3 attempts so far, just started a 4th. First 2 attempts were using 1.2.1, the last 2 were using 1.4.1 with stock settings.
1st ended after 2 years, with a surprise ambush at my gate with 80% of my dwarves out scavenging dead bodies and wood. Managed to kill those ambushers with minimal losses, but was instantly beset by another ambush that tore through my damaged military.
2nd ended after 7 years, not due to any in-game issues. I'd accidentally done 2 very stupid things: I turned off 'Alert on lost connection' in DwarfTherapist AND also disabled DF auto-saves. DT wrote some bad data to DF at some point, which corrupted my save entirely. That ended this run at the challenge.
3rd ended after not even 2 years, with more complications, or rather FUN, than I'd seen in a long time, mostly thanks to the features of the mod.
11 months in and I was beset by an acid-spewing megabeast, my miners took it down with minimal losses thanks to a selfless holy dwarf who kept healing the others despite being chewed on. 2 months later I had a zombie dragon show up - I didn't want to mess with it just yet so I locked it in an airlock for awhile. Once I had some decent gear on my miners and military, I barely managed to kill the dragon (it melted several dwarves first). All was clear until another megabeast showed up 6 months later, but managed to kill it without incident without losses. Then a necromancer child showed up... couldn't identify which child it was, so my fort of brave megabeast-killing dwarves were wiped out by a horde of self-inflicted zombies in the end.
4th fort is looking good so far. No trouble to speak of 2 years in, besides some industry complications. We'll see. It's too quiet and I'm sure something FUN is about to happen soon.
Feedback - First off, most issues I had from playing in 1.2.1 were fixed in 1.4.1. As for the rest, I've really enjoyed playing this mod a lot. It has single-handed revived my interest in DF (mostly I had issues with FPS and bugs from vanilla when I stopped playing last fall, MDF fixed all that and more!).
A few thoughts:
- Children necromancer/holy - Not a good thing. Nigh impossible to pinpoint the problem child, as combat logs only show "Dwarven child" with no name.
- Turrets as migrants - Still an imbalance in the early game (I know you're working on it)
- Landmines - Still trying to utilize them effectively, but not having much luck. Currently they're just a backup thief detection system inside my fort, otherwise I'd just butcher them to help with FPS.
- Warpstone - Adding a chance to heal warpstone sickness maybe? Would provide some balance to not having a pause feature when warpstone is struck. Not fond of losing skilled miners because I'm off dealing with dwarf drama elsewhere.
- Rock crutch - missing from Stonecutter which has splints - more of a wish on my part.
- Toys - Seems making these for trade also creates all sorts the high value goods like blueprints, golem casts and even training books. I haven't tested to see if the golem casts work, but blueprints and books definitely do. Obvious imbalance, removes the need for high-value trade with caravans and bypasses a lot of metal needs early on.
- Bone studs don't get put into any stockpiles as far as I can tell.
PS - A word of caution for others, Hellfire turrets shooting towards defensive bridges sealing your fort is not a good idea.