I strongly agree with this - before I realized that plump helmets are an absolute necessity for an early fortress (you have a lot more freedom now - but for a w

I strongly agree with this - before I realized that plump helmets are an absolute necessity for an early fortress (you have a lot more freedom now - but for a while not immediately building a plump helmet farm would be a really bad decision) I really struggled to have fun - once you've got a general idea of which decisions aren't totally stupid then you reach the interesting choices. I think that with a proper tutorial there'd be a much more immediately interesting set of choices. I would say though that Civilization has always had obviously bad choices that aren't clear to new players - most games take this approach where the player is given a lot of obvious choices to feel good about rejecting. The difference is that in most games these choices are rather artificially created and clearly signaled because they're obviously wrong (Sorry - are you sure you wanted to create that Barbarian with 18 WIS and CHA and 3 STR and CON?) - in dwarf fortress it's harder to detect those terrible choices due to having pretty much every option open to you as soon as you start a new game (except a few gated features like Law and Nobility). That all said - maybe you could make a fortress work where you set up a pottery commune and don't actually set up any agriculture - just try and rely entirely on trade to feed your dwarves.