Where to start.I've never purposefully caused the death of any of my Dwarves, even the most useless.
There's many of us, I'm sure.
- I have never killed merchants, neither directly nor indirectly. Robbed them once indirectly and accidentally, by mass forbidding the kind of stone the depot happened to be made of.
- I've been at war with elves exactly once, in a fort where they happened to start at war with my civ.
While I have a deep dislike for elven motifs and flavor in pretty much all works of fiction, I don't loathe elves unto themselves; it's more of a "I do my thing, you do yours, let's never meet" kind of deal than outright hatred. If anything, I find DF elves a notch above your average kind of elf.
-I have never arranged unfortunate accidents for any noble, no matter how insufferable. At most I have replaced a mayor through the nobles screen, for having some impossible to obtain item as preference for the mandates. Only slightly related, but I miss the 40d dungeon master and the philosopher.
- I have never used minecarts for their main intended purpose of hauling rock and ore. I hate carving tracks and permanently defacing some hallway with them just to get rid of some boulders when there's wheelbarrows available.
- I make way way too much use of quantum stockpiles, and way too little use of standard stockpiles.
- I'm very conservative in planning the architecture of my forts. As said above, I generally hate 'defacing' undug areas by peppering them with unsightly tunnels. I hardly ever do exploratory mining for the same reason, preferring to follow veins from already open areas such as caverns or dug out chambers.
- More often than not I embark without miners, with just two picks or the materials to forge them. It's a habit I acquired because mining as a hardcoded moodable skill drives me crazy, because I don't truly see it as moodable.
- On that note, I micromanage the training of moodable skills for each and every single dwarf. I pick a main job for them taking into account their preferences, aptitudes, and personality, and try to help them accomplish their lifetime dream.
Each dwarf gets their personal quarters (consisting of: bedroom, living room, and dining room) and a designed tomb down in the catacombs. I take note of their favorite materials and build some piece of furniture or workshops for them out of that. If that displeases nobles, I solve the problem by rearranging designations.
This is usually the norm, but it may change depending on the emerging roleplay of the fort during the playthrough.
- I like aquifers and seek them out on purpose when choosing a site.
- I used to savescum regularly during my first year of playing (2008), before being really able to accept defeat as a valid experience, see the improvements in that, and the spirit of the game. My rationale was that I wasn't learning anything by losing a fort to what I used to see as stupid reasons, and I was sparing myself the chore of having to restart.
- I play without Dwarf Therapist. I use Dfhack only for its prospecting and reveal functions for those times I want to prepare for a megaproject.
- The food selection at the embarking screen makes me hungry. More than half of that is non-existing things and/or things I would never want to eat in real life, yet it manages to come off as appetizing. It's magical.
I guess it's just the thought of these dwarven pioneers really enjoying their meal after a long day of work that makes it so appealing by association.
- Adventure mode: I never use even the useless stats as dump stats.
- I get the exuberant charm of the omnicidal murderhobo adventurer, and I don't think any ill of those who enjoy that playstyle, but personally it's not my thing. Once I was forced to try and commit omnicide for the worthy pursue of science, and I couldn't bring myself to go through with it.