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[Tacomagic]

2 of each gender gives you an 87.8% chance of getting at least one mated pair, and 3 of each is a bit over 96% chance.

On a quick note: those 87.8% cannot be true because you already got a 87.5% chance that both males are sterile (not counting in female sterility).

Think you meant fertile there.  But you are incorrect because my numbers were for calculating getting at least one mated pair. The chance of at least one of the males being fertile is 93.7%, not 87.5%.  You multiplied by 2 rather than by each other.

Here's my work: 
The probablilty of infertility in any animal P(f_n) is 0.25. 

The chance of two animals being infertile is the product of both events: P(f₁) * P(f₂) = 0.25*0.25 =  0.0625

The chance of at least one male being fertile is the compliment of full sterility: P(f_males) = 1 - 0.0625 = 0.9375

Females are the same: P(f_females) = 0.9375

The chance of BOTH occuring is the product: P(f_males) * P(f_females) = 0.9735 * 0.9735 ~= 0.8789...

So, the chances of thre being at least one valid pair is roughly 87.9%

[Trouserman]

2 of each gender gives you an 87.8% chance of getting at least one mated pair, and 3 of each is a bit over 96% chance.

On a quick note: those 87.8% cannot be true because you already got a 87.5% chance that both males are sterile (not counting in female sterility).

Yeah, woops combined the 87.5% gender fertility chacne incorrectly. Should be 76% fertility rate for 2 and 2.

3 and 3 is ~96.9%.

Eh? If the probability of a single individual being sterile is .25, the first figure was correct. The probability of both of two of the same gender being sterile is .25^2 = .0625. So you have a probability of 1 - .0625 = .9375 that at least one of two of the same gender is fertile. With 2 and 2, you need at least one of both genders to be fertile, so the probability of having at least one breeding pair is .9375^2 = .8789 (approximately).

[SpoCk0nd0pe]

The chance of two animals being infertile is the product of both events: P(f1) * P(f2) = 0.25*0.25 =  0.0625

The chance of at least one male being fertile is the compliment of full sterility: P(f)males = 1 - 0.0625 = 0.937

You're right. That's what I tried to calculate but made a mistake (essentailly 1/4*1/4=1/8...).

[Snaake]

Answering some questions SpoCk0nd0pe asked in the PE LNP thread, and ones posted here...

...
What would you cut if you tried to start out with a dedicated hunter/marksdwarf and how would you skill him?

I tend to have problems acquiring the leather needed for military uses (quivers+backpacks). What poultry is best suited to help in this regard btw? From the wiki I think Blue Peafowl but I'm not sure, maybe there is poultry that yields leather when butchered without being fully grown?

Another thing I couldn't really find info about is how profession impacts skill rust and xp gain when dwarfs do different work. Does it have an impact at all? Having read the wiki article about moodable skills it seems that you do not want your weapon/armor smiths to become miners.

Thanks in advance for any tips on those matters!

I'd probably take 3-5 levels in ambush and marksdwarf (either might be higher), then 1 point each in  dodger, armor use and shield use. Ambusher affects how well the dwarf can sneak up on his/her prey: some animals will flee when approached, others will attack the hunter before they get many shots off. I don't know if there's a "sneak attack" bonus. Hunting animals will sneak along with the dwarf btw.

Honestly I usually used the raw mod to have larger animals give more leather in 34.11, haven't tried that in 40.x yet but it probably still works. Yea, blue peafowl beat the other birds, geese are almost as good, slightly larger in fact when fully grown at 1 year, but they lay about 2 eggs less on average. Birdsplosions are a thing though, so geese are also decent.

As always, crocodilians are just insane for egg-laying, and alligators (the smallest of the 3 ingame) are size 200 000 and can breed at 1 year (grow to be 400k at 2 years), lay clutches of 10-30 eggs (also the smallest clutch size of the crocodilians iirc). Now, they're only size 60 when they hatch, but they grow fast enough to reach 4k in 1/50th of an in-game year, so about an ingame week. Buuuut you have to mod the raws a bit to use crocodilian leather, since they butcher for scales by default :/ And this is also a bit of a sidetrack because you can't embark with them, at least on a fresh world (hm, can you get a species domesticated enough that it'll start showing up as a choice on the embark screen...).

I'm not aware that profession would affect rust. Skills rust when they're not used for a long time, regardless of what the dwarf's profession is/was. You don't want weaponsmiths mining, because the mooded skill is always the highest moodable one, so if your initial weaponsmith 5 levels mining to 6, he'll never mood weaponsmithing until it's higher again (or mining rusts, iirc rust does prevent that skill from mooding). Rust isn't too bad in general though, easy enough to get rid of if you want to, once you notice it.

