Bay 12 Games Forum

Useful tidbit: when embarking in the current version, always check the preferences on your Starting Seven to make sure that they don't like crystal glass.  Since they're the most likely to ascend to early noble positions, this greatly reduces the risk of a crystal glass mandate, which in turn reduces¹ the necessity of giving them a magma shower.



1. Necessity of magma shower may be reduced by imperceptible amounts.  Likelihood may remain at or near 100% in common situations.  Your mileage may vary.  Do not expose beard to sunlight, coal dust, water, alcohol, or open flame.  Do not feed dwarves cheese after midnight.  Do not taunt magma.  Void where prohibited.

backflip, as a supply-chain guy, you're probably trying to do the most with the least, but I would encourage you to think like a union organizer.  Dwarves get paid a flat rate for hauling jobs, but they are lazy and easily distracted, so if the hauling path is too long, you can end up with rotten food and miasma.  I like to think of my food in two supply chains: barrel foods and bag foods.

(1) Barrel Foods - two plots; one on the surface and one directly below, with a staircase that leads to a secluded seed pile that only allows seeds from plants you grow in this sector.  Rotate crops to include anything you want to brew.  In winter, be sure to grow plump helmet.  Also guarantee one season of sweet pods, which you should process into syrup for high-value roasts.  Nearby workshops include a still, a farmer's workshop, and a carpenter's workshop with a full queue of barrel jobs.  A small dorm, a woodpile, or even a tiny dining room are also nice luxuries for this area.  If you fertilize your fields, a pile that will accept potash is nice too.  The "output" pile for this area should be a single stockpile that can accommodate all of this zone's products.

(2) Bag Foods - another pair of plots, same arrangement.  These fields grow rope reed and pig tail for making bags, longland grass and dwarven wheat for processing into flour, sweet pods if you don't mind the inefficiency of sugar, and quarry bushes because they are super awesome.  In the winter grow dye crops like dimple cup.  Workshops in this zone include a loom, dyer, clothier, mill, and farmer's workshop (you may want two in this zone).  A bag stockpile that accepts low- and mediocre-quality bags should be nearby, but you should also have an overflow area for higher-quality dyed bags to be used as containers in dwarves' rooms.  Again, having an 'output' pile is nice.

(3) Meat and Leather - cages, breeding pits, a butcher, a tanner, a dyer, and a leather works.  Produces leather bags (back to 2) and meat (ahead to 4 and 5), as well as bones and skulls for crafting.

(4) Luxury Kitchen - a single kitchen that only allows your best cook.  This kitchen should pull from zones (1) and (2) and take quarry bush leaves, dwarven syrup, whip vine flour, and sunshine booze.  It should also accept cheese and luxury meats like dragon or unicorn.  Makes roasts (4 ingredient meals) all the time.  Should have easy access to the trade depot.

(5) Common Kitchen - accepts all other ingredients that can't be eaten raw as well as lower-preference booze, and makes Easy meals all the time, to maximize the number of cooking jobs per ingredient and skill up additional cooking staff.  Should also be near the trade depot to accommodate inexpensive meat that you import.

(6) Pantry - accepts all raw foodstuffs and is near the dining hall. 

Because of pile rules (A can take from B and C, but A and B can't take from C) you'll need to be careful how you set up your pile exclusions.  This setup gives you extraordinarily high-value roasts good for trading, cloth and leather supplies good for crafting, and a wide variety of foods that your dwarves will love.  I find that this strategy allows me to operate a fortress as a drive-through restaurant, trading single ludicrously-ornate roasts for the entire contents of an elven caravan.

Elves don't siege...

They don't siege because the siege announcement was making all of their enemies laugh too hard to hear the elven demands.  "A SHINY FORCE OF RAINBOWS HAS ARRIVED!"

they only send ambush squads (riding unicorns) or at least I've never had them siege even when they've been at war with my forts parent dwarven civilization.

...if you anger the elves, make sure to add cage traps to your defenses.  Unicorns breed reliably, a unicorn filet grills up nicely in a dwarven syrup sauce, and sending your hit squads out to kill the elves while wearing suits of unicorn-bone armor is a great way to twist the knife.

