I've played Dwarf Fortress off and on, trying a version and then quitting for several months while I wait for a new version.
I definately prefered the 2d version, and kept playing it for a while.
Getting started in DF wasn't a problem for me, it was challenging to figure out how much food I needed to last the winter, and also it was difficult to know how to use space effectively. Building a early fort, for example, you want to build bedrooms for your dwarves but if you do that, you will have those holes forever. So you need to both thing practically (what rooms do i need) and long term (how do I plan to do this in the future?) which was exciting.
However, this problem could have been resolved completely with the ability to /fill in/ a tile. This has never appeared in DF, save by collapsing an area which doesn't really work. You can build walls in 3D version, but you can't smooth them and its difficult to fill in entire rooms so this is a feature that still doesn't exist.
Then there are strange moods. I love them, however it produces the very annoying behavior of having to keep 'one of everything'. And there's no really easy way to do it. For example, if you want to make bone crafts, you need to make a stockpile of one of every kind of bone, then you are screwed because you can't tell people not to take from the stockpile unless they have a fey mood. This is possible but it takes WAY too much micromanageing.
There ought to be a 'strange mood' warehouse where rare items can be kept. This isn't just practical, it's also nice for people who like to collect rare items. Think of it as a museum. Sure I can make my OWN museum, but it means being very careful to mine around rare items and to have huge stockpiles and not do certain things until i get to the point where i can have megaprojects, which isn't fun.
There also needs to be a dwarf prospector job which can reveal undug locations so you can plan your mining routes without needing to babysit. [[ Actually, a lot of Dwarf Fortress is babysitting. This isn't fun. I like micromanagement and macromanagement, but not babysitting. ]]
Surprisingly, enemies in DF still don't know to dig into your fortress, which is dissapointing, i was hoping for it for the 2D fortress but its still not there
3D fortress takes away a lot of the fun of 2D fortress while introducing a buttload of problems.
- no longer do you have to overcome the challenges of the river, chasm, magma, and demon pits. I understand that it doesn't really work in 3D since you could in theory just dig straight down to the bottom layer, but there could be a 2.5D mode where you have say, 3-5 levels but with different challenges on each level.
- Most maps in 3D mode don't allow you to do every industry. Which is fine since maybe i want to 'challenge' myself, but the site finder doesn't help since most worlds don't have even a single site with every feature on it. It should be easy to play on a site with whatever features you want.
- Terrible 3D pathing. I'm sure we've all seen this: for some reason dwarf always has to go find the piece of stone a million miles away just because it is 'closest' in a straight line... on different z levels. UGH. Please put in an option to 'prefer' items on your own Z level (or even just adjacent Z levels) if you don't want to actually tell the dwarf which is the closest with a pathfinding app. Same thing happens with stockpiles too. This might be acceptable if we had decent framerates, but poor framerates AND terrible pathfinding together makes it insane.
- Dwarfs don't sleep enough. I really liked it in the 2D version how often the dwarfs slept. They probably don't sleep as much because if they did, they wouldn't get anything done with their terrible AI, but that doesn't make me feel any better.
- Dwarven Farming. I also prefered farming in the 2D version. In the 3D version it just isn't interesting at all. The addition of outdoor farming is neat but it doesn't add anything to the game IMO.
- Too many kinds of things! 2D had 'dark stone' and 'light stone', 3D has a million kinds of things, and it's not possible to distinguish by color or value. Made worse by dwarf's tendancy to want one certain kind of stone when they get strange moods, UGH. Each object should belong to a category, and you should be able to order constructions based on the category or individual type of material. The economic menu, and the ability to create jobs of different metal types needs to be universal for everything in the game and available also at the worshops.
- Lack of collapsing rooms, flooding, earthquakes, etc that all made DF 2D exciting.
- Industries that are too complicated. Now I can understand metalworking being complicated, but it should be the only complicated industry. Like how with farming there a optional improvements (like fertilizer, cooking, breweries). On the other hand, there is pretty much no reason to use quarry bushes, for example. Yet it is still impossible to milk a cow?
- It is impossible to order my guys around. I use Dwarf Foreman to make my life much easier, but there are still too many jobs and it's impossible to know what job is for what task without looking it up. Plus there is no way to give the dwarfs a sense of urgency, they are equally interested in organizing my craftsdwarf's workshop and getting my goods off of the trade depot before the racoons steal everything.
Basically I am happy with the dwarf fortress 'bloat' but think it needs to take a back seat to things like z-level pathing, prospectors, prioritizing jobs and organizing materials.
I lke how my dwarfs occasionally do stupid things (like get caught on fire or fall into wells) but I don't like babysitting. I like how dwarfs have so many personality traits but i don't think that actually makes the game any more fun. I think that things like religion should determine what kind of army attacks you, but the fact that you get attacks and have animals roaming your lands should make the game fun even if it makes no sense (eg you've killed everyone in the world). It is hard to read engravings, but it mostly is cool when it comes to the artifact descriptions. But then i've just had 4 artifacts made where the only thing on the artifact is 'dwarfs are labouring' which is boring
As far as it being an alpha, i have played many games in alpha, and also coded my own. Playability of 'the game' always comes first over shiney features. I think most of 3D mode is only fun for dwarf adventure and i don't care about adventure mode really.
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Topic: What turns you off about DF? (Read 314956 times)