DF (like Dungeon Keeper or Evil Genius) appears to be a macromanagement game. You don't designate individual jobs for individual dwarves (like in WC3), you designate an overall strategy and your dwarves execute it.
There are a few things that get in the way of this.
Some of these ideas have been discussed elsewhere, but I'm going to collate them here.
1) Lack of overview screens.
Are any of my Dwarves unhappy? I have to manually cycle through every single one of the blighters to find out. u-c-z-enter-space-space-space u-down-c-z-enter-space-space-space u-down-down-c-z-enter... etc.
You would do well to try to gather a bit of information on what kinds of data the player needs access to while playing the game. This data could then be presented in overview screens. In order to preserve the challenge of the early stages of the game, these screens could be abilities of nobles (like the Justice, Stocks and Manager screens)
Off the top of my head:
- Dwarf happiness (Filter by happiness level. Zoom to creature - to manage unhappy dwarves)
- How many empty barrels/bins/bags are in my fort.
There's probably a few others.
2) Lack of macromanagement tools for your military.
First up, a panic button (all squads go "on duty") would make military encounters less micromanagement intensive. Additionally an "all dwarves stand down" button would be helpful.
When (A)ctivated, dwarves should initially be in the "standing down" state - or at least there should be an option to toggle this.
3) Lack of macromanagement tools for labor assignment.
I want all of my "Haulers" to be hauling Items and Furniture and nothing else. I want all of my "Farmers" to be farming and nothing else. At the moment I have to set up labors for each dwarf individually - which seriously disrupts game flow whenever a wave of migrants appears.
Better would be to have a system of labor profiles. This has been discussed elsewhere, but I'll summarise:-
I designate a new "profession" (possibly with an associated tile color, but that's less important), let's say "Furnace Operator". I want all of my "Furnace Operator"s to have the Furnace Operating, Ashery Operating and Wood Burning labors enabled. Then I designate Dwarves X, Y and Z to be "Furnace Operator"s and the game assignes these labors to them. If I then go and add Item Hauling to the profession, that labor is added to the dwarves with that profession.
All of these tasks are already accomplishable in the game. All of this data is already availible. However, it is not availible in an easy-to-navigate flow-preserving fashion. I do not believe that these features would reduce the challenge of the game (manually tabbing through my dwarves to determine their happiness is not a challenge, nor is repeatedly assigning the same labors to a number of dwarves a challenge), but they would allow the game to flow more smoothly.
That's my 2p.
Apologies if I sound too critical. These flaws are expected in a game in-development, and DF is a fantastic game despite them.
TY and see you.
Back to the Elephants.
Mowglie.
Do artificial magma waterfalls give happy thoughts?