Bay 12 Games Forum

I wouldn't go so far as to take -no- moodable skills with you on embark.  You can pick your armor/weaponsmith to bring based off any nice preferences (You like both Platinum AND warhammers, you don't say...), but I wouldn't go so far as to take none.  In fact, you can min/max that stuff by taking pairs of moodable skill/non moodable skill.  Things like wood cutting can't trigger moods but carpentry can.  Others will pair gem setter with diagnostician and other weird combinations.  Weapon smith/cook.  Miner/brewer. 

Later on its generally best to stick with a skilled crafter than retrain a weaponsmith from nothing just to accommodate a legendary cheesemonger that likes battleaxes. 

Damn, nethercap mine carts don't work? I've always just used magma pistons or settled my fort over the magma sea/in third cavern layer (like for glaciers).  I never felt like fooling with impulse ramps and minecarts in general.  I also thought the concept of the self-replicating magma-piston was dorfy as all get out too.  After that I just need careful planning of tunnels+magma safe pumps to control it all.

Hmmm so you don't have access to iron on site, your civilization doesn't ever bring any to trade/can't request it, you don't have access to human merchants (they almost always have some), nor do you have a nearby tower/source of goblinite? I don't think that has ever happened to me, but then again I tend to always settle near at least a goblin or tower for "fun" Same for trading partners, even the elves.  Makes the game more interesting.

That is exactly my point though, if you focus on wealth first you will easily be caught by a small invasion/beast attack in aproximately a year's time.  Absolute bare minimum is prepping your military/defenses ALONGSIDE your wealth generation.  Seeing as you get military rolling from the start, that is fine.  But you need a handful of armed/semi-trained soldiers and at least some rudimetary defenses set up by the first winter if you push wealth early.  Otherwsie, you can caught facing a squad or two of goblins without a military, line of cage traps, or at the very least a bridge to seal off your fort. 

I was simply warning that buying out the caravan invites trouble.  If you are prepared for said trouble, its fine.  If you were just pushing wealth and "were just about to" set up your defenses? Screwed. 

As part of the food/spoilage overhaul, I've suggested wax as a sealing agent for large pots and honey as a perservative for fruits.  In fact, you can store your fruits from the summer harvest in pots, dump in some honey as a perservative, then seal the whole thing shut with wax! Historically both were in common usage. 

You can actually go completely absurd with layering.  6+ cloaks and mutliple sets of chain mail.  This only offers marginally more protection and will reduce a dorf down to a crawl without legendary armor use. 

First and foremost- GET THAT SHIELD.  No dorf should ever lack a shield.  As stupid as it is, a wooden/leather shield will perfectly protect dorf's from the same dragonfire that melts the adamantium statue next to him.  They also are paramount in blocking arrows and any other attacks really.  Lucky one-hit-kills are a very real and common occurrence in DF.  A sword that pierces the heart/hammer that crushes the skull/axe that lops off his head can all happen in the first round of combat.  Barring that, enough damage can be caused to double your dorf over in pain leaving him vulnerable to follow up attacks.  The single best thing to do is give your dorf his shield.  Later, with dodger and enough armor user to move in a full suit of gear your dorf becomes much safer... but again that shield is the single best thing you can give him.  Also, heavier shields will definitely encumber your dorf more.  Bashing is dependent on weight, but only helps if the dorf loses his weapon.  I'd stick with wooden shields (over copper/heavy artifact shields), as even at higher armor levels it still wears the dorf down more.  More encumbrance=less attacks+ quicker exertion.  Even at proficient armor/shield user the extra weight of steel shields killed most of their users fighting an identical squad with lighter wood shields.  You might can switch to copper shields at grand master, but again this only helps when your dorf loses his weapon.  They are kinda screwed then anyway. 

After that you can have a leather tunic for training.  As someone else mentioned, you want your military dorfs training asap.  A single piece of armor is all they need to start training the skill, so if you are light on metals/don't have your metal industry set up just give your dorfs a piece of leather/shell/bone armor to get the ball rolling.  Gauntlets and boots are also very light and can be added early on if you have the materials ready.  Copper gauntlets/boots and leather tunic/bone greaves +helm + wood shield won't encumber an early dorf much while providing decent coverage.  Later you can give them a full suit of copper/bronze armor as their armor user and your metal industry allows.  It doesn't matter if your dorfs don't have full masterwork steel before your first siege- just so long as they have a full suit of armor and hte skills to use it.  As the years go by and you have a legendary smith churning out full suits of masterwork armor with access to candy, and you have full squads of legendary armor users you can start worrying about maximizing layers and coverage. 

I want to say you need at least armor user 5 to fully equip a dorf with metal armor.  I checked back on the military testing page of the wiki and a grandmaster user can handle full armor+3 chain shirts like they aren't there, but I didn't find further testing done. 

My favorite trap is to set up a couple of stone doors with layers of magma between them.  Troll smack door... new door! SMACK! /rushes into lava

Nah that is entirely working as intended.  You had metal, you had moodable dwarves that could use metal... so they grabbed said metal and went to work.  Not only do you have something bloody awesome (pair of legendary smiths), but the artifacts aren't half bad.  Remember, gold is actually heavier than both copper and silver.  Shields and crossbows work better (for their secondary functions) based on weight... Its still a buckler... but its not an -atrocious- artifact like a bone hammer.  As you lack weapon's grade metals, you can still definitely put it to use.

