Nethack occasionally spawns gnome lords with wands of death/lightning/magic missile.
I'm not sure I would hold up NetHack as a perfect example of well-designed balance in a roguelike game, but... nethack.alt.org lists a 29-game winning streak, a 25-game winning streak, and a 23-game winning streak. The actual number of unavoidable deaths in NetHack is extremely small, much smaller than the casual player supposes is the case.
Also, hm. I think a roguelike can't avoid the occasional unfair death without becoming either too easy or too repetitive. But that doesn't make it a good idea to write in a game mechanic that causes unavoidable deaths without any benefits, and "any monster can potentially oneshot you in combat" is such a mechanic.
I'm referring to the way rivers downstream from waterfalls have incorrectly high pressure and the water doesn't behave as you expect.
I haven't noticed that before - how is it incorrect?
It's a lot easier to set up a test case in Fortress mode, but briefly, water taken from the river below a waterfall can seek a z-level higher than the river, and this can cause unexpected flooding.
What I'm trying to say is that that could be done without simulating the entire world.
To some extent, but what would be the point of taking away the world sim?
I'm not saying "take it away", but I am saying it represents a lot of "jam tomorrow" work that hasn't really changed the (fortress mode) game we play now, because an embark site _is_ a pocket dimension. If you were trying to improve fortress mode starting from a game without the world simulator, you probably wouldn't write the world simulator first.
Also I'm saying it shouldn't be allowed to compromise the game we play now, and to a degree, the exercise where one furtles around with Site Finder to find a site with lots of interesting features is not really a very helpful one.
And to me, deciduous trees growing in a desert at the rim of an active volcano just so I can have glass and beds and infinite fuel without having to trade for anything outside of my 3x3 embark area -- and having that be the common state of affairs! I can walk 6 miles up the road and see the exact same setup!
Well, again, it doesn't have to be the common state of affairs, because an embark site only wants to be dollied up at the point you actually embark. The rest of the world could stay as it is, because it's only relevant to adventurer mode.
"3x3" embark site is an interesting point. The current state of DF actively encourages you to take a large embark site in order to encompass more biomes... in a game notorious for crippling CPU demands. Here's a radical proposal; throw any idea of the "real" scale out the window, and shrink each embark tile to the desired size, so I can lay out a 12x12 embark area and use CPU for a 3x3, with each embark tile occupying 1/16 of the space it does now. That's an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about - recognise that once you have embarked the rest of the world is reduced to a few numbers, and don't compromise the play value of the embark site for the sake of the "real" state of the rest of the world.
It would be nice if dwarves recognized that being on fire is a bad thing. I'm definitely not arguing against bug fixes.
And if fire acted like fire, not some slow-acting contagion! The trouble is, development effort is limited; the more wrinkles that are added, the less chance there is fire ever works.
Hospitals treatment and surgery don't change the gameplay interestingly?
I think you misunderstood me. I _like_ the idea of hospitals and dwarves with medical skills. It seems entirely appropriate to extend the medical care simulation beyond the current, rather unsatisfying one. I just don't think it needs to be done by simulating individual stitches!
Already fixed in the next version. There are now more attributes, split into mental and physical categories, and certain tasks exercise only certain attributes.
So I gather, but really, how long has it been like that?
Another oddity is what materials can construct what. Stone (but not metal, oddly) can be used to make mechanisms, which not only are completely modular (can be used for any purpose) but can exert action at any distance. However, it is impossible to construct a bed from the stuff!
... sure, the demand for wood doesn't hurt the game, but in practice the demand for inflammables is going to send you out in search of wood. The bed thing is just arbitary.