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[Sowelu]

Trying to find ways to make my embarks as easy as possible.

Obviously I want to bring along level-5 weaponsmiths and armorsmiths, so that I get a jump on early gear...but if I'm going to do that, it seems a little silly (not to mention expensive!) to bring any metal gear myself.

Trick #1: Forge-your-own bismuth bronze
- Don't bring ANY metal tools except an anvil.
- Bring N tin, N bismuth, and 2N copper bars.  You're going to be making a lot of bismuth bronze in a hurry.  Those all cost 10 each, while one bar of bronze costs 25.  Four assorted bars + 1 fuel = four bismuth bronze, what a steal!  When you factor in fuel, below, each bismuth bronze bar costs a little less than 11 embark points.
- Bring a ton of wood.  You'll use it as your sole fuel source early on and you want to start burning it ASAP.  A cost of 3 and a little time gives you charcoal, much cheaper than the 10 that fuel normally costs.
- Burn five logs, and you have 4 bismuth bronze and the fuel to make your initial 2 picks + 2 axes for the low low price of 55 dwarfbucks in total.  Pretty good considering that a single pick is normally, like...44 embark points.  If you brought a proficient weaponsmith, they are probably *tools*, which makes a massive difference if your workers get jumped by anything.
- I can usually spare enough points to make, oh, 28 bars.  Two picks for miners, two axes for woodcutters, and eight bars each for a squad of three military dwarves: That's a pretty damn good start!  Right from the very beginning, they each get a *quality* weapon, shield, breastplate, and greaves.  You can cover the rest with leather if you want.

Trick #2: Cheap booze
The only plants you can bring are plump helmets, at a cost of 4.  They're very versatile.  Now, of course you want to maximize your barrels by bringing a drink of each type, but it goes a lot farther.  At first glance you might say, "Plump helmets cost 4, booze costs 2, of course I want to bring the booze--it's cheaper!"  But no.  Remember, brewing turns a stack of 5 plants into a stack of 25 booze!  Twenty points of plump helmets (5x food) turns into fifty points of booze (25x wine).  I think I heard that dwarves prefer homemade booze, too.  So, it's simple:
- Bring extra plump helmets.  10 extra oughtta do it.
- Bring just a little bit of extra wood: 2 as above.  You need barrels after all, but you don't need many.  Plants in stacks of 5 are nice!
- About a day or two in the still, and suddenly you have more booze than you thought you could ever need.  40 points of plump helmets + 6 points of wood = 50 booze for 46 points.  If you bought it straight, you'd be paying 100 points.
- Want a slightly even bigger bonus?  I haven't tried this myself, but I think you can use pots for booze.  Now you don't even need to bring extra wood, just snag the stone!

Trick #3: Leather and wood goods
- Leather costs 5 embark points.  Rope and bags and quivers stuff can cost as much as 20.  Need I say more?
- Leather is also good for armor, so don't worry about bringing a whole ton of it.
- Similarly, crutches and splints are pretty expensive.  Logs are not.
- Seriously guys.  Bring that wood.  The less time you spend chopping it down, the more time you spend building your early fortress.  Also, you'll be wishing you brought more wood when your wilderness gets mostly depleted and you have to station your military outside to cover your woodcutters from goblin attacks.

Trick #4: Dog genders
Yeah, this is an old and obvious trick.  But if you bring four dogs, you really only need one of them to be male.  You don't need them to be war dogs, either, because a little spare time from a single dwarf will make them into that anyway.If you bring a lot of extras

Trick #5: A skill you don't need
If you played earlier versions, you knew that having at least novice appraisal was absolutely necessary to see the prices in a trade depot.  Not anymore.  Drop it like it's hot.

"But Commander Hurricane," you ask, "Won't it take a long time to get all of this stuff set up?  It'll take valuable months before I can even strike the earth!"  Nay, I say.  I got my miners equipped and some booze in the stockpile by day 7.  This stuff happens FAST.  The biggest problem I have is hauling all my wood into the fortress!


Any other sneaky tips and tricks to abuse your embark screen as much as possible?

[SalmonGod]

Interesting stuff.  Made me pause and think about how I'll do things in the future.

[agatharchides]

A couple things I noticed.

Why bismuth bronze? AFAIK it isn't better than normal bronze and bismuth is more expensive than tin or copper. Just bring copper+cassiterite. Plus bismuth it is pretty rare, a lot of civs won't have it if you are playing anything post 31.19.

I rarely bring anything wooden. Usually there is plenty available on site and I usually have enough people for mining and woodcutting. You probably don't need to bring fuel. Obviously if you are embarking on a glacier that might change, thought you can breach a cavern even there. 

[MarcAFK]

Does it count as a stupid embark trick to raise embark points, start with 7 high skill masons and a fuckton of Marble Food and booze and spend the first year doing nothing but building? Also making the first migrant wave of a dozen or so masons as well?
Cause i've done that but then lost interest after completing a massive tower while everything else falls apart, starvation thirst and tantrum spirals from people falling off deconstructed scaffolding took it's toll on the project, i'm meaning to restart with the current version.

[Clotifoth]

Meat per animal comes on a "by animal" basis.  Therefore, instead of 15 prepared (animal) intestines, bring one each of 15 animal intestines for 15 barrels... that still works right? Either way I think it keeps dwarves happy with the variety.

[Urist Da Vinci]

...
Trick #1: Forge-your-own bismuth bronze
...
Any other sneaky tips and tricks to abuse your embark screen as much as possible?

