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[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

The fact that your average dwarf is a fundamentally retarded alcoholic with more neuroses than Howard Hughes.

[Gauphastus]

What turns me off is the eventual boredom, but that goes away as each release comes out.
There's a lot of fleshing out to be done, and I can wait. I can't say why other people might be turned off.

But yeah, I do tend to get bored. You start to lose interest when a release closes in.
There's not much you can do about that anyway.

Aside from that, I'd have to say that, like others have said here, it gets incredibly easy. Like you'll spend ages just sitting and waiting for something to happen (caravans, sieges, miners striking a map feature, etc.).
I've said before that I find the game most exciting when you're roughing it out with your starting seven dwarves, just barely getting by. But actually, it's still pretty dang easy.
In my case, it's easy because I know what to do. Though... eh, even when I first got into the game and had only a basic idea of what I was doing, it wasn't hard to survive. I'm not saying starting off should necessarily be assrapingly hard. Just more complex.
That's me though. I like complexity and depth.

We just have to wait for the game to be fleshed out more. Some areas of the game definitely need work, but their time will come.
I really don't think there's much you can do about hesitant potential players at this point. You might be better off asking down the line a bit.

[bombcar]

Have the startup screen mention the Wiki.

Make it so I can mass-select trade items, and cull based on mandates and WOOD.

Implement scroll wheel for changing levels.

And I do agree that making more graphic tileset support (and easier) would help.

[Gothmog]

Yeah I can only agree with Neonivek on how the wiki can be extremely helpful. The first time I tried DF I played it for no more than 5 or so minutes and dropped it because... yeah ASCII, no tutorial, no pointers... what the hell do I have to do with everything? Man was I hopeless. The interface was not the greatest burden, as it's rather easy to assume that building is related to the "b" key. Especially since ist also says (b) behind build. A few weeks later I came across DF again, this time with a link to the wiki, I also read some stories and ... yeah.

The problem pretty much was that it was impossible for a beginner to understand certain concepts like... for me it was that fish needs to be processed (that bugged me for quite a while..), how to build stairs... how water works together with dug out edges and so on.

The Wiki helped a lot with that, and I guess a build in manual should do the same. Maybe include some info on how to propperly feed and shelter your dwarves, coming together with a tutorial map (so you don't try to tell someone to build farms and fell trees on to of a glacier or something)

Or go the lazy way and link to the wiki. Should work, too.

I love DF, it's rather addicting and a potential player gets sucked in an fascinated with it really fast, but... the problem for me (and I guess some others) is that you need a starting point to plung into the worlf of DF. Being extremely hopeless leads to abandoning the game instead.

[Deon]

Ugh... I've read the thread title as "what turns you on about DF" ...

[Davion]

I didn't have much of a problem, like Neonivek, because I too clung to the Wiki for dear life which is one of the major problems I suppose.

Anyway, it'd be a lot easier on new people if descriptions of various workshops and objects were integrated into the game because 90% of my time on the Wiki was looking up what all of it did and why I'd need it to survive.

Givings a dwarf a job was a pain in the ass from a navigational standpoint in the beginning, and then realizing I have to do that for every dwarf individually. Generally the inconsistency in navigating various menus was a pain as well, but one that you get over with time.

When at the Site Finder it'd be nice if you could bring up a map legend as well as maybe a small tutorial or breakdown on how to pick an embark site.

Integrating a lot of the init options into some kind of in-game Options menu would be nice, especially stuff like changing the size of the window, and if that could be automated to some degree that would be even better.

Brought up quite a bit, but mouse support would go a long way too.

Also, as others have suggested, shipping the game with a bunch of ready-to-go embark profiles would be nice.

[Mel_Vixen]

I would like to see some of the Micromanagment reduced its seriously sometimes turning me off.

What is killing my fun is that at bigger forts i have to set each dwarf i want for a task f.e. to Engraver if i just want 20 dwarfs from the list to smooth a room. I would like to group select them somehow and then turn them to engraver with one klick/keypress.

Also furnishing Rooms can be very funkilling. I would like to designate 5 rooms and then say furnish with a Chair, table, ghest. After this the dwarfes should furnish theyr rooms by themselfs.


