Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Yes, please give us Vikings and Ninjas and Knights.

Yes, but only if it doesnt take too much work.

Maybe better to only make one civ, as close to vanilla DF humans as possible.

Maybe better to only make one civ, as close to MDF humans as possible.

No, I dont like it because it doesnt fit a procedually generated fantasy world.

No, I dont like it, because... (please post the reasons)

[lcy03406]

A beginner question. I find humans are short on human resource. When I play with dwarves I can set two of them start sparing right after embark. But now the two men must spend their life cutting stones and building floors.

And the first wave of migrants is too small. Maybe that's because I can't make enough wealth.

Now here are only 9 adults and 2 children and winter is comming.

[slay_mithos]

I might not be the best for advices on this, as I play on 1/8 speed ever since it became an option.

The thing about humans is that you can "dig" the first rooms, and just have the roof to build, it saves time when making the bedroom and such.

They are somewhat slow starters on the wealth, but it also means that you won't get assaulted too soon, meaning that you have time to set up your defences.
It is also important to note that early military for humans is best done with guns (buy them from the human merchant), as they are physically weaker than the dwarves.

If you play on normal speed, I'd say to put 2 people to mining strait from the start, 1 farming, 1 stone cutter, and the 3 others can build, store, cut trees...
Depending on the biome, you might want to rush a merchant stall or two (the basic resource ones), to get a few gold coins and be able to buy what you want, including wealth materials for your migrant waves.

Again, I play on 1/8 speed, so I usually have already started my wall off when the first migrant wave appears, and by the first winter, I have a small town built, with the necessary traps and bridges to fend off most "early" threats.

But if you really want population, you have at least two ways to do that:
* You can increase your starting count from the launcher.
* You can use dfHack to spawn a migrant wave at any time.

Humans rely on having a bit more work to do, so starting with 10-15 should give you a comparable start to the default for the dwarves, as long as you take enough food.

[lcy03406]

I love human. There are always problems that dwarves never have. How to defeat firebirds?

[JAK]

A beginner question. I find humans are short on human resource. When I play with dwarves I can set two of them start sparing right after embark. But now the two men must spend their life cutting stones and building floors.

And the first wave of migrants is too small. Maybe that's because I can't make enough wealth.

Now here are only 9 adults and 2 children and winter is comming.

Through the council building you can spawn migrant waves for coins (I think it also attracts migrant attention like wealth does, as doing it multiple times got me larger waves).

You can get 10 generic stone boulders from the local merchant for just 500 coins. In wealthier fortresses you can completely substitute mining through that source. Remember to enable each stone type in the Stone window.

If you're crafty you can make entire underground stories by channeling out a large area vertically and linking it to a staircase, putting a roof over it, then filling in the floors as needed.

If you're short of gold...
-Ordering as much as possible in the form of bars, crates of bars, and using the trade screen's search function to look for gold items to melt is a great help.
-Build 2 of the Engineer's guild coin presses.
-Having a large livestock industry is great to passively accumulate wealth, namely with cheese. 5 units of cheese nets 500 gold at the local merchant, and butchering the adult males gives a little extra by selling the meat. I keep a large number of horses and pigs for this, and stuff into the same pasture the other stray grazers. 4 farmer's workshops milk on repeat.
-Succubus invaders and the Fortress Defense Mod races often bring gold equipment that can be melted down. The assorted other crap metal they bring is a great way to get scrap metal for ammunition production.

[LMeire]

A little exploratory mining can't hurt either, as long as you keep rotating your miners and employ an efficient design to dig up valuables. Rough gems are super valuable and pretty easy to find in most kinds of stone layers, I paid for most of my starting guilds just with gems. You just have to be careful not to make the tunnels too wide or far apart to keep your miners digging as fast as they can before cave adaption sets in and you have to rotate them out for new ones. I recommend 1-2 wide tunnels spaced 2-3 tiles apart, it's fairly a fairly efficient way to find gem clusters. (If you've found something like an emerald on a layer, it's a good idea to shrink the spacing from 3 to 2 if you haven't already. A single emerald is worth 2500 at the gem merchant shop, but they're only found in single tile "clusters" so a spacing of 3 can pass over them unnoticed.) It's also helpful to dig out actual mines since they can be used as catacombs and/or cisterns after you've extracted all the valuables from a layer.

