I tried to play DF. I even got over the ASCII interface.
But honestly Rimworld is better and a bit deeper.
But honestly Rimworld is better and a bit deeper.
But what really annoyed me about Rimworld, and why I never really got into it, was how "gamey" it feels.
One element is, the mechanics of random events, which feel extremely arbitrary. I'm not talking about random animals coming onto the map, that's little different from a legendary beast turning up in DF, but things like a solar event causing all your batteries to blow up for no reason. And random events seem to happen every few minutes. Whereas in DF, pretty much everything that happens, happens for a reason. There's randomness, but it's not completely random. If your fortress is wealthy, it will attract invasions. Forgotten beasts actually exist on the world map and have a history. That sort of thing.
In addition to that, crafting and combat are extremely simplistic compared to DF. In DF, bootstrapping an economy which can actually craft everything you need from scratch is actually fairly difficult and requires significant planning and investment. Many things require multiple stages of processing, and it can be very hard to find the particular raw material you need. In Rimworld, you pick up a few raw materials and can manufacture an assault rifle in a couple of minutes. And that assault rifle doesn't need ammunition, and is hopelessly inaccurate beyond 10m or so, for some reason. Compare that to DF where when a dwarf shoots a crossbow it actually does a 3D simulation of the bolt's trajectory. And in the background it's also simulating things like the bolt's temperature, and when it hits the target, it determines what happens based on the density and strength of the bolt's material and the material of whatever it hit.
There's a sense of something missing, and RimWorld tries to fill that void with its random event generator, the "storyteller system". A better game would at least give you ways to interact with them - to predict solar flares or prevent electrical shorts - and indeed there are mods which help with this. But it just underlines the shallowness of the simulation, how these events are truly random and not connected to the game world in any meaningful way.