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[Mortesphere]

I alway hear people complaining that DF has too steep a learning curve. I've tried showing friends it, and they can't figure out anything past digging.

Right as soon as I got the thing started, I messed about with the menu a little, getting used to it, and got started. Admittedly, I did take a little peek at the "My First Fortress" wiki entry, and I did take a little bit to get used to it, but people seem to blow the interface out of proportion.

[Arucard]

I think stepping from games where you are directly in control of the character(s) to something of this nature could be a little jarring. If a player had a lot of experience with sims or tactics games, where you give commands and then watch the scene play out, they may be more comfortable with it. There's no doubt there are an immense amount of commands, but that's what it takes to play a game with this much depth. For the record, I had to watch the tutorial series to even dream about playing. 

[DFPongo]

its a very steep learning curve.
Your mind must work like toadys. or you full of it.

[Cymsdale]

I think it's kinda a double-edged sword. I love the complexity of the game and find it incredibly fun almost because it's so difficult to get your mind around.. however, it does make it difficult to pull others into enjoying it as well. However, I think a lot would be lost from the game if it ended up 'dumbed down' to pull in a larger audience.

I think one of the greatest parts about the game is how it's so easy to pick a path to failure, since it's not intuitively obvious what's the best way to manage your resources from the get go - or even what you need to do! That path of discovery (with a lot of trial and error) just makes successes even more satisfying to me.

[piecewise]

The basics are pretty easy, it's the more complex stuff which often gets people. Knowing what to bring is sorta hard and controlling the military is often a exercise in frustration. 

[Impaler[WrG]]

It's a learning cliff, and I don't think that not controlling dwarves directly is part of that at all, their are a long line of 'sim' games that follow the same principle (Dungeon Keeper, Settlers) and don't have DF's issues.  I had to use the wiki to even figure out their was more then one z-level and how to mine out stairs.

[zwei]

I am sure this picture applies to DF too:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Malicus]

I was JUST THINKING of that chart...  but I don't think DF's curve is quite THAT bad.

[Retro]

DF doesn't have a learning curve. It has a sheer cliff face. And you have to climb it with nothing but a keyboard.

[RedWarrior0]

And you get ASCII, not those newfangled "graphics" things.

[piecewise]

I think the major problem to trying to learn to play without a tutorial is that you're dumped in with little to no explanation of what anything is or how it works or how to do anything. Its a bit like being a baby again, dumped into a world where nothing makes sense and everything is out to kill you.

[JohnLukeG]

I think the main problem I had was the way people convinced me to play the game.  Basically, all I knew about the game when I loaded it was "Oh my god, a goblin just ambushed my hunter and cut his leg off, but he managed to shoot the goblin in the eye with his crossbow". 

I had no idea the game was an indirect control game like Evil Genius or Majesty.  I gave up the first time around because I didn't understand what anything was.  I tried a year later with a starting guide and immediately fell in love with the game.  It took forever to understand how to use everything like pumps and mechanics, but it was well worth it.

[Exponent]

I don't think the general gameplay has a steep learning curve.  But many specific details of the gameplay do.  (E.g., making stairs work, figuring out pumps, effectively managing resources with stockpiles and orders)  And the interface definitely has a steep learning curve, both in terms of user input to the game, and game feedback to the user.

Fixing the latter groups without significantly altering the general gameplay could go a long way to reducing the learning curve while not really dumbing down the game at all.  I hope people don't get sucked into the notion that complexity for complexity's sake is good.  Complexity for gameplay's sake can be good, but needlessly making something more complex than it needs to be (or allowing an early and complex design to remain complex merely out of a desire to avoid simplifying it) is not something I am a fan of.

An example of dumbing down the core gameplay would be reducing the varieties of food to generic plant, generic meat, and generic prepared meal.  An example of how the game is already dumbed down (albeit simply because it hasn't gotten further attention yet) is that a dwarf's mood is completely linear.

Redesigning stairs to be simpler to grasp and to dig or build would not really affect the meat of the gameplay.  Making decisions about the layout of a fortress would remain the same.  The functioning of stairs once built would remain the same.

Similarly, redesigning the whole zone/stockpile thing as well as the interface for creating regions (zones, stockpiles, rooms, farm plots, et cetera) could reduce the learning curve a lot while maintaining the interesting aspects of managing resources and dwarves efficiently:  One would still need to choose which items get stored where, the locations where dwarves get to perform certain activities, and so on.  It would merely be easier to grasp how these concepts work, and easier to actually implement some design once that design is chosen.

[Mel_Vixen]

You may be right.

[Bishop36]

I didn't find the gameplay all that hard to grasp, the Z level thing took a while though, but when I finally understood it I was like "Oooohhhh that's what all that black space with green dots is."

But I have played every rogue-like that exists so I guess I took out some of the learning curve on those.(Played dwarf fortress last because I was scared off by tales of notoriously stupid dwarves and magma floods.)