After lurking the Wiki and forums for many a week since .31, I am quite confused about the direction that Fortress Mode is heading.
There are gaps within the everyday fort such as the lack of economy, nobles not showing up, and wagons not entering with traders. Other than that, however, Dwarf Fortress Mode is a solid experience.
I have played quite a few fortresses, love the game, and fully support Toady... But I cannot help but wonder why the military was so well improved upon, and Fortress mode got one step closer to running without a hitch, and yet some essential aspects of dwarven society such as the economy, tax collector, hammerer, dungeon master, and so on are still missing. This essentially dwarfs (pun intended) the potential of any fort that a player attempts to make, as it can never truly develop into a society. What the player ends up with is basically a bunch of dwarfs living in an area with none of the depth that 40d gave it past that point with the economy... It almost feels like .31 has downgraded from that.
I suppose my question(s) is:
Have the developers stated why it is essential to make additions to Adventure mode while Fortress mode (what one would expect to be the main mode played by fans) is being left without so many features?
When can we expect the economy changes to arrive and give Dwarf Fortress those wide open doors that it has the potential to?
Thank you very much for your responses, it was just something that I was confused about while picturing my magma forge workers having a payroll.
Dwarf Fortress is more then just Fort Mode. Adventure Mode and Fort Mode are suppose to be equally viable means to play the game.
Adventure mode has been getting no love for a long bit, and was way over due for some expansion. Even while Toady is doing Adventure Mode centric stuff, Fort mode still doens't get left out completely. Bug fixes that come with each release affect both modes, as well as some new things in Fortmode. Such as new livestock for Fortmode, that came from a consequence of fleshing out the economic models of the world, which will be most felt (probably) in Adventure mode.
The .31 release saw a great many things change behind the scenes, including reworking how the nobles function and them getting moved to the RAWS. Therefore some things are going to straggle being reimplemented into the new system. I suspect the nobles won't get really put back into the game until things like Guilds are reintroduced. Nobles, as of the popular opinion of the forum, were broken in the 40d release.
As for how Toady and co are going about developing the game, he does keep a rather open dialogue through the Dev Dairy and the Future of the Fortress thread on the forum, wherein he answers questions presented to him in info dumps every now and then. Of course there is the Dwarf Talk Pod Cast.
Currently Toady is developing in the game, in what is known as Arcs. The foundation set for the two present arcs, the Economic Arc and the Military arc were set the .31 release, and has become stable enough really consider moving onward with it.
.19 is going to be seeing the a good start for the Economy Arc, then we'll get some hefty bug fixes, and be moving onto Military Arc.
The Military Arc is going to be quite deponent on local populations and their local resources. Which before, wasn't really being tracked at all by the game. When sieges come, the gobbo were just poofed at the edge of the map, along with their equipment with very loose ties to their local resources.
This means that sites need to have growing towns, and towns which can trade resources with each other. Which, is coming with the Economic Arc.
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Also, it sounds like you aren't aware of the Dev Dairy, the Future of the Fortress thread or the Podcast.