FL

If you've happened upon this post and you don't know what DF is, click the link and get playing. Lots of people really like the game and I think tigsource was the first crowd to start playing with it (at least that's where I first saw it). I think the best way to put it to a casual crowd is that it's the Sims in a Lord of the Rings (fantasy) setting, and you can build things and watch things fight. The graphics are traditionally ASCII (or single character, so an 'E' is supposed to be an elephant).

Anyways, DF and Toady, the creator, are really cool and people like to play DF, except it's got some issues. The big ones (perceived or real (I really don't want to get into an argument on this)) are:

• the graphics turn people off. I have a friend who's looked into fantasy and Warhammer and whatever but he refuses to touch DF because of the roguelike graphics. Even tilesets can't take care of this initial impression that reddit and the general populace has created.
• new players feel overwhelmed. Captainduck of SA makes good tutorial videos, but a lot of people who play games don't like sitting through 50 minutes of video to do things. They just want to...uh, do things.
• Part of this is the interface. Menus aren't consistent, and remembering all the hotkeys to do various things take time.
• Different features are in different stages of development. Until recently the military and combat were broken (I'm actually not sure if Toady has released the fixed version yet but whatever). The new hospital feature was broken (I know this was fixed last version).
• It gets unplayable when you have over 70-100 dwarves. It literally takes a second to have a single creature move one space, something which is unbearable when you have dwarves zipping off for trees at 100 distance over 10 seconds in the beginning.
  
• Updates of actually playable versions are sporadic.
  
• Stuff gets boring unless you're an inventive person. (see: Spore).
  

The beef I've personally had with DF is that I feel combat is dull. Very very dull. Goblins or whatever come to attack you and you can either powerlevel your military so it's cake, add traps so it's cakes, or watch disinterestedly as your dwarves fight it out with the monsters and look at all the cool combat reports (which are cool, but after a few iterations get tedious). Also, why are the goblins attacking? From a story standpoint, I guess dwarves and goblins are NATURAL ENEMIES, but I think it's good when people know motives and it's not assumed.

Given that I'm not a super patient person and that I feel like I can do some things for myself, I've set out to make my own fortress-like (FL). The idea I've had in my head for what FL ultimately (or a good checkpoint) should be able to do:

The dwarves have constructed their fortress. After long periods of refinement, they've managed to recreate Draupnir, which will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Unfortunately, such a cool ring drives the dwarves in the fortress crazy with avarice, and news of their wondrous creation attracts trouble. Goblins (and any other sentient creature, no racial profiling here) organize and set up sieges. They build catapults, battering rams, and other things to destroy the walls so they can penetrate the fortress and steal the ring.

I've written way too much, so you can read into the above ramblings and description as much or as little as you want. Also, if anyone can suggest an easy way to record a short video, I can show you guys what I have right now.