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[Meph]

Simpler trading does not remove important toys. Only flavor items with specific names, but no needed items for tech.

[MarineMorton]

Starting a fort with the newest release.

Went with miner embark with added chickens lets see how we go!

[mglarev]

My 1.4.1 fort will soon have reached the 10 years, I think. Are you interested in my findings? Mostly balance issues, I think. Maybe some suggestions, probable bugs. With that frequency of updates, it is hard to play 10 years in an up-to-date fort.

[Meph]

Yeah, I update once every 1-2 weeks. And of course I like feedback. I did balance most reported stuff from 1.4.1 though. Hopefully you found some new things for me

[mglarev]

Ok, I post it here when I am finished with it. Hopefully soon.

[mglarev]

I embarked in the predefined Scorched Serra, in a temparate region with a vulcano and no river/stream.

Year 1 to 3:

After my last fortres was continously attacked by humans, drows and elves, my main goal was to protect traders and diplomats, to export many goods and import other things.

The first year was good. I started to lay down the passage for the traders with walls, but did not finish it. I quickly set up my magma forges, to forge axe blades and set the timberyard up. Trees are very scarce in this world, planting fungi seemed a good idea.

Before the second dwarven caravan arrived, I completed the caravan pathway. They could still be shot by goblin archers, but it was okay.

Notes so far:

• The planting of fungi trees really helps to encounter the tree scarcity. While one can make beds out of rock with the mod, you still need wood for ashes, ammunition and some other things.
• While it is better than the wood, using the category food/plants for unprocessed fungiwood is a little strange. They are cluttering the food stockpiles. Maybe it is possible to add a new subcategory to the food stockpile? like food/wood?
• The export value of rock bolts is a little bit high. They can easily reach a value of 1200/stack. I already reported it, and I think it is fixed by now.
• On the other side, the base values of raw glass (including crystal glass) seems to be to low, which makes cutting them more or less useless.. I have no glass production set up though, so I do not know how hard is it to produce.

A while after the second dwarfen caravan (if i remember correctly) a zombie elven ambush appeared. It was killed by a hellfire turret more or less in 2 seconds. On the fun side, it also killed like 10 dwarfs + children + babys. This resulted in a massive tantrum spiral. After 3/4 of the population died, I decided to abandon the fort and reclaim it.

Reclaim, the year 1 and 2
I reclaimed the fortress with the standard embark. In the first few month I focussed on sorting the stockpiles and setting the farms up again. After that, I had a well stocked fortress to work on. I focussed on some more defenses and prepared an archery tower, than another.

When trading with the first dwarven caravan, I noted that I can trade the artifacts that my dwarfs built on the previous try on the fortress. I sold a 220.000 legendary bag of loot and buyed practically anything on the caravan, including some turrets. I also bought some nether-cap seeds.
I walled in some slade and bullet turrets, which proved to be very useful later.

Notes on turrets:

• While walling the turrets in, I think there is a new tag in the recent DF version: [IMMOBILE] or something like that. That should help.
• The prices for the slade and bullet turrets seem to be about right.  Maybe the slade turret could be 10% higher, they are really useful.
• the hellfire turret is absolutely deadly. I think it destroyed my non-magmasafe bridge once. I have not found a good tactic to use them yet, though. Fire have so many disadvantages. Maybe I build an indoor fighting ground to encounter invaders some time in the future.
• The stunning effect of the warpstone turret is interesting, but seems to be quite useless. Maybe it is better against strong single invaders like titans or megabeasts, but the price seems to be to high for the effect.
• No comment on the acid turret yet. Did not have the chance to evaluate it.

Reclaim, year 3-4:

• I build some more archery towers to deal with the huge masses of incoming invaders. Crossbows seem to be enough for now. I consider to upgrade them to javelin throwers some time, but the material costs of the javelins is to damn high. I could literally throw iron bars at the enemies with better effort.
• I tried out the libary system. I imported lots of leather for quivers, leather armor and making books to. I created a few books and trained a dwarf in crossdwarfship. I have no concrete numbers, but it did not seem worth the effort. Maybe lower the chance for the book decay from 5% to 3%, or increase the XP gained.
• My nether-cap farm yields good stuff, I start building some nether-cap things. My baron arrives. The trading of the artifacts did not count to the exported wealth, but I exported more things.
• I build a blast furnance and a metal refinery. I like the blast furnance. The batch making of steel does not feel to strong. The best thing about it is not manually controlling the pig iron bar amount.
• The metal refinery seems to be a bit random. The naming of the materials is confusing, too: Battle steel, damast steel, folded steel. I think this is already removed in the later releases. Nevertheless a refinement of than steel could be useful. Maybe some temple-based smithing of the steel? Like praying for better steel, or sacrifing stuff for better steel?

