Excellent post!
I've been playing it a bit, and thus far It's clearly not a "finished" product, but, it's quite good for being early beta or alpha. While it's got issues with building roofs and scaffolding being a huge PITA, and it would be great if you could rotate the map, it runs well and can be quite interesting.
The biggest issue I have is keeping my people happy, but that's simply because I tend to totally overproduce food and assign them too much work to do ....
So, I often do the "move everybody to the army trick" to get new settlers
Thus far the biggest I have gotten is about 70 townies.
Also, Unlike many new games or games in alpha or beta, I have been able to leave the game running overnight with 50+ townies and tons of items scattered about. I have not experienced a single crash yet!
My biggest issue seems to be that they don't like to put flour into raw foods stockpiles ,and instead, they will let hundreds or even thousands of flour litter all the land near my farms/mills ... (note: when I left my game running for 48 hours, I had over 2000 flour at the end, even with "haul" as 2nd priority, and plenty of raw food stockpile space, the flour was all over the place, and very little was in the stockpiles.
I have done some minor modding to help clean up the "mess' of too much crap .... (increased raw materials stockpile size to 200, all other stockpiles to 50), seems like with less individual items all over the place on tiles, the game runs much faster. (not having slow response issues unless I have like 6000 mud and 5000 stone and 2000 flour all over the place while running at 5760x1080 resolution (eyefinity), once my guys cleaned up the mud and stone, game ran nice and smooth again.
Excellent fix for anybody who enjoys a Settlers Type game. Man o man there are a METRIC TON of cry babies on Meta and the boards about it being an ALPHA.. Anybody who maybe "reads" up on a game before throwing money at it would know this.. Project Greenlight has never said it was finished games, just games the community feels are worth supporting.. HECK the game has A DEMO!!!!! if your so pissed off about $10, you sure should be managing your money better, should have tried the DEMO.. I'm getting so sick of people making mistakes and blaming it on anybody but themselves...
The game is fairly deep in the fact it has quite a bit you can do, its as the OP said, kinda a Minecraft like thing.. if you don't enjoy building I don't think you will like it. Has an enormous amount of micro managing till you get the hang of it. YOU DO NOT control your people (like all god/sim/theme park games) you just give orders and change priorities.
I like the game but it has many problems.. one level view (you can change it)- its easy to forget a villager who is on anther level (roof) who cant get down.. they will die. Interface- yes it needs work.. but as the game is being developed.. functional is fine, it will improve I would guess, as its changed over time, it will continue (its better now then it was) its farily fast paced at start, but as you build you need to slow down a bit and can be hard to do.
Tips- add more people: you need rooms that are empty. Your people must have stored up extra food, your people must be happy
TREE's- till 2 or 3 6-8 square long rows.. plant tree's of your choice (same as planting wheat).. never run out of trees.. they will regrow over and over just like wheat (same for anything that grows, flowers/etc)
Happy- people cant work non stop... slow down your building so they can stand around a bit. make sure they have decorations in there personal rooms (and BEDS!) also put decorations where they go.. bushes along paths.. statues by doorways (put something by storage so they all pass it) if you get most of your people in the 30's fr happiness you should see new people.
Common issue is people want coal-iron right away.. you can make a campfire with flint (gravel) right away to cook meat. so don't rush to dig into that dungeon.
Plant 3 sets of 3X3 wheat farms to start.. you can make bread almost right away
DONT dig down till you have some Hero's
DO equip your villagers with some early Armour and weapons
BUILD FARMS ASAP big farms.. do not harvest them non stop.. keep your villagers on fruit and wheat (bread) for a bit.. once a farm has 5 plus of something in it start to harvest it.. I build my farms in groups of 6 (six pig farms, or badger, or cow).... fence all farms in (or they wander off)
BARRELS- turn them off with a right click.. (especially bones) as it will keep your villagers from wandering off and dying.. manage what they can pick up at start of game.
BUILD underground (not below ground, but in hills) you need to mine, why not carve out rooms in the hills side?
CARAVANS- careful selling all that MUD to the dorfs.. your people will have to carry all 200 of those pieces of mud to them.. and they wont be harvesting food/chopping trees , etc..
when building and digging, make sure somebody is not trapped on a wall or underground.. they will die without food.. and bones make ghosts.. throw a scafold up (or down) to save um
Roofs- fook um! you can build um but it takes forever, they are supposed to speed up crafting, but speed was never an issue for me. Wait till its patched to be easier.
Dead villagers- bury um.. they are huge hit to happiness and make ghosts.
Most of all- play it a bit.. if you get pissed -re start...bad luck is part of the game.