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[Grendus]

You touched on the major thing I think. ASCII graphics and lack of a tutorial really hurt the game, and while from a community standpoint I think this is a good thing, as it tends to scare off players who don't want to roll with the punches, in terms of size this slows growth badly. Other problems:

1. Menus are painful to sort through. Once players get over the initial shock and into the management, they may find themselves digging through, say, the animal menu where animals are thrown in seemingly at random or trying to forbid/unforbid certain stones in the stones menu. Compared to even the rough organization of the kitchen menu (which seems to be arranged in meat->seeds->plants->drinks->processed cookables). Arranging stones by use and animals by species and gender would be great.

2. Army is a pita to work with. Much of this is being addressed in the next version, but a better interface for dwarves switching to training weapons between sieges or ambushes would be a godsend. Currently, if I let my dwarves spar with unmodified iron warhammers I usually end up with internal injuries, but I don't dare have them try to switch to silver in the event of an orc siege. Granted I'm playing with the military difficulty ramped up, but even then, for mature fortresses in vanilla this is the same problem.

3. Traps. Traps are too damn good, to me this is actually a turn off. There's no real incentive to build an army if you can line an entrance corridor with 50 rows of weapon traps, but at the same time building armies is so much fun. To go along with military improvements, a change to traps would, I think, go a long way toward improving the game for newbies.

4. Ambushes suck. If you aren't reading a walkthrough and pre-warned about them, they can really wreck your day. Something smaller than a single squad siege but visible unlike an ambush would be a good way to introduce new players to combat. The attacks from underground creatures might help with this.

[Neonivek]

Army is a pita to work with

This just perplexes me. While I would have put "Pain" there, "Pita" just seems very intentional. Which is sorta awesome to me.

Is it Pita?

[Footkerchief]

"Pain in the ass."

[Andir]

1. Menus are painful to sort through. Once players get over the initial shock and into the management, they may find themselves digging through, say, the animal menu where animals are thrown in seemingly at random or trying to forbid/unforbid certain stones in the stones menu. Compared to even the rough organization of the kitchen menu (which seems to be arranged in meat->seeds->plants->drinks->processed cookables). Arranging stones by use and animals by species and gender would be great.

This is mainly interface, IMHO.  Objects (including empty tiles) should be contextually controlled as I've mentioned before.  If you "activate" an empty tile above a ground tile, it should give you the option to dig (stairs), build(workshop, wall, statue [if available], etc), or designate (room, area -> food, stone...).  If it has a dwarf in it, you should be able to assign it a job (miner, farmer, militia...) and if it's a underground tile you get the only options available there as well (excavate, etc.)

[Neruz]

The menus just need a little more consistency to them, rather than swapping which keys do what seemingly arbitrarily.

[Neonivek]

The menus just need a little more consistency to them, rather than swapping which keys do what seemingly arbitrarily.

But it keeps you on your toes. It is like your not only battling goblins but the menu as well!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Joke

[John Hopoate]

It seems like I've offended some people so let me clarify what I was saying

Toady, you're obviously a fascinating person, just the kind of guy I'd love to share a beer with, after all you created Dwarf Fortress, the most mesmerising game since Hearts of Iron came out over half a decade ago. Your problem is that you're not used to fanboys telling you that your turds are made out of 24 carat gold, this is why you're acting like a barren 40-something sexually ambiguous spinster who thinks that people want to hear about her cats, it's not your fault, when you ramble on about your cat everyone's telling you that it's fucking Shakespere and you're not used to fame so how are you to know the difference? In my country (Australia) we're well aware of the damage cats do to the environment and red blooded Aussies only interact with cats at 900 metres per second. The best thing I can say about cats is that they taste a little like veal if you gut and skin them thoroughly before dousing their meaty remains in a stew sufficient amount of Gochugaru (Korean chilli flakes) and rice wine vinegar in order to make them taste sufficiently authentic.

Call me a barbarian if you must but apparently raccoons taste good too, the main difference is that cats are a destructive feral animal and by shooting and eating cats I'm making a positive contribution towards the restoration of Australia's pre-European ecosystem.

[darkflagrance]

It seems like I've offended some people so let me clarify what I was saying

Toady, you're obviously a fascinating person, just the kind of guy I'd love to share a beer with, after all you created Dwarf Fortress, the most mesmerising game since Hearts of Iron came out over half a decade ago. Your problem is that you're not used to fanboys telling you that your turds are made out of 24 carat gold, this is why you're acting like a barren 40-something sexually ambiguous spinster who thinks that people want to hear about her cats, it's not your fault, when you ramble on about your cat everyone's telling you that it's fucking Shakespere and you're not used to fame so how are you to know the difference? In my country (Australia) we're well aware of the damage cats do to the environment and red blooded Aussies only interact with cats at 900 metres per second. The best thing I can say about cats is that they taste a little like veal if you gut and skin them thoroughly before dousing their meaty remains in a stew sufficient amount of Gochugaru (Korean chilli flakes) and rice wine vinegar in order to make them taste sufficiently authentic.

Call me a barbarian if you must but apparently raccoons taste good too, the main difference is that cats are a destructive feral animal and by shooting and eating cats I'm making a positive contribution towards the restoration of Australia's pre-European ecosystem.

