I love Dwarf Fortress and it's the inspiration for many modern simulators (and I put my $30 for Tarn with this release), but I do think that Oxygen Not Included, Rimworld, Factorio, et.al. have surpassed it.
My main issue with DF is that the main challenge of the game, combat, is pretty boring and rife with issues. For example, let's say I'm new to the game and want to put some XBow dwarfs behind a few fortifications in my base. Will the dwarfs intelligently do this when a siege happens? Is there a specific way to tell the AI that specific spots are where the Dwarfs should stand to defend? No and No.
Instead I will either have to painstakingly set up individual zones / burrows for each individual defender or the dwarfs will just ignore the fortifications, even if they are in a burrow! And they'll just sit there and ignore invaders breaking through your kill zone unless you specifically micromanage them into 1-wide spaces with fortifications facing the kill zone, and even then they might just run outside your fortress on the other side of the fortifications so they're close to where you ordered them to.
Rimworld on the other hand, (for all of its flaws around random and explosive damage), will at least let you draft a pawn, order it to stand behind a wall, and the pawn will get a significant cover bonus even without fortifications. They're smart enough to lean out and attack on their own too.
I say all this not to criticize DF but to say that the genre has come a long way, and I hope that with this success they're looking at weaknesses like this in the gameplay loop so that folks don't just take 20+ years of goodwill as a replacement for the possibilities ahead.
You are correct about logistics, but that is such a small part of DF to nitpick on that I have to push back. The logistics aren't the Fun part, and no other game has come close to DF on the Fun stuff.
DF things that come to mind that no other colony-sim has:
- 3 dimensions (z-levels) and all of the shenanigans (hydraulics, creative traps, etc) that go with them
- geological and historical civilization simulation
- the inter-relatedness of the game session to the history of the world is a story-generating masterpiece.
- The "zones" (surface, caverns, spoilery places) and how different they feel. Oxygen Not Included does this kinda, but not as deeply.
- Three different games in one using the same procedural engine and world: Adventure Mode, Legends Mode, Fortress Mode (Steam edition is currently missing Adventure mode and it will probably be a while).
- The "flavor" procedural systems: Villain, Religion, Instrument/Music, Literature, Forgotten Beasts. They don't have tons of impact on gameplay, but it makes the lore so much more rich.
- Sub-biome "surroundings" regions (Good, Evil, Savage, Benign) which have large effects on gameplay. Evil areas can be hilarious Fun.
- the pacing feels just right to me. It's not realistic from a simulation perspective (skills increase too quickly, it takes very little time to build complex things, etc), but it "gets to the good parts" in a very satisfying duration in my opinion. The combat takes longer than it should, but then stories can happen.
This narrow view is like claiming Minecraft only has about 2 hours of gameplay, because that's how long it takes to beat the ender dragon. It's perfectly possible to enjoy dwarf fortress in a completely sealed off fortress.
The problem with every game that attempts to be in DF's genre (Rimworld, O2NI, etc) is that, as commercial products first, they lack depth. They're built to be a game first and foremost, rather than than an art project that's fun to to explore. The surface level game mechanics are fun, in many ways improvements over Dwarf Fortress's. But they cannot compete with the incredibly rich simulation complexity that DF has obtained. World generation, history generation, characters with complex feelings and motivations, mechanics that interact with other in myriad ways. DF is a fantasy world simulator first, and a game a distant second.
And that's its biggest strength: compared to other games in the genre, DF is infinitely replayable, because there are an infinite number of interesting things to experience. Kings gaining power thanks to backroom deals with criminal organizations blackmailing their competitors, Necromancers forming towers to hold their book club meetings where they discus "An Analysis of Urist Svolgen's Musings on ovin Gentrout's Review of The Secrets of Life and Death", a werepanther that repeatedly terrorizes not just your fortress, but also all the surrounding sites drowning in a lake because they turned back into a human while trying to swim across a moat.
Can combat be improved? Of course. But I'll take additional mechanics that explode into emergent behavior any day. And I would love to find another game that even comes close, but Rimworld sure as shit ain't it.
> that the main challenge of the game, combat, is pretty boring and rife with issues
It might be the most 'challening' part of the game, but combat is not at all why I play the game, and neither are any specific gameplay mechanics the reason to be honest.
It's hard to put my finger on why I enjoy the game so much, but the fact that the game is about drunken and (mostly) grumpy dwarfs building a fortress inside a mountain in a world with a generated history and lore has a lot to do with it. The same game in a science fiction / space colony setting would be entirely unappealing to me for instance.
Haven't tried it yet, but I expect that you can use the scheduling menu to set up what you describe once, and switch them onto that schedule as needed. You'd want to set up a schedule with multiple station commands, each with a dwarf count of 1, on each tile you want them to stand.
Then you can swap them with a couple clicks between training, off duty, and whatever station schedules you need.
My main issue with DF is that the main challenge of the game, combat, is pretty boring and rife with issues. For example, let's say I'm new to the game and want to put some XBow dwarfs behind a few fortifications in my base. Will the dwarfs intelligently do this when a siege happens? Is there a specific way to tell the AI that specific spots are where the Dwarfs should stand to defend? No and No.
Instead I will either have to painstakingly set up individual zones / burrows for each individual defender or the dwarfs will just ignore the fortifications, even if they are in a burrow! And they'll just sit there and ignore invaders breaking through your kill zone unless you specifically micromanage them into 1-wide spaces with fortifications facing the kill zone, and even then they might just run outside your fortress on the other side of the fortifications so they're close to where you ordered them to.
Rimworld on the other hand, (for all of its flaws around random and explosive damage), will at least let you draft a pawn, order it to stand behind a wall, and the pawn will get a significant cover bonus even without fortifications. They're smart enough to lean out and attack on their own too.
I say all this not to criticize DF but to say that the genre has come a long way, and I hope that with this success they're looking at weaknesses like this in the gameplay loop so that folks don't just take 20+ years of goodwill as a replacement for the possibilities ahead.
PS: Fuck cancer