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[Sarmatian123]

I had once FB idling on side of my well in a cavern. Not moving even to attack passing by Dwarves for some reason. It seems FB needs 1 empty space to be able to destroy its target. It is a bug. I guess the upward hatch trick exploits this bug in FB behavior.

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

Re the OP, I've never really settled on a ''standard" embark setup, but you got me thinking about it anyways.  I jumped into the prepare carefully screen and cobbled together one that I would consider to be comfortable with using in *most* situations.  Note that some item types are merged for clarity and those counts are a bit rounded because I'm lazy.

Dorfs:
Leader - Brewer 10 Appraiser 6
Doctor - 2 pts in each of the 5 doctor skills
Soldier - Weapon 7 Shield 8 Armor 7 Fighter 8
Soldier - Weapon 7 Shield 8 Armor 7 Fighter 8
Smith - Weapons 10 Armor 10
Woodworker - Carpenter 10 Bowyer 10
Farmer - Grower 10 Cook 8

Livestock:
4 dogs (2m/2f)
2 cats (1m/1f)

Building Materials:
anvil
stone[10]
logs[50]
lignite[22]
tetrahedrite[8]
cassiterite[8]
sand[6]

Food:
alcohol[80]
plump helmets[30]
assorted foods[60]

Seed:
PH Spawn[15]
all other seeds[5]

Medical Supplies:
plaster[6]
silk thread[6]
silk cloth[6]




Thoughts:
The dorfs above are ranked in order of priority, as far as aptitude goes.

The leader is the dwarf with the best social aptitudes which makes him the expedition leader and trader.  He is my starting brewer, but will probably stop doing that job as the fort matures.

It's not just important that the doctor has traits that make him want to do that work, but I also really want him to be interested in being a scholar.  This keeps his skills up.

If there's a lot of wood available on the map, I'm very likely to switch the Carpentry out for masonry.  I find it's faster to train carpentry, but would rather turn out quality goods from the start if wood is scarce.

If you're a fan of sealing enemies out of the fort in the event of an attack (I'm not), the soldier and bowyer skills don't have the same degree of immediacy and you can probably tone down the amount of bronze that you bring with you.

I used lignite because bituminous coal isn't available to my civ.  If bituminous coal is available you can replace the 22 lignite with 11 bituminous coal so you can probably get some savings there (I can't remember the price per unit of bituminous coal vs lignite for sure, so I'm not positive).


That being said, this embark gives 64 bronze bars and 80 coke.  Building 2 full sets of bronze plate amor + weapon + bronze shield for the soldiers, 2 axes, and 5 picks would take 31 bronze bars and 25 coke, leaving 33 bronze bars and 55 coke available for miscellaneous tools and/or trade goods.

The sand bags are there to jump start a glassmaking industry, if you desire it.  If not, you can dump the sand and reclaim the bags, which are always handy to have.

The plump helmets *can* be eaten in an emergency, but are really for brewing more alcohol and providing more seeds to jumpstart your agriculture.  They definitely shouldn't be cooked.

[daggaz]

No picks or did you just leave them out, and who does the mining in that setup?  Also, you could bring 3 female and 1 male dogs and get more puppers than bringing two males.  The lone male can be a stud. 

[gchristopher]

What's so great about having a high-level building designer? Just to increase the value of your buildings?

Again, the buildings will be installed faster, which is important in dangerous biomes and as well frees your mason up faster for getting back to production work.  Not sure if it increases building value, but again, this is not a bad thing.

Roads and bridges need it, and it's one of the harder/slower skills to train. It's also very rare on migrants.

I bring 5 dwarves with level 5 architect, because that's the high-use skill that seems harder to acquire than any other.

For most skills, you can get legendaries by manipulating the mood lottery. (Though I mostly train everyone to mood as mason for priceless building-destroyer-proof doors/hatches/furniture.)

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

No picks or did you just leave them out, and who does the mining in that setup?  Also, you could bring 3 female and 1 male dogs and get more puppers than bringing two males.  The lone male can be a stud.

My setup has the things necessary to make the picks.  Everyone that isn't a soldier does the mining, unless they're needed for some more important task at that moment.  Hell, if you really want, you can make 7 picks and put *everyone* on mining duty, putting off the arms and armor until you have the fort roughed out.  There's plenty of supplies there for that.

