Bay 12 Games Forum

Going complealty vanilla is kinda painful due to the rather clunky interface the stock game has.  At least DFhack not for the cheat aspect but for the ease of use plugins really makes the experience more enjoyable.  Your going to either have to break down and get DFhack or DT or just suffer through not having them in this case.

Many people actually recommend 2 adjacent stockpiles for seeds, or even 2 1-tile stockpiles per seed type.

One should be to set to "take from anywhere" & to give to the other, which should be set to take from the 1st pile & only "accept from links".

This does unfortunately mean you need 2 bags per seed type, but it should significantly reduce the incidence of the bag your farmer wants to use being carted off to the dining haul or still to add the leftovers from the last snack or drink.

Thats the more advanced form. that cuts down even further on the spam.

Another alternitive is to put your stills and farmer workshops near the fields and dissalow seeds in all stockpiles.  You'll end up wit seeds cluttering up the dining hall sometimes but most of them will stay in the workshops for your farmers to grab at their leisure.

9 is 1984, 10 is Civilization.

Intresting bit on 10.  Never did much forum trolling back when I played the civ series.  Dont recall ever takeing a tank up agianst a spearman but found it with google after that lead.   I really should read 1984.  Its one of those books thats been siting on the too read list forever but never got around too.

1/2) Well a good first step is for every migrant wave after the first 2 hardcoded ones draft 2-3 dwarfes into their own squad, assign them a weapon and get them training.  If the wave is exceptionaly large or you are already comfortable with your workforce feel free to draft more but keep em in 2 or 3 man training squads.  This will start building a modest sized force and like a saveings account it grows over time.  You can keep adding to your military whenever you notice that your idelers are staying consistantly high.  Theres no hard and fast % of your fort that should be military, just follow the rule of thumb that all dwarves should be doing something productive, if they are not productive its probably time for boot camp.

3) early on? melee dwarves about 75%.  Untill they are trained and well armored frankly I wouldn't bother sending in the melee without 2-1 odds(2 dwarfs to 1 enemy)  Marksdwarves you can probably go no losses right out the gate if you can get them to all arrive with bolts in their quiver if there is not too many enemies. If you perch them out of reach of melee behind fortifications then they can plink all day as long as no eliet bowmen show up.  Melee dwarves do shine later on but you really want them training for a couple years in 2-3 man squads or stick them in a danger room for a while.

4) meh up to you.  I try to keep my female military as marksdwarvs and the melee all male but baby meat shields are a valid approach depending on who you ask.

5)  Iron is good enough to start and its better than nothing if you need your military for an emergency.  Better to gear them now and upgrade them later if at all possible.  If nothing else once you have enough steel/candy equipment for your military you can issue all that iron gear to the civies so they have a chance of surviving an ambush.

Would it be possible to build a safe house before abandoning, placing it so that the reclaim party's wagon starts inside it? It'd probably need access to the map edge for it to be a valid spawn location, but that could be handled by drawbridges if it's the only problem. Then you'd have to hope that no unfriendly creatures also start inside the safe house...

Will the wagon always spawn in the same spot?  might be possible to build a small hut around that area with a bridge and lever already hooked up so the dwarves can just seal it off right away.

As for dwarves in squads, i like a good bit of sexism, the military is stricktly for men, as i dont want the women running around having babies mid-fight

Oh come on there's nothing more entertaining than a female dwarf(or wardog) poping out a sprog the instant after they get a killing blow.  Talk about bein hardcore.

you can also set items and bodies to be forbidden on death. That may be annoying sometimes, so you can change it back when the siege/assault is over

Not really that hard to do a mass reclaim over the site of a battle when its time to clean up, and maybe your hospital depending on how things went.  As long as you dont let enemies go and touch your civies in bad places you shouldnt have alot of random auto forbiden equipment scattered outside of where the battle happend.

I stand corrected on the sealing.  To be honest I tend to seal the HFS in prior to the final colapse and so tend to end up in a mostly recoverable situation asumeing the tantrum spiral from my military geting wiped out dosent finish things off.  Didnt know that tidbit about remaining monsteres populating from the outside in however.  Explains the one time I tried to seal things off and the reclaim was really hairry, though I'd just missed an exit.