Bay 12 Games Forum

Aye, dwarves eat 2 units of food a season.  So 300 food supports 150 dwarves for only 3 months (roughly).  Now, a bookkeeper will only tell you your total amount of food NOT how much you are producing/consuming.  With the civ alert/remodeling your production chains were disrupted... and they may not have been strong enough in the first place.  Only 300 food for 150 dwarves is really skimping it.  Its quite possible you've been oustripping your food production for some time as your migrants built up rapidly.  The waves are small... its easy to account for 7-15 more dwarves.  Then you geta wave of 30 followed by two waves of 50.  BOOM your farms are overwhelmed. 

I'd suggest creating a few immediate food sources (butchering animals, fishers, plant gatherers) while expanding your farms.  If you must, flood a small area of stone to create the mud needed.  Just remember that if you are trying to fish in the caverns, your dwarves can be pulled in by cave crocs and pond grabbers.  Its best to have them fish out of a grate that is in a secured part of your fort.  Hilariously, you can also (safely) fish out of a tile filled by an aquifer.  Plant gathering is actually very strong right now too.  Its the least safe (unless you have an underground herb/tree farm), but herbalists can carry 100+ plants at a time with multi-hauling.  You can easily create a (secured) herb farm by leveling some miners through soil/stone (that you flood).  I am not sure what the upper limit is... the most I've see is 135 on an herbalist still making his way to more plants.  I had to cancel the rest of his jobs because he was already moving at a crawl. 

If you have 1000+ plus seeds, you can enable them as food stuff to be cooked.  You only need 50 max of each seed.  Also keep in mind that some of your farm production is being used up to create booze.  That 300+ plants needs to be both booze and food. 

Part of your problem might be feeling overwhelmed by the free-form nature of setting up your fortress.  There is no one "right" way to do things- especially considering every embark site is different.  Instead of searching for the "perfect embark site," try setting a single clear goal ahead of time.  What industry should I work on? What defenses do I get up and when? What projects will I be doing? Is this a surface fort or a cavern fort? Etc.

Military

Dwarven armies
Ability to send out fortress dwarves to lead larger groups of surrounding dwarves out around mid-level maps (or just go alone)
Ability to send equipment and fortress dwarves out to train surrounding dwarves
Ability to attack sites and entity populations with your dwarven armies
Ability to set fires and select supplies to haul back when sacking a site

This is pulled from the DF Development page.  We are supposed to be much more active with our surrounding space.  I think you are talking more about complex orders and moving in formation, though.  The combat AI is still pretty simple, but maybe "March as group" would prevent the quicker/more nearby dwarves from suicide rushing the enemy.  Also "protect incapacitated/fallen comrades" might work too.

Only if there was a massive buff to siege engines.  As they stand, needing 5+ people for a single crappy siege engine would be beyond overkill.  So we would need an accuracy buff, piercing damage instead of blunt, speed increase, and the ability to shoot across multiple z levels. 

What you really needed to have done was set up a bridge over hell.  Let in only so many demons before flipping the lever.  It helps to create a couple of airlocks after this to better control exactly how many make it to your axe-line.  This lets you overwhelm only a few demons at a time.  Furthermore, set it up so that the demon is entering a room from below/rounding a corner/dropping a bridge directly in melee range of your axelords.  The point is that you fight the ranged-attackers 1v10 already engaged in melee, as opposed to letting them turn your dorfs into mince-meat ahead of time. 

To top all this off, seal in the fighting area so that even if all your warriors die your fort still lives to try again.  At this point you can try cave ins or atom smashers to kill the steel syndrome slinging scorpions (or w/e killed most of your dorfs).

Try to catch a web slinger early tough... catch him like you would a normal Forgotten beast (behind a bridge in a sealed off room).  I believe the silk from a demon is supposed to be fire-proof.  I don't think its actually valueable, but a fun novelty at least. 

They are tropical plants.  Rope reed is one of the pre-2014 crops that grows virtually everywhere.  Like fisher berries and prickleberries.... you just can't seem to -not- find them. 

However, back to the actual point of hte thread.  I like to add in [mat_leather] to scales and chitin.  Thus, when I send my axelords to kill those 10 useless crundles spooking my weavers, my refuse stockpile doesn't get inundated with worthless crundle scales.

Other than that, I add [child] tags to dragons and other non-breedable creatures.  While I think dragons CAN breed now, they hatch fully grown.  I'm never going to run a 1000+ year fort, but its still silly to have a hatchling born larger than its parent.