When I first started playing (back in the 2D version), I think it may have taken me the first month just trying to figure out where/what my dwarves were. After that it was a jumble of commas, percentage marks, and letters of all different colors and capitalizations until things finally "clicked" and I went Matrix.
ASCII takes time getting used to. It's daunting at first, but after a while there's a sudden change and then the character interpretation becomes second nature. In fact, it actually goes the other way for a bit, and you start seeing elephants in your typing and you notice that Faerūn has a bucket in the middle of it for some odd reason. Luckily, that will pass (sort of).
Getting a tileset will, of course, change things a bit. But just because it's trickier to get into doesn't mean that ASCII is inaccessible, far from it. It's really just a matter of choice, as you'll have some oddities you need to get used to when dealing with a tileset (what are those chairs doing on my drawbridge? And why are there drumsticks swimming around in the moat? How did that butterfly turn into a purple skeleton? I never knew that cave spiders made their webs out of white crystals...). Tilesets will probably be easier for getting to see and recognize standard everyday objects, but they have certain unique quirks that take some getting used to. Like I said, it really just comes down to personal preference.
The user interface is an absolute bastard to work with, but you'll familiarize yourself with it in due course. It's really just a matter of practice... Eventually, all those keypresses will get locked into your fingers and you won't have to think about how to navigate to the page you happen to need.
The tutorial videos are of course quite helpful, but like the wiki, they're only supplementary. The only way you're going to learn how to play dwarf fortress is to do exactly that: Play it. If you're ready to accept that your first five or so fortresses will collapse due to some hilarious planning oversight or other catastrophic accident, then you're good to go. There will always be more dwarves where those came from.
You might actually want to consider trying out the old version of DF, the 2D version. It had a lot of nasty bugs and there are some significant differences between then and now, but the older version didn't have nearly as much content as the newer one, and was thus quite a bit less complicated. I wouldn't really recommend it due to the fact that you'll need to re-learn at least part of what you pick up from the 2D version in order to get into 3D, but if you're having a lot of trouble keeping track of things then it's always an option.
I remember my first fort... I built what I thought was a grand entrance into the fort, and then started branching off into a number of other rooms so I could build whatever I happened to need at that particular time.
It didn't take long before I found out that a single-tile-wide entrance isn't exactly "grand", and that you can run into quite a bit of traffic if your hallways are of the same size. Also, having your bedrooms separated from the outside by five squares of dirt and a single stone door isn't what you might call "well-protected".
Much later, I'd managed to permanently flood the area outside my front gate, render a couple inside rooms unusable, and have quite a few dwarves get knocked about by highly preventable cave-ins. Life was good.
So, yeah... Don't expect to get into the game on your first, second, or even third try. As has been said, Dwarf Fortress doesn't have a learning curve, it has a learning cliff. It really is quite astonishing when you miraculously reach that moment of enlightenment and start giving the game a taste of its own medicine. There's really very little build-up in skill or success, it's just a matter of "death, death, death, death, death, epic".
Good luck in your continued efforts! And Dwarf Fortress will only ever be "not for you" if you want it to be. It's a wild, untamed cave horse, bucking at the saddle you try to strap on it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't want you to ride it.
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Topic: Trying to get into the game and failing. Ideas? (Read 3145 times)