Although I've been into gaming forever I've only just recently gotten into ascii style rogue-likes. I discovered Dwarf Fortess, Cataclysm: DDA, and COGMIND at the same time about this time last year. I found COGMIND from having found and played with the X@COM demo.
I decided to buy and support COGMIND in the hopes that once it's finished X@COM would get more work. At first I thought COGMIND's UI was amazing like X@COM's, but the game itself didn't interest me as much, and of course I died a lot. After cycling through some other games I've started playing COGMIND again and this time I'm enjoying it a lot more. I think a problem I was having the first time was that I was playing too aggresively. Also, once I started playing DF with ascii instead of graphic tiles other ascii games started getting easier to understand.
Great game. Even if X@COM never gets finished, the money was still well spent on COGMIND.