Seven peasants. After embark I end up with a smith/jeweler, woodworker, farmer, and four mason/miners (one architect, two if there are more than one high creativity masons). The farmer is the one with the worst creativity, the smith and one mason have the best creativity. The woodworker being creative is useful, but I don't consider it a requirement in the first couple of years.
4 dogs (1 male), a breeding pair of cats, plus whatever ends up pulling the wagon. The wagon pullers are usually the first to visit the butcher shop once I need meat.
I dump the picks, axes, quiver, wheelbarrow, splints, crutches, rope, bags, cloth, and thread, but keep all the default food, booze and seeds (except for the dimple cup spawn and maybe one of the plump helmets so i end up with embark points divisible by three). I then get 2 oak logs, 12 bituminous coal (or lignite if I must), 12 cassiterite, 12 malachite or copper nuggets (tetrahedrite if I must, but at its cost I usually reduce the ore and coal to keep the cost about the same), and all the rest of the points for building material -- 200 to 250 gneiss, granite or quartzite boulders, usually.
One log makes a mason shop right next to the wagon. I put that on repeat for blocks. With the first four blocks I build a wood furnace, smelter, forge and a second mason shop. These four are usually where I plan to locate them once the walls of the above ground keep are in place (yeah, its a standardized layout, but I adapt it slightly to how the embark is layed out). While the masons work on the walls, I turn the second log into charcoal, one coal (or lignite) into coke, and one order of bronze bars from ore. That bronze becomes an axe and four picks (with three bars left over). Once those are made I queue up 10 spears, 10 helms, 10 breastplates, and 10 greaves for the militia members I draft. The farmer gathers some surface plants and, if I remember, starts working on farms for them.
I based this on other folks' "bring ore to make my own stuff" embarks, and the fact that bringing boulders and making blocks gives quite a lot of blocks. I can usually get an initial wall up and my dwarves secured inside it with room for a pasture before the first migrant wave.
My current embark using this is on its third year, and just received its second dwarven caravan because just as the first caravan left the map I got a necromancer siege, and had to turtle up for about 18 months (a second one showed up six months after the first). When the elves showed up in the third spring they brought another undead siege, but my 10 spears and six marksdwarves (drafted farmers) allowed my seventy five dwarves (~20 were children under two) to survive with only five losses (three were marksdwarves that went for socks, of all things; the first was my mayor, which meant I didn't have to arrange anything for him).
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Topic: What's your standard embark? (Read 3082 times)