Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, there are some obviously evil potential plotters, such as demons, necromancers, vampires and, to a lesser extent, bandits/criminals (judging by the Toady's presentation, criminal plots are reasonably less genocidal). Possibly, even night trolls.

And we already have various worldgen adventurers, including beast hunters and mercenaries, notably so. I agree that it would be good to see them being utilized by local governments against such supernatural threats.

Armor quality matters very little in combat calcs, so greaves are generally a bit better. The difference is not drastic, though, and leggings are a little lighter, so it really bogs down to whether you care more about passive protection or endurance.

Artifact greaves, on the other hand, would be great, because they would never suffer permanent damage in combat. For steel leggings this is irrelevant, because they'd never suffer damage anyway, no matter their quality, unless met with a divine/candy edged weapon all of sudden.

Yes. You'd just need to make sure that all the creatures you want to be used have the [CREATURE_CLASS:your class tag here] in their creature raws.

There is no reliable way to counter it or manage it without putting a big damn roof over the whole fort, so I disable the weather in d_init.txt. Then only enable it back on if I need to clean the surface from blood, in which case I just burrow the dwarves inside.

Yep, without problem. After the caravans unload their goods and you press [t]rade, you'll be given a choice with which civ you want to trade now.

Depends.

I build fairly big above ground forts, which are really more like towns than motte-and-bailey castles (which wouldn't have a market, e.g. depot, at all), so there is enough room for everything. Late game houses are at least two stories tall, so there's plenty of space for stockpiling on the ground level.

There is a "market", where the depot is packed tightly together with various workshops and the houses where the craftsmen live.

Medic has their own house, where the hospital is located, which can be expanded if the need for hospital beds grows. The castle's barracks can be repurposed for a hospital temporarily, if the things get really bad.

I use individual dinning rooms (for commoners it just overlaps with their bedroom), so taverns are more like little gathering places where people meet (undistracted by furniture etc., as suggested in this thread), scattered around the town. The ones outside the castle are open for all, while the ones inside are citizen-only.

The library is merged with the main temple, which is a dedicated building.

I don't do open quarries for fps reasons. The mines (together with the smelters and such) are usually outside the walls, but that is never a big problem because they are only used occassionally, and thus, don't require constant defense. There is a fence and a door, and I can move a bunch of guards nearby when the bars/blocks get hauled out, but that's about it. I keep the metal bars in various stockpiles within the town/castle, somewhere near the forges where they get processed as needed (fairly quick, as armor and weapons in my mod are expensive to make). Motivates me to be more cautious with resources during the sieges, which would hardly be the case with a nigh-infinite supply of metal within the walls.

Not necessarily so. For one, there were motte-and-bailey castles, where the peasants' part was also fortified, even if to a lesser extent.
Also, it is the lord's duty to organize proper protection for peasants: patrols, guarding posts etc. Since any DF fort is basically a war-torn frontier (from a realistic perspective), the peasants themselves could very well be mandatorily armed (historically, they stashed their weapons at home, but that's too cumbersome to manage in DF) and trained, much in the same way the English did, for instance.
Finally, individual/family houses, fences and locked doors stall most enemies long enough for the military to arrive. Werebeasts in my forts of such desing were particularly keen on trying to demolish (floodgate) fences, transforming back and getting trampled.

So asking for ingoing tribute stops wars?

Not sure, but I recall if you only ever ask for tribute (instead of razing, pillaging or occupying) and do so successfully (e.g. without any combat), the war will not even start. So you'll have caravans bringing tribute and then normal caravans too.

Also, does this mean I can have more then 3 caravans a year? A month?

Yep, a month. For instance, you can have three human caravans each summer. I assume you can also attract a lot of additional snatchers and sieges, if you "contact" multiple goblin civs, as they're always chaotic evil.