Decided to give the gnomes a whirl while I wait for invasions in the new releases. Lotta fun guys, nice work.
Some thoughts/observations/tips for others:
Pop:
At first I frowned at the idea of dismissing members of my civ at the nature shrine and ignored it. However it's pretty useful later on. You end up with a lot of children since they stay children so long, and while kids will have a couple of jobs they will do you cant alter them and they wont haul in a reasonable manner. I had issues with a lot of idle kids whose skills were not useful, dismiss those. Those who have a decent skill can be kept and allowed to train.
Related to this, watch out for child immigrants with outdoor non-workshop labours. Fishers, herbalists and woodcutters. You can only keep them indoors with a burrow, which is a good plan as they will get snatched a lot. Burrow the kids inside the walls.
Wildlife:
Seriously, bring a decent druid on embark or cry. It takes quite a bit of skill to persuade decent animals across, and the ones you really want can be very hard. Likewise you need a high skill druid to wartrain the high end creatures. Animal Trainer levels obscenely slowly, sure everyone in the fort has novice, but migrants with it I havent seen yet and you want it early and big.
Actually getting favor shouldnt be hard, just dont ever ever butcher anything yourself or keep stuff caged. Keeping animals seems to constantly pad your score over time, with some exotics seemingly worth big amounts of credit. I never had issues even with occassional combat deaths.
Using wildlife in combat as your defense totally works, but you need the right animals, big ones. Dogs and wolves are about as small as a melee war animal should go with certain exotic exceptions. Bears, big cats and large hooved/horned stuff like yak and up are best. Even so you will have to armor your pets or they will get annihilated. The animal armoring system worked really nicely, though needed some micromanagement of pastures and nicknaming animals so I could see what I was doing. Training the animals helps hugely too, many will have bite primary attacks so my starting 7 included a pair of druid5/bite5 gnomes as beastmasters. Trained grizzlys are tearing armored goblins in half with shakes.
Breaking pet bonds needs some serious skill for a high value pet, it was 2 years in before my starting druids had enough skill to pull off stuff like spiritwebbers. I didnt play much with the formation/follow stuff but I imagine it's likewise needing of good skill for many creatures. Clockwork/mechanical takes really high skill to wartrain too.
Clockwork:
I didnt tinker much with tinkering *hehe*, made some clockwork critters which worked quite well. A handful of copper beetles scattered around the entrance as spotters were useful earlygame. I also made a number of mechanical dogs which proved quite combat effective. Note that mechanical animals need a really good druid to 'war/hunt train' at the advanced trainer but improve considerably with it. I did make the cool clockwork pants for my smelter and forger so that they worked while they slept, that was great. I didnt find the flowchart until late on, if you dont know the recipes its a little irritating, i used the manager to order end-products and then reverse-engineered the recipes from cancellation spam but it wasnt pretty.
Playstyle:
Good unique feeling to the race, I started by trying to play them pure vegetarian water-drinking. You need a lot of wells for a big fort however and with harder farming enabled you will have a big job feeding the masses. I added fish into their diet and things stabilized out. I did no hunting and butchered nothing deliberately (an accident or 2 with weapon traps and animal-on-animal scuffles). I didnt muck around with much of the machinery this time through the few bits I played with needed plenty power so definitely embark on flowing water for power, fish and drinking. They are highly amusing in melee combat, I didn't make squads but the few times a gnome was on the receiving end of an attack they pretty much blew to pieces.
Played 4 years up until attacks began to intensify past the point at which my purely animal defenses could handle. They struggle once the hostiles start armoring in a serious fashion. I'll do another more mixed play-through now that I have a handle on the animal system, which is epic. Damn fine job. I embarked on tropical moist brdleaf and mountain, both untamed wilds with wolves and grizzlies. Wolves made good bodyguards while grizzlies are brawlers. I swiftly picked up from the local area snow leopards which was awesome (proficient druid worked), then later giant snow leopards which was even cooler (It took a professional druid to attract a giant snow leopard with mixed success), and finally giant sloth bears which was also fairly brutal.
Armored and trained the wild catches and used them as frontline defense until they bred and their offspring got tamed, then released the parents and replaced them with the next generation. Remember that even gnomes cannot take every wild creature and make it (Tame), you still need to breed certain (Trained) creatures and tame the offspring to establish fully tame populations.
Letting your druids spar for a bit unarmed will buff their fighter/dodge/strike/kick etc which they can then pass on. But bite is what you really want to teach your animals and that climbs very slowly, hence embarking with biter druids.
?: Where is the whole 'Replace a limb with a mechanical one' thing done? Couldnt seem to find a workshop for that, reactions didnt appear in the Artificer's. Also gnomes will wear adjustable gauntlets, is that intentional? seems to be the only animal gear they can wear but suited me fine, I produced loads before realising 95% of my animals needed none but wanted 4 boots.
Also, got plenty of leather from dwarven/human caravans, but bone is really tough for gnomes to source, makes you quite dependant on vermin for the leather II upgrade so bring a vermin-hunter.
