None of your business, aight. Leave it alone.

If this is a complaint then it is a bit of an ignorant statement. This topic exists because when we didn't have separate sales threads for the Summer Sale there were always people complaining in the Gaming Deals thread that it was overrun with Steam sales and Steam discussion.

Ah right, a humorous curiosity, what was I thinking :)

Has anyone played with Gnomoria? It seems to be still in beta, but it looks rather good, especially for the price.

*bro hug*

I'm just parroting here, but from what I've heard it's basically a dumbed down Dwarf Fortress with nicer graphics, an actual price tag and of course way more accessible.

I've heard similar things, but that's partly why I'm interested in it. The concept of Dwarf Fortress seems great to me, but I could never get into it because of the horribly counterintuitive UI. This seems to fix that, which might be worth the slightly less complex gameplay.

Ehhh, "slightly less" is a flat-out falsehood. No game that's ever existed really comes close to DF in the sheer amount of features and the amount of stuff it attempts to simulate, even going down to the footprints creatures leave on the ground and the type of fruit that grows of trees. The fact that it simulates this using ASCII doesn't make it any worse since fan-made tilesets are available. I mean DF is a game that the programmer has dedicated his life to and will take about 30 years to even reach full-version (it's still in Alpha).

It annoys me a little seeing people compare any game to DF, because it's essentially unique and nothing even touches it. Is it because Gnomes are like Dwarves?

Buyed Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon in the flash sale yesterday, now waiting until the next daily deals starts

The comparison is made most likely because at their bare bones both have a bunch of dwarves/gnomes building a fortress, upkeeping it and defending it. That's the premise at least.

Alright, considerable less "deep", then. This doesn't change that DF is not enjoyable to me - and enjoyment is what makes me play games, not complexity. Even with fan-made tilesets, the game looks pretty bad. (also, I don't think that the tilesets change the controls and the interface of the game, merely the graphics) And I don't really mind "bad" graphics in old games, since that's the best that was available at the time. But I've grown accustomed to a certain amount of polish, which it most certainly lacks.

The graphics aren't "bad", that would imply the attempt something and fail at it, they are abstract, representative, the tiles represent different things, once you've played the game for long enough then you gradually get to understand what everything is under the heavy level of abstraction (ie this is a tree, rock, hill, goblin, etc). If you can't deal with abstraction in games then there's not much to be said, I can understand that, some people don't like other roguelikes or grand strategy games either which are also highly abstract. You might be interested in this though: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0

Yeah, I have Gnomoria, and it's surprisingly good. Normally I'd detest a company which tried to clone a free game, dumb it down, and have 'better graphics!', and then sell the resulting product. In this case, though, that could be said to be sorely needed for new players at least, and - as I say - it is a fairly nice game. The isometric view sometimes makes things a little awkward, but gives you a good view of what the different layers of your fortress look like together, which DF (at least without extra tools) doesn't. At worst, I feel that it could be a good route into dwarf fortress for newcomers, who are then familiar with how the game works and don't suffer so much from information overload.

Basically, if you enjoy DF, you may also enjoy Gnomoria (the Gnomoria forum certainly contains people who do) or you might find it overly simple. If you like the idea of DF, but were unable to get into it due to the interface/complexity, give Gnomoria a try.

It also has a fairly extensive demo which lets you play for several in game days, so you can get a feel for whether you like the game.

"Bad" may not be the right choice of word here - I understand that the goal of developers wasn't to create a visually pleasing game with the ASCII graphics. I wouldn't quite say that they fail at something, but they definitely aren't ideal for such a busy game, in my opinion. I don't mind similar graphics in a roguelike, because there is far less to keep track of. Also, I consider grand grategy one of my favorite genres in gaming, which is why I was interested in DF to begin with.
I've seen that post before and it still wasn't great with that package, but much better than the basic game. I might give it another shot, though. I've seen people this passionate about very few games. :D

@pi4t: Thanks a lot for the reply! I'll probably download the demo soon, because I do believe I fall under the second category.