Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Pan]

What was yours? Mine was the military, where I got the whole schedule and alert thing really, really confused. I was up till one, tearing at my hair.

[dfJuice]

My biggest hurdle is always being scared to try new things, like I've never used a drawbridge before and I'm scared to because I'm not sure how they work.

[Excedion]

When I relied too heavily on trade to get certain items then in later game every trade caravan would come at the same time as an ambush and get destroyed. I eventually started using magma forges and vast farms to produce everything i needed

[Mimidormi]

Stairs.

Basically, to figure out that the downstairs are carved from the natural floor tiles on your current level, and not from the z-level below. The image on the wiki helped. Oddly enough, i never had a problem with ramps.

[orrey]

Machinery (Waterwheels, Windmills) and proper power transfer probably took me the longest time to actually figure out.  As for the military, I had played older versions of the game and used it fine; but the newest interface took me a while to get through.  Not because it was that difficult, but because the interface looked so incredibly daunting.  So I kind of put off attempting to learn it for a long while and tried to get by with cages and other automated defenses, which usually ended in the first trapimmune critter to show up making a mess of things.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Honestly? Convincing myself to download after having read the wiki for so long.

[zakkeh]

The graphics. I'm used to playing stuff by myself and learning on the run, even if this game was just | for the learning curve, but I didn't understand ANY of the graphics. This was my first rogue-like, so my mind was just blown out of the water trying to understand all the ASCII graphics. Tilesets helped me through that period, but I'm trying to learn the proper ASCII now ^_^

[Jelle]

The ASCII graphics. I still cannot play this game with the standard tileset.
I might recognize a few places but I wouldn't be able to make any sane decision looking at what in the name of armok is going on.

[Lectorog]

Past the initial graphics and interface: It's a tie between military and burrows. I am, like many, still slowly figuring them out.

I also have trouble "dwarfing up" and taking control of the caverns. I still hesitantly mine out ore deposits without actually creating a hole into the caverns.

And graphics are a huge problem for me, in reverse. I've never played the game without the default ASCII. Playing major mods (especially Genesis) that use tilesets is like learning an entire new game.

[jc6036]

The metal industry.     I had no idea what stones to use, and when I found out about the z stone menu, I had NO ore what so ever. I had 70 plus dwarves, 40 in the army, all wrestlers. Lost my fort to a siege.

[IDidItForScience]

Of all the things that have made this game hard to learn, framerate has to be the worst. I'm currently on my first for to hit the 200 dorf mark without also hitting the 0 FPS mark.

Also, hospitals. They can burn with the damn clowns. Trying to find a way to get the medics to haul an injured dwarf to the hospital after he refused to acknowledge his two broken legs, two broken arms, and shattered shoulders is just frustrating. Especially since he was a pretty decent marksdwarf.

[Dareon Clearwater]

I've had three distinct plateaus in my learning process, where things took me a bit longer to learn.  The first was stairs soon after I started playing, my forts tended to look like the Winchester Mystery House, with a half-dozen up stairs connecting to one down stair and a few down stairs that just didn't connect to anything.  Then came lava and mechanisms, I melted a few floodgates and went over my connections and tanks three times before casting my first batch of obsidian.  And currently, I'm slowly working my way through the military.

I've found that the best way to deal with a mechanic is to build a fort specifically designed to use that.  A team of 7 mechanics on a volcano, a team of 7 specialist doctors (Not as effective as one dude with all the doctor skills who just sits around as manager and bookkeeper otherwise), or, most recently, 7 dwarves with military skills.

[johnny_cat]

Oh, that's easy. Z levels. After I learned you could go up and down by pressing the > and < buttons, my forts started getting a lot more 3 dimensional.

[Lagslayer]

Hotkeys and navigating the menus. The walls of text are just daunting, and I still look forward to an interfacelift. Everything else I could figure out from the wiki, the forums, and some simple trial and error.

The ASCII graphics would have been a problem, no doubt, if I hadn't been using the LNP from the beginning. But that probably fits somewhere into the wall of text problem.

[Untelligent]

Open Space. I thought it just meant land without any features on it.

Also I happened to be on a glacier, and ice is a pretty similar color, so you can imagine my confusion as I tried to get my dwarves to move onto it.