Ingame tutorials would be very nice. i turned down the game 3 times before i got realy into it.

[Rutilant]

Overly demanding and underwhelming water, pathfinding calculations, lack of proper military control, the knowledge that eventually I'll run out of enemy leaders and local wildlife, the amount of time devoted to getting my tile number and game resolution JUST right so everything isn't a garbled mess.

How nothing is convenient to perform, like building walls, floors, assigning jobs, and the fact that it's really hard to make a convincing looking set of wolf-men for fortress mode using 16x16 squares. The inability to confiscate dwarf items combined with the fact that certain dwarves get madly obsessive about hoarding my fortress's items and generally muck up the flow of things.

Edit: I'd like to say that the game has a strange mix of micromanaging mixed with a certain hands-offness. There's more micro than a city building game because you need to manage your dwarves as well, and more macro than an RTS because you've got the entire fortress to plan along with infrastructure and (basically) zoning, but you have much more direct control over your subjects than a god game..

So I don't know who to feel like - I don't really feel like a god guiding the little dwarves to their success, or a mayor leading his people, as much as I feel like a schizophrenic madman yelling at these stupid little people to STOP PARTYING GODDAMNIT.

Somehow, despite all this, I still love the hell out of the game so maybe it's a good thing. Without all these flaws I might turn into a gurgling, Uristing, fortress-playing vegetable.

[bombcar]

What is killing my fun is that at bigger forts i have to set each dwarf i want for a task f.e. to Engraver if i just want 20 dwarfs from the list to smooth a room. I would like to group select them somehow and then turn them to engraver with one klick/keypress.

Look into the addon program "Dwarf Manager"

[jockmo42]

Okay, the biggest problem I had at the start was not knowing how to do anything without looking at the Wiki. New players need an almost in-game guide telling them how to do things as simple as changing the Z-Level that they're viewing. This doesn't mean, of course, that little windows should pop up every nine seconds telling the players how to do something. Just give them a packaged manual with the download or something. Make the manual more comprehensive, a better "Getting Started" section. Just something to give them the basic rundown of how to navigate such a giant game.

The ASCII graphics were, for me, easy enough to understand because of the invaluable "Look" key. And this is from someone who'd never played an ASCII game before in their lives. The graphics are not a problem for me, I still play with the vanilla characters, because after learning them, I find tile sets annoying.

The thing I really like, what really keeps me playing, is waiting for the next update. I don't get attached to a site because I'm constantly thinking of what I could do with the next arc. The development log is great too. It keeps us updated on what's coming up and keeps players excited.

As an afterthought, descriptions of buildings and objects, also jobs, would do wonders for accessibility as well.

Integration of some of the functionality that players find in third-party programs would definitely help as well. Regardless of the trepidation that comes with "borrowing" other people's ideas.

[Greiger]

When I first started my main problems were figuring out exactly what the diffrent buildings did.  I recall building my first fishery next to the river because I thought it worked like a dock in simcity.

Perhaps when navigating a side menu like the build menu or the designate menu, if the player presses "?" with something highlighted the game will bring up a basic description of the highlighted item, what it is for, and in case of a workshop what kind of objects are used as raw materiels and what kinda stuff it creates.

Something like "A mason's workshop is a bench with a number of stoneworking tools on it.  It converts raw stone into large furniture items used for various buildings within the fortress..  The workshop requires the masonry labor to be built and function." or "This is a wall, it has little function other than to block movement.  Using the designation screen it can have fortifications engraved in it, but it cannot be engraved like natural walls.  It requires the masonry labor to be built and a worker can only build it from one of the 4 cardinal directions."

[Stele007]

the amount of time devoted to getting my tile number and game resolution JUST right so everything isn't a garbled mess.

Is this really difficult?  Multiply a tile's resolution by the grid and you're done.


I definitely agree with Kutulu.  Making little tutorial missions where certain aspects of the game are disabled would help immensely.