My build order would be:
Wood Furnace
Smelter
Smelter
Metalsmiths Workshop
2 Picks
Arms and Armor
Everything Else

While that's going on, idlers can be used to build other necessary things, like the mason and still and stuff.

Also, you could bring 3 female and 1 male dogs and get more puppers than bringing two males.  The lone male can be a stud. 

You can, but bringing two of each is a practice born of hard experience on my part.  Two pairs has more redundancy, in the event that a wandering monster decides to stop at your place for a snack and your soldiers aren't as prompt in showing that dwarven hospitality as they should be.

[Romeofalling]

While I agree that optimization is good to think about, I also think it's important to optimize the amount of fun I'm having, not the ability to produce some specific good quickly. A lot of my "optimization" choices come from that thinking. If I have a general game philosophy, it's that incremental mood boosts can save you from a tantrum spiral.

Except where noted, I nickname my starting dwarves after their favorite drink or a preference I can acquire more easily through trade. Incidentally, I'll also name any professional dwarves with the same system, and military dwarves get nicknamed their actual name (So Ezum becomes 'Ezum' and this easily sorts important dwarves from peons in Therapist).

I pick which dwarf gets which job based on their item preferences.

My TreeKiller, for example, is the one who likes axes or something made of wood, etc. He'll get Carpenter 5, because everybody interacts with the stuff he makes, so it might as well look nice and give people a free mood boost. I'll also be selling off anything he makes that isn't masterwork, until we have masterwork splints, crutchs, step ladders, wheelbarrows, beds, bins, etc. He also gets 1 in the entire Wood Burning -> Soap tree. (Elves are clearly dirty hippies because they can't make soap!). With stone pots, I no longer make wooden barrels except during the first year.

The Miner/Mayor is whoever has the least offensive possible mandates. He gets Miner 1, Appraiser 1, and social skills appropriate to his personality.

Mason 5 / Animal Handler 2 / Caretaker 3, usually. In my current fort, he loves rope reed paper, so he has papermaker 1 instead of one of the other points. I want my mason making doors, furniture, and statues asap, particularly because my preferred method of learning about the world is with the new(-ish) Details tab on the statue. I start by making statues about our civilization, look at them, and if I see someone do something interesting, I make more statues of him. I keep a record of this search visually stored in a statue garden. They get quite maze like and delightfully organic.

My Stonecrafter gets Architect 5, again on the argument of nice buildings inoculate against tantrums. He'll be nicknamed something that reminds me of what he likes to craft the most.

Next I look for my Mechanic/Glassmaker/Potter/Bonecarver. He's my odd jobs guy.

The Doctor gets Diagnostic 5, brewer 1, and 1 point in all the other medical skills.

The Herbalist 5 gets 1 grower, 1 cook, 3 leatherworker. High Herbalist means more seeds from each square I gather from, which makes my above ground crop farms stop spamming cancellation messages sooner. I try to make sure my still is producing all the alcohol preferences of my starting 7 and any Legendary Dorfs that migrate in. It makes them happy, but it also gives each fortress something memorable that connects them.

3 Picks, with the mason and stonecrafter working them until the soil layer, bedrooms and first workshops are completed. The soil layer has all the farming and treekilling stuff.

2 axes, because f*** those keas, dammit, I won't be fooled again.

Pets for each dwarf who can reasonably get one, especially egg laying ones.

3 Females and 2 males of any animals I'm breeding for yarn, leather, eggs or meat. That's part redundancy, as has been mentioned, and part to make sure I always have something to quickly kill if I need leather or bones for a Mood.

Notably, the dogs get trained up to wardog, and then the uglier of the two males gets gelded. I used to chain the gelded dog by my entrance to sniff for ambushers, but I felt bad about it, so now one dog gets his freedom and the other dog gets to keep his balls.

Also, since time immemorial, one male cat gets sacrificed to Armok if we manage to survive to the first spring. I'm quite pleased that I can now proudly display the cat skull totem we make of him on a pedestal in the dining room. The sexiest female cat gets pastured in the Soil Layer before the doors gets put in, so she has the run of the entire floor.

I start with one bar of everything that might be needed for a mood, 10 each of the hospital stuff, and I abuse the meat barrel & sand bag exploit.

[jecowa]

He'll get Carpenter 5, because everybody interacts with the stuff he makes, so it might as well look nice and give people a free mood boost.

This is how I feel about it. Getting +5 carpenter makes crafting beds faster so everyone gets a bed sooner, and then they all have nicer beds for it.

