4 ms·

Df is just like OpenTTD. Both are like Chess, easy to start, fun to play casually but it takes years to master. Great games, complex if you want to and a time s

Df is just like OpenTTD. Both are like Chess, easy to start, fun to play casually but it takes years to master. Great games, complex if you want to and a time sink if you don't keep an eye on it. Have had many hundreds of fun hours in both games

DizzyDoo 5y ago
I've played a fair amount of Dwarf Fortress and I'd never describe it as 'easy to start'? The learning curve is notorious and for most people involves watching a lot of YouTube tutorials and copying actions. I'm hopeful that the upcoming Kitfox Games version makes it very accessible to lots more people.
anthk 5y ago
Eh, Chess it's much more complex than Slashem to me, and I never ascended in Nethack/Slashem/DCSS.
short_sells_poo 5y ago
I agree with the spirit of your post, but Dwarf Fortress and Easy to Start do not fit in the same sentence in my opinion. I mean, the game is legendary for it's arcane user interface and the vast number of things that can go wrong even for experts. Dwarf Fortress is something like vim, where usually on the first interaction people don't even know how to start the game, let alone do anything in it. Chess is easy to start, the rules fit on a post it note basically. Dwarf Fortress is difficult to start, and even more difficult to master.
- devenvdev 5y ago
  When I first started playing DF it took me all day reading the wiki... Next week was spent on trying to survive the first winter... As a 15 years vim user though - vim has a much more gradual but also much higher learning curve, I'm still learning new tricks in vim on a weekly basis.
- Agentlien 5y ago
  I love Dwarf Fortress and play it quite actively. I've been using Vim as my primary IDE for many years. That said, I wouldn't compare Dwarf Fortress to Vim. Vim is mainly difficult to get into because the model itself is so different from what people are used to and there's inherent complexity. But, quirks aside, it's mostly very consistent and learning a few patterns will get you very far. In Dwarf Fortress you need to fight not only incredible complexity, but also so very much bad UI/UX and inconsistencies between what should have been identical actions. A great example is searching a list of items. This is done with q for query. Or sometimes s for search. And in some cases f for filter. Or even better, the way k, v, t, q, are all just needles variants of "look at thing under cursor". And none of them work for some activity zones such as pastures, then you need i. As much as I love DF I'm very much looking forward to the Steam version, mainly for the UI overhaul, which is so far looking really promising.
ALittleLight 5y ago
Dwarf Fortress seems incredibly hard to start to me. The UI is chaotic and the "graphics" verge on incoherent.
SilverRed 5y ago
This seems to be the opposite of what people have described in the past. With the start being incredibly hard as you basically need to follow a wiki page step by step to work it out. But after a bit you can find a method that pretty much makes the game unlosable so you have to start implementing your own restrictions and artificial difficulties.

DizzyDoo 5y ago

I've played a fair amount of Dwarf Fortress and I'd never describe it as 'easy to start'? The learning curve is notorious and for most people involves watching a lot of YouTube tutorials and copying actions. I'm hopeful that the upcoming Kitfox Games version makes it very accessible to lots more people.

anthk 5y ago

Eh, Chess it's much more complex than Slashem to me, and I never ascended in Nethack/Slashem/DCSS.

short_sells_poo 5y ago

I agree with the spirit of your post, but Dwarf Fortress and Easy to Start do not fit in the same sentence in my opinion. I mean, the game is legendary for it's arcane user interface and the vast number of things that can go wrong even for experts. Dwarf Fortress is something like vim, where usually on the first interaction people don't even know how to start the game, let alone do anything in it. Chess is easy to start, the rules fit on a post it note basically. Dwarf Fortress is difficult to start, and even more difficult to master.

devenvdev 5y ago
When I first started playing DF it took me all day reading the wiki... Next week was spent on trying to survive the first winter... As a 15 years vim user though - vim has a much more gradual but also much higher learning curve, I'm still learning new tricks in vim on a weekly basis.
Agentlien 5y ago
I love Dwarf Fortress and play it quite actively. I've been using Vim as my primary IDE for many years. That said, I wouldn't compare Dwarf Fortress to Vim. Vim is mainly difficult to get into because the model itself is so different from what people are used to and there's inherent complexity. But, quirks aside, it's mostly very consistent and learning a few patterns will get you very far. In Dwarf Fortress you need to fight not only incredible complexity, but also so very much bad UI/UX and inconsistencies between what should have been identical actions. A great example is searching a list of items. This is done with q for query. Or sometimes s for search. And in some cases f for filter. Or even better, the way k, v, t, q, are all just needles variants of "look at thing under cursor". And none of them work for some activity zones such as pastures, then you need i. As much as I love DF I'm very much looking forward to the Steam version, mainly for the UI overhaul, which is so far looking really promising.

ALittleLight 5y ago

Dwarf Fortress seems incredibly hard to start to me. The UI is chaotic and the "graphics" verge on incoherent.

SilverRed 5y ago

This seems to be the opposite of what people have described in the past. With the start being incredibly hard as you basically need to follow a wiki page step by step to work it out. But after a bit you can find a method that pretty much makes the game unlosable so you have to start implementing your own restrictions and artificial difficulties.