[Jiri Petru]

If I hadn't read Boatmurdered, I'd probably never get into the game. Thanks to the LP, though, I was determined to overcome the starting difficulties. There were:

1. No tutorial

2. No documentation. When I play a game, I need to know how it works - I don't want to hear all the specifics and spoilers, but I need to have basic Idea what is going on. Eg. I don't want to know copper deals 75% damage, while Iron deals 100%, but I need someone to tell me "iron makes better weapons than copper". As DF has no documentation, I had to use the wiki, which spoiled plenty of thing I'd rather be suprised by. Also, the wiki is an information overload.

Have you played Civilization? I fancy the idea of Civopaedia... or ingame Dwarfopaedia. Or a normal manual


The commands took a lot of time getting used to. Things that confused me most were:

4. The difference between "build", "construct", "designate", "make a zone", and "place a piece a furniture and make a room of it". The last one in particular - creating a room from a placed bed seems kinda weird. I wanted to click "build > barracks" like in other games! Also, even now I tend to search for farms and roads in the "designate" menu.


Now, that I'm a DF veteran  , I'm over these things. The reason I don't play DF so much is (aside from the lack of things to do after a few years) micromanagment! I like to keep all my dwarves occupied and workshops busy, which means I need to issue new orders every couple of minutes. I hate ordering clothing, by the way. I dream of a magical "make a random item" button on every workshop. Then I'd simply activate it on "repeat" and forget about clothes industry.

DF immediatelly reminded me of Settlers. In this game, all workshops were automated - you build them, they did their job, you stopped caring about them and went to do something more interesting. If you needed a specific item, there were sliders that adjusted the probability a certain item would be made - eg.  saws 0%, axes 40%, bows 100%. Now I don't say DF should have exactly the same solution, only just that it would benefit of some way ouf automation.

[Footkerchief]

Turnoffs while getting started:

• Not knowing that the default controls require a numpad.  I was playing on a laptop and it took me a while to figure out what to remap.  Most people don't play on laptops so this isn't that important, but the game should probably have a way to save/load interface settings.  So the game would include an interface_default and interface_laptop, and players would be able to load those ingame.
• Difficulty installing custom graphics.  Had to convert the charset PNG to BMP (not necessary now), copy over the graphics folder, make a bunch of changes to init.txt, etc.  Graphical prepacks like Mayday's make this somewhat easier, but for people who don't want prepacks, ideally a graphics set could be installed into vanilla DF with a single copy-paste.  This would mean breaking init.txt into multiple init files, so that a copy-pasted graphics pack could overwrite the init settings relevant to its own operation without overwriting all the other init settings.

Turnoffs while playing:

• The usual interface inconsistencies (scrolling, etc).
• More graphics crap, like graphical tiles making text unreadable and corpses showing up as ASCII instead of using the creature graphics.
• Fish not getting auto prepared.  I was enraged by having to create the job over and over again.
• Channeling.  Digging made perfect sense to me, but I was confused by channeling, with its thing of designating a channel on the current level to create a channel in the level below.
• Constructed stairs vs. dug stairs.  I think I was trying to construct an up stair in solid rock below a dug-out down stair or something.

[Detrivus]

I agree that the two main things weighing me down at the moment is micromanagement and framerate.  However, framerate isn't something that can just be "fixed," and to some extent there's not really a way around letting our machines bear the burden on that one.  (I don't know the intricacies of the efficiency of pathfinding and AI, so I won't really touch that one.)

As far as micromanaging goes, I feel like when a third-party program (in my case, DwarfManager) is necessary (or feels like it), something's wrong.  Maybe if there were a "labor" screen with each of your fortress's dwarves represented graphically, which operated akin to a standard RTS:  You can form groups which you assign to function keys, and then the labors themselves are represent in tree form, with each major category on a master list (i.e. "Woodworking" and then under that, "Carpentry," "Crossbow-Making," and "Woodcutting"), and you could activate a whole group of labors for a group of dwarves with a few keystrokes.

Something like that.  I'm loving it so far, and mostly I get frustrated because of my own perfectionism (if something goes wrong, I tend to freak out).

Ah well.  Losing is fun!

Also, save files should be sorted by date.  It's annoying when a bunch of old saves I don't want to get rid of are on the top of the list.