About whether DF Fortress mode is roguelike, for those who like to split hairs, we should clear up some confusion about what "real time" is. If you can stop the clock and queue arbitrary actions, your game is not real time. Dwarf Fortress is not real time. Starcraft is real time. Mario Brothers is real time. Dwarf Fortress allows you to advance gametime one time quantum at a time and allows you to stop time altogether and issue arbitrary commands during the use.
I'm going to counter this saying that cat adoption cannot be stopped with the pause key, and thus it is real-time, but that is just me being facetious.
Look, I don't debate that Fortress Mode isn't real time, but I don' really feel comfortable calling it turn-based either. I'd argue that most of the time is spent running the game instead of having it paused, but what that makes it is really up for discussion.
There are two things about Fortress mode that mark substantial deviations from the usual roguelike approach: Controlling multiple entities and doing so via issuing work orders that are carried out by various dwarves according to who's available and so forth. You guys make it easy on me by saying roguelikes no one's ever played or heard of ("7DRLs", etc.) count as expanding the genre, so I should say I know of at least one roguelike that allowed you to control a party of characters -- it was an angband variant and the author did not come up with a convincing system of control (unsurprising for an angband variant maintainer). I'm sure there's a ridiculous thread to be had about whether this angband variant is roguelike, please spare me. The point is, once you allow multiple entities, which is not unprecedented in the genre, it's natural to have a command set with emphasis on performing tasks that would take a number of turns and therefore hundreds of keystrokes in a traditional roguelike.
Again, this challenges the typical definition of a roguelike. For many people, roguelike also means you control one char, and you control it directly. Both of those have been subverted over the years - there are multi-character roguelikes, yes, and there is at least one game with indirect control. I don't deny that.
But if you look at the existing roguelikes, both established ones, small ones and 7DRLs, 99% of them are about exploration and hack&slash, either in the stereotypical dungeon or some other hostile environment. DF, in contrast, is a game about building a base and caring for dwarves. The gameplay is vastly different from almost every roguelike I know. It's much more like a 4x game.
As an example, let's take a look at my favorite TBS game of the old days, Civ 3. It has a world that can be and often is randomly generated, it is turn-based with direct control, it is grid-based (good old pseudo-eight-directions like roguelikes have it), it's non-modal, has several solutions for problems (as you would expect in a roguelike), you have to manage resources, no rule difference between player units and other units, it shows you the numbers and is tactically complex. So right out of the box it fits at least more than half of the points of the Berlin Interpretation (which of course isn't perfect, but a good compromise between different people's idea of a roguelike). The problem is that Civ 3 is a turn-based strategy game and no one ever will call it a roguelike.
Of course, that's nothing new either. Roguelikes have had shift-move since the eighties at least (I don't know if rogue had it in the 70s) to avoid spamming your calculator pad through every tunnel you encounter. Now the standard bearer of the traditional roguelikes, crawl, has o-move, which * gasp * automatically moves the player to explore levels, the greatest blasphemy since direction pad replaced the o'pen door command -- a fitting irony that this formerly absurd command key is repurposed in such an expressive and interesting way. Why not a-move then? I don't usually stop hitting direction and space until a new monster hits the scene or I go below a certain threshold of HP.
I don't think anyone views autoexplore as a 'blasphemy'. It's a useful tool to skip uninteresting parts of the game, and thus has been incorporated into several recently developed games. The debate on autoexplore is more about the fact that it means skipping content, which leads to the question why this content is there at all if everyone skips it, and what can be done to make it interesting. But this is more of a design issue than outright dislike for a feature.
So who's excited for df2013!?
New complex stealth system, the world becomes alive, armies pathing about on the overworld, the ability to start insurrections, non-lethal combat, movement and attack speed decoupled, creature tracking, tree climbing, fortress retiring...
Here's a fan maintained list of expected updates: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vgy5h5tmWFZLqCJMYd1cbGG67SUCSIn30Y--DNymzdg/edit
I am. So. Much. I think every Bay12er is.
Though I really hope that in the aftermath of the DF2013 release, we will see fixes for a few long standing bugs that have forced me to run binary patched for a few fortresses now.
A ton of new features and no UI improvement?
What are you, some sort of elf?
Toady has made it pretty clear that feature completion is more important than UI, so we'll probably see most of the UI improvements once the game hits version one or at least RC.
