If you haven't played Dwarf Fortress recently, the performance seems to have improved nontrivially in recent releases. I was out of the game for a couple years and came back to a big jump in perf when I've got a lot of dwarves.

I'm reading a play through story posted elsewhere in this thread[0] and inbetween instalments by the OP there are plenty of comments by people talking about how their ability to play the game is constrained by fps.

This is from Feb 2016, are the updates you're talking about more recent?

[0]http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=156319.0

Kill cats before they adopt a dwarf. Clean up old clothes with dfhack, and stop making dams!

The other big one is making sure dwarves don't path to complicated places, or animals don't path at all. Needing to know about how the game is written to make it useable is not great, though.

That's actually a good point - I like that I can figure more about the game by looking how it's made.

That's the point of it, and I think it attracts all sorts of interesting comments and exploration, like the massive study on the impacts of various types of arrows and bolts on subjects.

I think it's part of the package.

Name me anything that is perfect without flaws and still useful? Water is great to drink yet it gets you wet and drowns you if you breath it. Fire is lovely and warm and cooks our food but burns and melts our flesh if we play in it. Lids keep felt tip pens wet, and choke our children. Fish are pretty and taste nice but occasionally swallow fisherdwarves. The internet is great and connects us but causes divide by mixing people who were better separated. Light is fantastic, but I can't sleep if I can see any. Tea is just perfect, but it mAkEs Me ShaKe toO mUcH aNd ThaT caN be a ProbleM.

We're not asking for perfection.

> Water is great to drink yet it gets you wet and drowns you if you breath it.

If we're going to carry this analogy to Dwarf Fortress, if water was DF, it would be great to drink unless you happened to drink it from an aqueduct that carried it more than 20 miles. It would also make you spontaneously explode if your cat also drank from the same container, and you would be able to demand that your landlord replace your front door with one made of water and would go berserk when he didn't comply.

But isn't figuring this out part of the !!FUN!! ?

Here's the thing; I like the !!FUN!! of Dwarf Fortress. I like knowing that some giant with poisonous spikes can come in, kill half my dwarves before succumbing to arrows, and let me carry on as usual... until I realize that cats are tracking poison into the kitchen, which leads to everyone dying. That's !!FUN!!.

Not fucking remembering how to engrave gemstones because the key combination is unlike anything else, or how to put down a butcher table, or how to to set up a training rotation for my military? That's just shitty design.