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[doublestrafe]

As for the ambushes, however, youre not supposed to get any attackers until the second year, iirc. That might be one of the many, many bugs in the game.

Yeah, that happened only twice in two different games. The other times it's just a group of thieves or snatchers, and those are easier to deal with. I though the ambushes arrived because I settled near goblins, without noticing.

I looked this up, and the wiki says that you will not get any attackers unless you have a population of 80 dwarves or higher. So it does not depend on the proximity of goblin civs, nor the age of the fort, but apparently on the population. I think you also have a higher chance of getting a siege/ambush if you have a huge amount of Created wealth(not sure about imported wealth).

Quick correction: 80 dwarves is the threshold for sieges, not "any attackers". Ambushes and snatchers can happen much earlier than that.

[Reelya]

Heck, I don't even bother with beds until the second year starts and I haven't had any tantrums. My embark profile is generally as follows

1. Enough seeds to fill a 3x3 field of each plant type (9 each of plump helmet spawn, cave wheat, etc).
2. Enough food and booze to last a fair time (30 each of two different meats, 30 each of plump helmet and each drink type wine, rum, etc).
3. Metal and coal for initial industries (about 24 each of cassiterite, malachite, and bituminous coal, plus 1 bar of coke to start things up)
A few more miscellaneous things

^ some refinements to the above idea, if you don't mind a touch more micro-management right at the start:

a) Bring one of eat possible meat, not 60 split between two meats. That's because each meat type gets it's own barrel, rather than 5 to a barrel. Upshot: you get lots of free barrels once the meat is removed. I think you could also dump and reclaim all the meat out to get free barrels to use right away. ban barrels from the food stockpile. leading to the next idea:
b) bring fresh plump helmets instead of plump helmet wine, get your farmer quickly brewing it all to wine using the emptied meat barrels. That gets you free seeds, and cheaper booze while waiting for farms to be dug out. A single stack of 5 plump helmets makes a barrel of 25 booze and 1 seed. So 25 fresh plump helmets will make 125 booze in 5 barrels, and 5 seeds.

This post has more tricks to consider:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=102276.15

[krenshala]

The same thing applies to the earlier suggestion of bringing bituminous coal and one bar of coke.  Bring one log specifically for turning into charcoal (you need one fire safe rock to make the woodburner), and spend 3 pts for that log instead of 24 points for the bar of coke.

Myself, I have a pretty good starting setup.

Normal setup, but I drop the picks, axes, bags, cloth, thread, rope, buckets, splints, crutches, wheelbarrow, rock nuts and dimple dye seeds. I then get 3 dogs (one male), 2 cats (breeding pair), 9 oak logs (or some other hardwood), 12 bituminous coal, 12 cassiterite, 12 copper nuggets (or malachite), and the rest of the points as granite (should be 229 rocks).  This gives me enough bronze to make 10 each of weapons (I normally make spears), helms, mail, greaves, and 4 each picks and axes, and still have about 30 bars left over (both coke and bronze).  The 229 rocks can be converted to 920 granite blocks (aboveground portion of the fort in my case).  I then set one peasant as a smith/jeweler, then two each of mason/stoneworker, woodworker/craftsdwarf, and farmer.  They live in the dirt until the merchants arrive, specifically to keep wealth down, but everyone is usually happy enough (content) and I usually have 20 to 30 dwarves by the end of the first year, when I start caring about getting them rooms/beds.

[Chief10]

After my first few forts I developed a formula that has yet to fail me (I've only abandoned forts due to Megabeasts or boredom).