Year 5 and 6:
Nether-cap everything!
Nether-caps. Nether-caps. Nether-caps! Once you set up the production, that stuff is magical.

• It has a really high-value, maybe even higher than gold, and requires lesser work.
• The seeds are very expensive, but not expensive enough. At least triple the value of the seeds for the first import.
• You can make low-value heat-resistance leather out of it. That idea is really good (since leather is often scarce). But if should need some further processing. Like: Remove the bark at the timberyard, and process it with lye to get leather.
• I tried to understand the fungiwood processing (heartwood, saps, refined wood,...), I even looked at the raw files. To complicated. Is the heartwood of higher value than normal fungiwood? Whatever.

Year 7:
Despite my efforts some diplomats got killed. Ambushes spawned within 10 tiles of them and killed them the instant they appeared. It is close to impossible to control the whole map this early in the game, and a squad can not react so fast. I think my relationship to the other civilizations is okay, so maybe the wont declare war on me yet.

Got some golem hearts from the drow. Will try to do something with them soon. Also: black bibles. I have no idea what they can be used for. Maybe its not implemented in the 1.4.1 release yet. Still, some hints in the (v) description of the items would be useful.

Year 8 and plans:

• Trading works well.
• My cloth industry works well. Very well. A have not used dying yet, but the cloth crafts sells good, about 6000 per bin.
• I have yet to find an efficient way to fight the automatons. Crossbows are not very good. Javelin throwers neither. Maybe I should escalate the situation and try out this strange gunpowder stuff. Or the golems, which (I heard) flee in the older releases.

Year 8 after the founding:

• First I will equip some elite Swordsdwarf with Steel plate armor and tower shields. Than I will train them to master fighters using the library. Should take a while.
• I will finally dig down into the first two cavern layers, that I get a water supply. My ponds are somehow contaminated. Strange. Or better: I try to get the water from alcohol to test the features.

[mglarev]

Year 8,5 (a long year)

• The humans declared war on me. I am glad that I got the armory plans recently. Probably because of the dead diplomat. But who cares.
• Outside of my base, a lot of slade ~50 appeared. If have no idea how it got there. Really odd.
• Working on the complete plate armoring for my dwarfs. Meanwhile training them with the library. What is really annoying: You need 1 book cover for a book, and 5 pages. Could you please make the reaction for paper to 5 pages per job? just increase the material or whatever, but it is quite annoying.
• Also learning military skills with the library is _really_ slow, because (a) you need not one but at least 3 skills, normally 5 or 6. (b) you normally want to train more than one dwarf. More like 10. (c) I think your active dwarfs in squads dont go to the library.

[mglarev]

Bugs:

• "Add plates to helm" uses leather helms sometimes
• "Add plates to shields" also sometimes creates leather tower shields.
• books, paper, armor plates, book covers are not stockpiled and clutter the workshops.

[Meph]

Wow, this is an amazing report.

Also: black bibles. I have no idea what they can be used for. Maybe its not implemented in the 1.4.1 release yet. Still, some hints in the (v) description of the items would be useful.

Used to create necromancers. I cant add a description to items though, only creatures.

"Add plates to helm" uses leather helms sometimes
"Add plates to shields" also sometimes creates leather tower shields.
books, paper, armor plates, book covers are not stockpiled and clutter the workshops.

As long as you get leather plate helms and leather tower shields everything works as intended. No one said you can put plates on leather armor. I will check the materials I use for the not-stockpiled items, I think I just have to add a HARD_MAT tag on them to fix it.

I will check stone bolts values and nether-cap production (you could buy seeds, really ? Shouldnt be able to do so, they are too deep for the dwarven homeciv to reach) And yes, making the leather from them harder to get is a good idea.

you still need wood for ashes, ammunition and some other things.

