Apologies, on luch break at work, so I'm typing on my phone.
My first experience with this game was a simultaneous trainwreck and instant success. I immediately dived in with no training, and began excavating what to this day was my favorite embark. I accidentally found a location with a volcano, underground river, bottomless pit, chasm, and HFS. It also had an above ground major river. The site was PACKED.
From south to north, there was a forest, the river running east to west perfectly straight all the way across the 5x5 embark. North of the river, began the mountains, a round bottomless pit sunken like a crater centered almost perfectly at the foot of the mouuntains. Beyond this, about 30 tiles north was a straight chasm again east-west, ending on both sides with a gcs in both end of the chasm, almost completely perfect span of the map. The chasm was ros-straight, only deviating a little bit near the end on the east.
Then, in the north-west corner was the volcano. 30 or so _-levels of lovely magma. The underground river was traveling from northeast to southwest, cascading down into my chasm. The HFS was located in the northeast corner.
This map was perfect, and I was like a kid in a candy shop, trying to get the basics down. In the end, my first goblin raid slaughtered my unprepared dwarves easily, and I lost the save.
The worst part? I've found some really interesting places since, but nothing so truly perfect as this.
Playing nethack, ADOM, and a few dozen other roguelikes really helped me get into it easy. The only thing that threw me off was losing dwarves due to buggy pathing, buggy designation-handling, and buggy hauling. Since then, I have learned that these are not bugged, and that dwarves are just very particular about how they go about things, and also lack any semblance of foresight.