Mason 5 / Animal Handler 2 / Caretaker 3, usually. In my current fort, he loves rope reed paper, so he has papermaker 1 instead of one of the other points. I want my mason making doors, furniture, and statues asap, particularly because my preferred method of learning about the world is with the new(-ish) Details tab on the statue. I start by making statues about our civilization, look at them, and if I see someone do something interesting, I make more statues of him. I keep a record of this search visually stored in a statue garden. They get quite maze like and delightfully organic.

My Stonecrafter gets Architect 5, again on the argument of nice buildings inoculate against tantrums.

Do you think it might make more sense to pair the Mason skill with the Architect skill? Daggaz (OP) did this so that he could build stone bridges by himself.

High Herbalist means more seeds from each square I gather from, which makes my above ground crop farms stop spamming cancellation messages sooner.

That's the best reason I've heard for including an Herbalist.

Notably, the dogs get trained up to wardog, and then the uglier of the two males gets gelded. I used to chain the gelded dog by my entrance to sniff for ambushers, but I felt bad about it, so now one dog gets his freedom and the other dog gets to keep his balls.

Also, since time immemorial, one male cat gets sacrificed to Armok if we manage to survive to the first spring. I'm quite pleased that I can now proudly display the cat skull totem we make of him on a pedestal in the dining room. The sexiest female cat gets pastured in the Soil Layer before the doors gets put in, so she has the run of the entire floor.

How do you measure the attractiveness of your pets?

[Sarmatian123]

Thing with setting on embark high levels in a skill, which gets used rarely or a lot, but only on rare occasion is that skills deteriorate extremely fast. Those skill points spent on embark turn into lv1 (dubbling) just in few years time frame. This is why I take under consideration aptitudes of Dwarves for the skills and give them just +1 in some of those. If skill gets used, then they'll skill like a lightning. Recently I started considering to turn skills off from immigrants, as I can have a talented but unskilled Dwarf going legendary almost in the same time extremely unable immigrant Dwarf getting his skill from lv14 (high master) to lv16 (legendary). You don't need even spreadsheet for that. Just "u"-"enter" to check Dwarves in the list for their attributes and then with "u"-"y" you can leave remarks in their custom profession name. Also there is no mechanism in vanilla DF to check quality and value of workshops, bridges and other structures, so there is no point with those.

Lets be honest. Greatest challenge on embark is covering basic needs and shelter from wild life. Not maintaining skills sky high. It is matter of 1st season if not 1st year survival. Sometimes you need to greedily dig into 1st cavern for resources or just hide underground from immediate dangerous elements. You need to dig that cave asap and move all your stuff inside, then cover entrance with some wall, if not bridge. For that you need woodcutters to asap remove annoying trees on surface (if you cut them down later, trees will create holes in your cave's roof). Then you need miners. A lot. You need also some basic combat skills for your 7 Dwarves to fend off predators in your immediate area without any inflicted wounds. Discipline, observation, striking and kicking seem most efficient to shorten fight. Wrestling combines with biting and prolongs it, endangering your Dwarves to receiving wounds. When I had wrestling on one of my embarks bird of prey efficiently removed one leg on a wrestling Dwarf. What a fail.

[Romeofalling]

First, let me say that it's a pleasure talking to you, jecowa. I really appreciate your posts on this forum.

Mason 5 / Animal Handler 2 / Caretaker 3, usually....I want my mason making doors, furniture, and statues asap, particularly because my preferred method of learning about the world is with the new(-ish) Details tab on the statue. I start by making statues about our civilization, look at them, and if I see someone do something interesting, I make more statues of him. I keep a record of this search visually stored in a statue garden. They get quite maze like and delightfully organic.

My Stonecrafter gets Architect 5, again on the argument of nice buildings inoculate against tantrums.

Do you think it might make more sense to pair the Mason skill with the Architect skill? Daggaz (OP) did this so that he could build stone bridges by himself.

It might make sense for others to do, but I want my embark Mason to stay in his workshop as much as possible. To me, learning the world and looking for emergent stories is the actual game. Designing and building the fortress is just the path to get to the game. Those statues about our civ is my first step to finding out who they are as a people, what their values are in fort design, etc.

Mind you, part of that comes from the fact that I'm playing on OSX, and for the longest time, there was no equivalent to Legends Viewer for OSX. I only discovered the java-based Legends Browser this week.

