Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[McCautious]

@Col_Jessep:
Interesting, you also have some dwarves with barely any strength but I assume these are on pump-duty as well?
I have as similar occurence: Some of the weaker dwarves are also bad at pumping which leads me to the assumption that they somehow dodge that duty. Other are actually pretty good pumpers but are still weak. I don't remember these having been especially weak in the beginning and generally I don't recruit anyone who has strength in the red ...
Do you have an explanation for this?

[Col_Jessep]

I just recruit every male dwarf I get. Population limit is at 80 so I pretty much need everybody unless I would start selectively killing weak dwarfs. I only keep the weakest dwarf for sheriff or guard duty.

Some dwarfs might try to dodge the pumping job but the pumps don't go away. During their training they get all duties but pumping disabled and I build new pumps if all pumps are in use...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

My veterans are all legendary pump operators by now and the newbies are slowly getting there. Even the weakest legendary pump operator has a strength of 1700+ which counts as 'strong' or 'very strong'. Some just need some more time.

I think a year or two has passed and now I'm just making my dwarfs unbreakable:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is sorted by strength. The discipline value gives you a good idea how long a dwarf has been recruited. It might be kind of important to note that I build one veteran squad and split it up into two, then those two into 4. Good fighters with high teacher skill usually become the new squad leaders. I think it's probably best if the newbies are trained by a good fighter.

For comparison, this is my newbie swordsdorf squad (~2 years in training) compared to regular dwarfs:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Again, sorted by strength. So the civilians at the top are the strongest I have. They are all women but I don't think DF makes a difference in that regard. (Disregard the Nightfeathers, they are marksdwarfs and only get a bit pumping duty when I run out of bolts.)

I'm currently thinking about setting up a new training facility for agility. Swimming or furnace operator might be interesting. And I'm considering to give regular dwarfs pump training, leather armor and a pickaxe. Might save their lives if they get surprised in the woods! =3

[fourpotatoes]

I've lately been using war miners a lot: they're good in combat and have dual-use skills, so I don't need to spend time getting them a civilian skill to prevent bad thoughts about being relieved of duty, and I can get highly-skilled miners faster than I can axedwarves.

Once the initial rush of mining is done, my dedicated miners spend most of their time idle. I take some of them, turn off their mining labor and put them into a war-miner squad set to train constantly. They don't return to civilian mining unless they're crippled or there's a civilian labor shortage. Newly-arrived insufficiently-skilled miners also get drafted. After enough training, everyone on the squad's incredibly strong and nearly unbreakable. They pick up combat skills from sparring, but it helps to seed the squad with someone who has decent military skills.

By this point, I find I can assign novice cheesemakers to the miner squad and turn them into expert war miners in a reasonable amount of time. Once I have a big enough military, I try to keep separate front-line and training squads: before I started doing that, I had a cheeseminer attrition rate between 25% and 50%.

[McCautious]

[...] This is sorted by strength. The discipline value gives you a good idea how long a dwarf has been recruited. [...]

Thanks for the elaborate reply. You got a nice crew going there.
So according to the discipline values compared to strength it is really just a matter of time and sooner or later everybody will muscle up eh?

Guess I have to be more patient then and give everybody a chance to pump. I don't have enough pumps for every dwarf because I kind of need them to take over some of the hauling. Now I was hoping that pump-jobs eventually even out across dwarves. But I also noticed that a pumping job takes forever so it might just be that only certain dwarfs ended up getting the pump job time and again and the (by now) weaklings got stuck hauling until it was time to train again ...

[Col_Jessep]

I guess some dwarfs try to dodge pumping in favor of hauling or other tasks but if I find one of those he gets pumping as his sole job until he has seen the errors of his ways. ;P

Step 2:
Training the civies. Everybody got at leather armor and iron helmets and gauntlets:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This bunch just started training half a year ago and they didn't have a lot of time for the pumps yet. Still, nobody is considered 'weak' anymore. They should stand a decent chance when the next beast arrives.

In my last big fort (17 years before FPS death) my mayor was caught out in the open by a goblin siege. He killed 12 or 16 with his pick before my military arrived! I like it when my civies can take care of themselves in a pinch. 76 of my 86 dwarfs are now in the militia.
2 Miners, a woodcutter a mother and our Captain of the Guard are excused from training and pumpin, the others are children.