The easiest way to get started with engineered defenses starts with "M" and rhymes with "BOAT".  Dig a moat, throw a three-tile-wide bridge across it, and consider funneling traffic from that bridge into a narrow area overlooked by fortifications bristling with marksdwarves.  I recommend digging your moat early using the "everybody digs" embark profile, but you can do it however/whenever you feel it's appropriate. 

Moat-only defenses will cause invaders to scare off dwarves within line-of-sight (even if they're safely on opposite sides of the moat).  A moat without a wall also leaves you vulnerable to archers.  I don't think it's specifically coded that way, but every time I gambled on a moat being enough, the goblin siege armies sent archers.

So, put up a moat first, a wall second, and then start on towers and other fortifications.  I like to use Export Local Image to get a print-out of my fort's surface layer and plot out where the towers are going to go in advance so I don't run into trouble.

One last word of advice: when ordering tower construction on upper floors, place any exterior corners first.  Once they're constructed, place the remaining walls and interior corners.  Dwarves have a funny habit of walling themselves in (TONIGHT ONLY: a dazzling one-man performance of Poe's Cask of Whip Wine!) or leaving the hardest bits for last and then shrugging at their inability to do that part of the work.

Here's a visualization of what you can do if you plan carefully before striking the earth.  My fort's in year 4, and we're just now starting on adding upper floors to the bastion (round tower to the west).  The gate-house has access from below and a working drawbridge, and there's a bunker that currently holds archers but will soon hold three ballista teams, with the archers moving to the floor above to command a view of the approach.

To the OP, I wouldn't say you're at the midgame because with DF, there's no single endgame (so there's no way to measure 'halfway').  Rather, I'd say that you have successfully finished the 'settle and survive' phase.  The way I typically play, the phases go

- Settle & Survive
- Establish Farming Industry (Craft and Trade Farming Byproducts)
- Weather Sieges
- Establish Metalworking Industry (Craft and Trade Secondary and Tertiary Byproducts)
- Keep the Nobles From Rioting (n.b. this phase is very simple if your metalworking industry is founded on magma)
- Gird The Fortress In Luxury
- Megaprojects & Megabeasts

...but that's just how I play the game.

Are there any memory layouts for Dwarf Manager / Dwarf Foreman / Dwarf Therapist that are compatible with d17 yet?

At some point soon the interaction between dwarvish diet, exercise, climate, and survivability is going to create some incredible emergent behavior.  Dwarfs in warm climates will be able to survive on booze, grains, mushrooms, and fresh fruits... but a dwarf in a cold or freezing biome is going to need to eat very fatty meats to stay alive, especially if he's outside a lot.

I'd love to see convective and conductive heat transfer (!) taken into account, even if you just calculate the steady-state temperature for each Z-level of each embark tile with a wind penalty for being outside.  That way, dwarves living more than five or six Z-levels down (or in an embark tile with a magma source) would be warm most of the time, but dwarves on guard duty on a tile with the "outside" flag would be exposed to wind and surface temperatures.  That way your craftsdwarves would end up eating a mostly-vegetarian diet because they would tend to be pampered and kept warm; meanwhile your warrior caste and woodcutters would eat lots of fatty meats to stay warm, and would end up becoming almost all muscle.  The smiths and smelters would probably eat leaner meats and lots of fruit to stay hydrated, but their muscles would also end up looking like someone wrapped pink steel bridge-cables around a fire hydrant and then shrink-wrapped it in a bearskin.

...at which point you need to start asking yourself which kind of physique a female dwarf is going to select for her mate!

In any case, it's clear that eventually all of the vegetables will need separate ratings for crispness and freshness, and the meats are going to need calories from protein and calories from fat. 

i must suggest that you cast off the horribly broken 4th edition.

3.5 is a much better system.

What does the 3½th Edition Monster Manual say about trolls?  Oh yeah: "Do not feed them." 
This is where I should have locked the thread.  Not sure how I failed to notice the flame-war going on around me.  Y'all can have a cat-fight somewhere else.