I came back to DF to see if the new version was out, and as it isn't yet, decided to finally give Masterwork a try.
Damnit, Meph, I have things I should be doing right now! Your mod is too addictive. It's like I'm playing dwarf fortress for the first time again. My first fortress fell to warlocks. My second was felled by some kind of bug that continually crashed the game when the human traders appeared. I upgraded to Masterwork public release beta. My third fortress was abandoned for "Holy crap, I did a bunch of things totally wrong!" reasons. When I saw my first "struck non-euclidean rock" message, I paused the game, having a pretty good idea what would happen if I let the miner continue. Wanting to start over anyhow, I just let him go on digging down the mountains of madness. Good times, much fun.
But the fourth fortress is doing well. We've weathered ambushes by warlocks, goblins, orcs, and automatons, as well as goblin and warlock sieges above ground, and antman sieges below. A reanimated forest giant now shares our halls.
It is now the fourth year of the fortress, 255. Our population numbers 136 adults, 16 children, and 10 babies. Our military consists of 14 steel clad melee warriors, and 13 crossbow dwarves, all military caste. We have a number of steel clad war badgerdogs, as well as a few steel clad cragtooth boars and grizzlies.
We have one priest and one high priest overseeing the temple complex, which lacks only the magma temple at this point. No carp god cult sightings as yet. Being able to pray for rain saved our fort from immolation recently when a warlock siege went awry (for the warlocks) at the edge of the map. For some unknown reason (savage biome?) some of their war animals showed up "opposed to life" and the siege killed itself off in a fire.
As our civilization is called "The Gates of Sorcery" I've had the dwarves focus on magic. We lack only the evil altar and the oceanguide altar. Let me just say, having DRINKS as a reagent sucks in a busy fortress. I had to play the ballad of sustenance in the tavern in order to get the little bastards to the cancellations. Adding insult to injury, tears of armok are not that common! I've found two, and both times I managed to get it to even start, the research failed.
The most interesting part of our school of magic is the little two year old adept running around building things and doing research. He came with a migrant wave as a baby, and had the sorcery labor enabled at the start. As soon as the little bugger was able to walk on his own he started doing sorcerer jobs. As for real mages, I have one rock-kin, one healer, and one protector.
I've done a lot of research, lacking only the more advanced buildings. The archaeologist has had a lot do, this embark is rife with seams of collapsed brick. Playing with harder farming has actually helped me to not overproduce food/booze, and the greater range of agricultural and animal products has proven very entertaining to figure out. I'm playing with rendermax, and it is simply gorgeous. Everybody gets a fireplace!
In short, kudos to everyone who has worked on the Masterwork mod, and especially Meph. This is amazing!
