Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm looking at the dwarves for my next embark and I'm noticing that most of them have one of or a combination of bad spatial sense, bad kinesthetic sense, bad analytical ability, susceptible to disease or slow healing. I know combat and training will raise willpower, strength, agility and endurance, but will it raise spatial sense or kinesthetic sense? Is there any way to bolster a dwarf who heals very slowly or is susceptible to disease? Lastly, does analytical ability, intuition or any other attributes I didn't mention have an impact on a dwarf's combat effectiveness?

(Edit: Bluh, forget this, I just realized that I was tricked by the wiki page: All the associated skills and attributes are listed at the bottom after the break! If anyone wants to offer any input though, it would be welcome!)

Will traps block off areas to a trade depot? I've had a couple of occurrences where traders either skip over me or refuse to leave and the only thing I can correlate between these is that in both cases I had traps over my only exit.

Secondly. can anyone give me any hints for defense? I just abandoned my current fort after half the population was wiped out from a series of unfortunate, FUN events. I had a wall encircling my entrance with the depot outside the fortress and the actual fortress entrance with a layer of cage traps and blade traps (Including one artifact giant iron blade a weaponsmith decided to smelt!) and I had what seems like the worse luck. First a Werebuffalo attacked, he was taken care of easily by my two Axedwarves in full iron with about high master Axe and Fighter skills and skilled defense skills. Unfortunately, he took a chunk out of a hunter and I forgot about what happens to the survivors of a were attack, and he ended up transforming and killing a miner before my commander sliced him in half.

But then things got REALLY bad. A minotaur showed up and couldn't hit my two axedwarves for crap, so the minotaur decided to grab my commander by the iron breastplate, gore him through his skull and then proceeded to use the iron breastplate to kill my other axedwarf and a few of my marksdwarves. (Who were just hunters I hadn't gotten around to training yet) I sounded the civilian alarm and my dwarves huddled in the meeting hall, hoping that the traps would get the minotaur... And of course, right before the minotaur runs through the traps, all three of the cage traps (My entrance and high traffic corridors are 3 wide) trigger and catch three goblin baby snatchers. Then the minotaur just dodges over the blade traps I have set up...

Long story short, I only survived because my civilians ended up being backed into a corner and punched the minotaur half to death, and then she tried crawling out and got annihilated by the blade traps. I think the final death count was around in the 40s, not including the war dogs and other animals killed...

So, any tips for my new fortress? Right now think I'm going to channel into a hill so I have less walls to build. I'll probably forgo trading entirely for the first few years too, as I think I was generating too much wealth last game. (I had made TONS of porcelain goods and was smelting all of my platinum, silver and gold into bars.)