Have most of the nasty bugs/problems (like being unable to spar, and stat/skill rust being crazy fast) been dealt with?
Anybody up to making a "here's what to watch out for" list for me?
Training works pretty well if you bring the right skills. You could wait for migrants as they often come with military skills, but Teacher is one I've never seen often. By the way, I would pick a defensive skill over a weapon skill. Weapon skills train quickly, especially if your dwarf can't be hit while they're figuring out which end of the shiny sharp thing goes in the enemy, and also train quite quickly in sparring. Dodging can be force-trained by stripping dwarves of all their equipment (no parrying, shield blocking, or armour protection. Do this one over the winter...), so that leaves armour and shield use for defence. Dodging is a good skill to have, but it seems to have really high priority when it comes to demonstrations. Bring a Dodger / Teacher and they'll have everyone up to their level by summer, but you won't see much of the other defensive skills.
In later versions of .31, skill rust was related to the amount of skill present. A Novice dwarf would be rusty by the end of Autumn, but a Legendary one would take far longer to start displaying rust. I would presume that still holds true. Skill rust can be slowed or stopped by editing the raws, as can attribute rust. Here are the settings I use:
[SKILL_RATES:100:16:32:64]
[SKILL_RATE:DIAGNOSE:100:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:SURGERY:100:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:SUTURE:100:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:DRESS_WOUNDS:100:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:SET_BONE:100:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:EXTRACT_STRAND:200:0:0:0]
[PHYS_ATT_RATES:STRENGTH:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[PHYS_ATT_RATES:AGILITY:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[PHYS_ATT_RATES:TOUGHNESS:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[PHYS_ATT_RATES:ENDURANCE:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[PHYS_ATT_RATES:DISEASE_RESISTANCE:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[PHYS_ATT_RATES:RECUPERATION:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:ANALYTICAL_ABILITY:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:CREATIVITY:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:EMPATHY:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:FOCUS:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:INTUITION:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:KINESTHETIC_SENSE:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:LINGUISTIC_ABILITY:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:MUSICALITY:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:PATIENCE:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:SOCIAL_AWARENESS:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:MEMORY:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:SPATIAL_SENSE:1000:9999:9999:9999]
[MENT_ATT_RATES:WILLPOWER:1000:9999:9999:9999]
'Nother edit! Apparently, disabling rust entirely causes all your migrants to turn up with the racial average for that attribute. Since the default rust rate is 2:3:2 or something like that, this will slow it down to 'not in a dwarven lifetime' so long as there isn't a >9999 cap in place for the rust counters.
In short, skill loss is slowed for most skills and disabled entirely for medical skills. Attribute loss is disabled entirely in exchange for extremely slow gains, and strand extraction gives twice as much XP. It doesn't rust either.
Caverns were new in .31. With caverns you are guaranteed magma and pretty much guaranteed water, but Forgotten Beasts will wander onto the map. Some of these are easy to kill, some not so much, and some of them have very nasty attacks that can melt your military. Deadly dust often lives up to its name because it throws cavein dust around and sends all units flying. With caverns I like to map them out before any FBs turn up, so that I know where to dig and also what exactly is on the map underground (stuff will spawn on edges as it does above ground). You can do this with military, or you can drop an animal into the cavern and direct it using meeting zones.
There are also vampires, and you'll need to have a Justice system in place to handle those in-game. At the moment it doesn't work as well as player intervention, because dwarves believe jail time or (ineffective) physical punishment is enough to quell vampiric tendencies. They're said to be quite good lever-pullers and managers because of their lack of physical needs, and their physical strength makes them good fighters.
Infections. Soap. Hospitals. Learn about them.
You can get dwarves that are good enough compared to anything else to be superdwarves if you start with the right dwarves and give them the right equipment. Materials no longer have a flat damage / defence, they have actual physical properties that interact. Your hammer made out of that one metal that's as light as styrofoam and can be sharpened down to the atom? It works about as well as you'd expect. In the case of identical materials, armour will protect better than weapons attack, but go for the best you can anyway. With the exception of blunt adamantine weapons, materials are ranked in roughly the same order as they were before. Changes to the material system also mean that masterwork bone bolts are no longer the equivalent of no-quality iron bolts, but with sufficient skill and quality you can put them through a goblin's iron helm anyway. Since all your civilians can carry crossbows and will use them on hostiles without being trapped in a corner you're going to get that shot eventually if the goblin doesn't die of being turned into a bony sieve.
Dwarven attributes are capped at racial average or 200% of the starting value, whichever is greater. Agility is still the god-stat in DF, since movement speed and action speed aren't separated yet. Disease resistance and healing rate never change, but the former doesn't seem to have much practical effect. The latter does, so try and get fast healers in your military.
.34 also made some changes to water, specifically murky pools.
DO NOT allow stagnant water to come in contact with fresh water, it'll pollute the lot. I channelled a 12-tile murky pool into a 4-embark-tile lake and it turned the whole top two layers of the lake into stagnant water (it seems as though flow is required for this. The stagnant water spread out from the channel in a way that matched the cloud of 6/7 water randomly sloshing about. Since this 6/7 water needs to hit a map edge before it's refilled, it's going to get all over the water before the flow stops). Don't run your fresh water through any tiles that have ever contained stagnant water either, stagnancy is tile-based and controlled by a flag that can never be switched back to non-stagnant.
Edit: never mind, I'll put it in the vampire topic.
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Topic: so... considering the move from 40d (Read 7043 times)