Having hotkeys onscreen is a great help, but being required to use them is still a terrible cognitive burden if you have lots of them and they impose modal effe

Having hotkeys onscreen is a great help, but being required to use them is still a terrible cognitive burden if you have lots of them and they impose modal effect(which DF does in spades). When you're "browsing" for actions to perform, it's easier to click on something when you see it than it is to see a keyboard binding and then find the key a second time on the keyboard - and it is a "find" on the keyboard because the muscle memory is going to be different from regular typing. As well, the visualization style has fundamental limitations. The 3D structures are hard to understand well with flat 2D. You can learn what the icons are, but embedded within them is a small pile of properties that have to be enumerated separately. No health bars, status effect overlays, etc. This obfuscates a lot of the game's mechanics.