I'm no old veteran but I thought i would say my piece.
Overall I'm liking what I'm seeing, a few random points to do with both features and devcycle. Maybe some of this is in the works, or isn't part of DF's design philosophy but the occasional newbie perspective is still useful to ensure the end product isn't impenetrable to non-veterans.
1. Bugfixes, bugfixes, bugfixes. I understand that .31 is very new and Toady's just one guy who I assume has a day job, but some of the bugs are extremely frustrating and as a new player I don't really have any interest in 40d. I guess what I'm saying is I hope Toady keeps his eye on the ball and doesn't get distracted by side projects--owing to the nature of DF I'd rather have fewer features that all work as intended than a lot of hacked-in stuff that looks cool but doesn't work right.
Everybody hopes for fixes and that is a good thing because it means that the new stuff is highly anticipated. People want them working and not the old stable version. But I would suggest you look at 40d in the meantime as it is very stable and a lot of fun, also some things are actually less complicated which should be good for a beginner. You do not have the medical wing of the dwarven lifestyle so your starting 7 are less restricted in their choice of profession and the military designations are much easier though also a lot less useful. Also AFAIK .31 has been made harder in general because 40d was considered too easy in the long run.
2. The ability to only have one extant fortress at a time is very annoying, as is the inability to quit without saving. Owing to how easy it is to save off files and how the current system is implemented, I can only conclude that this is a design decision and it isn't a good one. Aside from playability the trouble of having to copy over one save at a time makes it difficult to isolate bugs and quirks. As for what I'm assuming is the long-term desire to let players build many forts on the map I would say go with Simcity 4's non-temporal system. Making sure neighboring forts A and B are the same age looks good on paper, but the ways of enforcing this tend to utterly kill gameplay.
You can have multiple fortresses but only if you generate another world. If you do not care for ultimately having the smoldering remains of your failed fortresses dotting the landscape for your adventurer to explore, generate several small or medium worlds. It is quicker and you can try the world parameters to get the kind of site you want (desert fortress, volcano island fortress, etc.). But two fortresses on the same world are probably impossible because one fortress will greatly influence its surroundings by killing megabeasts and armies that could otherwise go somewhere else and the like. There may be ways to do it but i suppose that it is much too complicated for a feature that is not really needed.
The inability to save without quitting or quit without saving is probably there because it is based of the old roguelike RPG's which in turn come from Pen&Paper where you can't take back a decision once made. Savescumming is generally considered a bad thing but I also did it in my first fortresses, especially when building my first well and the like. I think there are save manager programs that automatically backup and quickly restore your saves but I'm not sure. You can simply quit by killing the DF process and keep your last save but that is probably not the best thing to do.
3. I'd like some kind of a newbie-mode option in the ini, or at embark or something to block invaders and severely nerf wilderness threats for two years or so to give people who aren't ultra-hardcore-familiar with the game mechanics some time to get their surface constructions and upper fort going before worrying about serious threats. A lot of people I've talked to have said one of the reasons they couldn't get into DF was they got hella murdered by goblins before they could even figure out how to grow food.
This is largely an issue related to the site you have chosen, keep away from the goblin fortresses and pick a region with low savagery and low-medium evil and you should be fine for the first year or two. That gives you plenty of time to move underground and design a way to isolate your fortress under siege.
3a. Tone down immigration and wealth triggers. A couple of successful artifact jobs seem to be capable of generating enough wealth to trigger tons of incoming dwarves (which the fort can't handle yet) and spawn all sorts of nasty hostiles that shouldn't be showing up until the player has developed a proper infrastructure. Losing may be fun when magma is involved, but trantrum spirals and overwhelming invaders are just lame.
I never had much problem with a lot of dwarves because your basic farm with two growers and a brewer will generate huge amounts of food. They may have to sleep on the floor for a bit but that won't kill them, the biggest problem is deciding what to do with them and managing it and a big help there is the awesome tool
Dwarf Therapist. Check it out if you did not know about it.
3b. Nerf tantrum spirals. I want to lose because I dug too deep and/or flooded the fort, not because the RNG hates me.
They are a core part of the game, I admit that having the option to lessen their impact for beginners would be nice but your approach to them is essential. You can build a very neat fortress that keeps everybody extremely happy (mist generators in the dining hall, rooms that have some furniture for everybody and high quality all around) or you could create isolation forts (keeping the dwarves seperate so they don't have many relationships and a tantrum spiral can't kill the whole fort). But the biggest reward is to have an attack go badly with several dwarves dead and some pets killed and you don't even get someone sulking.
4. Owing to my status as a newbie, it's time to piss off most of the veterans. 
The ASCII UI is interesting, but it's hard to make things out and it just isn't all that visually appealing. Frankly there's a reason developers moved away from straight text as soon as the technology became available. The tilesets on the other hand do a fine job, but they're limited by the standard output and doubling up with plaintext characters causes UI problems. Perhaps for one of the next major releases Toady could look into revamping the UI so it spits out just an array of tile structures (the game map), which are then run through an I/O module which also kicks back the player input. In the long run it would probably save work since Toady could effectively draft the tileset makers into making the game look and feel good (i.e. the current clunky key-combo input becomes their problem) while he focuses on doing awesome new game mechanics. ASCII could of course be one of the options for the old-schoolers.
Do you also use graphic sets? They replace all creatures with individual images without replacing the characters in the text and combined with a nice tileset the only thing looking bad depends on how badly said tileset mangles the text. There are even more appealing graphics (or were for 40d) with visualizers, Stonesense, which gives an isometric view, is probably the nicest because it automatically updates and looks good. If you have two monitors you might want to use it.
The biggest problem with better graphics is that the game can topple even the mightiest of computers during a flood or simply with a very large fort and better graphics won't improve that. Also the current output of ASCII-Char + Color would need to be more detailed if you want to have advanced graphics because you want to see the difference between "Prepared meal, unexplored underground, screw pump in action" (description of '%' char). But yeah, it would be quite nice to have some better graphics BUT badly made 3D graphics with stiff animations will never look as good as nice 2D graphics. And think about the vivid random generated creature descriptions, integrating those into advanced graphics is pretty much impossible.
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Topic: grab-bag suggestions from a new player (Read 947 times)