Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm experiencing this too. 

But I think the real bug is to do with the creation of flasks at the leatherworks instead of waterskins.  I thought flasks were glass objects for storing extracts.

Just for clarification for people who have never edited raws before like me.

You have to edit the raw files in your save folder.
Open "material_template_default.txt"
Then just add [EDIBLE_COOKED] to all the entries that have the [MEAT] tag.

When you next load your game, all the meat, liver, brains, heart, etc that came from your butchers will be cook-able.   

Voted for trade. 

I think I have some idea on how awesome those two other areas will be.  But I can't guess what the intentions are for trade.  I'm curious!

Absolutely brilliant!!!   

Platinum road.
Rebuild all your workshops in platinum.
Decorate your military armour and weapons.

I think it's linked to the tax collector noble.  I'm not sure what triggers him though (likely population but could also be created or wealth).

I had the economy running only on one fortress so my experience with it is quite limited.  Here's what I observed but some of it needs verification.

• All bedrooms will cost money to sleep in.  Nice rooms cost more.  Nobles sleep for free.  I think champions sleep for free as well.  Dwarves who can't afford rooms will sleep on the beds in the barracks.  If there are no beds available, they will sleep on the floor.  If you have no barracks, dwarves will sleep anywhere.  
  
• There is a currency page on the status screen which tells you how many coins you should mint. There doesn't seem to be any penalty or ill effect if you don't mint enough coins.  
  
• You can see how much money a dwarf has by 'v'iewing them. Sometimes it's red, sometimes it's yellow but I am unsure what it means.
  
• Dwarves *seem* to collect coins at the beginning of each season based on the jobs they have been doing.  My guards and military always had a room to sleep in so I'm guessing they get paid as well.  As dwarves pay rent or buy stuff from shops, coins get taken back to your stockpile if you have one, otherwise, they just get left on the floor like any other un-owned item.  Unsure if item hauling counts as a paid job.  It might do as peasants with no skills seem to have some money.
  
• Bookkeeper still doesn't stack coins so you get those annoying small stacks of 1 coin littered all over your fortress.  I believe that's on Toady's todo list.
  
• Eating and drinking is free. (well, I didn't have any peasants starve)
  
• You get to build shops.
  

The downside is that it can take a long time to get an army skilled enough to a point where you can take goblins head on and not take losses.  Here are my suggestions.

1. Garb - Ensure all your melee troops are wearing the best possible armour your fortress can produce.  Start out with iron, nothing less, all high quality full plate with shield.  If you don't have a highly skilled armourer, train one up by forging -> melting -> reforge if you can afford the resources.  Once you kill a few packs of goblins, I suggest melting down their narrow steel and using it to forge new steel armour if you can't produce it yourself.  

2. Skills - Ensure that your troops are highly trained (i.e. "Great" or better), that includes wrestling.  The problem it that it levels really slowly when wielding a weapon so I suggest training all your dwarves in wrestling alone while wearing heavy armour (incl. shield) before starting them with a weapon.  

3. The approach - Digging underneath goblins is always a good idea if you want to launch an ambush.  If you can't be bothered with digging, you can safely position your dwarves about 1 or 2 screens away without them noticing.  I suggest putting all you dwarves under the command on a single dwarf.  You also can lessen the impact of arrows / bolts if you approach from trees or hills.

4. Royal / Fortress Guard - It keeps your Nobles from becoming unhappy if you have enough guard.  After several seasons, you may find your fortress / royal guards quite well trained and you might want to swap them out into your regular army.  Note that if you swap out a dwarf from the royal guard, s/he will get an unhappy thought for "being dismissed from royal guard".

5. Siege weapons - ballistas are much more effective than catapults, but I believe they need to be on the same Z level.

From personal experience, a few dwarves with the high quality steel armour and legendary skills can take out packs of goblins alone.  However, you can lose any dwarf to a lucky arrow or bolt so it's always good to mix in lesser recruits when you go out to battle.

Here is one of my vids showing you the fun you can have with a top notch army.

Good luck!