Bay 12 Games Forum

my mod has many dwarven guns - a recruit with a bayonetted musket or boomstick is pretty comfortable with 200 damage shots (til an enemy with a gun comes and rips the recruit to shreddery. i'd say swords/spears anything more lethal is good for newbie recruits. the more effective the weapon generally the quicker they'll get kills and therefore experience.

Dwarves get experience for each attack that hits, kills have nothing to do with it. That's how they spar, they're really fighting each other they just do less damage and use weaker weapons. The reality is, if you want to train via combat you should use less lethal weapons so they can hit their target more times before it dies. Spears and swords for untrained recruits might be good though, since they'll have a higher chance of getting lethal wounds on the one or two attacks they get before they're mauled.

Overall though you'd probably be best off actually training your unskilled peasants as backup militia. There are plenty of them, when they die it's no great loss, and it will increase their strength and agility letting them haul heavier loads faster.

Why, why, oh why did it take me until reading this thread to discover you could just dig a fortification instead of making a darn grate?  Oh well! Dwarf Fortress is a near-perpetual learning process.

Some traps made from bauxite mechanisms and loaded with steel weapons would take care of those imps. Tough to harass dwarves when both of your undead arms are floating around the bottom of the volcano.

Had a map with a dolomite layer, magma, and as I was digging out my storage space I hit hematite. As I was channeling to the magma, I struck magnetite. I dug due west from the first magnetite vein and hit a second one.

I gave up on the map though, the exposed magma pipe critters kept lighting the world on fire. I hate that, not really fun just annoying.

Interesting base layout. I can't make hide nor hair of it, but it looks functional.

I've seen crazy stuff like that happen before. Had a human liaison trigger a cage trap and go nuts, and another one just randomly dropped dead. It happens

I'm fairly sure that any cave-in will kill whatever is underneath it. Only rock cave-ins will cause new stone to form at the bottom though, tried that to dam a river I made and it didn't work (was crippling my fps).

I'd still go with magma though.

If your civilians are being scared by the troll, it means they can see it. If they can see it, that means a marksdwarf can shoot it. Set a patrol along the side of the ledge, and when the troll moves into view your marksdwarf will start shooting.

Undead troll. I don't know of archers can even hurt them, they don't require their internal organs to live. The only way I know of to kill them is with melee weapons.

The first caravan often sucks for getting an anvil. If they bring iron you're good, if they bring steel you're screwed unless you're very fast with building your economy.

Go to the religion thread (dunno where it is). I suggested a scheme of worshipping deities for imperceptible bonuses to your fort, or slight smiting of your foes.

I think a lot of how evil spheres and the undead will relate to religion will be up to Toady, more than most suggesters would like. How deities are implemented (are they real, are they DnD style where they're mortal but inhumanly strong or are they truly divine, are they good/evil/benign/vary) will very strongly effect how they interact with evil forces.