For a Dwarf-Fortress-like experience with a much more friendly UI and reasonable learning curve, try Gnomoria (http://gnomoria.com)
The developer is awesome and releases an update (mostly) every week. It made it through Steam Greenlight but hasn't been released there yet. It is well worth the 8 bucks.
As a person who hates repeating himself, my biggest problem with DF and its difficulty curve was that I often would make a small mistake early in the game, like expand too fast or forget to close off an entrance to a cavern, and have to start all over, and repeat the same X steps to get a basic civilization going, which gets tiresome. Gnomoria is no different, but it is much more forgiving in the early going and leads to fewer short-order restarts. Also, graphics!
The developer is awesome and releases an update (mostly) every week. It made it through Steam Greenlight but hasn't been released there yet. It is well worth the 8 bucks.
As a person who hates repeating himself, my biggest problem with DF and its difficulty curve was that I often would make a small mistake early in the game, like expand too fast or forget to close off an entrance to a cavern, and have to start all over, and repeat the same X steps to get a basic civilization going, which gets tiresome. Gnomoria is no different, but it is much more forgiving in the early going and leads to fewer short-order restarts. Also, graphics!