Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, and since civilizations never seem to appoint new leaders after world gen you end up with lots of human fortresses without a lord/lady to give you quests in adventure mode. Still even without a diplomat killing the caravan often enough and never letting them leave with profit should eventually lead to war.

You misread tame for train. Small animals can't be trained, they can only be eaten and processed for extracts (a select few). You can also try to put them up for adoption, but since dwarfs normally have no preference for vermin that will probably do nothing.

Yes, station them in front of the fortifications with a (m)ove order. Notice that dwarfs who are of low skill will fail to shoot through fortifications if they're not right next to them, so you might have to restrict the possible tiles they can occupy by building walls.

If they don't just dump it away or wait till it degrades away. Besides a legendary dodger/shield user doesn't really need armor anyway.

Will this change the goblin mounted siege squad behavior? I read on the wiki the goblins can come with any underground creature that has the mount_exotic tag. But they never do for me.

Nah it's really just the scaling that is a little off, with farming being the worst. At the beginning you get stacks of 2-3 plants, later on with legendary farmers and potash you get so much food which gets crazy multipliers for being masterfully minced wealth isn't an issue. The material size being disabled means a decent outfit for a soldier for a mere 8 bars of metal. The legendary dwarves are pretty overpowered too. Attribute bonuses stacking up for every legendary skill leads to supersoldiers who can only die to syndromes (if you don't use dangerrooms it will take a few years but afterwards a siege doesn't mean anything but annoying dumping of goblin clothing). Legendary +5 crafters churn out the masterworks by the dozen (shouldn't a masterwork be something special? - instead it becomes the quality standard and anything else is melted/dumped/traded).
Enemies preferring gloves/shoes/leather over metal armor turns the table in the dwarfs favor too much (and results in even more clean up woes).
I could go on but i think i made my point.

Anyway I'm now on an embark that only has copper, silver and zinc, and I will probably not trade for metals i might still get enough goblinite for my armor needs anyway.

The bolt mechanics are weird to say the least, common sense would suggest bolts initially do piercing damage, but the wiki says they do edge damage (That means it will either slash or pierce and if i read the bit about contact area vs size right they should pretty much always pierce). For edged weapons steel is second best and adamantine is best because of its ridiculous max_edge parameter. Then why is adamantine the worst material for bolts (that's also written on the wiki btw).
Well for normal edge weapons the strength of the weapon wielder plays a big part in the damage that is done. Bolts however seem to rely on a kinetic energy model (of which no one but toady probably knows how detailed it is). Kinetic energy is 0.5*m*vē so it scales linearly with the bolts mass and quadratic with its velocity (the latter appearing to be a non-factor since ranged weapons always seem to fire ammunition at the max_velocity from the raws).
The biggest difference for bolts should come from the fact whether they pierce the armor or not (if they don't the damage is changed to blunt which can still damage the target even if the armor material completely outclasses the bolt material in all properties).
So what you would theoretically want is bolts that are very heavy and very hard.
Steel would fit the very hard part and adamantine would fit it even more. Silver would be the heaviest of the possible bolt materials, but its also very soft.
Anyway i don't know why i just wrote all this as testing shows that all bolt metals except adamantine perform pretty much the same. Imho just base the choice depending on what you have too much of.

Got ambushed in a good forest yesterday... companions impaled on unicorn horns everywhere \o/