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[Old Skool]

Hey Everyone --

I was playing DF several years ago, but like a lot of people got busy with life, etc, etc and I quit playing for awhile. I was what might be considered a competent player as I have played with several forts surpassing 100 in dwarfy population, I know how to use the job manager and have survived multiple goblin attacks. The other night I decided to download the lazy newb pack and start playing again. I've got a couple of comments and questions and hope you will indulge me and answer my questions.

First of all, I have to say that embarking is much nicer now than back in the day when you got one positive hit after a search. I like this a lot more!

That said, I feel that tools provided in dfhack are great game improvers as well. I use prospect just to get an idea of the lay of the land before the actual embark. I figure dwarves would innately know this stuff anyway.

Great job everyone! I look forward to striking the earth again and again!

Anyway, I do have a couple questions:

1 - hilltop embarks. I like hilltop embarks. Is there anyway to facilitate the creation of hills when generating the world. My current strategy is to look for river branchings as there is usually one region higher than the other. This is not ideal, but seems to be the best that I can find using the generic world gen (and the lazy newb one as well).

2 - back in the day I would frequently embark near a chasm or volcano column. I guess chasms are gone now? And there are vampires and were creatures? Sounds cool. Do I have to embark near evil areas to find this FUN or will these baddies just show up over the course of history?

3 - Military revamp. I guess there has been considerable work on the military system since I took my hiatus. I quit playing just before the military revamp. Back then my strategy was to take a group of worthless dwarves and set them to work dry pumping or mining until they got beefy then sending them to crossbow training. Does this still work? I keep reading about scheduling and squads and stuff.. it's pretty confusing. I guess once I get it working once I will be ok.

4 - Speaking of the military, how do you set up archery ranges these days? Before I would build the archery ranges, define the rooms, then tear down the walls between the rooms and channel them out. Is that how it's still done? How long should an archery range be? And what's up with channels? Now they are always slopes on the edges?

OK.. that's all for me now.. thanks.. and don't worry toady.. I will be donating soon!

 

[martinuzz]

2 - back in the day I would frequently embark near a chasm or volcano column. I guess chasms are gone now? And there are vampires and were creatures? Sounds cool. Do I have to embark near evil areas to find this FUN or will these baddies just show up over the course of history?

Vampires and were creatures will visit you regardless of biome alignment. Necromancers will only siege you if you embark near a tower. Embarking on evil lands brings it's own fun.

3 - Military revamp. I guess there has been considerable work on the military system since I took my hiatus. I quit playing just before the military revamp. Back then my strategy was to take a group of worthless dwarves and set them to work dry pumping or mining until they got beefy then sending them to crossbow training. Does this still work? I keep reading about scheduling and squads and stuff.. it's pretty confusing. I guess once I get it working once I will be ok.

You might want to check these links:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=102911.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=75200.msg1886315#msg1886315

4 - Speaking of the military, how do you set up archery ranges these days? Before I would build the archery ranges, define the rooms, then tear down the walls between the rooms and channel them out. Is that how it's still done? How long should an archery range be? And what's up with channels? Now they are always slopes on the edges?

Archerey ranges still work the same (they even have been un-bugged).
If you dig out the space below where you want a channel first, you will get a channel instead of a ramp.

[Loud Whispers]

1. I suppose meddling with the [max z lvl variance] in advanced world gen parameters would help greatly

2. Chasms are gone, replaced by the caverns... Have fun
As for were-creatures and vampires, they will find you regardless of where you go. Though most of the new fun Toady's implemented has been confined to evil areas. *Looking at you huskies. Make me shudder.

3. The military has expanded 'quite' a bit. Namesakely people have found great ways to optimize it, and with effective 3 dwarf squads, you too can learn the joys of sparring

4. Dwarfs need an uninterrupted straight line path to the archery range to use it, need to be facing the right direction... I think that's about it.

[jaxy15]

Seriously, don't embark in evil areas.
As soon as you butcher one of those newborn puppies, all hell will break loose as it's skull suddenly starts moving and kills half your population.