Notably, the dogs get trained up to wardog, and then the uglier of the two males gets gelded. ...

How do you measure the attractiveness of your pets?

I haven't really thought about it before. I look at their descriptions and try to visualize each dog. I might look up the pictures of dogs with the different colors described. I make guesses about what breed it is based on the colors. For a couple of months back in....2014?, I would call a friend of mine who was really into dogs and ask her. It's a visualization exercise.

While it's nominally about breeding, it's really pretty subjective. It could also do with the dogs' temperaments. For example, in my current fort, one of my male dogs kept leaving the training pasture to fight badgers. By the time he was a wardog, he was covered in scars. A scarred dog that hasn't even been trained for war yet? That boy clearly needs to be neutered. Bad dog! Bad dog!

If I haven't noticed any "personality quirks," then I check the descriptions to see if their stats say anything about being particularly fat or anything. This is when I notice the color and look of the dog, and between the two, I usually have one that has nicer coloration. Failing that, I actually check Therapist and look at their stats. In the current game, the skinny one was also the naughty one, and then checking Therapist, his stats were all lower than the larger dog, so it was a pretty easy choice. Especially with a strength of 10.

Mind you, I might discover that it's the higher-stat dog that has been the troublemaker, and decide that my Mason just likes to kick the weaker dog around, and is always blaming him for the trouble the better breeding dog is actually doing. Turns the Mason into a bit of a redneckbeard, in my head. The dogs'll get up to something and I see the mason yelling at the dogs and grabbing a horizontal axle. What a dick, that guy is.

[Sutremaine]

Teacher + Dodge / Armour / Shield + turkeys. In previous versions, dwarves with this skill combo would very quickly demonstrate said skill to other dwarves and then start sparring. In my two embarks in 44.03, they've been far more interested in doing individual combat drills. Hm. Don't know what to make of that.

With that setup, I start with three peasants and lots of turkeys. After a while, I have lots of leather, lots of meat and bones and fat, lots of plants, and three recruits who won't moan about being returned to civilian life to power through hauling jobs.

Fastest dwarf usually gets to be Miner, even if I don't actually put any points into it. They'll be doing a lot of walking from place to place.
Slowest dwarf usually ends up with Consoler, Pacifier, Judge of Intent, Diagnostician, and maybe a couple of levels of Swimmer. Some jobs need a dwarf that won't drown, and everyone quicker got their ten levels allotted to skilled jobs. Maybe they have item preferences, maybe not. The ability to attach work orders to a particular workshop and specify craft objects makes the actual act of fulfilling a mandate much easier. Is there any item that can't now be ordered directly?

Gem Setter is an occasional pick for Proficiency, because I find it such a pain to level up. I swapped skill rust for 50% skill gain with a few exceptions. (Mining and Pump Operating are lower than that, medical skills are higher.) That means I can put it on a dwarf and leave it for several years until I feel like getting a production area set up.

Does skill in Architecture affect anything beyond building quality? You could say that's the entire point of having the skill, but I don't mind having base-quality architecture. Everybody get Mason and Architect paired, and Carpentry too for good measure. Production jobs are handled by setting workshops to >Novice, or to a particular dwarf while they level from Dabbling.

[daggaz]

In my latest fort, I went with 3 dwarves with Teacher 5 / (Dodge 5 or Wrestling 5 or Shields 5), the Mason/Architect, the Mechanic/Diagnostician, and a Weaponsmith 5 and a Armorsmith 5 who do all the mining for now (no ranks spent).   Rest of the embark points I spent on booze, some war dogs, two cats, a female yak calf (yak meat features prominently in the food available for this civ) a few extra seeds and various food items. 

My observations so far (almost made it to the first spring)

Mining doesn't give any attribute gains.  Both smiths are legendary miners now (from 0 ranks) and neither has the slightest change to any of their stats.  This might be a bug/oversight, would expect continual heavy physical labor to train body attributes at least. 

