My two cents on the matter of DF:
First let me get something out of the way. For me, DF holds amazing promise. It's inherent complexity is something I tremendously enjoy and sorely miss in today's games (PI's titles excepted). I love that there is no iron ore in DF. There's limonite, magnetite, and so on which I had to read and learn they are iron ores and could be smelted for it. I love that butchered animals don't just give meat, but a million products like various cookable organs, different bones that can be used in art and fat which can be used in soap production. I love that the textile industry has a million steps from procuring wool or fiber to getting the final product. This game delivers a unique experience that I found thoroughly entertaining. That doesn't change the fact that its interface is not just bad, but abominable.
I find it interesting that I stopped playing DF after I had learned the game. I soldiered on through the sheer, ice covered cliff that is its learning curve and I figured out how to manage a fortress with 200 dwarves, how to construct a mega-project to bring magma 50 levels up to my smelters, how to make a thriving textile industry, etc. Keeping the great wiki close at hand, I stayed with the game through all the learning process because I found that to be fun. Throughout this process I was struggling with my own ignorance of how things worked and since I love learning new things I found the process extremely entertaining. It was only when I figured how everything worked that I got bored with it and the sole reason for that was the realisation that from now on, every project I decided to undertake the greatest source of challenge would have been not the game mechanics but the interface.
Let me say something that some of those familiar with DF might find weird. DF is not an inherently hard game. It is complex, but there is nothing there that means the game has to be hard. The difficulty factor comes mostly from the interface not from the mechanics themselves. To make this clearer let me give an example. It has to do with the huge variety of ore deposits in the game, which on your first play-through will seem beyond arcane unless you are a geology student. Now imagine the game actually used a mouse and when you placed it over a magnetite deposit there was a tooltip saying something like "This is an ore of iron found in sedimentary layers. It is magma safe and may contain veins of native silver." There... Complexity of the game untouched, learning curve smoothed and you don't have to alt-tab to the wiki for this information.
I am no longer playing this game because I want to spend 90% of my time designing a massive above-land fortress and 10% of my time building it, where as it is now I have to spend 25% of my time pressing hotkeys like 'b-shift c-f' (that's to build a floor for those unfamiliar with DF), 25% of my time moving the cursor with keyboard arrows to designate construction areas and 25% of my time freeing trapped masons who didn't do a pathfinding check to their bed or something before starting to build and ended up on the wrong part of the wall.
*The above numbers are a product of a rigorous statistical study best known as 'just made them up'.
But enough about DF. This is a forum for a different game. From what I can tell, aGoD's only similarities with DF are that they are both underground-settlement construction god games. And they both have dwarves... We don't know enough about its gameplay to judge it really, but from what I've seen so far I'm intrigued and will certainly be reading the following dev diaries and keep track of its development. Another settlement building god-game is more than welcome in my book. It's a very overlooked genre.
o
