Bay 12 Games Forum

I haven't really noticed marksdwarves being any more lazy than melee types. It does help to remove all their other labors (other than cleaning and highly-skilled low-demand jobs that actually matter) once you draft them. When they don't have anything else to do they seem to be much more likely to actually train, as opposed to sitting around admiring tables in the meeting hall.

Even with this done, it seems like some dwarves just spend way more time at the range. I chalk it up to personality differences, though I couldn't tell you exactly which ones matter.

You can also pit captured creatures in/near the practice range for xp boosts.

For maximum laziness, I recommend The Lazy Newb Pack. It has Phoebus installed by default, but the .bat program included can switch between graphics packs as well as some other nifty features. It comes with several utilities as well.

It's even been updated to the most recent version... for now.

Do these fortifications have a square (non-diagonal) that the dwarves can build them from?

I appreciate the suggestions thus far, and especially the general advice on tactics. However, I not a fan of the idea of a danger room for the same reason that I don't want to decorate every inch of my entrance with OP little cage traps. It does sound effective, and I will probably give it a try one day, but I (naively, perhaps) want it to flow naturally, without having to cheat, nor go through painstaking micro-management to do so.

Even burrows are too much work for me. :/

Burrows are too much work? You select an area for the burrow, then turn the alert on when you want all the Urist McSquishies to go there. It's extremely easy unless you want to micro-manage individual burrows to minimize work interruption. Personally, I just do one burrow and then resolve the issue quickly so everyone can get back to work.

Honestly, I consider danger rooms more of a high risk, high reward venture. They can take awhile to set up, depending on the size you want, since it's bottlenecked to 1 mechanic working on hooking up traps at a time (unless you use two or more pressure plate/levers). Not only that, but pets constantly get in to my danger room despite having 3 pet-airlock doors. I had to discharge one of my soldiers when two of his pets died and he got dangerously unhappy. Not to mention that injuries can happen in danger rooms (I've been lucky so far). Not to mention that simultaneously you have to get decent armor set up. Also, on at least two occasions my repeater has just plain stopped working and needed to be shut down for repairs. I now have an auto-reset lever.

It's basically lessening the chance of an early military catastrophe (once it is actually operational) and raising the chance of other types of fun. So I guess it comes down to choosing whether you want your embark to end with a bang or a whimper, if it comes to that. If you're the blaze of glory type, more power to ya.

I hadn't tried it before my latest fortress, but I was pleasantly surprised by the speed with which a danger room trained my dwarves. With the amount of time I spent building it, the repeater to power it, and the hospital to treat the danger room's victims (none so far, surprisingly with almost all trained to legendary weapon and armor skill), and the armor to keep them from getting danger roomed'd, I thought for sure I'd have goblins breathing down my neck. Traps and the occasional lava bath held them off more than long enough though. And my hospital was overly-elaborate and took quite some time to build due to the plumbing system/reactors.

I'll have trouble if I ever need to go back to a simpler method...

You shouldn't need a gear between a vertical axle and a pump, as long as the axle is directly above one of the spaces of the pump. Pumps tend to act like gears for translating power in most circumstances I have encountered.

Well, heavier armor will result in them moving slightly slower (although I believe armor training can decrease this penalty). However, because I have not yet seen a marksdwarf that will actually attempt to run away when fighting in melee or move to better cover when fired upon, moving more quickly isn't much of an advantage for them, other than possibly firing a little faster.

Also, marksdwarves only have piercing damage, so I think anything that can't bleed to death or die from organ damage will pretty much just laugh at you unless you have some other sources of damage, be they traps or more dwarf-based.

As far as I know, the magma-based workshops are always available. They're just not really worth building unless you actually have some access to magma. And without being too cryptic or hopefully ruining anything: there's magma on every embark location, if you look in the right places. It's just that there's occasionally magma elsewhere as well (volcanoes, magma pipes).

I have seen this as well. I thought they were only supposed to grow after the first cavern breech, but I think I had seen them without a breech once before.

You can link multiple items to a single lever/pressure plate.