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[SmileyMan]

I can go to the supermarket, or log on to Steam, and hand over twenty quid for any of a hundred games that are "simple."  And unless they involve the sweet spot combination of violence/humour of L4D, I get bored of them veeeeeery quickly.

DF is a game for the unashamedly elitist intellectual. 

[gislegron]

"I would like the option of saying "Make me a steel battle axe" and the game queuing up the entire job list for it, from magnetite, coal, and limestone to finished product, just to speed the game along."

As said earlier, this whould be grand, a option to automate some processes should be added.

And a user interface, i don't care if it is toady that makes it or some other brave soul like Mayday that gathers lots of stuff into a golden package.

Just something like as mouse hover over a dwarf to get his name, and clicking the creature to get the next menu where you can assign labour or check happyness.

Other than that i love complex games, but not complexity for the sake of complexity.

[Lord Inquisitor]

Can I say complex with option of turning off the bits that dont work/I still havent figured out.

[HebaruSan]

ps. saying "both" is cheating.

What about saying "the right amount of the right kind of complexity"?

I've been thinking a lot about Nethack lately. It derives a huge amount of complexity from a few basic mechanics and a ton of special cases. Drinking from a fountain can summon a nymph to steal your gear, unless you've eliminated nymphs with a blessed scroll of genocide. Some monsters can teleport you, which is a pain unless you have the intrinsic ability to control teleport. Medusa is quite deadly, unless you wear a blindfold. A cockatrice can turn you to stone, but if you kill it and wear gloves, you can swing its corpse around to turn other monsters to stone instead. And if you polymorph into a female cockatrice, you can lay eggs that do the same thing, to throw once you polymorph back! The Nethack term for handling unexpected interactions is "The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything."

I like that kind of complexity, the kind that stays out of your way most of the time and then springs on you all at once when you least expect it. The kind that you can use as building blocks for accomplishing interesting things.

Compared to that, the challenge of clicking each tile of a complexly-shaped vein of magnetite, or selecting which pieces of gneiss to put in this wall, or placing dozens of beds in dozens of 2x2 rooms, or running out of booze because all your barrels are full of roasts, comes up short in terms of contributing to gameplay.

Of course there ARE things in DF that have the good kind of complexity (tantrum spirals, perhaps?), and hopefully it will move more and more in that direction over time, but the "other" kind of complexity can get in the way. Sometimes this is a UI problem, but sometimes it's because the simulation requires the player to do things that don't have interesting consequences other than not-dying (e.g. easy mandates). I think as a general rule, complexity within a subsystem tends towards tedious micromanagement, whereas complexity between and among multiple subsystems more often results in satisfying consequences that are unexpected yet plausible.

[Urist Imiknorris]

A good amount of the "fake complexity" can be solved with macros or utilities such as DFHack.

[Tokkius]

I say keep the general scheme we have now, but add the option for vastly more complicated extreme micro-control.

[gislegron]

Of course you can fix many problems with tools and macros, but then what do you have, a program with holes that must be patched manually.

Should not be needed.

[subject name here]

neither, i want a DF with a user interface streamlined in the same way civ4's was. not a complicated mess that requires a hell of a lot of free time or a disorder to deal with because dwarven pubic hair algorithms are higher on toady's priority list then a user interface that doesn't punish you for trying to use it.

[Agamemnon]

Can I say: "Complex but functional"? As in: "You can do almost everything, and for all those things that you can't do, there is at least one bug you can exploit and declare it a 'dwarven solution'."

[Teldin]

I started playing after reading Boatmurdered and it seems everything's just gotten harder and harder to understand since then. Am I the only one who would rather play a functional, bug-free 2D than have to spend a month learning how to plant crops?


Oh.

Well, never mind then, I guess. Back to your spreadsheets, gentlemen.

[mnjiman]

Complex.

Complex doesnt have to be messy though.


Bug fixes are on there way currently, and hopefully the UI will be modified for better handling etc.

[Dora Feddy]

Complex, please. There's something about DF's complexness that makes it feel generally more sandbox-like.

-You want a monument of your best warrior? Sure! How many z-levels and where do you want the magma to pour out?

-You want to create your own volcano? Great! Are you gonna make the cone yourself out of awesome materials or are you gonna carve the volcano out of the mountain?

-You want a labyrinth filled with megabeasts? Awesome! What kind of megabeast and how big is the labyrinth gonna be?

-You want to flood your whole map, and eventually drown everything on it? Ok! Magma or water?

It's the little things like this that keep the game interesting and engaging. I like the way there isn't just one way to do something, and that you can usually try anything that you put your mind to.

[Vertigon]

Complex, please. There's something about DF's complexness that makes it feel generally more sandbox-like.

-You want a monument of your best warrior? Sure! How many z-levels and where do you want the magma to pour out?

-You want to create your own volcano? Great! Are you gonna make the cone yourself out of awesome materials or are you gonna carve the volcano out of the mountain?

-You want a labyrinth filled with megabeasts? Awesome! What kind of megabeast and how big is the labyrinth gonna be?

-You want to flood your whole map, and eventually drown everything on it? Ok! Magma or water?

It's the little things like this that keep the game interesting and engaging. I like the way there isn't just one way to do something, and that you can usually try anything that you put your mind to.

This is a quite excellent way to define what I feel.

[Particleman]

I started playing after reading Boatmurdered and it seems everything's just gotten harder and harder to understand since then. Am I the only one who would rather play a functional, bug-free 2D than have to spend a month learning how to plant crops?


Oh.

Well, never mind then, I guess. Back to your spreadsheets, gentlemen.

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress.

Also, a lot of people seem to forget that the game is in Alpha. Most games at this stage of development aren't even playable, period. The game is VERY, VERY FAR from being finished.

Complaining about the state of the game now is like complaining about how your house looks before construction has actually started, and all that's really happened is the ground has been prepared and the foundation laid, and you don't even have acces to the blueprints.

[Urist McDepravity]

spend a month learning how to plant crops

Sure, I understand that its intentional exaggeration, but I hardly can keep myself from stating my opinion on intellectual capability of someone, who needs month for something that simple.
When I started playing 3D version, I didn't know its simplier to use existing soil, and irrigation was felt as easy and obvious concept. 4 years later, when I was re-introduced to it due to .31 release, I had no problem re-implementing my irrigation solutions, and if any, found it much easier than before. Your mud does not spread across the fort from farms. Your mud does not evaporate each season if not stepped at. Nowadays irrigations are as simple as 'drop murky pool content over farm area', you dont even need permanent water source anymore.