Some advice that may or may not have been posted in this thread yet.
It is really important to have Dwarf Therapist downloaded and running. If you are new especially, it will help you organize who does what and get an idea of what skill the dwarves have all on a nice color coded spreadsheet that you can modify there.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122968.0You are going to have to download an additional file mentioned at the end of the thread and save it to the proper folder for it to work with the nov 5th version.
There are really awesome different worlds listed here and you can request some too:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=140180.0That thread has a lot of different worlds you can use, I'd personally stay away with any map that has a purple I on it because necromancers are absolute beasts. IIRC (I have avoided them for awhile) they summon undead in a radius around themselves and they bring some undead with them. If you get a dead dwarf, he will become a zombie, if his arms got hacked off first, they will becomes animated, I -think- if limbs get hacked off but the dwarf survives they will still animate, not sure though.
They are just difficult.
The only thing you really want to avoid, or at least I have, is getting sieged too early. Especially if you aren't familiar with military stuff and training. Sometimes it is actually smarter to hole yourself in and dig down to the lower caverns, where you will get less organized beasts attacking you. You'll be safe for a couple years at least I think before you need to do that.
In my current fort, I have been training my dwarves for awhile, four squads three people training in each at all times minimum, and I've not really seen any gains. I'm probably doing something wrong, I remember, before I stopped playing for awhile, I had a crazy powerful army that eventually died when I tapped into something that I don't want to spoil for you. (it's super fun if it happen!)
Things you might want to take out of a worldgen would be vampires (though they can be tons of fun) titans, forgotten beasts, and collosi. But I wouldn't. An untrained fort will be doomed, but really, I think you're going about this with the wrong perspective.
No fort lasts forever. The more forts you make the more efficient you get at starting out which is important. Each fort will have different challenges.
The world I'm in right now has no goblins and no conflicts, which was fun while setting up, but now I'm kind of bored. I'm perfecting the water supply and maybe adding a few more things before retiring it.
I might just dig down as far as I can go and see what's below though.
There are tilesets that can make the game more visual, which might help, though I always find them to be unpleasant to look at and prefer the ASCII characters. But when my boyfriend looks at the game, it is all just gibberish to him. It took me a good long while to figure things out.
Oh! and the most important advice at all is there is a Dwarf Fortress Wiki, and it has tons of answers to questions you might need answered quickly. Including the buttons you need to push to do various things.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Main_PageThis is a really good game. The learning curve is more of a cliff. The absolute depth and attention to detail, the weird way everything plays out and the very complex things you can do with your fort give this game so much more than one with a bigger focus on graphics.