...
Idog stated that he does not think medical skills govern the outcome. Is there some definite knowledge about this? If some medical skills do determine the outcome of procedures it might be useful to fill the remaining points with medical skills.

Maybe architect 4 is a good idea for the mason since some buildings need architecture and masonry when made of stone.

After re-reading the wiki article on strange moods it is apparently undesirable to give dwarfs a 1 of in certain skills just for mooding. The number of moodable skills does not seem to determine the frequency of moods.
...

IIRC medical skills mostly affect the speed at which the jobs are done... but when (not if, WHEN) you get several dwarves injured, speed matters. They all need to be diagnosed, sutured, bandaged, bones set, surgery done, sutured and bandage, before infection sets in. And I've had dwarves that required over half a dozen medical jobs on just 1 limb... This is why it's also a good idea to have specialist "doctors" and "nurses", the latter can handle the cleaning/feeding and the less critical stuff, and you concentrate e.g. surgery training on one or two dwarves.

Architect raises really slowly and is (or at least was in 34.xx and before) really rare on migrants. If you're going to put point in it, take it to 5 IMO. Pretty much it's only effect is that it's an extra hidden value modifier for architecture wealth on the buildings that require an architect. If you don't care for that, you can just not take the skill for anyone, as long as you remember to enable the labor on a dwarf or few.

It's a decent tactic to give dwarves a skill of 1 to guide the mood to the skills you want. The initial mood chance doesn't depend on your dwarves' skills, as long as the basic conditions allow moods. Then yes, profession does determine the weighting of which dwarves are most likely to mood (and some, like active military, never do iirc), but once you get a mood that hits a peasant instead of, say, an armorsmith, that peasant will check what his/her highest (non-rusted iirc) moodable skill is, and even if they just have dabbling armorsmith from doing 1 job, they'll make an armor artifact instead of a woodcrafter/bonecrafter/stonecrafter one (which are the 3 defaults, if the mooding dwarf doesn't have any moodable skills). So then again, it's fairly easy to spread around some mood-training, just requires a bit of micromanagement. I've done this fairly often in the past: embark with ores, have the non-miners forge 1 pick/axe/helmet(for armor)/mechanism(for mechanic?) per dwarf by micromanaging the labors. And moods don't start happening until you have 20 dwarves iirc, so you've got until the 2nd migrant wave, usually.


As an extra pointer, pottery/glassmaker were mentioned as being quite useful in one of the LNP thread posts. Of these two, glassmaker wins out because you can make a wider array of goods (trap components, "gems" for cutting practice, vials etc), all glass can be used to store liquid (basic earthenware can't store liquids without glazing), and the clincher for me is that pottery isn't a moodable skill for some reason. It's the only non-moodable skill that produces stuff with quality levels as far as I know. Ok, cooking and dying also have quality levels and don't mood, so make that "non-consumable, non-enhancement stuff with quality levels".

[clinodev]

The animal infertility is an important factor, and I'll be adding males for dogs and birds where it doesn't matter much and is cheap to fix. I'm hoping this changes, actually, as now there are no affordable large animals (4 pigs, 4 sheep? Meh. I think that's strike three for my pigs, although I've personally been lucky so far.) Having grown up on a farm, I can confidently state whatever percentage of animals are infertile for any reason is vastly lower than the current model.

I'm fascinated by the love for starting carpenters in this thread! Many embark sites are going to have more _starting_ wood than their 34.11 equivalent, admittedly, but many potential sites will still have very little. I'm reading through the above comments and trying to imagine how the popular "sell prepared meals" tactic works out using barrels instead of rock pots in a sparsely treed embark, shipping out a unit of wood with each meal stack. Commenters are probably technically correct about stonecrafters not being a high priority for embark profiles, but those arguments apply pretty much the same to starting carpenters, no?

I strongly agree about the wastefulness of starting miners and woodcutters.  I'm fairly sure my five or so untrained woodcutters/miners are quicker the first season than a couple of trained  dwarves would be, but I haven't done science.

Love the discussion!

[SpoCk0nd0pe]

Thanks for the detailed answer!

Architect raises really slowly and is (or at least was in 34.xx and before) really rare on migrants. If you're going to put point in it, take it to 5 IMO. Pretty much it's only effect is that it's an extra hidden value modifier for architecture wealth on the buildings that require an architect. If you don't care for that, you can just not take the skill for anyone, as long as you remember to enable the labor on a dwarf or few.

