Within a week, both Dwarf Fort and Brogue have received updates. Both on opposite ends of the usability spectrum. I've already played a fair bit of the new Brogue update and it's a blast. Lumen runs are much harder now, but the main game is of similar difficulty with more variety. Dwarf Fort keeps crashing, but the little bit of adventure mode I played I killed a goblin in his basement, stole everything he owned, then got his wife to escort me to a nearby village after an amiable conversation about the bandits. Fort mode will wait for therapy.
I've always wanted to get into Dwarf Fortress, because the game concept seems so awesome. But I do need at least some semblance of a UI before I can really consider it a game.
To be entirely honest, I like Dwarf Fortresses Fortress mode UI once you add Dwarf Therapist. It lists all the context sensitive binds. There are several inteface options,with minimaps and whatnot available. The only reason dwarf therapist becomes necessary is because once you have 35+ dwarves they need to be put into a spreadsheet to be organized. But for managing burrows, giving orders, queuing builds, and excavating, Dwarf Fortress actually does a really good job of making it usable without mods. It's just that job management and general keeping an eye on peoples moods becomes tedious. It also helps that once you get underground(the first thing you generally do) there is infinitely less visual clutter. EDIT: The old build also now has stonesense working within the game, so you can play it in isometric 3d if you want. You'll need to wait on the new one. Adventure Mode, on the other hand, is extremely visually cluttered. Z levels are much more difficult to navigate visually. It hides the binds in a help menu. Is generally obtuse about letting you know how to attack properly, and is otherwise annoying to use. It's super duper open ended though. My buddy just watched some children get kidnapped, offered his condolences to the parents, then said the event was terrific. Everybody got quiet after that. EDIT: It appears as though talking to your god crashes the game for a lot of people. Stay agnostic folks.
A shameless necrobump, because I have a story to tell. Since succession of the throne got added this update, I managed to feel the horrendous possible effects of it this run. One of my initial 7 became a queen within the first 3 months. This meant that I had a spoiled unproductive leech who can get angry if not appeased. And, as queen of all dwarves, she was the most demanding. She also had some sort of odd scepter and grate fetish, as she regularly mandated the construction of them and banned their exports. I had to make an 11x11(in contrast, my normal dwaves live in 1x3) bedroom, furnished with 10 chests, 5 cabinets, 5 weapon, 5 armor, and 10 stone slabs. On top of that, the entirety of the walls and floor were engraved with masterfully done sculptures. Her dining room needed to have 10 SOLID GOLD tables. Her throne room had 5 SOLID GOLD statues. Her dedicated Mausoleum had 10 electrum statues since I was running low on gold. A 50/50 silver/gold mix would have to suffice. While it's thankful that I had an abundance of gold and silver to appease Queen Urist McQueenyBitch, that also happened to mean that I was pretty much without any iron. No iron, no steel. And not any copper either. That meant I was lacking crucial armor making metals in case my fortress got invaded. Fast forward 2 in-game years. The queen is appeased, I have a surplus of food and booze, and I'm working on making more housing for the ridiculous influx of migrants that come from my over-inflated electrum derived wealth. I get invaded by some necromancers towing an army of undead. It's alright, I'll draw up the drawbridge and wait it out. Well, I end up needing to get to some stuff from outdoors(horse skin for a possessed dwarf, don't ask), so I open it a bit while the necromancers are away from the entrance. Bad move, 2 dorfs die. Neither were important. Simple stone haulers. But they had families. And those families started punching people. And those people started punching people. And all of a sudden I'm dealing with 50 angry bearded midgets bitch slapping each other in the middle of a siege. Getting aggravated at my lack of a military, lack of iron, and my increasingly ugly layout made from various necessities, I decide to let the zombie horde invade. What I didn't account for was the possibility of my dwarves falling down the staircase into the unexplored tunnels below. My central staircase emptied out into the ceiling of the first cavern floor, but I had no other entrances to it since I didn't want to deal with cave spiders and whatnot yet. 5 survived the zombie onslaught by suffering a 4 story drop during the melee. Fumes POURED out into the ceiling of the cavern, where no less than 40 corpses were generating an obscene amount of toxic gas. The survivors, either upset from the earlier tantrum spiral or now enraged at the loss of their home enter into a 5 person wrestling deathmatch in the middle of stinking corpse fumes. One manages to suffocate. The queen and the mayor were the last two standing. The queen ran away in fear, the mayor killed everybody else with his bear hands. A couple days later while hiding from the enraged mayor, the queen is ambushed and killed by a giant toad. The mayor starves to death after several months, losing his title a week before he died since nobody was left to vote for him...