Just trade for your metals.  Even if you just have access to the dwarven caravan you can request all three types of iron and all the flux stone.  Melt down copper cages to make copper shields, etc.  Prepare a soldier-less defense for the first siege though.  At most, you can set up some choke-points with protected marksdorfs.  Dig giant chasms with one tile wide bridges snaking around and a trio of ballistae on the other end.  Put weak weapon traps on the bridge forcing goblins to dodge to their doom.  Straight up make pit traps that lead 10+ tiles down that lead to a fortification-walled pit surrounded by marksdorfs.  Engineer drowning chambers.  Create "airlocks" that break up the enemy into waves your bone and leather clad wrestlers (or obsidian sword wielders) can manage.  Gamble on mining some addy (with bridges ready to seal off any !FUN!) and make a few proper weapons.  When everything is said and done, harvest the goblinite and put your legendary smiths to work!

This is why the metal duping exploit pisses me off so much.  People think that if the game doesn't "give" them the right metals, they are free to do w/e they want.  Bitch please, this is DF.  The game doesn't have to give you shit.  We already have enough tools and freedom to handle anything.  Its why players are always thinking of more absurd challenges and restrictions to overcome.  We already have MORE than enough options.  I actually like settling on sparse-metal embarks.  It forces us to be more creative and better utilize our options instead of just paving everything in gold and setting up a 100 strong wall of steel military.

I know you didn't mention using the infinite metal exploit on caravan steel, but it just sounds to me like you are already set up and ready to go for an amazing fort.  You already have the training out of the way, now you just need a handful of metals. 

Invasion sensitive is right, the point is to keep your herbalists inside during times of trouble- early on its a great time to have them help processing.  After the goblinite has been harvested you can return to gathering.  Particularly during summer if you fence in a handful of trees, you can easily squeeze an entire year's worth of food out in under a season.  I got 4 proficient herbalists to hit ~2000 plants by the start of summer.  I'll need to experiment a bit more to find roughly how much space is needed to grow that many herbs alone in a year. 

Now, cage-trapping the caverns has always been ridiculous amounts of food- particularly if you use your military to help out the process.  Others have made ample use of a "closet full of pigs" that continually generate bacon (and milk) from dust and wishes.  Herbalism as the SOLE food source has never been that viable.  Sure, quarry bushes and sweet pod food can be stretched rather thin, but you'd still need to gather enough textiles and ohter booze-able plants to cover your entire fort.  Between dimple cups, sweet pods, quarry bushes, and pig tails being used for food/textiles, you'd have to gather 640 plump helmets/dwarven wheat a year (and 300 pig tails at least).  This was entirely doable, but for hte most part you were using livestock/hunting/cage traps as your "main" food source and allowing herbalism to be the supplemental.  The remainder (mostly cloth) was picked up from caravans. 

The point of my post, though, is to highlight how broken plant gathering is atm.  I've always kept an herbalist on deck, its free food just laying there! If nothing else it was always a good idea to dump the plump helmets and skimp on booze.  While you have one guy chopping trees and another 1-2 mining out rooms, the rest of your four dwarves could spend at least a couple of weeks harvesting from 0 skill.  Later on a legendary herbalist could bring in hundreds of plants a year... but my point is that now a non-legendary herbalist can bring in several hundred plants a season. 

Before multi-hauling, they'd waste insane amounts of time picking a plant, running back to pick up a barrel, lugging that (heavy) barrel all the way across the map, and then finally bringing the plant all the way back to your stockpile.  Even with feeder stockpiles, you'd still see the herbalist return to base for each harvest job.  Now, I see dwarves picking 30-40+ plants in a row before returning with 100-150 easily after a couple of weeks. 

From what I've gathered on hte forums, many people have just gotten into the habit of ignoring herbalism entirely.  At most they'd turn their 5th legendary cheesemaker into an herbalist for something to do, but mostly I've just kept coming across people that don't even consider it. Not at the beginning when your dorfs are just milling around the wagon, not at the end when you have 20 free dorfs doing nothing in your dining room.  I keep reading over and over about how you need to rush and get that first farm set up for a spring harvest... how many farming plots do you need to work to feed your dorfs, etc. Most of it has just revovled around farming as the main food source.  Every now and then you'd come across someone that set up live-stock as a main food source, but never have we been able to use HERBALISM as a main source.  Its gone from being a niche (like bee-keeping) to the easiest and most powerful food source to exploit.

I just wanted to point this out for all the people that have been ignoring herbalism entirely.  Even if you don't bring an herbalist you can still see huge gains sending your idle dorfs off to clear the area around the wagon for some large gains.  And if you really want to be silly...  If nothing else, people can safely ditch all their food/seeds/booze on embark to save ~250 points.  Just butcher your pack animals and quickly harvest/brew up a batch of booze.  You can bring 7-14 units of booze as a "buffer" as well.  It helps to disable barrels in your first food stockpile to ensure your brewers have something to work with. 

Yes though, this is redonkulous.  ~5 non legendary gatherers brought in 2000 plants in under a season, without using fruit trees.  By the end of summer, I had well over 4000 harvested plants.  So, two seasons, 4k plants.  If you have been ignoring herbalism up till now, don't! Stop being a dummy and bring one on embark.  A single herbalist/cook/brewer/processor can supply your entire early fort, freeing your other dorfs to set up the infrastructure or even military.