Just wanted to say a couple of things. First, I love this mod! It makes some pretty radical changes, but I find I like them.
Second, was the GUI made by you, Meph? It's pretty awesome. That deserves praise all on it's own.
I've been playing the same one fort since 1.6 came out - all my other forts managed to die when something got past my defenses. The following statements/questions are with that in mind:
Third, People have been complaining about the Brick Oven, but I found it vital to get any sort of surface presence open - I had to find a way to seal myself off, because flying enemies attack and kill my fort. I could have just used stone... but that feels ugly. I think that all the Brick Oven does is make it easier to build stuff and have it be more aesthetically pleasing.
I also have two bugs to report:
Fourth, I had a bug in 1.6 where the Tech Research Lab would not produce blueprints. I managed to get a holy tome or whatever before I realized I had no idea what to do with it, so I turned that off; for a couple of ingame years, I had my Alchemist - A Maniac, if that makes any difference - working steadily on research, and got nothing. I checked the raws, and it seems that you switched from using toys to bars of soap, or something. Personally, I liked toys - I was a short list I could check in the stocks menu. Bars, on the other hand, is not.
I changed the raws back to use the toys, which still seem to be there, and Immediately got myself a magma Gunsmith blueprint. Pretty sure this is a bug.
Finally, I have had an amusing bug with the zombie bite syndrome. A baby of one of my soldiers got turned, and got put on the enemies list. I didn't realize this at first - just that it was a zombie that somehow got into my danger room, which I then ordered my military to kill. They immediately circeled around it and started making it bleed - blood was everywhere, and they were using Great Axes, so I thought it would die in short order. It didn't - no matter what I did to it, it would not die. To make things worse, unless I ordered my military squad, which included the parent, to actively target it, the parent would pick up his 'child' and act normally. Talk about zombie denial. Note that they WERE making it bleed - I had them fighting it in several different places, and everytime I ordered my military to back off, it would wander around, tracking blood. Did I mention it's limbs had been hacked off? Yeah, a limbless zombie baby doesn't go anywhere fast. I guess it was rolling, or something.
Eventually, I moved the squad next to a pit and had them 'kill' the zombie baby, which got pushed over the side in the fight. Now that it was trapped, I used DFHack to spawn some magma in the air above it, hoping to deal with it that way. It got set on fire, but still hasn't died. It's been a few seasons now, and it's just producing smoke and wandering around in its little pit.
I'm pretty sure invincible zombie babies are a bug.
Anyway, I'm loving this mod, which is more of a fix. I honestly think Toady should just work on features and let 'mods' do the balancing. The guns and stuff kinda make this off-center in terms of fixing problems, but I still love it.