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[Ubiq]

Well it rained (only noticed when one of the pools was 4/7 full) and my rainwater collecting cistern doesn't work... nice construction that definitely taught me something about building, but not functional.

A cistern should fill up over time; it may have not rained enough to avoid losing the water to evaporation. How big is it?

When I wanted to train the dogs, they weren't on a leash. What else could have been wrong?

Huh. You didn't already have them trained as Hunting Dogs or something, did you? That and these are dogs rather than puppies, correct? You can't train an animal until it's grown.

[Hyndis]

The best types of rainwater cisterns are narrow but deep. This minimizes water evaporation while still allowing you to store large amounts of water in it.

You want to minimize the amount of digging done to get the water from the ponds to the cistern though. Remember that each tile you dig means the water gets more spread out, and if it gets spread out too much it will evaporate without flowing anywhere.

[Milkymalk]

The dogs weren't already trained and mature, I had checked. Strangely enough, it worked now.

My cistern is 3x3, but the funnel is 11x11 on top so there should be quite a lot of water incoming when it rains.
Unfortunately the pool is really far away, so no chance there I fear.

[Hyndis]

Rain only turns into water if it hits a murky pond tile. It will not turn into water if it hits anywhere else on the map. There is currently no way to increase the murky ponds. You only get as many as you start with, though they can be destroyed by constructing things over them.

[Grendus]

To the original question, remember that a civ can only send either a siege or ambushes in a season. So if you fought off a goblin siege, the rest of the season is yours to cut wood. Ambushes can be particularly nasty though, I've had times when I waited two months with my doors open (often I don't even have a drawbridge, if something strong enough to kill me arrives so be it) and nothing arrived, only to have a champion bumble into a goblin on his way in to get a drink and proceed to butcher four ambushes simultaneously.

I'd train up a small military. In DF, size doesn't matter as much as you'd think. I've seen a legendary hammerdwarf take on an entire orc squad and walk away with a light gray wound to his elbow. A champion here or there stationed around your haulers will protect them from almost anything. Or you could go the route I went, I have a fortress capped at 70 dwarves with 40 soldiers. Both fun and fun^tm


For your second question, it's going to be hard to fill cisterns that way. Try stopping up the drainage, building buckets, and (presuming you can protect the haulers) having dwarf bucket brigades fill small indoor fishing ponds.

[Hyndis]

Yup. A level 30ish legendary wrestler can, alone and completely naked, destroy an entire goblin siege without even getting tired.

You really only need a few legendary wrestlers for security. Each one is an army.

[Milkymalk]

Protecting seems to be working well now. My 8 marksdwarves fought off an ambush of 15 goblins with only one near-casualty, who is being nursed now. Thankfully, the pool was filled... well they got two of my civilians because they shot right through my open gate at the fleeing dwarves. Now I remembered what I saw in several historical movies and constructed a giant pavese behind my gate so you have to actually enter the castle to shoot anybody.

I though about using buckets to fill my cistern (will rain turn into water when it hits water?), but I can't find any designation or command for it, so I foolishly assumed it's not possible.

[Grendus]

Rain will only turn into water if it lands on a "murky pool" tile. You can dig, you can have exposed water, you can have exposed magma, you can have exposed ice (well... if you have exposed ice you probably will be getting snow instead of rain). Rain will only turn into water if it lands on top of a murky pool tile.

Depending on your environment, water can be a hard thing to get. I embarked in a nice temperate forest one time where I had a very large murky pool right next to my fort feeding a large well-access cistern. In another "temperate" biome, low rainfall and hot summers left me with no water and dry ground the whole time. It's frustrating. You may want to embark near a brook/river or with a small amount of aquifer for infinite water. Ice and magma can produce infinite water as well, but that's trickier to do - 2/7 or higher water will freeze into an ice wall which melts into 7/7 water, producing up to 5/7 water per tile per melt. It takes a lot of magma-experience to safely work the magma engineering to selectively heat and cool water without destroying the pumps, mechanics, and engineers working these mechanisms. It's fun (and fun^tm) to learn, but it's something you'll want to learn after you've mastered combat and other problems.