Well, clearly the bugs are one of the more frustrating things - but of course the game is beta, and its free - its a personal project so I have no grudges to bear whatsoever. I've got a million times my money's worth out of DF.
When it comes to 0.31, that's kinda beside the point. Toady completely changed several in-game systems, but did so in a -somewhat- rushed manner, knowing half of them would be horribly buggy and the other half insanely unbalanced (all very dwarfy). He did so in order to avoid breaking save-game compatibility for futur versions: a debatable choice, but which is pointless to discuss at this point. There is plenty of software out there following a similar development strategy: offering both a development and a stable release. The problem is that the current "stable" release (which we've played to death... elves death) is lacking a lot of features compared to the "development" release. Hopefully, in the futur, Toady will add new features in several releases instead of a single huge buggy one.
As for the interface, I don't find it that bad... or rather that bad compared to 40d. The only problem I have is that half the military system is buggy, so the interface only make it worse. When you need to disband, dump gear, recreate squad, reassign equipment, recreate schedule to "fix" a bug, it really doesn't help when the interface is counter-intuitive, inconsistent, uselessly complex and with bugs of its own. I wish Toady would spend some time to improve the whole interface before the next major release. I would be glad of simply being able to see item in a building from the "q" menu, items on the ground from the "v" menu instead of having "t" and "k", which I almost never use, and having stockpiles and zones in the same menu. I would not mind combining burrows designation with points/routes and adding traffic designation in there too. Hell, I would like the whole interface to be easily modable so Toady wouldn't even have to do it himself (that's what fanboyish communities are for).
Seriously, 8 ways to draw rectangles? I can only think of 2: using UHKM keys or enter, move cursor and enter (alternatively, enter, right click and enter, so let's say 3). I might (probably) be missing some, but 5 or 6?
Anyway, I may sound like a fanboy (I am
), but it doesn't mean I don't understand or care. However, I think that before judging the core of the new military (medical, underground, material, etc.) system, we should wait for the main bugs to be fixed. So far in 0.31.#, Toady "broke" more stuff than he fixed, but that was expected, even planned
If I wasn't enjoying having magma all over the place so much, I would be playing with 40d instead. So in conclusion (Yeah!!
), if you enjoyed playing 40d, but you are having a hard time enjoying 0.31, I would suggest to stick to the former... that's the only real goal of a game: to have fun. Keep an eye open for new releases and comments from users and wait for one that sounds right for your taste.
P.S. I'm not bothering reading myself, so sorry
if anything for whatever doesn't make sense... sleepy