Bay 12 Games Forum

My experience has been that snatchers get caught in cage traps, while thieves avoid them.  Both of them show up as "thieves", but snatchers have a bag of holding (children).

On topic:
1) train your military, armored gobbos with no weapons, armored dwarves with training weapons 
2) pit all of them in a room, lure the cavern FBs into another room, open connecting door, at least 1 of your problems will be solved 

JMZ

Stone crafts are easy money from cheap resources that (almost) everybody has.  Unfortunately, they require a lot of hauling, so they might not be the best if you're short on dwarfs.  The wiki page on value can give you an idea of what items/materials are good combinations for the resources you have available.  I find green glass/silver serrated discs and spiked balls have a nice profit/effort ratio.

JMZ

This looks good, very helpful for new players.  Keep up the good work.

JMZ

So I picked a terrifying/untamed wilds embark, and brought along a couple of teacher dwarfs to start my military.  As soon as I unpause, a pair of harpies attack.  2 unarmed, unarmored dwarfs and 5 dogs made slow work of the harpies, and the non-commander got a vicious red wound on the upper arm, with sensory and motor nerve damage.  Quickly built a hospital (a bed in the middle of the hall, and no medical skills), and Urist McWounded was nowhere to be found.  Zoom to him, and he's chopping down trees while faint and unhappy (blood loss, no weapon skill, no civilian skill, so he's "complained about the draft", "complained about relieved from duty", and "suffered a serious injury" with no happy thoughts to balance it).  His wound eventually healed, leaving a "large, jagged scar".  He still has nerve damage, though, and his "ability to grasp is somewhat impaired".  This hasn't stopped him from being the first to charge into a fight, and he hasn't had any trouble since that first battle.

When summer rolled around, Urist McOnlyAFleshWound had killed a total of 6 harpies and 2 ogres, with no additional wounds.  Unfortunately he was a little slow chasing the badgers, so the militia commander got all eight of them.  We've gone from no weapons/armor to a mix of bronze and bone armor, and +bronze battle axes+.  As soon as the magma forges are online, we'll upgrade to steel, and mix in 6-8 migrants who have dabbling or better military skills.  I think they'll go well with the Stray Giant Badgers guarding the entrances from thieves. 

Looking forward to fighting goblins, whenever they get off their lazy butts and decide to start ambushing (currently Autumn of year 2).

JMZ

A standard suit of armor is still the same.  The difference is you can tell a dwarf to wear what is effectively 3 suits of armor at the same time now.  Combat was just as deadly, but training was easier, and markdwarves were basically unstoppable. 

Mineral scarcity can be adjusted in worldgen, although finding sites rich in iron ore is more difficult since we can't see what the layer stones are.  I'm assuming that wagons will carry even more than pack animals once they're working again, and requesting the same thing at max priority year after year increases how much the traders bring.

I, too, am happy that the caravan/trade/economy system is being worked on, and look forward to the changes the military arc will bring, as well.

JMZ

lol no one asks about the hammerer because it makes it harder to ignore noble requests >.>

and...there is no economy for the tax collector to be useful for lol

i dont even understand how the economy would be useful anyway >.>

A lot of people appoint a sheriff/captain of the guard, which has the same effect as having a hammerer.  The economy is for flavor, and a late-game challenge.  Once food/booze/defense/metal production is set up, most of the early challenge is gone.  Providing varying levels of housing and consumer goods in a mature fort was an added challenge in 40d.  That probably won't come back any time soon, although it has been replaced by forgotten beasts with melt-your-dwarf syndromes.

JMZ

AFAIK, once a dwarf takes a lover (prerequisite for marriage) they are monogamous for life.  They will never remarry, they will never take a new lover.  Dwarfs will never "get over it".  You can confine the 2 dwarfs in question to a 1-tile burrow, with all labors turned off.  Or make a bedroom with 2 beds, and assign overlapping rooms from both beds.  Or lock them in a room with food and booze and no one else for company.  But if one of them is already married, they will never be more than just friends.

JMZ

I believe all you need to mod is who appoints the DM.  Adding [APPOINTED_BY:MAYOR] to the DM entry in entity_default.txt should work.  However, modding the entity requires genning a new world. 

To get the DM in an existing world, you need the NoExotic mod.  It changes all [PET_EXOTIC] and [MOUNT_EXOTIC] tags to [PET] and [MOUNT], respectively.  You need to run it in the region folder for your current fort so it can find the right raw files.

JMZ