Doesn't architecture grant the "admired a building lately" happy thought? It was the reason I thought about the skill. Generated wealth can actually be counter productive.

Thanks for pointing out the mood stuff! I will add armorsmith 1 to my farmers.

@clinodev: The starting carpenter also makes your dwarfs happy by raising the value of their bedrooms and can produce masterwork wooden shields in case you have the wood.

[khearn]

I'm fascinated by the love for starting carpenters in this thread! Many embark sites are going to have more _starting_ wood than their 34.11 equivalent, admittedly, but many potential sites will still have very little. I'm reading through the above comments and trying to imagine how the popular "sell prepared meals" tactic works out using barrels instead of rock pots in a sparsely treed embark, shipping out a unit of wood with each meal stack. Commenters are probably technically correct about stonecrafters not being a high priority for embark profiles, but those arguments apply pretty much the same to starting carpenters, no?

I don't put prepared meals in pots or barrels. All my prepared meal stockpiles have barrels set to zero. I may need slightly bigger stockpiles, but once your meal stacks start getting big you can't fit many stacks in a barrel anyways. And it makes it easier to tell at a glance if I start getting low on meals. A cat or two works pretty effectively to keep the vermin away.

I also use dfhack's workflow to manage my prepared meals, and I set it to count stacks, not items. So if I have a 5x5 main pile that feeds to two 4x4 piles, that's 57 stacks I need at most, and 33 stacks to make sure that each pile has at least 1 stack. If I use barrels, it's hard to tell how many stacks will end up where and I might end up with my main pile running empty, or all the piles might fill up and I have meals sitting in the kitchen with no place to put them.

The thing about carpenters is that you can only make beds out of wood, and unless you like unhappy dwarves, you have to make beds for your dwarves, and quality beds make for quality bedrooms. If you're short on wood, you can't afford to use a lot of logs to train up your carpenter. It's the embarks with tons of wood that can afford to start with an unskilled carpenter, since they can make lots of stuff to build skill. Plus, a skilled carpenter works quicker, so it's easier to make rooms when you get a wave of 25+ immigrants at once.

   Keith

[clinodev]

Oh, I'm not against elf-crafting carpentry, of course, it's just that by the time I need 25 quality beds in a hurry, a carpenter will have shown up from the mountainhome. The ten or so beds I need for my first year end up in my "new arrivals" burrow, where quality isn't nearly as important.

Thanks for your workflow tips, khearn! I'll try and remember to play with that more when I have time. I became convinced of workflow's value just before  DF2014 came out and I learned I could actually play vanilla,  and now I forget about dfhack after a pre-embark "prospect." Gotta get back into it!

Incidentally, I don't personally trade out meals, but it's very common advice still, even after their trade value was nerfed recently. It's probably excellent advice for newer players, as it's one more reminder of the importance of food and booze production.

So, let's post some embark profiles! I'll see if I can't get another one together while I'm on the road this week. I'm thinking about writing a more optimized hostile embark profile for sites other than ruins. Any tips from players who prefer evil glacier embarks are most welcome!

[khearn]

I must have lousy luck with immigrants. I don't recall getting a carpenter with more than skill level of 3 in 40.XX, and that high is pretty rare. Come to think of it, I don't think I've seen any non-military skill above about 3. I don't even get legendary cheesemakers, just novices.

I've have a few with weapon skills of 8 or 11, though. Always happy to see those dwarves arrive.

[ldog]

Gay geese? Now I've seen it all. Not to get into a discussion about the realism or not of this, this is one of those things that adds absolutely 0% to play value. I've got enough to worry about in this game, and my livestocks sexual preference isn't something isn't something I want to add to this list. Anyway, I suppose it is what it is as they say.

So carpentry. While I like mastercrafted everything all around, being as wood goods (and stone for that matter) are so cheap anyway, the difference a bed worth 40 vs a bed worth 120 makes in room quality isn't going to make a difference. I'm a little extravagant in that my standard bedroom is 3x3, with a bed, coffer and cabinet, smoothed and engraved if I've got dorfs with nothing to do. More than enough to make all but the handful with special requirements very happy. Even gem-encrusted crap (wood/stone) wasn't enough to make a room fit for a king but a couple pieces of metal furniture sure are. I don't know if shield quality makes a difference or not (since material doesn't I am inclined to think not, but it isn't a given). So other than for speed carpentry skill level is a bit moot. As it seems I can never have enough bins and barrels it doesn't take much to level it either. So while I consider a carpenter important right from the get go, I still don't consider it worth putting a lot of starting points into. Same for masonry.