Chief10 Recipe for success:
-Embark somewhere with lots of wood. If you think you're still at the "mediocre" level, don't add an extra level of difficulty (wood shortage).
-Poultry. Poultry are so good at producing food I think its a flaw in the game. Put poultry (I like turkeys) in a room, plop down a few nest boxes, and they will continue producing food (eggs) until they die. Requires no upkeep. Every couple of years, lock the door so that the eggs hatch into poults, and you have a new generation of poultry.
-Sealed fortress. Create exactly 1 (one) entrance to your fortress. Wall it off and put doors in the wall. In front of the doors put a drawbridge over a pit. Attach the drawbridge to a lever.
-Cage traps. These are so effective that I've actually stopped using them to make the game more interesting. Put cage traps behind the doors of your fort entrance. Put them in front of your drawbridge. Put them in the pit under the drawbridge. With enough cage traps you can stop an entire siege without lifting a finger.
-Rock crafts. Early in the game, before you can produce metal, set up a craftsdwarf workshop. Immediately have your mason produce rock crafts ad infinitum to trade to caravans.
-Trade for food early in the game. Especially the first year, don't buy ANYTHING but food and booze. Trade them all those rock crafts.
-Furniture. You really don't need much furniture early on. Just create 7 beds (for your 7 dwarves), at least one table so you can designate a meeting hall (Inside!!), and a 2-3 doors for your main entrance.

[sal880612m]

As for the ambushes, however, youre not supposed to get any attackers until the second year, iirc. That might be one of the many, many bugs in the game.

Yeah, that happened only twice in two different games. The other times it's just a group of thieves or snatchers, and those are easier to deal with. I though the ambushes arrived because I settled near goblins, without noticing.

I looked this up, and the wiki says that you will not get any attackers unless you have a population of 80 dwarves or higher. So it does not depend on the proximity of goblin civs, nor the age of the fort, but apparently on the population. I think you also have a higher chance of getting a siege/ambush if you have a huge amount of Created wealth(not sure about imported wealth).

Quick correction: 80 dwarves is the threshold for sieges, not "any attackers". Ambushes and snatchers can happen much earlier than that.

I think these values are set by tokens in the raws. So if you want you can turn sieges off entirely or you can set them to a higher value so that they will only occur when you have more than 150 dwarves. I think if you want to stop ambushes and snatchers though you need to alter [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POPULATION],[PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PRODUCTION][PROGRESS_TRIGGER_TRADE] instead of [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POP_SIEGE],[PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PROD_SIEGE][PROGRESS_TRIGGER_TRADE_SIEGE]. Read up on entity tokens on the wiki if you want to know acceptable values and what they mean. It can be interesting to play around with these, you can make it so that human caravans will only come if you have exported  30000☼ worth of goods. I could be totally wrong about this though.

[GavJ]

Meeting halls are NOT a good way of avoiding all your forts ending in tantrum spirals. That's like... the opposite of the advice you need IMO.

Give every dwarf their own bedroom. If you can't do better quickly enough, do 1x1 rooms with just a bed, whatever. Doesn't matter immediately how nice they are, just make something. The point is not to make them enamored of their huge bedroom. The point is to give them a place to spend time in alone while idling so they don't talk to each other. And then have NO meeting room anywhere.

They will not make friends with one another, and thus they won't care when one of them dies, and you will virtually never have a tantrum spiral death ever again. You can still have most of your fort die of tantrum related things, but only if something so bad is happening that all of them individually get driven to tantrums on their own. Which is much much easier to avoid. The "spiral" part is removed.

Meeting areas in general are pretty much just a trap.

[Chief10]

I usually make my dwarfs 1x4, door+bed, and leave room to add a cabinet and a chest later on.

[Chief10]

And dining hall/meeting area just to get dwarves inside

[Vyro]

GavJ is damn correct. A small good thought from admiring a nice statue while loafing around never outweights massive shock wave that crashes in when quarter of the population suddenly kicks the bucket in a violent way. Which is statistically likely in an average DF fort. Unless you are going for some kind of exotic, absolutely automatic defence perimeter (and if it's breached, you are screwed anyways) or you like your dorfs all cozy and friendly and really appreciate the inevitable FUN.

And there's another thing - no meeting areas means no parties allowed, which is less talking more working. And these are pretty obnoxious at times.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but do dorfs even get a good thought about partying ("Urist enjoyed doing a kegstand recently")? Can't remember any.

[miauw62]

Don't engrave and produce too much at first, that makes migration waves (and sieges) larger.

