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[Sucker Punch]

I know this is a big request, so no worries if no one fills it completely.  

I've got early game down, I think.   I never really have any problems getting through winter, and getting some basic bedrooms and workshops going.   But once I had that down, I'm kinda lost.

Right now, my plan is.

1. Set up stockpiles outside, and clear away any trees/plants and smooth any stone in the way of my eventual road.   Also, start digging to the underground river.

2. Build a mason, craftworking, carpenter, mechanic workshops, aswell as a kennel and trade depot.   Butcher shop or fishery aswell depending on what I'm doing.

3. Start making floodgates, doors, crafts, beds, tables, chairs, blocks and buckets while clearing space for a farm and a new food stockpile.

4. Set up my farm and start farming while I clear bedrooms and a dining room.

5. Move all my furniture in while I flesh out my hallway, and dig out whatever's leftover from my rushing to get my farm and bedrooms set up.   Also, start building a bridge and road to connect offscreen.

6. Clear room to move my workshops and stockpiles inside.

This seems to work pretty good, and will usually get me to spring of the second year.   From here, I don't really know what to do.  

Should I be trying to flesh out my military?
Try to figure out how to hell to use the other workshops?
Dig to the magma?
Sit tight for a while, clean out my extra rocks and smooth everything?

If anyone has some time, I'd really appreciate it if you could give me a general outline of how you advance to having a huge, functioning fortress  .

Also, I have a couple other questions that I figured I'd just toss in here, rather than making another thread.

1. The wiki says hunting is bugged, and to avoid it.   Is it still that way?  And if so, how is it bugged.   Meat and bones would be pretty useful.

2. What do you do with all the bloody rocks?   I have a massive freaking room in my base that I keep having to expand, but its never big enough to keep it clean.   I'm a little anal, and hate having rocks all over the freaking place.

[Fieari]

It's not that hunting is bugged, per se, it's more that the AI for hunting is stupid.  In fact, the AI for picking most outdoor jobs is stupid (tree cutting, plant picking, etc) but it's more pronounced for hunting because at least with plant picking and tree cutting, you can select specific things, whereas with hunting, the hunter just goes at it.

It works like this.  Imagine that the X/Y coordinate grid for the map starts with 0,0 in the upper-left corner, and increases as you go right and down.

Now instead of an X/Y grid, imagine that it's just one very long tape, starting with the first column, then taking the 2nd column and putting it below the first, the 3rd below that, and so on.  In other words, we're going from top to bottom, right one column, top to bottom, etc, in that order.

Outdoor jobs will select the first item it comes across in this list, ignoring anything else on the way.

The trouble with this is that first of all, hunting is already a dangerous profession.  But if you're heading for the point that is effectively the farthest point from the fortress gate, the chance of running through other groups of animals BESIDES the one that was picked for hunting is high.  This means there's a very good chance your hunter is going to get swamped by dozens of critters at once, and thus die.

Even if this doesn't happen however, the long haul produces another problem.  When/if he makes a successful kill, he then has to bring that kill back to the butchers shop.  BUT, because the walk is so gosh darned long, first to get out there, then to kill, then to come back, chances are, on the way back, he'll get hungry/thirsty/sleepy.

And as we all know, dwarves who are hungry/thirsty/sleepy drop whatever it is they are doing, literally in the case of hauling jobs, and go get food/beer/sleep.  Leaving the corpse in the middle of the great out doors to rot.

In fact, unless you have "Gather Refuse from Outside" turned on expressly in the orders menu, it's GUARANTEED to rot, because no one will go get it, ever!  The hunter won't even get it, because he canceled that job and forgot about it!

So, it's not that hunting is bugged, it's just that hunting displays to the fullest extent a weakness of job selection and management that DF has in general, and as such, is usually not worth the bother unless you expressly want to kill off some immigrants.