I do think most of you are discounting work speed completely. It's impossible to keep a high-level anything busy without queing manager jobs. They will burn through work very quickly. A pair of legendary miners probably works circles around 7 lvl 5s. So those couple starting levels in (most) any skill are not completely worthless, although I would almost always pick 1 skill to start at lvl 5.

The other reason I've found some pairings to be better than others are because of the randomness of immigrants and strange moods. Ultimately I'm aiming for 1 task 1 dwarf but you need to make trade-offs until that point. As I said earlier, neither the embark armorer nor the weaponsmith on my current game serve as either, but I got immigrants early enough with higher armor and weaponsmithing to not need them. It's always a bit of a crapshoot, so a plan B is good.

Another thing to pairing skills to think about is you can have a dwarf do all the non-moodable skills to your hearts content as needed and still very easily control their moodable skill.

Also a small tip for those who might not know, but are anal enough (most DF players?) to assign embark skills by traits. You can fire up 'Therapist and connect once you hit the embark screen and view abilities and preferences and all that jazz. The only thing it won't show until you hit go are the skills you assign.

Oh, and fishing. Has fishing changed recently? I've never been really thrilled with it, but current game I'm in a hot clime, set a small area on riverbank and set to only fish at designated. Mussels, mussels, mussels - I am buried in mussels. Mussels and mussel shells. I could probably base my whole economy off them. Ahh if only I had garlic and olive oil....

[StagnantSoul]

What I consider the perfect embark-
1: Remove all the items.
2: Go to your dwarf screen, and put one dwarf up to proficient armor smith, and proficient grower. Armor is pretty much a must if you're going to have any military, and higher quality is better. A skilled grower both plants faster and gets more out of each seed. The more food you have, the better. Any unexpected immigrant boom won't destroy your food stockpile.
3: Put one dwarf up to a proficient weapon smith, and proficient metal crafter. A better sword being pumped out faster means a better military. A better military means a stronger fort. And for trade, metal crafts are an excellent path. Gold mostly exists to be crammed up the human traders pie hole. Eventually, master grafted, diamond, unicorn teeth, silver and gold, leather, silk, cloth, yarn, and as many metals as you want practically, can be added to one master crafted platinum craft. This thing can probably buy an entire caravan.
3: Make one dwarf proficient in both gem cutting and setting. This guy can increase the value of your masterwork gold crafts my masterly shoving amethysts onto them, or shoving some indigo tourmalines onto a masterwork large red diamond. This guy will basically increase your forts value.
4: Make the next dwarf a proficient mason and stone crafter. Stone master craft flux stone or obsidian crafts can make good items for your gem setter and metal crafters to practice on, shoving lead and lesser gems on stone crafts. While not as expensive as metal crafts, these are still useful for early, and maybe late game, trade.
5: Make the next dwarf novice in judge of intent, appraiser, negotiator, liar, and persuader. This will make it so your expedition leader is also an effective broker. On top of his broker skills, make him a proficient leather worker. Leather cloaks, hoods, mittens, and robes add on extra armor to your military, making their job of survival easier. Oh, and they could make clothes for your civilians.
6 and 7: Make the last two skilled in armor user, adequate in shield user, and then skilled in axe dwarf for one, hammer dwarf for the other. These two are your first soldiers.
8: Now, with your remaining 841 embark points, go back to the empty item screen. Press n to bring up the new items part, then put in five each of the top three meat, then the same for the fish.
9: Put in 20 plump helmets. These will often be your main food.
10: For seeds, put in twenty plump helmet spawn, ten rock nuts, and ten cave wheat.  Plump helmets are good for all food, cave wheat can be both brewed and ground into flower for your chefs. Rock nuts are useful for grinding into rock nut paste, then pressed into rock nut oil, which can be made into soap, which is very important for your hospital.
11: Go to digging implements, then toss in four copper picks. Picks are the only way you can mine, which is a massive part of the game.
12: Go to stone and toss in 20 cassiterite, very useful for making bronze, which is nearly as good as iron. Then, also through in 15 bitimous coal, which is useful for getting 105 units of fuel for your furnaces. This will hold your fuel needs temporarily.
13: Go to drinks and put in ten of each drink. This gives you a variety of drinks, which keeps your dwarves both drunk, and happy.
14: Press n and find tools, pushing up once to go to the wood tools, then putting in three wooden nest boxes. These are used to get your birds to lay eggs. This is good for cooking.
15: Finally, go the the side of the screen with animals. Put in one turkey gobbler, one male and female dog, one male and female cat, one ewe and one ram, and three turkey hens. The cats get rid of pesky vermin from your fort, the dogs can help you fight, the ewe and ram are used to provide both meat with baby males and cloth from every one, and the turkeys provide eggs and poults, which, when grown, provide a lot of meat.
16: Press e to embark.
17: Survive.