[JAK]

Question: I know I can buy a wraithblade from the warlock merchant, and that it's like a sword that shoots projectiles. Can my human soldiers make use of them, especially if I send the user to get trained by the warlock professor?

[lcy03406]

It's no need to mint coins by myself. 2 featherwood to 500 cions, 1 silk to 500 coins. Buy all the cloth from caravans, and all the spore and fungi woods from dwarven caravan, then we have enough gold to run the first guildhalls. In fact I'm considering melt down the coins and make golden furniture, instead of making furniture from featherwood.

[There Is No Vic]

Infinite Coins: (edit: may be exploity)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

- Make a Human Contract
- Build a Merchant (Foreign)
- Rent to Humans
- Build Merchant (local)
- Set up Ranged Weapon Merchant

• Buy Musket for 2500 Sovereigns
• Sell Musket (6 vouchers)
• Sell Steel voucher for 1000 Sovereigns (x6) = 6000 coins
• repeat

3500 coins per cycle. Quickly, your traders will be Legendary and you'll have masterwork muskets and gold coins to trade to the caravans. Coins can't be sorted by quality, so I'd just forbid the high quality ones until the caravan arrived.

[lcy03406]

Infinite metal bars:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-Get a weapon-grade metal bar.
-Build 2 local merchant.
-Set up weapon shop and trap shop.

• Forge a knuckle duster
• Sell it(2 vouchers)
• Buy 5 cages(2 vouchers)
• Melt the cages(5 bars)
• repeat

[Meph]

A question from my side about these exploits:

Should I fix them, or should I leave them in, as a reward for smart players that learned how to cheat the system?

[Arcvasti]

I'd say that there SHOULD be ways to get infinite gold by making a profit by taking a raw material, processing it through several steps and then selling the final product for enough to buy 2-3 of the original raw material. That's how economies normally work. The exploits of the type described above seem easier then that and the yield should probably be adjusted to make it less profitable.

[slay_mithos]

I would not fix them, because that would punish the people that didn't use them, more than anything.

Maybe change a bit for many "chains", to allow small profits on other branches too, like the textile industry, so that those chains reward labour, rather than seeing them as exploits.

Personally, I try not to abuse those, to keep things a bit challenging, never having enough coins at the beginning, having to choose what industry to build or what can be sold because not needed right now, because I need a few additional coins.

At the same time, I tend to abuse an other loop in the mid-late game, by selling worthless junk (the flux from the metal processing, usually) to make masterwork coins, and use those to buy all I need from caravans, rinse and repeat.


If you think about it, most of the loops are not that overpowered, when you compare them to what other race can also do.
Dwarves have the praying that can give them free stuff at an alarming rate when trained, orcs and kobolds have this stealing/raiding that can net big prizes, gnomes can automate production, digging and transportation of goods, warlocks can revive their dead, and create the lower castes at will, allowing to scale the work force when needed, and the succubus can transform other civ members into specialized castes, that are better versions of their originals.

I might not know every (or any) race inside out , but it feels normal to have some overpowered things here and there for the players to discover, that's what DF has been about for me since I started, and seeing the insane contraptions people come up with, I'd say that I'm not the only one.

[lcy03406]

A question from my side about these exploits:

Should I fix them, or should I leave them in, as a reward for smart players that learned how to cheat the system?

Without these exploits human must rely on hunting and farming. While only raw resources truly make wealth you can't say human is a race that is heavily related to trading and gold coins. 1 bronze sawblade = 2 vouchers = 2000 coins = 80 meat. Level 2 guildhall and stonecutter = 7000 coins = 280 meat. Life is too harsh, isn't it?

BUT these exploits are so powerful that breaks the balance. Textile industry only trains skills but produce exactly same money as the plants. All the other industries spend more money than you earn. I'd say human economy is base on hunting and farming and exploits. It's still not very much business of trading.

Maybe change a bit for many "chains", to allow small profits on other branches too, like the textile industry, so that those chains reward labour, rather than seeing them as exploits.

That sounds perfect.

[lcy03406]

Human can't build stable?

[LMeire]

Human can't build stable?

There's a "kennel" attachment in the Farmer's guild. I haven't messed with it much, but I assume it's the same thing.