[ January 22, 2007: Message edited by: Fieari ]

[Fieari]

As much as it does not appeal to your sense of aesthetics, I can say with much certainty that it is not worth it to stockpile stones in your fortress, except for maybe a small cache right next to the mason/craftdwarf workshops.  If you really want to clean up the stones, don't put them in stockpiles, turn them into stone blocks at the mason.  Blocks can be put into bins.

Why?  Because there simply isn't enough dwarfpower to haul all that rock!  They will NEVER FINISH.  I don't care if you have enough stockpile space, until the day you stop expanding your fortress, you will never run out of rock to haul.  Maybe if you expand your immigration limit to a thousand and reach that peak... MAYBE, but then again, if you have that many dwarves, you must have also increased the size of your fort to fit them all, and that means more rock to haul, so even then I don't think it's going to happen.

The biggest trouble here is, dwarves will always haul the NEWEST CREATED rock, not the oldest.  What that means is, you have miners expanding the fortress off in the distance, hunting the magma or looking for gold or whatnot.  Your dwarves will ignore the stones littering the halls they live, eat, sleep, and work in, and go all the way out into the boonies to get the rocks to put in the stockpile.  Now, the stockpile is invariably not going to be out in the boonies, but closer to your main area.  As such, for each individual stone, your haulers will have to travel the dwarven equivalent of miles into the earth, and then back.  And no wagons or carts or whatever to help.  And don't forget, they get hungry, thirsty, sleepy, and take breaks from time to time.

They will never finish.  They will never even get to your main fortress to clean it out.

But you don't REALLY want to clean it out anyway.  Why?  Because you're going to be building stuff anyway, and when you build stuff, the oldest mined rock will be at the top of the list, nearest to where you're building anyway.

Furthermore, masons and craftdwarves grab stones that are nearby to do their work on.  As I said above, making stone blocks is the best way to clear your fortress.  Even though it takes time to make those blocks, ironically, because they're getting the nearest ones, this will clean your fortress a million billion times faster than having rock haulers put stones in stockpiles.  In fact, since as I've said, rock haulers will never actually be able to finish the job, or even get to your main fort because they're so busy with the new stuff, masons and craftdwarves will clean your fort infinitely faster, even if it seems pretty slow to you.

If you REALLY need a particular stone moved out immediately (and you generally don't need to do this for building stuff, as builders automatically move rocks in the way), there's a trick you can use.  Put a single stockpile on top of the stone you are offended by.  Make a stockpile where you want the stone moved to.  Use the "Take From" interface to get the stone moved.

Hopefully, they'll move the stone from stockpile to stockpile before heading off into the sticks to haul useless rock.

At any rate, there are better things for your dwarves to do then haul rock.  You can make your haulers farmers, for instance, and gain a higher food output.  Or have them all become craftdwarves or masons, and still take care of the stone problem (and get useful stoneblocks/trading goods out of it too!).  Or you could start training them in any number of other different professions.

In fact, one of the most useful things you can do with your former stone haulers, is make them food haulers instead.  Food rots, and with a still/kitchen setup, you can have a LOT of it left out to rot, so food haulers are high in demand.  Furnature haulers are pretty useful too, as are item haulers, and in fact, every single darned type of hauler except stone!

Don't haul rock!  It's a waste!

[Sucker Punch]

That makes a lot of sense.   Thanks so much for taking the time to write all that, Fieari.

[Fieari]

As for the more general "what do I do next" advice you're asking for?  Well... there aren't clear cut answers for that, unlike the above two essays I just wrote.  I know it sounds trite, but all I can really say is, "It's up to you!  What do you want to do?"

Survival is something that you can get a formula for.  Making a sweet fortress to be proud of, however, is not a mathematical formula like survival, where there are efficient ways of doing it and inefficient, right and wrong if you will.  Making a sweet fortress is a matter of ART, and taste.  You can follow in the footsteps of other fortresses, and try to imitate methods, reproduce results, but there are so many things to do, and so many ways to do it, that I can't tell you what to do next.  I can only offer some guidelines.

