Bay 12 Games Forum

(5) You scramble the signal, and preventing more pollice officers from coming.

Use a smallish table as a shield and hit Erils. Destroying furniture is unforgivable!

What do you mean by scaffolding? Building stairs next to the structure? Building ramps?

Dwarf Fortress: Immigrants are the expendable gender.

If you want FUN, you should try bringing magma to the surface to power your forges. No wiki allowed. Hint: screw pumps.

Otherwise, I've found that most of the conflict lies from what the player allows himself to use. Turtling is fool-proof against caverns and outside forces, Shaft of Enlightment and Danger Rooms make your military pretty broken very easily, Forge X to melt X to forge 1.5X makes steel easy to come by once you have access to magma etc etc.
So read the exploits, don't use them, and you'll improve the add flavour to play a harder game.

The RNG itself brings the second biggest conflict. FBs can come in easy form (fleshy) or hard (metal, fire/poison breath etc) and there's nothing you can do about it. Moods bring a big randomness factor, especially once some merchants have brought exotic items that you forgot to buy and they are very random in their requirements. In your case, the evil biome isn't reanimating, and the rain has destroyed the scenery, but it isn't always the case. Any evil biome (afaik) can be reanimating, and rains can be non destructive in evil environments.

Engineering is the third source of conflict, with mega-projects being the most prominent. Generational forts, Hermits, Theme parks forts and community forts can bring much fun from the limited resources you have to work with etc.

TL;DR:
1: No.
2: No.
3: What was the question again?
4: It is currently impossible to harvest the material an inorganic FB is made of.
5: FBs will always come, except if they are extinct. If the world is young, the megabeasts will be numerous, but weak (think Sturgeon's law). Don't bet on dragons though, they are pretty rare.
As the world gets older, vampires will appear. Which is a nice distraction from everyday life.
Empirical evidence has shown me that Necro towers can pop as early as year 150, but year 300 is much more frequent.

No worries, I'm exploiting. The only annoying thing is that the auto-melt script that makes a stockpile automatically mark items in it for melting makes my game crash after ~1 season. So I have to designate manually.

For now, I'm nicknaming Dwarves after the first name of their father, adding the number of their generation to it. I'm pretty lucky because this fortress has 12 families (and at least 4 of them have both husband and wife alive!) and no two families have the same family name. That's pretty cool.

I'd like to automate it, but it means fiddling with the memory of the game (I don't know how to do it) and the randomness of the family names makes it likely that two dwarves from different families will have the same name, so...

I am currently trying to refill my steel stocks by melting and forging axe blades etc. I want all my dwarves to be, at all times, equipped with masterwork steel armor and battle axes.
It's going good for now, because I used the 1 bar for 500 coins for 50 bars exploit (manually, mind you). Some dwarves have just under masterwork quality armor pieces. Now, only my dedicated woodcutter and dedicated miner are clothed, the rest are armored.
It's easier since I'm doing a closed fort. Invaders are ON, but I embarked with some wood, cut enough to be self sustaining for a loooong time, and disabled trading and migration.
Now I have 15 adult dwarves (3 or so have died from failed moods), very high drink and food stocks, and 25 or so children (pop cap set to 0, though, which means pop cap doesn't stop pregnancies).
I'm waiting for the first children to get old enough to work. For now, this is a pretty boring fort, since I don't need to expand at all.

I'd really like to have family names instead of random names

Take a towel and dry myself up. "Thank God it was only a nightmare!"

Name: Sebastian
Gender: Butler
Age: Enough wrinkles to be classy. Old enough not to be fit, but far from decrepit.

Overturn a table and hide.