But in all seriousness, getting to a point where the game is playable takes 2 or 3 failed games at worst (assuming you do some reading). The game just continues to offer complexity you can explore.
Ha ha reading the article it seems the author intentionally didn't do any reading of anything other than the info included with the game. I can see that without reading a noob guide or checking out the DF wiki at the very least a player would have absolutely zero idea about what the heck is going on.
Yeah. It didn't take me that long to get the hang of Dwarf Fortress. The hardest part is figuring out that you can't control any of the dwarves directly in Fortress mode, so anything you want done involves changing the work orders for the whole fortress.
The closest you can get to individual control is by putting one dwarf in a military squad, and even then there are limits.
It's almost like a perverse version of the Sims, where if one of your sims has a full bladder, rather than directing it to use the toilet, you have to queue "urinate" and "flush" jobs on the toilet itself, and a "wash hands" job on the sink. Then you have to mark the toilet such that it can only be used by that one sim. Otherwise, the sim with the largest and emptiest bladder rushes in, does the assigned jobs in seconds, and rushes out again, foiling your plan. And then you have to suspend the "wash hands" job until after the "flush" job is done, because the sink is closer to the door, and the sim would otherwise do that one first. Then you forgot that you didn't mark the "urinator" and "flusher" jobs as active on the sim, so you do that, and wait. You have to wait, because before emptying that full bladder, the sim now wants to "take a break" and guzzle a keg of mushroom wine and a pot of kitten livers.
Yeah 120 ties is probably about right then. I can't imagine learning all of that by trial and error. They probably settled in some terrible places too, which makes everything harder.
But in all seriousness, getting to a point where the game is playable takes 2 or 3 failed games at worst (assuming you do some reading). The game just continues to offer complexity you can explore.