Veal? Really? Calf fed on nothing but milk until it's so fat the meat turns white? I would have thought a feral cat would taste more like say, coney. After all, they didn't call it "roof rabbit" during famines for nothing.

Although Australia's rabbit problems rivaled the cat problem, so there's a good chance you'll have tasted some.

***

What I've discovered recently is that ever since I realized that mining out rocks caused severe fps drain, I've been forced to check my digging projects, and so every time I embark on a megaproject to dig out a great 100-square tile hall I feel reluctant to start for fear of lag.

It's like the "dug too deep" timer on 2d Dwarf Fortress except more insidious and inevitable over the course of normal play.

If a solution could be come up with to solve the problem of stone lag other than assigning your haulers to dump it into holes, it would certainly make things much less stressful - it really detracts from the feelings of grandeur when you have to solve the problem of putting the rubble somewhere, which only increases the more skilled miners you have. (I recently dug out a stone city 6 levels deep and assigned the stone to be dumped. 10 in-game years later two levels haven't even been started yet)

[Angellus]

Something that really annoys me lately.

I never forbid, unless absolutely nessecairy, but every reclaim I find myself needing to reclaim EVERY SINGLE OBJECT spread out over 20 z-levels of a 6x6 embark. Not to speak of the fps horror it brings along with the hauling ^^ but that pathfinding has been discussed more than enough.

I would like an option to reclaim everything on the map instantly, this would spare half an hour or designating for reclaim.

Also, I keep on finding friendly orcs in my base after reclaim, then when an invasion starts, they start killing everything around them (including the new invaders!).
I work around this with traps, but it still annoys me and gives several problems with tauntrum spirals XD

[kilakan]

there is a command to reclaim large areas of loot it's under the (d)esignate command, you can select an entire area to be reclaimed, you can also tell dwarves to not forbid used ammo/corpses/dropped loot from sieges.

[The Mad Engineer]

It's nothing personal Toady but please don't talk about your cat so much, many of us see them as cold, loveless creatures that destroy our natural environment one bird at a time.

Translation:

You're not allowed to talk about any part of your personal life that involves something I don't personally enjoy. This includes cats, hot dogs, and the color mauve. Thank you. Your cooperation has been noted.

[nil]

there is a command to reclaim large areas of loot it's under the (d)esignate command, you can select an entire area to be reclaimed, you can also tell dwarves to not forbid used ammo/corpses/dropped loot from sieges.

Also the stocks menu, although I think you need to do some bookkeeping for that to work.

Toady doesn't live in Australia, but rather a continent with an ecosystem robust enough to handle house cats

[Footkerchief]

Your problem is that you're not used to fanboys telling you that your turds are made out of 24 carat gold, this is why you're acting like a barren 40-something sexually ambiguous spinster who thinks that people want to hear about her cats, it's not your fault, when you ramble on about your cat everyone's telling you that it's fucking Shakespere and you're not used to fame so how are you to know the difference? In my country (Australia) we're well aware of the damage cats do to the environment and red blooded Aussies only interact with cats at 900 metres per second. The best thing I can say about cats is that they taste a little like veal if you gut and skin them thoroughly before dousing their meaty remains in a stew sufficient amount of Gochugaru (Korean chilli flakes) and rice wine vinegar in order to make them taste sufficiently authentic.

Conversely, kangaroos don't even exist.  It's true!  The biggest hoax in history!  I scoured all of these United States and didn't find a single one, and obviously the rest of the world is no different.

[Solarn]

1. Menus are painful to sort through. Once players get over the initial shock and into the management, they may find themselves digging through, say, the animal menu where animals are thrown in seemingly at random or trying to forbid/unforbid certain stones in the stones menu. Compared to even the rough organization of the kitchen menu (which seems to be arranged in meat->seeds->plants->drinks->processed cookables). Arranging stones by use and animals by species and gender would be great.

This is mainly interface, IMHO.  Objects (including empty tiles) should be contextually controlled as I've mentioned before.  If you "activate" an empty tile above a ground tile, it should give you the option to dig (stairs), build(workshop, wall, statue [if available], etc), or designate (room, area -> food, stone...).  If it has a dwarf in it, you should be able to assign it a job (miner, farmer, militia...) and if it's a underground tile you get the only options available there as well (excavate, etc.)

That would be excruciatingly tedious. I like the menus as they are right now.

[Andir]

1. Menus are painful to sort through. Once players get over the initial shock and into the management, they may find themselves digging through, say, the animal menu where animals are thrown in seemingly at random or trying to forbid/unforbid certain stones in the stones menu. Compared to even the rough organization of the kitchen menu (which seems to be arranged in meat->seeds->plants->drinks->processed cookables). Arranging stones by use and animals by species and gender would be great.

This is mainly interface, IMHO.  Objects (including empty tiles) should be contextually controlled as I've mentioned before.  If you "activate" an empty tile above a ground tile, it should give you the option to dig (stairs), build(workshop, wall, statue [if available], etc), or designate (room, area -> food, stone...).  If it has a dwarf in it, you should be able to assign it a job (miner, farmer, militia...) and if it's a underground tile you get the only options available there as well (excavate, etc.)

That would be excruciatingly tedious. I like the menus as they are right now.

You can keep your menus... this would be in addition.