The military school is progressing very nicely.  I dug the entry way, the trade depot, and my future barracks (central room with six small side rooms that can fit 10 beds each), and immediately moved my stockpiles and meeting place in the central barrack, and built workshops in the sleeping rooms.  The very first workshop was a masons and the very first item was an armorstand, which I immediately set into the second sleeping room and designated a barrack.  Training began immediately with no uniforms, and no breaks.  All three dwarves spent time teaching their main skill to the others, but quickly they fell out of sync due to needs, and individual training occured, where they taught themselves to be dabbling fighters/strikers/etc...   At this point, the main skills are all very close to proficient and they are all competent or better in these auxilary fighting skills.  However, they have not received any recognizable attribute gains as of yet.  I might have missed it, but I suspect they wont get this from watching demonstrations and need to actively spar, which they have only recently begun doing(having spontaneously learned biting and kicking).  Regardless, I am very happy with the result and will begin feeding migrants into the squads soon, along with minor armor kits (im curious if caps alone will begin training armor skill, no dwarves have armor user ranks as of yet), and eventually splitting the squad and giving the new groups different weapons.  All of my dwarves are learning observer and discipline, one dwarf in particular is learning organizer (he led the first lesson), and curiously, not one of them have learned to be a student. 

My mason and mechanic are both churning out masterwork items.  I bought more than I needed from the first caravan using a first wave migrant who had some decent brokering skills, selling all my excess mechanisms.  Items included all the iron anvils (building magma forges soon, this is a volcano embark with a TON of flux and iron), some steel and iron bars (in case I get hit with a mood before Im ready), all the booze, most of the food, and random items needed for hospital/moods. 

I have more than enough food and drink, and I have yet to plant a single crop or butcher any animals.  One of my migrants was a novice fisher but he was surprisingly effective at catching aquifer turtles so I got a little extra meat that way (but mostly shells, hurray).

I still dont have a carpenter, which is annoying.  Ive only gotten 4 dwarves in 2 migrations so far, which is well under the usual (fort is packed with masterwork buildings) so by now I was planning on having a farmer, a brewer, and a carpenter at the least.  But again, it hasnt been an issue, nobody is complaining about lack of beds yet. 

--------------------------------------------

If I was going to do anything different next time, it would be to whip out a few weapons and put the two smiths into military training as soon as the proto-fort was dug.  Then use two immigrants from the first migrant wave to do further mining, and get the smiths sparring for some time to train up their physical skills.  It's pointless that they are legendary miners as they got no boost for it and they will be too busy to mine now that I have ore to smelt and craft.  I imagine a few ranks of weapon skills, a few weapons, and no ranks in teacher is all they need to pretend to kill each other most of the day.  In the meantime, the two newbies could learn to mine and find all the ore. 

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

The military school is progressing very nicely.  I dug the entry way, the trade depot, and my future barracks (central room with six small side rooms that can fit 10 beds each

Here's a small but useful thing to consider:

Try doing the barracks the other way around.

Imagine you have the entrance to your fort, whatever that looks like, which connects to the barracks, which connects to the rest of the fort.  So anything that wants to get into the fort proper, must go through the barracks.  Instead of the side rooms being for sleeping, the sleeping quarters are the main room, with all the side rooms being for training, ammo storage, etc.

So, why is this helpful?

Well, let's take the situation where you're under attack.  Some goblins or undead or a titan or whatever have made it past your marksdwarves.  They're in your barracks and it's down to your melee dwarves skill at arms to save everybody.  Even though they're on an alert, you just know that there's good odds that somewhere between some and all of your soldiers are asleep.

In this situation, would you rather that your soldiers sleep soundly in a side room, or get woken up to join the fight by the monsters entering the room they're sleeping in.

[daggaz]

My stairway is sealable within the barracks, so monsters are going to be waking up my troops regardless.  That said, I want to see the fort where you can get a majority of your military to do the same thing at the same time, sleep included. 

From another thread, seems that shield training should come after armor training, as the former seems to interfere with the latter possibly due to effective blocking during sparring.  They also observed that wrestling is learned automatically.  From this and my own observations on attribute gain, I think I would change my three military builds to teaching 5 / dodge 5,  teaching 5 /armor user 5, and weaponskill 5 / student 5, seeing as how they will start sparring eventually anyhow so might as well get them some earlier stat gains and weapon know-how for it. 

[CABL]

PTW. The thread is very interesting, and I'll probably try out maximizing skills.

Also, Colonel Sanders Lite, how can you get dwarves with 10 levels in one skill at the embark? Do you use that DFHack command which removes "5 skill level max and no further" vanilla rule?

[DoktaYut]

Am I the only one that's been reading this thread and slowly been realizing that maybe he's been doing absolutely everything wrong? Because I feel a bit like that; should probably not be using techniques that were made before caverns were even a thing, should I...