Bay 12 Games Forum

Ah, gotcha. So accept it and deal with it. I think I naturally got better at this without realizing it because I've started doing the things you suggested (personal rooms, waterfall, etc)

Shield: Initially wood (only because leather isn't a selectable shield material)

Not to nitpick, but I guess you didn't know: Leather can be used for shields. In the Leatherworks, near the bottom if you scroll all the way down or reverse-scroll up, it's there. You can also queue up jobs for leather shields in through the Manager interface. Thanks for the replies about layering.

EDIT: To get this thread back on topic, I had an idea:

This... is... GIRDERGROOVES!

1) After your fort's basics are setup (farms and minimal workshops), throw every dwarf into military training (6 of 7 so someone can keep food and booze going) until the first migrant wave shows up.

2) Assess all of your dwarfs at this point, migrant wave and original 7 both.  Anyone with military prowess gets the nickname 'Spartan', everyone else gets the nickname 'Slave'.

3) Spartans train non-stop, live in a separate burrow, have personal grand bedrooms, and their own legendary dining hall sustained by the Slaves, which is the only contact the Spartans and Slaves have.

4) The slaves have minimal everything, living in a giant dorm and toiling all day for the Spartans.

5) Slaves have their own militia, clad in leather and armed with bone, wood, copper or bronze. Only Spartans touch iron or steel.

6) As Slaves train, if one begins to show promise and stand out from its peers, they may ascend to Spartan-hood.

If I do this, and I think I definitely will, I'll try to write it up somewhere around here.

Thanks for the advice and humorous replies everyone. The community that's formed around this game is definitely one of the factors sucking me into it.

For future forts if you are fine with sacrificing a little bit of FPS you can build a Mist Generator that is powered by a DWR.

I *just* pulled this off in my next fortress (but windmill-powered) in a legendary dining hall and was pleasantly shocked by the results. In regards to dwarfs getting too chummy, it's one of those things that is now on my "list of things to keep in mind" that I didn't even realize could become a problem. One solution I've thought up that I'm currently failing at trying is heavy decentralization of the fort. This comes in two varieties:

1) Self-sufficient mini-forts that have everything they need packed into 4-5 floors that fit into a 30x30 area or less

2) Interdependent, industry-isolated burrows that are connected via haulers + minecarts (inspired by the "Fortress Divided" thread http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=119333.0)

I'm still working on the first style of decentralization right now, but I really like the approach. I've worked out something that goes roughly like this:


Floor 1 is my militia, and floors 2-5 are my specialists and crafters. Floors 2-5 each hold 16 dwarfs (64 total), and the rest go to militia, usually 15-30. Once my first mini-fort is full and all roles and militia are covered,  I plan on having the next immigrants "start over" with floor 1 nearby.

Each mini fort then holds 80-90 dwarfs, meaning 4 of these would be more than enough to accommodate everyone up to the pop cap. This design is working well for me so far, although I just restarted it because I made a mess learning how pumps & gears work and know I can do better now. One of the perks is that I now have a "game plan" to approach my fortress with. Starting with the upper floors and working down is a logical progression to getting set up, beginning with farms at the top and working down to industry and hospital.

It also helps me as a "newer" player to be ready for migrant waves. They begin by hanging out in my awesome "Water Hall" to start increasing their mood as I sort them out and specialize them. I have a good idea of where I am progression-wise and am often eager for new migrants. This is much nicer than being overwhelmed by the 20+ population spikes that occur. It's more like, "Woohoo! The industry floor just showed up!" The multiple workshops and redundant industries are there to either meet the demands of my playstyle and/or accommodate for the fact that dwarfs don't work 24/7. Three to four workshops for full-time industries seems to be a good number to have at least 1-2 dwarfs always working while others take care of their needs.

Finally, specializing my work force has been very rewarding as I'm getting higher level dwarfs than I've had before, and it seems like tasks get done much quicker. I queue up something in the manager screen, and now instead of waiting for my generalized crafter to finish the 20 other things I had him/her doing, they hop right to it and quickly crank out a high quality material.

I've rambled enough and basically hijacked my own thread, so I'll stop myself h

On my 4th or 5th fortress now and it went absolutely splendid. 270+ population, over 1.4M wealth, huge, sprawling fortress chugging along at ~40 FPS... regardless of what I'm about to tell you happened next, I am was very proud of this fortress. My one and only gripe in this playthrough is that there wasn't a whole lot of Fun being thrown my way, so I did what any self-respecting dwarf does... I go look for it. I found some in the caverns and that definitely started spicing things up. But I'm sitting here thinking, "Wow, nearly 1.5 mill wealth, I've gotta be attra..." <Sassafrass the Unpronouncable the Dragon> has arrived! *gasp* Me first dragon! Zounds! Raise the alarm, bring in the hounds and set the children loose! Er, maybe do that the other way around.

Long story short, I end up with one dead dragon, 12 dead dwarves, and one completely incinerated mass storage area! But hey, I survived! So what killed my fortress?

Well, just as my dwarves get back from their dragon encounter, licking wounds and dead-in-arms, a posionous cloud-breathing Forgotten Beast from below shows up. *sigh* Send more dwarves in (I started with a military of ~100, but I'm still a noobtard, so the only dwarves with impressive skills were in the 8-10 level range and most of them died fighting the dragon.)

Somehow, miraculously, I manage to kill this toxic fuck bag with minimal losses. So what killed my fortress?

Well, just as my dwarves get back from their forgotten beast encounter, still wiping dragon blood off them, I started getting spam that children everywhere in the fortress are "randomly" dropping dead from suffocation! What in the f'ing H?! So I zoom to one, and it jumps to my hospital where the dwarves who survived the dragon encounter are unconscious and recovering. And littering the floor around them is a pile of their suffocated children who were waiting for mommy and daddy to wake up from the dragon attack (or the Forgotten Beast attack now, whatever.) And standing over this horrific pile of dwarf-chub is a cackling, vengeful ghost, just daring another dwarf to enter this death-hospital; one of my own who slipped through the cracks. Maybe literally? I don't even remember it happening or would have made his slab awhile ago...

I eventually get his soul put to rest. Phew. So what killed my fortress?

Well, as my dwarves dust themselves off from all this, I do a headcount and go white. My burgeoning fortress of 270+ dwarves had dwindled down to the 160's in less than an hour of real time. I now got to experience what I believe you guys call a "tantrum spiral." Children turned on parents, doctors turned on patients, pets turned on each other... It was as hilarious as it was sad. I didn't bother to sit and watch the whole thing take over, but I realized that 270+ dwarves sharing the same space for years on end tends to bring them together. I guess losing half of their entire community in 3 encounters in a span of a week was too much for them. Softies.

So what killed my fortress? Not the dragon, or the Forgotten Beast, or even the homicidal-child-smothering-ghost. ALL OF IT. Last time I ever complain about it being "quiet" in one of my games 

Thanks for reading.

So for clarification and my understanding, the best way to train archers is as follows:

1) Assign Marksdwarves to squad, assign uniforms, etc.
2) Set their orders to off-duty, year-round
3) Turn off ALL labors
4) Build Archery Target(s) (1 per dwarf?)
5) Assign squad to {T}rain at the target(s) but leave their orders 'inactive'

Correct? (and any idea how many targets is enough?)

Hm, alright, seems like solid easy-to-follow advice. Trade for what you're missing. Thanks for the reply!