Ashes = Crematorium, burn remains, bodyparts, any item... Ammo can be made often without wood.

I tried to understand the fungiwood processing (heartwood, saps, refined wood,...), I even looked at the raw files. To complicated. Is the heartwood of higher value than normal fungiwood? Whatever.

This stuff is for normal wood. The refined wood has nothing to do with it though, and does not exist as item. It is a fake wood for some items, disregard it. The reaction works like this:
You cut of the bark, might find seeds.
You split the log on heart and sap wood (realistic, the inner wood is harder and called heartwood)
You can now make valuable wood from the heart.
You can now make scrapwood from the sap.

I should add a AUTOMATIC tag to the "remove bark" and "split wood" reactions, since people will run them anyway I figured. And the farmable trees MUST be plants, otherwise the farmplot does not recognize them, I had to make a plant-tree for this. Everything exists twice ^^ Drawback is that they are stockpiled with other plants, in the food, but you should be able to disable them from the stockpiles you dont want them in.

I havent started with glass yet, another industry in my to do list. Would like really sharp glass blades, or volcanic glass as well...

Metal refinery is removed and all metal properties are overhauled, so yeah, I fixed that Turrets are now immobile as well.

Anything I forgot to adress ?

[mglarev]

Maybe something on the incredible high worth of now easy to obtain nether-cap items?
Also, can you make a reaction to plate only metal items? It is somehow a waste to see three armor plates attached to a leather item.

Further notes:

• Elves also declared war on me and started a siege. The sadest and shortest siege ever. I trained my newbie squad on them. (and they say elves are useless)
• Breached into the first cavern layer. as expected, little water. But at least some. Trained my melee squad on two ant men drones. Turned out on of them was a ant queen. Need to retrain half a squad now , nothing unusual in the first layer. Will build some fortifications, than go to the 2nd caverns.

Edit: Found a "bronze statue" in the 1st cavern layer. classified as wildlife. Attacked it. It fled. Got it nevertheless. Dropped a statue of itself. Description: "This is a finely-crafted bronze statue of Melici Singedplaque. The item is a finely-designed image of Melici Singedplaque the automaton in bronze." Ah, an automaton. Probably should not fleed when attacked by only 30 dwarfes.

[Meph]

Queens should be tough It is mostly the amount of shields the antmen carry that makes them so hard to kill. That, and natural chitin armor, and so many limbs to hit ^^

Elves should be a lot harder, did they still wear wood items ? In theory they should have super deadly archer squads, with moon/crescent arrows and such

[mglarev]

I will take a closer look at them at the next attack.

Oh I forgot one thing: I recently got a dwarven necromancer dwarf in an immigration wave, who quickly had an accident with a magma flood gate. The interesting thing: He returned as a ghost after a while, and was still capable of creating undead.

Now, A human diplomat arrived. Interesting, the recently sent me 50 Hammerman as an attack force.

[mglarev]

The human diplomat ask for peace. Glad to see the diplomacy finally works in DF, and that the mod does not inhibit it. Also, was sieged by ant people. My first game with the Masterwork Mod was ended by lots of ant people.... This was easier. I like to think that I am getting a better player.

[Meph]

Glad to see the diplomacy finally works in DF, and that the mod does not inhibit it

Psst... diplomacy does NOT work in DF, but my mod fixes that.

Edit: Found a "bronze statue" in the 1st cavern layer. classified as wildlife. Attacked it. It fled. Got it nevertheless. Dropped a statue of itself. Description: "This is a finely-crafted bronze statue of Melici Singedplaque. The item is a finely-designed image of Melici Singedplaque the automaton in bronze." Ah, an automaton. Probably should not fleed when attacked by only 30 dwarfes.

Bronze statue means a living bronze statue, like a mini-bronze colossus. The itemcorpse statue you get is of a random picture. Pure coincidence that it was an automaton. Believe me, an automaton would have put up a bigger fight. 

EDIT: Also lowered nether cap value be 30%- Should have a big impact on the items, since they use multipliers of the base value for the end value

[mglarev]

Ah, very nice. I also found out why my Marksdwarf were not picking up their ammunition: I designated them as hunters, naturally, that they get more training. But the standard hunter ammunition setting includes a lot of different ammo types, which were blocking the ammo setting of the soldiers (even if the ammo was not available)