Well, that was awesome. Thought I'd fire up the ol' DF and see how my dorfs were gonna handle my very first ambushes.
It went, uh...well, it was pretty creative. Those ambushes came at the same time as an elven caravan and a Mood, so I was going a little crazy trying to multitask and realizing I didn't have shit that I needed. Like, anything. I have NO clue how to get a good military, so I ended up drafting like, a dozen dorfs to go after these TWO little waves of goblins.
Which went horrifically. I had a few dorfs die, someone else bit it in an unrelated manner, and so began my very first tantrum spiral! So much Fun, so little time. I went from 48 dorfs to like, 30 or so. And then got a migrant wave. And then got another caravan in the summer.
With another ambush.
Luckily this was some dorf-caravan, so every time anyone got near them, forty thousand arrows came flying out (40d, I love you) and they'd turn into little red splotches. This didn't stop my entire fortress from FREAKING THE HELL OUT about a couple casualties, and people started going batty after each other. I had dorfs killing dorfs, dorfs killing themselves, that mood finally failed...and got replaced by another one, which ALSO failed! So those two went batty, I tried to assign some war dogs to them and found out I don't know how to unassign war dogs so I had some useless dogs trained by learning about Kennels...
And then I got ANOTHER migrant wave.
The good news about all this? My net loss for the whole escapade was about 9 dorfs. I have like, 1,200 drink available (no kidding!) and several hundred prepared meals. The sane, non-injured dorfs are starting to recover, but I lost ALL my good miners, AND my first mayor, so it's kind of a strange rebuilding process. Hopefully things calm down so that my NEW mayor will stop throwing tantrums in his bed (and calming down immediately, just to tantrum again). Not to mention so I can finish getting rid of the miasma issue.
So, folks, tell me about your first Fun stuff like that. Also, any hints on things like setting up a military in 40d would also be greatly appreciated.