You can pretty quickly assign your military tasks like killing things (use the "select from list" option and highlight all the baddies / annoying critters) or giving all the dwarves some well-deserved R&R (select squad, hit 't' and check their inactive/active status). I've found myself using the 's'quad interface for military commands. Check the df wiki for military quickstart guides, the interface is really confusing and you need to step through very carefully. Make an army before you amass too much wealth. Luckily, the army knew when their commander in chief had no clue what he was talking about. Later, I realized that the cavern goes way down, and that the dots weren't cave floor.
As an amusing sidenote, I initially told one squad to move to an area of open space, roughly 8 z-levels above the cavern floor, in order to explore the cavern system and defend any miners. Now a barony with over 130 dwarves and a well! We just breached the first cavern area, which very well may be my downfall. Also, I didn't yet have "building traps" as part of my DF skillset. Over 80 happy dwarves, woefully ill-equipped to deal with the invaders their glittering fortress invited. Rag-tag army suffered many losses, tantrum spiral rendered the fortress uninhabitable. Novice DF'er here, with a few tales of failure and some words of advice: #248 Heh, I'm so glad this game didn't exist when I was in school.
Once you've played the game a bit you get accustomed to the interface, and you don't notice problems with it for the most part. I for one welcome anything which makes it easier to enjoy the actual game, instead of trying to enjoy it while fighting the interface. This game and most ASCII roguelikes aren't built for the general public, sure you can get tilesets but the whole idea is it's keeping true to the original and arguably best format where time spent learning the game is very much well rewarded, If this game had mouse support what's the point, it's never been marketed as a noob friendly game, hell the catch phrase is "Remember, losing is fun" let people abandon it, i'll still be happily building death forts for many years to come. Rclick menus, building placement by mouse, (walls being the silliest example of where this is needed) and restructuring of some of the more bloated menus (hello, military screen) would go a long way toward making the game see more lasting players and fewer abandoned desktop icons. After what, 5+ years of development, why can't you use the mouse for anything but designations? The learning curve wouldn't be such a sheer face with even a few 'concessions' toward accessibility. I'm completely addicted to this game, there's very little that compares and I love the creative implications of such complex mechanics- but oh how I wish I could actually recommend this to any of my less masochistic friends. Yeah, but again, why waste time when you could just look at it and say "that's a log! I know it is because it's a picture of a log, and I can instantly recognize that" rather than say "what's that brown dash that kind of looks like a turd? let me use the look command to hover over it and see what it is." Dwarf Fortress is such a fun and rewarding game, but it frustrates me that the control scheme and default graphics are intentionally archaic (because hey, it's not about the bells and whistles, it's about the simulation, right?) Sim City is the only game I can think of that even approaches the complexity of Dwarf Fortress, and how successful do you think it would be if a every building was represented by an abstract ASCII symbol and you could only use the keyboard to control the game (and every time you switch to a different selection your cursor annoyingly snaps back to the center of the screen).and you had to navigate through all of the features with unintuitive hotkeys through barely organized menus with a control scheme that's not even consistent (sometimes you navigate menus with the plus/minus keys, sometimes you can use arrow keys, sometimes you can select areas with the enter key drawing the boarders, sometimes you use the ukhm keys, sometimes you use the plus/minus keys.
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