[Panando]

I personally do make a dining room, but I use a meeting zone rather than designating from a table. The meeting zone gives a place for dwarves and animals to congregate (it's important for getting immigrants to haul ass inside), but it eliminates parties which are where most of the socialization happens. Most my dwarves still just hang out in their bed cubicles (which are doorless slots 3-4 tiles long). They still socialize a bit, and make friends a bit. It works well with my style where I have everyone except miners in the army (at least as inactive marksdwarves), every siege a few dwarves die and it helps keep them hardened up. Quality doesn't truly matter for anything so if a legendary whatever dies, sure, it sucks a bit, but a few immigrants or grown-up peasants can replace the loss. Like in my latest game I lost my legendary miner, and his secondary miner, in an accident involving a cave-in and a magma pipe (they became magmanauts, or whatever you call dwarves who dive to see the bottom of the magma sea), bad? No, it's good. I replaced them with 5 just-matured peasants, who I trained up mining some dirt, they're a bit slower, but getting rid of a legendary actually hardens the fortress against tantrum spirals (and besides, what else are the new generation going to do if you don't off the old?)

One of the things which gets players into trouble is trying to make a uptopia where everyone is happy and no-one ever dies, the goal should be fortress where life is reasonably good but not too good, in fact one way of looking at it is, if attrition to war and accidents isn't outpacing immigration, and your fortress isn't collapsing into a tantrum spiral, then it's a good fortress even if it's something of a dystopia. Tantrum spirals are essentially what you get when you've had too much happiness for too long (dwarves who are treated like dirt, but have food, drink and a bedroom, will rarely tantrum, it's spoiled dwarves who like to go off their rocker), death is good, and immigration is good, because it keeps breaking up the social web, preventing a "critical mass" of relationships from accumulating. And dwarves who have to see and deal death, are much hardier than pampered dwarves hence a good policy is: everyone fights, and everyone has a chance of dying.

[§k]

That's really good advice! I should have known this earlier. I used to think they are going to be friends anyway sooner or later, and took no precaution. Now all the dwarves are friends to each other! Is the relation "friend" permanent? Will they become passing acquaintance again if they don't meet each other for a period?

[Koremu]

Meeting halls are NOT a good way of avoiding all your forts ending in tantrum spirals. That's like... the opposite of the advice you need IMO.

Give every dwarf their own bedroom. If you can't do better quickly enough, do 1x1 rooms with just a bed, whatever. Doesn't matter immediately how nice they are, just make something. The point is not to make them enamored of their huge bedroom. The point is to give them a place to spend time in alone while idling so they don't talk to each other. And then have NO meeting room anywhere.

Put a Table & Chair in there & eliminate dining halls as well as boosting the value of the room.

Ideally, you want to put sleeping quarters for each dwarf close to where they work. I never understand these fractal room layouts - they mean the dwarf has to walk between the rooms & their workspace.

The ultimate aim in my forts is to (as far as possible) seal each dorf into a small area which contains only their workspace, the required stockpiles and their quarters. Farmers only see & interact with other Farmers. Weavers only see weavers & dyers. Each area, if possible, should be linked to the next part of the fort by cart tracks alone, with physical access ways blocked by doors, gates or (best of all) walls.

You can do a very neat system with food where each area of the fortress is provided with food once a year by a set of minecarts that are triggered by the winter freeze.

Once you do the above the fortress essentially becomes a series of self-contained mini-forts; only the trade between them really matters.

You can take two approaches to children. You can either remove each one from their parents aged 3 and lock them in somewhere with 9 years worth of food & booze, or you can assess their stats and assign them to whichever caste you think will need them/they are good at.

[GavJ]

Ideally, you want to put sleeping quarters for each dwarf close to where they work. I never understand these fractal room layouts - they mean the dwarf has to walk between the rooms & their workspace.

Mixing rooms and workshops means dudes get woken up and get bad thoughts. Which may or may not make up for the extra distance walked. Probably depends how many idlers you usually have, and duplicate skilled workers (if you have a lot, then you're not limited by walking distance anyway, so make separate bedrooms. If all your guys are being pushed to the brink all the time, then don't worry about them being woken up)

[doublestrafe]

I use a really, really big dining room. Dwarves get to know each other when they're standing on the same tile. When the dining room is excessively huge, they end up not standing together, so they don't make friends, and the large number of tiles increases the dining room's value, adding to their happy thoughts. Haven't had a tantrum spiral in ages.