Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm excited for my turn, should be able to start tonight.  I don't mind having to outfit all the bedrooms and stuff, but if we have any plans or schematics or anything, could you either post them in the thread, or put a file in the save or something?

You said the upper couple layers of some of these towers were soil layers?  Do we have any intention of building some rooftop gardens or anything?  That could provide an additional food source.

I love the idea of mandates!  Can I sign up for a turn please?  As long as I don't have to start until Friday night or later.

Personally, I think succession games are much more fun when there are goals that take collaboration or at least continuation from previous overseers rather than just whatever project you come up with.  Otherwise I have to make my own one-year projects and end up with a 3/4 completed drowning trap or something.

I'm excited to see your secure fortress.  I've been playing on evil maps, but I haven't got one with a universal rising dead effect.  I only seem to get zombie-creating dust or rain.

I've been having thoughts about crypt security and I want to try them out.  If you can get the fortress stable for a year, enough to not instantly die, other overseers might be able to shore up remaining weak points.  Just point them out in your posts.

Carving up-ramps rather than channelling doesn't completely protect the cave-in option, but it makes it somewhat safer.  You can't be safe the whole time, but you can reduce surface exposure.  And a tower is just a room with the ground around it collapsed three times or so...

Also, you could always dig up and expose you battle arena to the surface for the benefits of rain/mist, but keep the fortified walls underground and allowing you as much time as you need to engineer the field of fire.

You could try roofing the whole thing over with bridges, I'm not sure whether or not that would still let rain in, there are some weird behaviors to the underside of bridges.

I think he just wants to know that you can use U,K,H,M while choosing a site to change the size of the embark.

Only once, but yes.  If you get the stone muddy with water, then you can build a farm plot there, and once you have a farm plot built, it never needs to be wet again, but it does severely limit your farming options until you find water.

And the caverns are worth figuring out too, although you can just avoid those if you want.

I say get a fortress going that you are comfortable with and think is fairly successful in a non-evil biome, when you get up to like 100 dwarfs, maybe abandon it and start a new one in an evil biome.

I vary load-outs by biome quite a bit, but if you take a temperate or warm biome with trees and shallow/deep metal and it isn't evil, you shouldn't have too many problems.

I'd bring 3 female dogs, 1 male, maybe 2 male cats, lots of seeds, booze, meat, a couple picks, a couple axes, and spend most of your points in whatever skills you like most that are hard to train.  A lot of people put max skills in armorer and weaponsmith on one dwarf, because they are hard to train later and valuable.  I always max one doctor dwarf out in Diagnostician, with the rest spread 3 Surgery, 2 Suturing, 1 Wound Cleaning.  This guy will then be an early hauler/mason.

Really, the most important skills are so quick to train because you do them a lot (Masonry, Mining, Carpentry, etc) that I just have a doctor, a weapon/armor smith, and maybe a mechanic/architect for speed and then spend the rest on booze and other supplies.

Oh, and it is worth noting that grazing animals need pasture space now.  There is a good table of how much they need under Pasture on the wiki, but otherwise your horses and whatnot will starve to death.  Cats and Dogs still don't eat though, so no worries there.  But food production is a bit more complicated than it used to be.

Oh, and trees grow underground in the caverns too!

I'd suggest trying a non-haunted biome first.

You could get lucky, but clouds that turn your cats into undead that can never die and either wipe out your army, as I read somewhere, or in my case, grind the fortress to a halt with cancellation spam, instant death rain, and perhaps other complications may make the haunted biome more of a chore then you want when you still have to relearn how to farm underground (get the floor wet), how to organize a military, how to set up a hospital, and various crap you may have forgotten like what workshops you need for some of the more complicated industries.  The wiki is your friend, and with enough pause time, forum posts, and wiki lookups I'm confident any player can handle anything, but the haunted and terrifying biomes will add countless extra security considerations that may be more trouble than they are worth when you're still trying to learn the differences from 40d and trying to remember what you once knew about fortress security when undead and weather were less of a problem.