Heh. I've fiddled with some of the high end gnome stuff (though I had to use dfhack to get the ingredients quickly enough for my taste) but didn't find it added all that much to it. I think in the end it felt sort of like orcish dreamwalkers ... why bother with fidgety magic when by the time you've got it going, you probably also have 4 squads of elite uruks with bloodsteel? Seeing a frostskald cast something on an elf bladedancer is less satisfying than reading through the report about all the severed parts sailing off from the steel scimitar buzzsaw brigade.
Almost always I call the caravan before I even go underground. My typical embark goes in this pattern:
1. Dig down into dirt/sand and hollow out large chamber. Store goods and food there (to protect them from monkeys) and set up a table as a meeting hall to keep everyone out of the rain. This room will be used for a farm later on.
2. Use one of about a dozen fortress designs I have macro'd. (I like to reproduce thematic sites from games, movies, etc.) Let the miners start digging that out.
3. Set up some food production, putting lavish meals into barrels and get a depot up for the fall traders. With gnomes, that means a telegraph has to go up fast, but so long as you take an anvil and a few metal bars than you can drop that right on the surface immediately, then deconstruct it later and move everything down deeper.
4. Once the deeps have been hollowed out sufficiently, set up the below level stuff.
For gnomes, they have SO MUCH fidgety devices which require a billion subcomponents. I recommend putting all of those on work order macros, so all you have to do is execute the "actuator" macro and then it sets up orders to put together all the rods, wires, cogs, mainsprings, etc. in the proper order. I have it set up to the extent that I just load and execute the "gorilla" macro and it will throw all the work orders up on the manager screen in the proper order for everything to be assembled. As long as I've got the proper metals and made sure to break down 10 or so sheets into strips, then all is good.
Going through the gnome pets, they are NOT all created equal. If you go through the raws, you'll see that some have one attack and some have multiple attacks. I settled on gorillas because they have the [EQUIPS] tag and you will sometimes see them pick up gear, though it seems erratic. It would be nice if you could actually instruct them what to pick up ... such as tell the giant steel gorilla to pick up the chainsaw and wield it.
I would think even those silly orcs would run in terror from a group of chainsaw wielding robot gorillas.
I find 3 spider tanks to be superior to a dragon ... more attacks, they can converge on a target in unison, and they have multiple limbs. They make mincemeat of dark stranglers pretty fast. The mechanical bull is my next favorite moving upwards because it can kick and its weight tends to propel many opponents into walls or other objects.
I'm looking forward to humans, but I have some concerns about building aboveground. The embark layouts so rarely favor that unless you pick something specific like a sweeping, empty plain.
