I encourage everyone to check out the game. It's quite crazy, and beginners inevitably lose due to the game's depth and crazy events ("Losing is fun!"). If the ASCII tile sets make your eyes bleed, there are other tile sets of graphics to try out. [0]
There's also a very vibrant modding community, including a lot of memory hacking through the dfhack project [1] – even fixing a lot of longstanding bugs in the game, like dwarves taking a pair of gloves and putting both gloves on one hand. There's a full engine to write tweaks in Ruby or Lua, too.
The third party graphics are helpful (but still make your eyes bleed) but the main issue is the controls -- I just couldn't get past how difficult it was to do anything.
It's been a while since I've played, but if I remember, you couldn't use the mouse -- I bet adding that functionality would make it so much easier to get into the game.
It's interesting, I used to think the same way. (well, I still do to some extent) But after getting acclimated to using VIM bindings for coding, learning keyboard shortcuts for common things, etc., when trying out the new version the controls were surprisingly comfortable. Now granted, they still aren't really good controls by any stretch of the imagination. But I found it to be an interesting experience that as I've gotten better at coding/using the keyboard for coding, purely using the keyboard to control such a complex game as DF has become a bit less of a barrier. I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience?
Dwarf fortress made me pickup emacs. After getting into dwarf fortress for a while, I found the idea of only using a keyboard liberating so I ended up seeking out a text editor that could give me that.
Hm. That makes sense. I use Gedit/Sublime for coding myself, only using VIM for a short period during college (never really cared to learn it more than I had to)
I dunno now... I used to play more when the fortress always started on a cliff face.
But back then people considered "winning" if you triggered the end-game demon... that despite that making you lose too, it was really hard to do... (and defeating said demon with a adventurer later even harder).
I would wait for the new release to stabilize, though, and for the third-party tools to be adapted to it. Or just go with the previous release, which is 2 years old.
Yeah, I launched the new version and found that dwarf therapist hasnt been updated (an absolutely needful addon if you like df, it makes managing the jobs so easy) and that there are quite a few bugs, longer worldgens crashing and various in-game crashes for undiscernible reasons, but all I did was turn on autosave and everything seems to be fine.
If you are into fortress mode (like me, I just dont like adventurer mode) just download the old release, there isnt enough changes for you to care and it is a bit more stable.
There's also a very vibrant modding community, including a lot of memory hacking through the dfhack project [1] – even fixing a lot of longstanding bugs in the game, like dwarves taking a pair of gloves and putting both gloves on one hand. There's a full engine to write tweaks in Ruby or Lua, too.
[0] http://www.dwarfcorp.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/df.... native versus http://i.imgur.com/FQaND.png (Phoebus tiles)
[1] https://github.com/DFHack/dfhack