[Loud Whispers]

Seriously, don't embark in evil areas.
As soon as you butcher one of those newborn puppies, all hell will break loose as it's skull suddenly starts moving and kills half your population.

1. Why did you bring puppies
2. Why didn't you bring hammers?

[blue sam3]

Oh, yes, and sparring works now. As in, it works. And your dwarves wont kill each other.

[thvaz]

It is a joy to see the health care system working.

[loose nut]

I would say a few things if you're coming to it from .40d back in the day.

- I don't think there are chasms anymore, but you don't need to look for stuff like that. There's always underground caverns which have things like cave spiders (and more bitey creatures) so there's always silk available. And there's always magma if you go deep enough.

- The new military system takes quite a bit of getting used to, and crossbowdwarves are much less deadly than they are in .40d (though still not bad – but I wouldn't just have crossbowdwarves, they're better as support for your front-liners). I would actually recommend setting up a low-density danger room (look it up; it involves putting training spears in upright spike traps, and having a dwarf activate them repeatedly while your military sits on them, which can be a real exploit, but you can always choose how much you do it) – anyway, do that for your first couple of forts to train your military to a decent level until you get a hang of the system.

- Stonefall traps are terrible and useless even as an interim defense. Put wooden or copper trap components into weapon traps instead (until you get actual metal to work with)

- The whole screw-pump gym thing works a little but not as much as it used to. It's better to look for dwarves with already-good physical stats and put them in your military. Military training is very good for your physical stats, but you want to start from a good baseline.

[BigD145]

Try Isoworld. It should let you find hilltops to embark upon.

[WCG]

It was a year and a half since my last fortress, too. There have been a lot of changes since then.

1) With pastures so useful, a hilltop embark is particularly nice these days. You need grass for grazing creatures (plus you've got chickens and beekeeping now), and with a hilltop pasture, you can keep goblin archers from firing at your animals from a higher vantage point. In fact, pastures really make my whole embark plans different now. I don't want any hills overlooking them.

2a) I don't know about chasms, but if you find two rivers that intersect, from different heights, you can easily find an embark point that's split by a deep ravine, with sheer cliffs on both sides. That's really pretty neat. (But dwarves and - especially - dogs will frequently fall into a river and go over a waterfall, if there is one. Even wild animals - even ducks and fish - will regularly do that.)

2b) At the very start of my second year, I had THREE vampires show up in a migrant wave (disguised as ordinary dwarves, of course). They are busy sucking the blood - and the life - out of the rest of my dwarves. And no, I'm not in or near an evil biome.

3) Good luck with the military screen! Honestly, that couldn't be more difficult if it was deliberately designed to be obtuse! But then, the interface for the whole game isn't exactly its strong point, is it?   

[Old Skool]

Thanks for all the answers.. I am just about ready to start training up some sacrificial military dwarves.

I built a bunch of cage and stone fall traps near my entrance to get some defense up.. gonna start building a few weapon traps as well..

I got flux, coal and iron... so.. off I go!

Oh yeah.. pastures!! I guess big grazing animals are more trouble than they are worth now?

Isoworld? what is isoworld? I search of the forums only brought up your post...

thanks again!

[BigD145]

Isoworld http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=3418

[Fratari]

Oh yeah.. pastures!! I guess big grazing animals are more trouble than they are worth now?

Broken is a better word. A few animals (elephants and rhinos off the top of my head) physically can't eat enough to keep themselves alive. Maintaining a large group of even regular grazing livestock is nigh on impossible.

[loose nut]

Well, eventually you can just keep them all underground. Until then, they make fine tripwires for goblin ambushes. 

[Keldane]

Small squads for training has already been mentioned as a method to promote sparring. Let me add to that, if you're lazy like me and don't want to carefully manage uniforms to make sure everyone's wearing all the right armor, you can get the same effect in a larger squad by issuing multiple training orders for the same month with a minimum of 2 dwarves performing the task. I've successfully had 6/10 members of a squad sparring simultaneously this way (and the only reason it wasn't all ten was because I issued three orders instead of five, to allow them to cycle out to drink and such), when without the multiple orders you'd wind up with two dwarves sparring and the rest doing individual combat drills.