Bay 12 Games Forum

The thing that I think best hooks people onto this game is the quirks that come out of it.

I've personally been able to convince about 10 people to play by just describing to them how cats used to get drunk because they walked through taverns and licked their beer-soaked paws. Then, of course, the cats would start bar fights. The bugs for the game show how in-depth it really is, which is where the game outshines any others.

I think this is a great idea. If you can tell them a short, easy-to-understand story that highlights the strengths of the game (its complexity, the interacting game mechanisms) then you can get people interested. Usually telling people super long stories doesn't work.

I also started playing ~2010, so a few things that stand out:
- Military training is *much* faster now. Enemies are still very dangerous for civilians, but you can actually get legendary fighters within a few years
- The world continues to run outside of your fort. You can see a world map of other sites and interact with them by raiding.
- The 3D trees. It really adds a lot of atmosphere by making your dwarfs seems dwarfed (heh) by the landscape.
- There are now many new room types and a "locations" system. This basically means you can add taverns, libraries, temples, guildhalls. Functionally they aren't super important, but it massively expands role-playing value. If you setup a tavern, you can get civilian visitors of all races that come and hang out. You also need at least a few temples to satisfy dwarf praying needs.

The steam version is incredible. Yes, there is a lot of mouse clicking, but the screen that lets you see a dwarf at-a-glance is a game changer for getting to know your dwarves better. I just think it's much easier to get relevant information quickly which makes it a much more engaging game. Some current known issues:
- Marksdwarves are once again a bit broken. You have to follow some very specific steps to get them working.
- There is an issue where the caverns will fill up with hundreds of hidden animal people. It can impact FPS.
- There aren't hotkeys for everything, but there definitely are hotkeys for *most* things. I suggest rebinding your hotkeys to keys that make sense for you.
- Adventure mode hasn't been released yet.

I highly recommend the new version, it's a masterpiece. None of the outstanding bugs are game breaking.

Doh, thanks! That was not intuitive to me, although I guess in retrospect it makes sense.

Just my two cents. in version 40, there was a little noted change that (in my opinion) permanently dented df’s reputation as a hard game: military skill training rate rose dramatically. In the past it was essentially impossible to get legendary military dwarfs without exploits. Now you can easily get a legendary military dwarf with 2 years of non-stop sparring. The result is that very few of the external threats are scary. If you have basic metal armor/weapons you can casually defeat any threat with your squad of 10 legendary hammer dwarfs.

I’m not sure if there was an actual change in xp gain rate or if maybe there was a sparring bug fixed. But either way, it takes away from the game when non of the military threats are actually threatening.

I also think farming is vastly over-powered. To be harder/more realistic, it should take more than 3 farmers to feed an entire fort.

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A lot of things should be condensed, and there's enough that I can start a sub-list.

A: Maybe we could not have q, v, t, and k as different ways of literally just looking, which is normally a passive thing with the cursor.

B: Next, possibly some kind of core change to what defines rooms, zones, stockpiles, and burrows as to not have an overwhelming amount of invisible areas. Stockpiles and zones could maybe be turned into one thing, with stockpile being a new kind of zone, and the more room-like zones (hospital, tavern, temple) being turned into actual rooms. Burrows and military alerts definitely need to be turned into one thing with settings to govern their exact behavior so you can decide who gets locked down and how much permission they have to leave their lockdown area.

C: Announcements could maybe also be simplified, with just a single announcements tab that can sort by different things instead of announcements, combat reports, mission reports, and petitions.

D: Un-necessary menus should be removed. Instead of having a Depot Access menu, make that a thing you can view from the depot building. Integrate the nobles menu with the units menu, maybe let us right click on a civilian in the units menu to change jobs, military status, nobility roles, and all that good stuff sort of that view does. Or just integrate it with what v normally does in the unit menu, if keybinds are kept as per usual. There's a few almost useless menus like R (rooms/buildings), h (complicated minecart stuff that I still hardly understand after a year of pretty heavy play), l (lowercase L, which is just redundant zone control except separated from the zones themselves and only relating to locations), and lastly, o (orders menu, which mostly belongs in the status menu tabs or shouldn't exist). There's a lot of interpretation and personal taste for how exactly menus should be condensed, but my opinion is that it needs to be done. Condensing menus and making them into simple settings and sub-menus will greatly contribute to removing some of that paralysis of "oh god there's like 18 menus and I only know what two of them do" feeling when you just get started.

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After reading all 40 pages of responses, I think this is the best, for a few reasons.

• Struggling through menus and information overload was quite literally the first issue I had when first starting. When a newb opens the game, where do their eyes go on the screen? What menus do they click through? How do they find out what dwarves they have? How do they find out what items they have?
  
• Menu/info-discovery changes can make the game smoother without really changing its "character".
  
• I think this is by far the best bang-for-buck in terms of development time. Sure it would be nice to massively overhaul some complicated system, but that would take ages and introduce new bugs. In theory re-arranging menus is one of the easiest "overhauls" there is.
  

It sounds like some of these things will be addressed in the steam UI release, but the videos I've seen make it seem like just putting graphics onto the existing layout. I sincerely hope there is a complete overhaul here.

edit: Just looked through all the news on steam, and looks like exactly this will be addressed! So nevermind, looks good to me :p

This has all been said, but just chiming in: I find stress related to seeing dead enemies a bit not-fun. The main reason being that it disincentivizes combat.

I know it doesn't answer your question but I don't think there is much point to danger rooms in the current version. Military skills train substantially faster than they used to, and you can easily get legendary dwarves in a year or two.