Bay 12 Games Forum

Wall your fortress off behind a dry moat and get some archers drafted. Also look up "civilian alert" on the wiki. That way you can always delay dealing with the beast until you're ready, and when you are ready you can shoot at it from a safe distance. Many titans seem to die rather easily after being shot 20+ times. Build some sort of plank with a pit zone that will allow you to toss a bait animal over the moat if you need to lure something in.

What he said. Beds, tables, chairs, fancy stuff. Tables and chairs help out when a manager needs to approve work orders from prison.

Jail cells with food stockpiles will get raided by random dwarves, don't think there's anything you can do about it really, but it's still worth placing food/drink in the cells. Marking the cells as restricted traffic areas might help, but might also discourage refilling of the stockpiles. Also, placing the entrance to the prison area near some sort of high traffic or meeting area might help a little. I usually create jail cell clusters on their own level off of a central stairwell where they aren't many hops from a well and meeting area.

FOCUS: archer, observer, ambusher
WILLPOWER: "resists exertion/pain effects"
SPATIAL SENSE: "combat skills"
KINESTHETIC SENSE: "Most skills involving any movement at all (lots of them)"

I did read about these, but I didn't include them in the suggested starting stats because these can all be raised relatively easily by doing stuff like sharpening and throwing rocks over and over. In any case they didn't seem as important as stuff like maxing out toughness and agility for maximizing survivability for those who aren't sure what they're doing yet.... I this point I don't know for sure if it's more important for defense to, say, max out toughness or if it's better to subtract a point from that and increase spacial sense or something.

Basically what I was trying to do was come up with the right allocation of stats/skills to come up with the hardest to kill character right off the bat, to facilitate getting through the tutorial, which isn't necessarily the best thing for longer term play. For example, I'm not sure I'd put any points into social awareness in a normal game since I'm not sure the extra companion slot(s) matter that much in the long run, but the extra companion in the beginning helps keep the noob alive enough to get through the tutorial.

Last time I tried it, even a 10Z drop onto 10 giant iron spikes didn't usually kill goblins instantly. They'd be so wounded that they couldn't do anything and would die eventually but still I was quite disappointed that being impaled on 10 spikes after a 10z drop wasn't instant death. 10 serrated discs and a 1z drop would be more effective.

In custom worldgen parameters you can up the number of titans to 100,000. (Though it says titans, I believe it actually means all megabeasts.)

The problem is that with 100,000 megabeasts running around the history generation will take forever as all of them roam around and do stuff.

I generated a pocket world with 10,000 "titans" and history generation wasn't too bad, but I ended up with small communities of 10+ megabeasts per lair/site instead of the usual one per site. Even with a small army that can become a little unmanageable.

I'm not sure if it's necessary but I give archers bucklers. This makes sense because they're strapped on the lower arm, leaving the hands free.

Copper armor isn't really that bad, and copper weapons are still reasonably effective. Give that you have lots of silver I'd probably make silver bolts and weight your military more heavily towards archery. Let the copper-clad guys clean up the bleeding pincushions.

Also, make valuable items and buy up ALL of the metal items of metals you don't have, even toy axes etc, then melt it all down. You can end up with a significant amount of iron and steel that way. Requesting items from the dwarven caravan that are likely to be made of metal also helps.