http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of...
You can grok the basics of the game in an hour or so by following a beginner tutorial. During your first few hours you will fail your first few fortresses.
After your first session, you should have a grasp of things and the next time you should be able to just pick up the game and get back to it.
I think the time suck aspect of this game is exaggerated a lot. You can pause and save the game at any point and get back to it later.
There's one thing that some of the tutorials and introductions don't make clear: you control the fortress, not the individual dwarfs.
No. Your assertion is that the only likely improvement to the UI would be a simple gamepad-mashing interface. DF is difficult even compared to programs with a complicated UI and games with a "normal" steep learning curve. Not wanting to battle through an insane UI does not equate one to a "soda guzzling teen".
And nowhere was is implied that not wanting to battle through an insane UI does not equate one to a "soda guzzling teen".
You can also manipulate world-gen so you have an easier time of it (making the game essentially Harvest Moon with occasional killer fish), but where's the fun in that?
It takes some getting into, but once you're in, you're in.
For anyone interested in learning to play DF, I highly recommend YouTube user 51ppycup's "Dwarf Fortress for Dummies" series - he gets the basics across really well and you'll be striking the earth in no time.
Dwarf Fortress for Dummies 2012: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD1A3FE72C0DCAC66
These ones were ok, but they were too slow in places and too fast in other places; I had a hard time learning much from them without continuously reverting back to the wiki to figure out what I really can or should do.
And by steep, you mean vertical.
A learning curve usually is time on x-axis and knowledge-percentage on y-axis. If knowledge-percentage only slowly increases the curve is flat. A nearly vertical curve means you learn fast.
This is a little bit like educating people about kerning [0]. For another example, a "quantum leap" is basically the smallest possible leap you can do.
Upvotes for both though...
I tried to start the game 5 times. The first 3 I could not even start a game. The 4th one I followed a tutorial and was able to start, and nothing else. The fifth time, I found Captnduck's excellent video tutorials ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZUS2h-Yzc ), and I was finally able to break into the game.
Then they added a whole layer of complexity to the military (with a lot of new UI quirks) and I just stopped playing.
In that case, a learning curve is a sort of visual hill with a steepness indicating difficulty of progression.
Just try the game.
edit: there are some tools you can use to visualize your dungeons and what is going on there. There might be nice videos of some 3d-renderings of fortresses that might be nice to give you an idea of the game.
To get a great flavour of dwarf fortress in a longer written form. You can't go wrong with boatmurdered, which is a game where each player took a year (I think) of playing the fortress and then handed on to the next player to pick up the pieces and carry on. http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/
I knew basically nothing of the game, so found a random [3]step-by-step tutorial and actually did pretty well until I accidentally killed the mayor, several other nobles and half my standing army at the grand opening of the new great drawbridge due to a...Minor malfunction.
The biggest three tips I can give are:
A. get a texture pack. I'm sure many people love the ASCII, but actually seeing dwarf and goblin icons removed one more thing for me to learn at the beginning.
B. download Dwarf Therapist. It's a great external UI for managing the roles of your dwarves.
C. don't be afraid to fail, because you will. Often.
[1]http://bronzemurder.timdenee.com/
[2]http://oilfurnace.timdenee.com/
[3]http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-u... (warning, may be out of date!)
I'm actually building on a pregenerated world right now where there are 2 cliff faces and waterfalls across from each other. Aquifer's are really annoying though.
Do you know of any texture packs that don't make the map 'zoom' level extremely high? Most of the texture packs seem to be made for large and specific resolutions, I play a smaller window mode on mba (1366x768).
I use Phoebus' Graphics Pack on my 1024x600 netbook and it seems ok, but I'm pretty used to a tiny screen and resolution so it might not be what you're after.
The only problem is the input system but anyone who has mastered Unix can easily master DF.