Bay 12 Games Forum

You need armor.  A steel armored military dorf is more like a battle mech then a knight.  Import the maximum number of: Steel bars, iron bars, pig iron bars, steel anvils, iron anvils, ore stones.  Consider buying bronze and silver from the humies.  Make crossbows and hammers out of bronze or silver because density matters for blunt weapons.  Make shields out of wood because material doesn't really matter. 

Set up a cloth/silk industry (I think silk is better).  Masterwork cloaks go to the army, other cloaks get traded.  Each soldier should ideally wear: two or three chain shirts, and many silk cloaks (10 or so), in addition to one of everything else.  The order they put those on is extremely important and I'm not 100% sure all that layering still works. 

If your army goes up against lashers you will need a new army.  They perform more or less like lightsabers in combat. 

Well they do steal babies.  I'm sure the other races would be more tolerant and accepting if they just traded for them like civilized people   

Its even better then that, you can just make one big room with 200 beds, make each into a bedroom taking up the entire area then toss in a couple of artifacts or engravings for 200 legendary bedrooms.  I call it a sleeping stockpile. 

So you strike the earth until it tells you where the caverns and spoilers are?  Nice 

Are you trying to use a garbage dump zone or a stockpile.  What sort of stockpile? 

Also, why so many dead horses. 

Year 1600:  Exactly two nations have colonies in the new world.  I (trier) have the Americanadian east coast and Flanders has a Caribean island.  MIEOU, why you break colonization? 

Lol Bohemia is fighting Britain and its blob of vassals and France plus the leftover little Frances.  This must be the 4th time at least.  Britain never accepts peace because it has this huge death fleet defending its coast and the Brohemians never accept peace because they are the emperor and have infinite troops.  Its pretty convenient too because no one is asking uncomfortable questions about where Munster and Cologne went and with 5 unlawful provinces my infamy is basically stuck at 9.5 until one of them cores. 

Bone and meat aren't all that tough.  If wood can punch through them, being able to punch MORE through them isn't going to give adamantine much of an advantage.  I suspect it gives more benefit to piercing armor and slashing weapons in general. 

Well did a quick test and even with the HELM set to MATERIAL_SIZE 300 (2 x 150), which makes it take the correct amount of metal bars, it only takes 1 bone to carve at a craftdwarves workshop (instead of, say, 300 bones as I feared)

My understanding is that most workshop jobs are just hardcoded recipies.  1 Bone--> 1 hat, the material and item properties are in the raws but the job isn't.  Even the forge stuff is only partly done, since partial bars are still just abstracted into the smelter. 

Also, shouldn't that helm still just take 1 bar to forge, because one bar = 3 "old material size" = 450 "new material size"? 

I made a duplicate save, and in both cases I had to melt two iron breastplates for a whole iron bar to be displayed in my smelter.

Thats odd.  Either your updated armors should be producing dozens of bars or the vanilla armors should be producing only 1/10 each.  Sounds like melting is hardcoded, or else the changes require a genning a world to fully take effect. 

Item weight does have an effect on encumbrance and may also be involved in the combat calculations (or maybe just material density is used). 
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Weight