Guideline: A military is a good idea eventually.  If you want to pander to the nobles, it'll even eventually become a requirement.  But there are other ways of defending yourself.  Siegers can't swim, for instance, so a 100% effective way of defending from siege is via a moat/drawbridge.  There are other methods.  Now, perfect defenses like those can be boring, and may fail to appeal to your sense of aesthetics, so you may want a military.

A trap system will likely suffice for defense against most (though not all) river, chasm, and magma monsters.  If your dwarves are industrious enough, they can churn out enough traps to cover every square of your entire fortress that isn't needed for other things.  That's WAY more than enough.  

You'll need a darn good military if you ever want to cross the magma though.

Guideline: Eventually, you're going to want more workshops, particularly if you want to start the dwarven economy.  Glassmaking is a very VERY good idea, because green glass comes in endless supply when you get a magma furnace, and you can make almost anything out of glass.  Furthermore, glass is often asked for by fey dwarves, so it's a good idea to have some in stock.  Clothes making will eventually be needed, as clothes wear out, and when your dwarves are naked, they're unhappy.  And yes, their clothes will in fact literally disintegrate off their backs after a while.  Alchemy isn't really important at the moment.  The farmer's workshop can help with food management by letting you stop planting plump helmets which your dwarves will eat raw, and letting you plant crops that need to be cooked, so you can make them happier by forcing them to eat cooked meals.  And yes, sometimes, they need to be forced.

Guideline: Getting to the magma is important eventually, because you REALLY want magma smelters and furnaces, otherwise you WILL run out of wood.  I don't care how heavily forested the map -was-, you'll clear cut it in no time.  This requires steel, of course, which can be... complicated... to make.  Check out the wiki for more details.

It'll also require decent defenses, either in the form of a military... which to be honest, would benefit from the magma furnace in the first place in order to get them steel weapons and armor, so I personally prefer a military after I get magma furnaces up... or in the form of massive amounts of traps, which are easy enough to make and install.

Guideline: You need to think about nobles that will be coming your way.  Some of them, you may desire to drown, and as such, you'll need to build execution chambers.  Or maybe you want a challenge, and decide to keep them alive. Either way, there are SOME nobles that are just plain useful any way you look at it, like the broker and manager, and you'll have to work towards accommodating them.  Dealing with noble needs and desires will take up a fair bit of your time and effort and planning, and may influence other goals.

The above things are just guidelines and things to think about.  As you keep playing and get deeper into the game, you'll start thinking of new plans and strategies and work out aesthetic and practical goals you never even considered before.  For instance, have you considered setting up a TEMPORARY fortress near the entrance, digging back to the magma, and moving your entire fort back there?  This will improve the efficiency of your magma smelters 10fold, as the smiths will no longer have to walk the long miles back to bed, to dinner, to drink, etc.  Of course, doing so has its own design considerations to think about and implement, defense issues to work out, logistics, etc...

[FaultyLogic]

I usually have two or more mason shops who repedeatly makes rockblocks. It nicely stores away all the excess stone at a slow rate.

[segmose]

How to get rid of unwanted stones the easy way, set up a catapult in the middle of your mine and set it to fire, make some peasants siege operators, remove it when they are legendary and reinstate it when a siege occures for your real defence catapults.

[Aquillion]

I second having constantly-running masons (stonecrafts, too.  Two stonecrafters working 24-7, and you'll always be able to buy anything a caravan offers.  Think of it as turning stone to food.)  And make sure you have someone constantly pouring your obsidian into black rock swords, of course...  they make nasty traps, and can provide emergency equipment if you need it, too.

Train your masons up to legendary.  Stone is cheap, plentiful, and easy to get, and at legendary they'll be able to eat it up fast enough to keep your fortress relatively clean.  More importantly, they'll be able to make stone furniture that can make meeting noble requirements much simpler, while improving dining halls.  Although stone blocks are a good thing to focus on since they can be binned, your legendary masons should also focus on making extra furniture, coffins, and so on...  just clear out a huge area to store them in.  You'll be glad you have a ton of extra stone furniture of every type when nobles start arriving en mass, definitely.

