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I like using the 4x1 rooms simply because I can make a long hall from just past the river going down to the bottom of the map and have 200+ rooms fast so that even when I get 2 waves of 30'ish immigrants in year 2 I got room for em no matter what hehe... not to mention I can easily make those rooms 300+ rent value even at that size lol... probably more if I double engraved with a legendary engraver or used a few of those masterpiece statues instead of walls...
mostly I use em because a pair of miners can clear out 200+ of them very fast so that by the end of the first winter I can at least have the bare rooms dug and go on to other things and they guarantee that every dwarf will have at least some kind of personal space to live in 
quote:
Originally posted by Pacho:
<STRONG>That's just the easiest way. It is possible for your dwarves to have fancy rooms (400+ rent) once you get a handle on things. Just make sure you have housing for the poor too, or at least a barracks for the homeless.
The economy is not broken that badly, just enough to need fixing.
[ November 19, 2006: Message edited by: Pacho ]</STRONG>
Note that I did say you could make levels of rooms as in a lot of 10 rent rooms all the way up to the fanciest you feel like designing... whether they will be of much use is another question and not really that important since it's easy to just overkill on building hehe.
IMO you should just save coins for in-house economy.
no idea on items...
The best way to make sure your dwarves can have SOME sort of room is to make the rooms small (1x4 tiles) with a bed, coffer,cabinet, and door only and all of the lowest quality. I often have to put new dwarves into carpentry and masonry just so I can get lower quality items out of it lol.
also NO engraving of the peons rooms helps to keep the rent down. (Making several "levels" of room so that wealthier workers can have better rooms can be a good idea too. For example some with higher quality furniture and then others with that AND engraving etc.)
be careful with double engraving because it can make even a tiny room too valuable for a peon but not good enough for a noble lol
I just designate a small area (1 or 2 screens worth) near the startpoint the first year... beginning of second year I designate the entire outside area lol. I have easily managed to chop em all down by the end of the second year even with just 1 chopper. but I've always had at least a handful "grow" every year as well so what controls it all I have no idea. I have never had a problem with wood in woodland settings or heavily forested ... other settings might differ. (I have NEVER had a towercap mature so I haven't a clue on those.)
(not enough more to matter since I am always massively overstocked on food to a ridiculous degree)I just notice that even when I give em jobs and make more workshops and so on I still get roughly the same output no matter how many more dwarves I get 20 is where production seems to stop increasing.
no starvation at all since I had my farms up in mid spring lol... that was after a smaller migration earlier too.. had around 50+ people during the first winter never had that happen again but that one was kinda interesting.The only thing I would like to see in immigration is for skilled workers to be very rare rather than the norm.
I've found that getting a good sized farm and lots of food is very easy... my build is generally 2 miners with 1 level in mining, 1 woodcutter/carpenter with 1 in each, 1 catchall (mason, engraver, building designer, mechanic, stone/bone crafter) 1 level each and 2 growers with max'd growing and 50 plumpy spawns. I also like to start with 20 each of sweet pod, pig tail, and cave wheat seeds, 25 turtle, and 25 or so booze.
The miners will skill up fairly quickly and the growers already nicely skilled will grow an insane amount of food with just a tiny patch of farm hehe. my first action is to designate a nice sized woodchopping ground near the starting area (no stockpile tho) turn off all jobs except woodcutting for the chopper then one long line into the cliff for the miners hoping to hit the river ASAP.
If I am VERY lucky the miner will cause a flood when he hits the river and I can immediately plop down a few mini-farms in early-mid spring hehe. If not I just make a smallish farm area. I like to ignore sleeping places because it's just insanely hard to keep up with immigration on beds sometimes... 99% of the time I buy out every caravan just for giggles so I get a LOT of immigration.
anyway you don't need a discourse on oddball strategies so I'll stop here hehe but I find the game VERY easy nowdays. But then I haven't made it past snatchers and thieves yet either. but I hate firemen extremely easy to kill but they can one-shot burn even my strongest hehe.
plump helmets can be eaten or brewed into wine.
pig tails can be brewed or used to make thread/cloth
sweet pods can be brewed into rum
cave wheat can be processed in a mill to make flour or brewed into beer.
quarry bushes need to be processed to bag in a farmers workshop then cooked into food.
anything else can either be brewed or needs to be cooked to eat. (and can't be grown in any case.)
other than that use CALM settings and cold or freezing climates. (cold you CAN get elephants but it's very rare while freezing you get wolves a lot and only groundhogs to hunt that have like 2 meat or something lol but full leather)
farming is fairly easy once you learn how floodgates work I like big farming rooms myself just because it lets me dedicate a nearly max sized farm plot for each type of seed. something like the example below.
code:
##################################
#................................#
#................................#
#................................#
#......#......#......#......#....# ~~~~
#................................XX~~~~
#................................D ~~~~
#................................#
##D###############################
# are walls
. are floors
XX are floodgates
D are doors
~ is the river.
basically the D on the lower left is the "entrance" and the one to the right is for accessing the floodgates to install mechanisms or other things like clearing stuck gates or whatever.
you can see the # down the middle this is support to prevent collapse since the thing is 9 high. width extends from the front "cliff face" to the river however long that ends up leaving an unmined wall every 7 tiles
hook up both floodgates to a single lever somewhere OUTSIDE the farm area then pull it to flood the farm and again to end the flood.
the nice thing about leaving wall instead of using supports is that farm plot placement will automatically amend itself to fit around walls but will give you a red X on supports.
One of the nice things is you can build it short first then expand later during the winter until you hit the cliff face 
[ October 30, 2006: Message edited by: DimmurWyrd ]
they are the same size and do the same damage and other than cats being carnivores basically they are identical.