Better:
Bring copper ore, tin ore, and bituminous coal. Turn one wood into charcoal, use to smelt all of the coal. Each coal costs 1 fuel to smelt, but produces 3 fuel bars, for a net gain of 2. Use 1 bar of fuel to smelt 2 bronze bars directly from the ores.

Sandbagging is more of an exploit than efficiency.

[Mitchewawa]

3 miners, a mason, a cutter/mechanic, a rock crafter and an everything-noble. 3 picks, an axe, a bunch of plump helmet seeds, some food and tonnes of booze.

You can assign your noble to do all the stupid food related jobs, and your rock crafter can pick berries or fish while you dig out the base. Everything else can be made on site, or bought during the first few caravans. The seeds get your food industry working quickly, with the rock crafter creating rock pots to store booze and crafts to quickly buy out everything you need out of a caravan. The amount of booze should last you until you get rock pots running. If there's trouble, draft miners equipped with picks to sort it out.

The real beauty of this embark is this; it's a bare-bones tactic that allows room for maximum skill assignments. From the get-go you have skilled dwarfs, meaning you get what you actually need faster. All the misc. skills that aren't dreadfully important at the start, such as farmers, doctors and warriors, can be left for migrants.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Leather costs 5.  Meat costs 2.  Geese cost 10, and give both a hide and 16-17 food units.  (Careful in evil biomes!)

Milk is half the price of meat and comes with a free barrel, and you can rapidly turn it into high value cheese.  Combine with a proficient cook for >1000 value roasts you can trade to the first merchants.

Yes, you can use stone pots for booze.

[Veylon]

Another thing to consider is bringing turkeys or other egg-layers along. They are fairly cheap at only 6 a piece, they'll lay eggs forever, and they can easily be bred up to vast numbers. I usually embark with a dozen or so.

[Loud Whispers]

Pre-Embark

Bring tons of crap

Don't unload anything

Abandon

Re-embark

You now have everything that was in your previous caravan(s).

[Girlinhat]

Bismuth bronze is the cheapest weapon-grade material by weight.  You're essentially watering down regular bronze with cheap bismuth, but it has the same properties so it's only making it cheaper.  If you embark with a woodcutter for fuel, then you can bring Bismunthinite, Copper Nuggets, and Cassiterite, which costs 1, 4 (two copper needed), and 2 respectively, for a total material value of 7.  Copper nuggets have a value of 2, so a copper breastplate, costing 9 bars, will have a default value of 18.  Magnetite has a value of 8, so a breastplate would be worth 72.  Bronze consumes tin and copper, giving you 2 bars for 2 ore, which means it averages to 2 material value and thus costs 18 - same as copper.  Steel would cost you 2x flux and 2x iron for 2x bars, or 1 flux and 1 iron per bar, so that would end up at material value of 2 for marble, and 8 for magnetite, so 10 value each.  A steel breastplate would have a raw material value of 90.

Bismuth Bronze, on the other hand, uses 1 bismuth, 2 copper, and 1 tin to produce 5 bars.  At costs, that's 1 for bismuth, 4 for copper, and 2 for tin.  Averaging that, (1+4+2)/4 = 1.75 material value per bar.  For a breastplate, that's about 15.75 material value.  So to recap, the cost of a breastplate in raw material value...

18 Copper
18 Bronze
72 Iron
15.75 Bismuth Bronze
90 Steel

It's a small increase, but if you're embarking somewhere heavily forested then it's worth it.  Clear cut the map and start smelting.  If you're embarking somewhere with sparse trees, or you intend to make walls with lumber or something, then regular bronze would be better as it requires less smelting.  After all, copper nuggets + cassiterite uses 1 fuel to make 2 bronze bars.  Bismunthinite, copper nuggets, and cassiterite could cost 4 to smelt into bars and 5th to make bismuth bronze, totaling 5 fuel to make 4 bars.

TL;DR - If you have a forest, it's cheaper to embark with the ore to produce bismuth bronze and do your own smelting.

[SixOfSpades]

Pre-Embark
Bring tons of crap
Don't unload anything
Abandon
Re-embark
You now have everything that was in your previous caravan(s).

I tried this myself once, and for some reason, my first wagon was totally indestructible. It simply would NOT be broken down into logs.
Also, I've heard that if you do the Double-Embark exploit, you can't bring any booze in your 1st-year load (it'll completely evaporate or something).

[NinjaBoot]

Mod the world to give you 10,000 embark points.

*cough*

[Gukag]

I'm a fan of the double or even triple or quadruple embark. 7 masons (or metalcrafters, or miners, or skill for whatever I want to build) a small ammount of food/drink then rest for raw meterials (blocks, etc). Make sure none of them die, or bury/memorialize them if they do...or it's ghosts for future embarks that you can't do anything about.

[Agent_86]

I'm a fan of the double or even triple or quadruple embark. 7 masons (or metalcrafters, or miners, or skill for whatever I want to build) a small ammount of food/drink then rest for raw meterials (blocks, etc). Make sure none of them die, or bury/memorialize them if they do...or it's ghosts for future embarks that you can't do anything about.

I was talking with someone today who mentioned he was going to try embarking, leaving all the materials he brings with him there, and now that historical figures come back to subsequent forts, embark with dwarves that have good/useful skills built up so that, on reclaim, they'll come back as migrants, instead of 15 animal caretakers and their 45 children.