[Baffler]

I tend to go the opposite way, and use danger rooms to get my miners up to legendary so they can dig faster. My forts tend to sprawl quite a bit, so it makes a good difference. It doesn't hurt to have such highly skilled reservists, of course, but if I've pulled them into service then the fort has already basically fallen.

[McCautious]

Holy crap. Those "civilians" are beastly killing machines! Doesn't this slow down the whole production process by a ton?
How about bad thoughts? My military sooner or later gets quite depressed about being on task. I have even considered building a kind of spa/health-resort area where I can send them on shore-leave: Two months just booze and belly rubs ... 

2 Miners, a woodcutter a mother and our Captain of the Guard are excused from training and pumpin, the others are children.

Hehehe, yes. Especially the Captain of Guard ... we wouldn't want him to get distracted from all his "important duties" now would we? After all, how is he gonna write up everybody when his muscles are too large to bring his hands in front of his chest ...

[Col_Jessep]

Well, to tell the truth, there is not much left to do in Graniteprison after 8 years.
I'm trying to keep my fort lean and mean to keep the FPS up. No clutter, no extra rooms, no crafts for trading. I religiously atom-smash and trade away anything I don't use. Minimal flowing water, no cavern exploration, no flowing magma. I only stockpile food, metal bars and leather.

I pretty much have at least one legendary dwarf for every workshop I use and everybody is wearing decent armor, iron for the military, iron and leather for the civilians.

The last project was a "waiting room" for invaders so they don't run away before I have time to take care of them:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The damn gobbos send a small squad of brainwashed dwarfs... It was over very quickly. D:
Right now I need to find a new project that doesn't hurt my FPS (too much).

I didn't have any problems with bad thoughts. I got plenty of booze, lavish meals, everybody gets an engraved 4x2 bedroom with nice furniture. My legendary engraver covered everything with masterwork pictures, every dwarf is wearing a very expensive set of armor and a masterwork sword and I think once they become legendary fighters they don't get bad thought from training or being stationed anymore.

I put the Captain of the Guard accidentally on pumping duty unfortunately but it's not too bad. He's still very weak. Besides, most dwarfs are heavily armored and clad in iron armor (no flux) so they should be alright. xD

[Thomasasia]

Dude, can you please post that save? That seems like the most bad ass fort ever. Any one of your civilians is worth probably as much as half a dozen average warriors. More even!

[Urist Tilaturist]

I do not want to sound like a spoilsport here, but I think that military miners are a little overpowered. Mining should increase a dwarf's strength and fitness for combat, but hitting rocks and goblins are not the same skill and it is a little too easy to make a legendary warrior by digging a big room.

The mining pick is also a suboptimal weapon because of its big mass concentrated away from the handle, which makes it slow and exhausting to strike enemies with. A lighter battle pick (like the historical horseman's pick) would be a more sensible weapon. Think of the difference between a felling axe and a battle axe. Using this weapon, or even using the normal pick as a weapon, should be a different skill, like how axedwarf differs from woodcutter.

[Naryar]

I do not want to sound like a spoilsport here, but I think that military miners are a little overpowered.

Tell that to goblin lashers !

[Urist Tilaturist]

Goblin lashers are stupidly overpowered. Whips are not remotely practical weapons against anyone wearing even chain mail, never mind plate. They should not even be front line warriors, instead disciplining the troops and engaging in all that torture that goblins love so much.

I made some raws edits myself to reduce this nonsense.

[Niddhoger]

wow i had no idea, thats awesome! Miners sit around not doing anything a lot of the time anyway after awhile. Might as well drill on dodge and stuff!

Can we force individual skill drills? Or will your miners spend half their time becoming legendary biters instead?

The main point is that not only does mining train a weapon skill, it also builds strength.  By the time your dorf gets to legendary mining, he'll have likely increased a strength level or two.  I often make useless migrants miners first for this reason.  I could have them endlessly toiling away at a screw-pump.. but making them miners is at least useful. 

[Bigheaded]

Personally i don't bother using the miners. I generally only have 2, whilst they reach legendary and in theory could be ultra strong, i almost always embark with 2x fighter dwarves with 2 weapons. Usually of the same type as i find they train faster if they're of same type.
Usually 1 is a proficient dodger, 3 points in fighting, 2 in the weapon, the other is simply 5 wep/5 fighting. This makes it likely they spar sooner (high fighting encourages that) and dodger ensures that is trained quite a lot and generally the one with 5 in dodging will only be ~3 months ahead in training dodging later on.

My guys are generally equal to those posted by Col. Although it doesn't help them becoming resistant to disease afaik.