Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh yes, speaking of bedrooms. They are highly optional. Actually, dwarves are happy with simple beds, you can just stick 50 beds in one room and make them all bedrooms (i.e. a dormitory except the dwarves can claim a bed), because dwarves are simple, they're happy to simply have a bed to call their own. The bedrooms people like to dig out? Terribly indulgent, totally unnecessary. Just shove 50 beds in one room and so something more worthy with your attention span. It's what I used to do while learning the military side of things and it works extremely well. If you want to boost room value (it's not necessary) you can install an artifact (furniture or weapon in a weapon trap) in the middle of the room, and even divided over all the beds, it'll give a pretty decent room value.

I take away my dwarves' named weapon all the time, if I want to replace it with a steel or masterwork version. Now I admit I've never checked specifically for bad thoughts, but I've never seen a bad thought related to having a named weapon taken away, and my dwarves don't seem to care in the slightest - they just cheeryfully go and get their newly assigned weapon.

As for the question of effectiveness, these things are notoriously difficult to test, I suspect in any case that if there is a bonus, it certainly wouldn't be better than the upgrade from going form say, bronze to steel for a bladed weapon.

Thanks for all the response's. So from what I'm seeing, if I split up my current ten man squad into 5 2 man squads, they all train faster, right?

If you use dhack there's a fix which makes large squads train faster - it has to be enabled in dfhack.init

However I actually prefer small squads for others reason too - firstly, early in the game you can't afford a squad of 10, but a squad of 2 is highly affordable and will deal with all early threats more effectively than traps. Secondly two well trained dwarves are ample to smash ambushes, most sieges, most things you'll find in the caverns. One dwarf is often enough but of course dwarves being what they are and needing to sleep and stuff, you'll sometimes only get one dwarf of the two, but it's normally enough (if one dwarf dies, give the survivor a new partner. The legendary will run a lot faster so will draw the attention of all the nasties, while the trainee comes up behind and helps mop up - it works out quite well and often the trainee becomes legendary as well in time).
Things which two dwarves aren't enough for, are basically things like deadly dust forgotten beasts which will kill almost everything thrown at them, it could be said that if throwing two legendary military dwarves at a problem wont solve it, then nor will throwing 10, you'll just end up with 10 corpses instead of 2.

So the squads of two are generally good from a deployment perspective, you can deploy one squad to obliterate an ambush, while another squad is ready for the OTHER ambush which pops up. Dwarves' stick like glue to their existing target so you basically need some guys sitting around twiddling their thumbs in reserve. Now there is an interface option for splitting up squads, but I find it really unwieldy to use and find it easier to just use small squads.

What I like to do is have two or three squads of 2 - ultra legendary, top-notch gear, they are the rapid response team, all drawn from the starting seven or first 2-3 immigration waves. I then make about 4 or 5 squads of 10 marksdwarves (permanently inactive), after that there is normally an over-abundance of labor, so I make some more melee squads, but these are squads of 10, normally all hammer, or all axe (to avoid waffling over weapons). These guys, can train at their leisure, because the elites will take care of most ordinary threats. These guys are basically for protecting the marksdwarves and soaking up damage, if you have a lot of dwarves charge into a huge fray the chances of a lucky shot taking down an ultra-legendary is small.

So I feel there is a place for both squads of 2 and squads of 10, squads of 2 = early game, squads of 10 = late game.

Even 100% terrifying biomes vary a lot. You make get a few wumpy zombie wolves and raining dwarf blood, and that's all (making it kind of creepy but not all that dangerous), or you could have blister inducing rain of doom, insanity inducing evil clouds of doom and giant zombie moths of doom.

For the most part only one pack of animals comes onto the map at a time (technically, there is always one pack unless everything has gone extinct, and sometimes one loner) so statistically speaking you're not going to have a pack from the terrifying biome very often. You might get unlucky and have something evil spawn there on embark, and bee-line your dwarves, but it'd be pretty unlikely. You might want to check what animals are on the map right at the start, so you know whether you have to panic or not.

The best survival strategy for "genuinely terrifying" embarks is to bring very little stuff and IMMEDIATELY get your dwarves underground because the rains can be so unpleasant to say nothing of zombie fliers, so often you kind of end up playing low point embark anyway. Such panic is not needed when the caravan lands in a non-evil biome.

Dear Urist McHunter (recently deceased),

I don't object to you trying to hunt Giant Cave Spiders (actually, I do, because I want to catch them), but just for future reference (not that you can read this, because you're dead, and your spouse is unhappy now, jerk), if you are going to try and hunt Giant Cave Spiders you might want a better strategy than sneaking up to within 3 tiles of it and trying to shoot it in the face - well, you know why now, I don't need to explain. Just so you know after the GCS finished nomming on your head it got caught in a cage trap and is now proudly displayed at the entrance to the fortress.

Sincerely,
Your compassionate and benevolent overlord.

The skill I usually take that I don't see mentioned here is Herbalism. Getting a jump start on year-round "aboveground" farming (channel out a little block and roof it over with bridges) pretty much guarantees a self-sufficient, lock-down-able fortress. I usually find that there's an absurdly low number of rope reeds (and, if applicable, sun berries) on the map, so I crank herbalism to try to prevent failing on them.

I'm quite a big fan of embarking with herbalism too. A nice aspect of it is you get much bigger stacks, the dabbler will only ever bring in stacks of 1, but a proficient will sometimes bring in stacks of 4. As well as larger barrels of booze (which every dwarf will appreciate) you also get many more seeds for bootstrapping farming. So it's a very good deal, if you're into above-ground plants.

Now with that said, I have to confess that I mod plant growth times to be 4x usual, this makes herbalism relatively better compared with farming - farming is still better overall, but herbalism is far more convenient at times.
I also have to confess, that I don't like plump helmets, pigtails, sweetpods, cave wheat, quarry bushes or especially dimple cups. Sorry, just ain't a big fan of crap which grows underground in the damp and dark. Throw me down the magma chute for heresy but I prefer to grow above ground crops in the sunshine and rain like an elf (but, it must be noted, that there are much nicer offerings above ground, there are no less than 7 edibles: sun berries, strawberries, fisher berries, prickle berries, ratweed, bloated tuber and muck root, two edibles after milling: longland grass and whipvine, quite a lot of brewables: all the previous, plus rope reed and several dyes)

I don't roof over my aboveground farms because I like the extra !FUN! potential of being exposed to the open air (and also some strategically placed cage traps will do a good job of catching birds which try to fly in to nick stuff or eat vermin).

What I do is I make lots of dwarves with hauling, masonry, mechanics and architecture enabled, I also enable medical skills on many as well (but more haphazardly).

Then for my important dwarves, the ones I want to make high quality stuff, I give them the custom profession of "Chief XYZ", so "Chief Cook", "Chief Leatherworker",  "Chief Armorsmith". When the fortress gets large enough, the chiefs will have other duties turned off. If a dwarf with superior skill immigrates, I make him/her the new Chief. This scheme is useful for keeping track of who has the highest skill, especially when you either A) have multiple armorsmiths due to immigration, or B) your best armorsmith is an even better furnace operator (for example).

Some jobs are caste, Miners are normally dedicated (sometimes my miners are used as woodcutters, this is because my miners normally aren't in the military because I don't like the uniform problems), so are farmers [farming: field, only]. For some skills with quality levels, like bone carving, I don't bother with a 'chief' but just let multiple dwarves train. Ditto for cooking, not because high quality roasts aren't cool, but because my cooks have a tendency to die and I like having a spare.