Hey guys, long term vanilla player here, but first time Masterpiece player. Any advice or things I should be aware of playing dwarves vs vanilla dwarves? And can anyone recommend a good let's play of this mod?
Does "let's play" mean only the video type? I know there's a couple out there, but never looked at them too much. There are several good text stories including
Riverrun which covers a lot of the features in Dwarf mode. The manual gives you some getting started advice.
Battle of the 8 Armies shows you all the civs but I guess is probably kind of hectic to look at if you're new!
If you're Dwarves, Orcs, or Humans, you can pretty much start playing like in vanilla and experiment with one new workshop / industry at a time until you get comfortable.
* Dwarves are a compilation of every and all cool feature. They will someday be overhauled to be more focused, but for now they are both awesome and bewildering in their scope. Don't try to take it all in at once. Use the ore processor before smelting.
* Humans are more at home above ground. They can run some big operation like a plantation or fishery and buy and sell materials for coins, and can rent out "empty" workshops to artisans from the other races to sample features from other modes.
* Orcs have access to lots of different weapons from several different industries that use different resources, so they are flexible to take advantage of many different environments. They can also butcher and make bonemold weapons from animals or invaders. You can stay at that baseline tech level forever and be perfectly successful, or explore the "tech tree" by buying or raiding blueprints.
Depending on your tolerance for unexpected !!FUN!! you might want to turn off Diseases, Harder Mining, Secret FUN, Banshees civ, Werewolves civ. Your mileage may vary.
I personally also turn off extra vermin and simple gems / soil / stone / minerals mostly just because of preference.
The other race modes are worth the time investment to learn, but are more different from vanilla, so you'd be well off to read the manual or a tutorial fort to get the feel for it.