[Genuine]

Instead of mass producing stone blocks, I usually make just crafts. Once you have a few hundred stone blocks there really isn't anything you can do with them aside from building a road. I find crafts more valuable because they can be traded as well as used to boost your fort's overall value.

[Aquillion]

You can PAVE THE WILDERNESS.

Grass and trees are undwarven.  So is the sky, but we can't pave that.

Yet.

[Genuine]

quote:Originally posted by Aquillion:
<STRONG>You can PAVE THE WILDERNESS.
</STRONG>

What a strange idea...I might need to melt a glacier and proceed to bridge over the entire resulting giant lake.

[Ookpik]

I had a fortress not too long ago where constant stonecrafting in half a dozen workshops, combined with six catapults set to Fire At Will, actually cleaned me out.  It got to a point where I actually needed to be careful about stone.

So getting rid of stone can actually be done.  In the interests of full disclosure, I like walls a lot more than some DF players do (I have no interest in these pillar-only fortresses) and I like to keep my footprint relatively small.  Even so, I was able to use up almost all the stone between rock face and magma through obsessive craftsworking and siege-firing, so it can be done.

[j.brigante]

Yeah, masons and crafters en masse can clear your main fortress of rocks in a few years, and trained siege operators not only dispose of rocks in an efficient way, they also earn good money doing so.

As for "what next", I find that magma smelters/forges as soon as possible are a good idea - I always put a huge cassiterite/malachite stockpile near the magma river so my metalsmiths can churn out lots of bronze equipment (mostly armor, spears for both the military and the weapon traps, and whatever else the human caravan wants - and crossbow bolts, too, should I want to send the marksdwarves to target practice on the local wildlife).

After having enough bronze bars for all eternity, switch the smelters to steel (for when your armor/weaponsmiths are reasonably trained - and don't forget the hematite/coal/limestone stockpiles!) and silver/gold/platinum for expensive, showy furniture and statues - and coins, should you want to start the economy (if all of your bedrooms are smoothed, 3x3, three-bar-furniture rooms, everyone would be evicted in a season because no-one would be able to pay the rent).

Also very important: clothes. Start making clothes. LOTS of clothes. You'll need looms (which, thankfully, are somewhat automated) and clothesmaker's workshops. Not only it will (hopefully) keep all of your dwarves fully dressed, it'll also create lots of jobs.

And some optional stuff, should you want to maximize your food output/food producion control: build kitchens and farmer's workshops, and plant some sweet pods. Dwarves won't eat sweet pods, nor the unprepared syrup you make from the sweet pods at the farmer's workshop; but you can turn all the syrup into prepared meals, which give happiness boosts and can come in up to 80-sized stacks (sometimes even more) should it be made mostly of barrels of syrup - and that means your food stockpiles won't need to be huge even after you've produced obscene amounts of food. Place a prepared meals stockpile in the middle of your dining hall, and don't forget to assign a few dedicated food haulers, or else the food will rot before leaving the kitchen - but that's rare. Another good thing with syrup is that, although it is processed into barrels, you have a greater control than with plants being put in barrels - with syrup, barrels are constantly being filled AND emptied, so most of the free barrels will be used for booze instead of plants/seeds/whatever else they always try to put into barrels. And anytime you run out of barrels, just suspend syrup-making for a moment and the kitchens will free up some of the syrup-filled ones, which the stills will promptly claim. Of course, you WILL need more (many more) barrels eventually, but your stills will never grind to a prolonged halt.

[Sucker Punch]

Man, that makes me nervous.   It sounds like the game completely changes halfway through once you start the economy.   I'm still trying to come to grips with how it starts  .

[Fieari]

Well, once you get down to a certain rhythm, the communist society just gets too easy... so capitalism adds that extra spark of challenge.

Hopefully in the future, the economy will make a little more sense, with supply/demand things and such.