[SpoCk0nd0pe]

Also a small tip for those who might not know, but are anal enough (most DF players?) to assign embark skills by traits. You can fire up 'Therapist and connect once you hit the embark screen and view abilities and preferences and all that jazz. The only thing it won't show until you hit go are the skills you assign.

Totally! That's quite an easy thing to do once you have your skills planned. I even go so far as to abort the mission when they totally suck. It is a little cheeky but hey, the expedition leader should have some interview before embarking right?

Min-maxing the different food types for more barrels has been suggested on the wiki, but having tried it I'm not a fan of it; you need to haul all that crap underground ASAP. Min-maxing for bags on the other hand does seem to be a good idea. Since early on it isn't something one tends to have the time or materials for. Sand is a good choice at 1 pt each, even if you don't really plan on glassworking.

It really depends on the amount of barrels you want. Don't bring more meat then you want barrels, but I think some is a good idea since they are so cheap and needed fast for early brewing.

[GavJ]

The thing about embarks is that at it ultimately barely matters what you bring, because you can already survive with virtually nothing, so it's just all different flavors of bonus easy-ifying stuff. For newer players, they do truly rely on the gear, however even then, 1200 whatever points is probably still overkill.

If there is going to be a collection of strategies, it would be more interesting IMO to see people's strategies for what to do with, like, some agreed upon lower amount like 250-300 embark points or something only.

[khearn]

Blue Peafowl vs. Turkey. Which is better?

For egg production, it's pretty clear that turkeys win. Turkeys produce 10-14 eggs per clutch, while blue peafowl only produce 6-8.

For meat production it's not so clear. Adult turkeys produce 9 meat, 9 fat and 1 intestine (according to the wiki), while blue peafowl only product 8 meat, 8 fat, and 1 intestine. But, both become adults after 1 year, but the peafowl are full size at that point, but you have to wait another year for the turkey to reach full size. Not only do you have to wait longer for Turkeys, but you have to keep track of how old the adults are. With a peafowl, you can butcher any adult and get full output.

But with turkeys' larger clutch size, you have more birds, so the smaller production per bird per time may not be that important.

Hmmm, one turkey hen will produce on average 12 eggs per clutch, while a peafowl produces 7 per clutch. Ok, looking at 1 peafowl and one turkey hen, after 18 months (6 months for eggs to hatch, 12 more months to become adults) you start getting peafowl output (combining meat, fat and intestines) of 119 units (7 * (8 + 8 + 1)), and a steady 119 units every 6 months after that. The Turkey gives you nothing until 30 months in, when you start getting 228 units (12 * (9 + 9 + 1)) per 6 months. At 30 months (2.5 years), the peafowl has already given you 357 units. But by 42 months (3.5 years) in, the Turkey passes the peafowl, 684 to 595 and continues to pull ahead.

So in the very short run, turkeys win by producing more eggs. But for meat, peafowls start producing at 18 months , while you don't get turkey meat until 30 months (assuming you wait until they're full sized), but once you start getting it, you get more.

Hmmm, now I need to go through the various non-bird meat producing animals and figure out how much they produce per year, give growth their growth rates. I should also consider the effect of butchering before they reach full size. Is it worth it to butcher those turkeys when their just 1 year old? Hmmm, no, it's not (unless you really need that meat in the 18-30 month window) because you don't have to feed them, so it's free meat if you can wait for it.

Egads, I just had a flashback to my college econ class and suddenly my mind came up with the term, "the time-value of meat". Now I feel a need to take a nap, another flashback to my college econ class.

Of course, this also brings up the question of whether raising any animals for meat is worth it? One metalcrafter with a steady supply of silver or gold can buy all the food on every caravan that comes buy, which is probably enough to feed even a big fort. Assuming, that is, that the caravans continue to arrive on a regular basis, which might not always be the case. I guess it's time to figure out how much food one really needs to supply. I did some science a few years ago on how much dwarves eat and drink, I'll have to dig that up.

  Keith

[StagnantSoul]

Surviving and thriving are quite different, and based on what type of biome you're in, the embark is either unimportant, or the only thing giving life to your fort. I do find embark skills for military are the most important thing, as seven peasant wrestlers, or five wrestlers and two pathetic axe dwarves, can be beaten by one moderately skilled dwarf.