time possible.
- Even if they had to travel across the whole map to fulfill the job, they will happily return to the fortress every time they feel some need, including when they didn't actually began the task and were just approaching. It's like you're travelling by car to a city 200 km away, and at 15 km of it you would say "hm, I'm a bit hungry. Let's return home".
- Of course, after eating / drinking / sleeping, they will never take the task again (excepted if they have nothing else to do of course). But even if they did, the task would have been reinitialized to zero (apart from jobs like building), so yeah...
* Livestock. They're killing framerate, and the techniques used to effectively raise and breed them without destroying your FPS are pretty counterintuitive. The whole "impregnated by spore" thing is silly, they should at the very least need a contact even for 1 frame. Even with the "animal" screen, it's hard to keep record of the animals, especially when there's a lot of them, and the whole ownership think don't help either. Maybe a sum-up screen with the different species present in the fortress, number of animals of each kind, male/female ratio, number of stray animals, etc., could be useful ? Also, they seem to eat pebbles and drink air.
There's also other things, but that the biggest points I can see right now. Oh, and it'll be nice to fix some of them (at least the easier one to fix) before adding new feature, but that's just my advice.