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Spending a gaming week or two deep diving into this is a worthwhile pursuit (I agree about the O'Reilly book as well). In the end, I came to the conclusion that the ASCII graphics were, in fact, incredibly good and info-dense, but the UI wrapped around the whole game was just infuriatingly bad. I'll look again in 2-3 years.

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Agreed. The fact that (depending on what action you're undertaking) there are three different independent ways, each with it's own set of keyboard commands, to specify a selection area should say something.

Or that 99% of the community relies on external applications which to manage dwarf assigned jobs, since doing it manually rapidly approaches impossible as you acquire more than a dozen dwarves.

I almost feel that Toady should hire somebody to design an ASCII-based UI for the game that actually works.

Sadly, I doubt it will happen based upon his reluctance to address the UI shortcomings in this recent thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_o...

Most enlightening quote from Tarn:

> I feel like I'm still working on basic features

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