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[tandrade96]

Hi, I've a 2 years old fortress, with more or less 72 dwarves and 300k wealth. Almost all of the fortress requirements in order to survive are covered but I still have a few questions:

1) I've been mining, I've 4 miners, but I haven't find any iron ore, only silver, gold and copper. Is it possible that there is no iron in the place? Is there any method to find iron? Is it more "recurrent" in certain levels?

2) My military is terribly slow. My 9 soldiers (completely equipped with copper) have been almost a year training and they've advanced only 2 or 3 levels in dodging, fighting and swordusing. I've a good swordsdwarf as captain but it seems to not make a difference. Is this usual?

3)2 years have passed and not even a single ambush has tried to kill me. This is in some ways good because I've time to prepare but also terribly boring. What's happening?

4)Normally from my 70 dwarves 30 are iddlers almost all the time. Most of them are peasants with no relevant skills (like shearing or fish dissection), what do i do with them?

Thanks in advance and sorry if my english is not good enough

[Extreme Boyheat]

3. There may not be a Goblin civ near where you've embarked.

[Eddis]

When you embark it's wise to use DFHACK and run "prospect all" to ensure you have hematite, magnetite and/or limonite listed. You can also bump your population over 80, which will bring in sieges - good source of iron IMO if you prefer to work for your metal.

[tandrade96]

There is a goblin civilization near the place where I embarked, at least is listed in the Civilizations panel

[tandrade96]

Also, what do you recomend to do with the inactive dwarves?

[Eddis]

Also, what do you recomend to do with the inactive dwarves?

There are certain necessities for a fortress which you can assign to a dedicated (non hauling) dwarf. Still, cook, miner, mason, woodcutter, doctor etc.

The rest are either specialty professions as needed, or are haulers.

A few with good traits will become military 

[Dwarf_Fever]

If you can't think of anything else to do, start building lots of screw pumps. Not connected to anything, just put them in rows somewhere. Then get all your dwarves with no skill of worth and enable pump labor, turn on the pumps. Voila, you have a working gym. Less idling and dangerous relationships formed, and potential future military recruits will start out stronger for it.

[hiroshi42]

1) Iron is not available in all maps it usually is found in sedimentary layers although it appears elsewhere.  as others said dfhack prospect all will tell you if it is on your map.  Other ways to get iron: traders, you can request iron ore, bars, steel bars, iron and steel goods etc. from your liason.  dfhack has a feature that can enable the human version of the liason so you can request from them.

2) Military training is painfully slow under most 'normal' circumstances.  You can create small squads that are more likely to spar, create multiple train orders in the squads menu so that small groups train.  If you are feeling exploity you can create a danger room.  less exploity version is to use you military to kill ever non dwarf on the map.  Go hunting, kill the elves, butcher the humans.  Or if you have undead available use them (with loads of caution)

3) Do you have a path into your fort?  Ambushes won't announce themselves if they have nothing to ambush. 

4) You have silver and copper.  Give the peasants weponsmith training.  Use the (P)rofile on some forges to limit the upper allowed skill level then let them go nuts.  Melt down the resulting crap weapons and you have some semi experienced weaponsmiths who with any luck will have a good mood. 
Or you could send the lot of them into the military.  Marksdwarves are a blessing on maps with minimal minerals and don't need as large of an investment as melee dwarves.  Just remember the quivers.

[Matoro]

Don't let them be idlers. Make them all engravers and order them to smooth the whole fortress. Make them all masons and start some aboveground building-megaproject. Make them haul useless stone (manual dumping). Make them military. Or something.

Also, concerning ambushes: Are you locked out from the world, or do you have open gates? Do you have ambush guards? Since theme may have been ambush squads, but because they haven't been able to path into your fort, they've just left the map. Also, your fort is just 2 years old. The winter of the second year is usually the age when goblin ambushes start. Have you had any goblin snatcher?

It's just two years old fort, so you'll just need a little bit of patience. Build wealth and things, goblins will come sooner or later.

[slothen]

its possible there is no iron, its also possible its there but you haven't found it yet.  If you've checked all the layers, its likely its not there (it tends to be in the upper layers actually).

slow military training is normal.  They train faster with smaller squads instead of a large squad of 10.  Also it seems pretty often that the first few levels are really slow but after that the pace picks up a lot.  If your melee squad is still at like novice or adequate, I would switch them to inactive for a few seasons, that way when they do off-duty training, it will be individual drills that train their weapon skill instead of listening to a novice give a demonstration to other novices.  Right now in vanilla the training rates and behavior for demonstrations is a bit unbalanced/slow, as it relies on the teacher's teacher skill, organization skill, and weapon skill, as well as the students skill in other things.  Also, depending on the min-required size, dwarves may spend more time waiting for demonstrations than listening to them.

Have you gotten goblin snatchers?  if so you'll definitely get ambushes/sieges.  There are a lot of factors that play into when you get ambushes and sieges, and many of them have to do with worldgen and are not readily apparent.

Nothing wrong with idlers.  Getting annoyed by idlers is even sillier than getting annoyed by migrants.  Marksdwarf training and getting them all primed for metalsmithing moods is a decent idea, but the fort always needs haulers and furnace operators.  Also 4 miners is a pretty low number.

[Garath]

ambushes and sieges won't show up untill the third year in an unmodded game, necromancer attacks being an exception. So if your fort is 2 years old, it is perfectly normal not to have seen any of these

I'm usually ok with 20 to 40% idlers. It usually keeps things ready for the next big work. You hear a lot about how socializing is bad and it is if a lot of dwarfs suddenly die. The remaining ones will be sad from losing their friends. For dwrfs that are unlikely to come to harm, there is not much of a problem. Being annoyed by someone they dislike usually balances out with talking to a friend. It may even help to prevent tantrums as they first talk to lots of friends before hitting one

[enizer]

1: it is possible to land on a map with no iron yes, personally, i would look into asking the caravan for iron ORE at this point, as well as cassiterite and bismuthine if it's available, ordering ore nets you much more then ordering bars, at less cost too

note this ore has to be specifically asked for though, the caravan does not bring it by default

2: melee dwarves need to be on active duty to train at any reasonable speed, default is off, which makes them train at a snails pace

3: in advanced worldgen, by default sieges do not happen until your fort has 80 dwarves, and i think 100k wealth, i assume it's the same everywhere
you have the wealth covered, but not the population requirement
i think you should be getting ambushes and kobolds though, but i'm not sure

4: idlers are normal, it's really hard to keep everyone busy, as for dwarves with pointless skills, i suggest you get dwarf therapist, and make those fish dissectors do something useful

[Mr. Palau]

Get more miners and carve out a castle for your king bellow ground.

[human_dictionary]

if you dont have walls yet, recruit a no-skill mason army and build some out of blocks, walls and blocks dont have quality, so skill only affects the speed at which they are made, but their slowness is negated by their sheer number

[tandrade96]

Thanks for all the counsells, I will use them in my next fortress. Finally, I finded the fun I was expecting. A siege arrived just before I reached 80 dwarves and they butchered my military, I automatically abandoned the fortress.

The last question: Every single caravan that arrived to my fortress had the same message: "Their wagons have bypassed your inaccesible site". I have a 3x10 tunnel as entrance to my fortress with a few cage traps. How can I change this?