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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree. ASCII graphics were completely fine, if not desirable. I loved playing DF but I also hated it at the same time because of the inconsistent UI. wasd vs. ijkl vs +- vs arrows vs ... almost nothing made sense to me until reading the manual. Granted, the game is fun enough that I always read the manual, but a good UI is intuitive UI. I hope this new effort fixes more than just graphics. I can't care less about ASCII vs pixel graphics, but UX needed to be improved imho.

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I agree that the graphics (with mods) were acceptable but the inconsistent UI made it more difficult than it needed to be. Some of the AI could use some tweaks as well. It definitely is a fun game (dropping lava on an orc/troll army and watching them run was awesome)

Never really advanced that much in the game to fight orcs. I just set up some good looking magma smelters, smelted whole bunch of jewels and sold them to caravan and elves and stuff. This was many years ago, I remember having a lot of fun, but also how excruciatingly tedious everything was. I remember setting dwarf tasks (allow/disallow) required a lot of micromanaging and DwarfTherapist didn't work well in linux. Regardless, amazing game, I hope devs solve the UX issue. I'd probably buy the game the day it's released.

Perhaps you put your fortress down in a place with no enemies... most games I would have to immediately setup a system to keep enemies out or they'd massacre everyone pretty quickly! Once I had a dragon come and lay waste to everything, burning down all of the trees outside and setting fire to all the hapless dwarves.

No, I would normally disable invasion. When I enabled invasion, I'd just lock my dwarfs in my fortress and not leave the fortress for a season and eventually goblins abandon the invasion. I just never figured out how to prepare an army and attack, so figured, I'd much rather focus on things like farming, smelting, jewelry etc.

You can just put down stone traps and it will kill 85% of invasions. The rest you can create a drawbridge or something and pull it up if you see an enemy you can't deal with. Closing yourself off also means you can't trade, generally, so it's good to leave your fortress semi-open.

The problem with traps that kill, when I've used them, is the cleanup aftermath where your dwarves will go crazy from having to cleanup the remains and reset the traps!

If you use cage traps instead, you can set up a target range to train your crossbowdwarfs.

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