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[A-chana]

Yeah, a good lot of them are running around with cruddy armor, if any at all. I'm probably going to make that my next project, along with catapult-building and multiple archery ranges. I'll have to see if I have any experienced Armorers -- half my decent ones either became Champions or were killed when a clothier went ax crazy.

On the subject of locking up puppies, I'll probably start on that once it seems every dog is breeding (the first litter I have should be growing up soon), although I have an idea -- say I draft someone with tons of pets (a horse and a dog, followed by one foal and four puppies). Could the pets be effective meat shields, or will they stay too far from the combat to be hit?

If the dwarf doesn't run too far ahead, or is a marksdwarf, or is generally used as a guard, animals are useful; they also scout ambushes - however, if he loses all his pets at once, you'll lose him anyway to insanity.

Thanks. I think it'll work out okay, since the most any dwarf actually owns is two pets, and the rest are just children of the mothers following around. I just need to train the dwarves to not die when attacked. I can probably keep them happy, anyway -- the three dead Champions were good friends with loads of people, and the worst that happened was a miner/wrestler who was buddies with all three going into a Fine mood. Granted, she had the "used to tragedy" marker, but most of the other dwarves didn't.

[Axe27]

Setting up a brand spank new fortress in a brand spankin' new world. The world is dominated by humans and dwarves, though there is one very strong elven civilization around, and the Kobolds and the Goblins are still around in healthy numbers. I found a site with both a brook, and a magma pipe, so now I can even start obsidan farms. This will be a fun game.

[dbfuru]

Just lost a fort.. Apparently all of my dwarves were far too busy to pull a lever just as an Orc siege approached. I finally stabilized food and drink production after I lost a fair amount of dwarves giving me a total of 9 and surviving so many sieges, and then, no one wanted to pull the damn lever! So just lost a fort.. FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU

[Jim Groovester]

Right now I'm constructing a mold for an obsidian tower. One that will be a square 96x96, but one that will also be 87 levels tall. I'm also building it into the side of a mountain, and I was trying to dig out all the veins of ore and gems before hand so I wouldn't get any irregularities in rooms once I dug it out after I cast it. I decided to ignore that since it was too much trouble making sure the magma and the water would properly mix, and instead have elected to dig out the part of the mountain using up/down stairs.

This is an awesome map that I'm building it on. One half is a huge mountain full of gold and tetrahedrite and cassiterite and platinum and garnierite, and the other is a flat red sand plain with trees and shrubs growing out of it. Beneath it is lots of bauxite, magnetite, chalk, and coal. There's also a magma pipe, a chasm, an underground river, and HFS. Most of them are well above the base of the mountain.

Parts of the map are frozen solid year round. The mountain is that way, even though it occasionally rains on it. The sand plain thaws out for about a month during the summer. This leaves the possibility for me to devise seasonal floods for underground rivers I'm planning on having run underneath the obsidian tower.

I'm also playing as goblins. I've already defeated a few elven ambushes and a dwarven siege (with champions wearing leather armor and wielding wooden swords, I might add), but my low wealth has prevented any massive amounts of enemies from coming to assault my fortress.

[Retro]

Finally collapsed the massive area I spent a week designing, another designating, and two more digging out. Dear god. Boiled away the stone a while ago to save huge amounts of FPS, and I'm starting actually build within the grotto now. Building small towns inside a dug-out cavern is pretty fun.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

Finally collapsed the massive area I spent a week designing, another designating, and two more digging out. Dear god. Boiled away the stone a while ago to save huge amounts of FPS, and I'm starting actually build within the grotto now. Building small towns inside a dug-out cavern is pretty fun.

that's the way i do-it

now i'm digging a fort arround a structure like a bottomless pit, with a tower on the middle that pierces the top of the cavern

[Innominate]

I added a 1% chance of iron to all otherwise non-smeltable stones, allowing me to melt them at a smelter (1 iron bar for every 100 melted). Side effects: extra iron is basically just cheating (though I can then just give those away to a caravan), now all stones except raw adamantine, lignite and bituminous coal (I didn't add the metal to them because you can generate coke) appear under "metal ores" when creating a stone stockpile. Despite this, it is still my preferred method for disposing of stone, as I think spontaneously boiling away kilotonnes of stone is more of a cheat than an extra iron bar now and then - which as I mentioned, I can get rid of. I look forward to a later hauling overhaul so that Toady can make waste management a part of the game.

Recently, my gem cutter had a secretive mood and (since I forbade all other gem types) created a perfect ruby - which menaces with spikes of ruby - worth 96kdb. Not too shabby. My best artifact is only 134kdb, made of native gold and red flash opal.

After I finally make some steel armour (after I finally get around to training up my armourer by making/melting copper stuff) I'll equip my champions and clear out the human siege which is, annoyingly, far away from my battlements.

[A-chana]

Got a pair of ambushes this time, but the worst I got was a maceman who just sort of tickled my wrestler champions.

The main issue was the marksdwarf that walked right into a then-hidden mob of four wrestlers and the maceman. It went about as well as you'd expect. However, I had to leave mid-fight, and saved without realizing she was airborne. It ended with her stuck in the air in stasis.

The best solution I got from the forums seemed to be unchecking stuff in Dwarf Companion (she was a lost cause, anyway, because her neck was mangled, I had no mercy-kill mechanisms in place, and I didn't want to heal her in DC). For the record, the flag labeled 0x1.4 controls airborneyness -- just saying because few of the "use DC" answers even mentioned what to do exactly. She collapsed, but by then the fight was pretty much over and now people were trying to save her. Not wanting to simply DC-kill her, since I'm trying to avoid simply healing or hurting people, I restarted to mid-fight and let the goblins get her.

Final tally: Eight of the nine goblins died, including the maceman, but I lost one marksdwarf. Better than last time, but I need to work on that whole issue with a single dwarf getting mobbed. Station them in groups, perhaps.

Plus, one of my Champions reached five kills. Her last name is Drillstaff, and her title is The Flowery Tunnel. Should I be calling Dr. Freud right now?

Maybe for a siege, I'll let them walk into the fort instead. I have stone-fall traps and spiked-ball traps lying around the entrances, so that should soften them up. Then again, I have catapults lying around the outside, although with no highly-experienced siege operators... This will be great. I have maybe one more season to prepare for Goblin Christmas, assuming I get six migrants soon to push me up into a population of 80.

Meanwhile, caravans can't seem to get enough of my ☼shale earrings☼ and other shale crafts. Too bad they don't bring enough steel weapons and shield I can use, but they do bring dogs and food and leather.

EDIT: ohgod one of the stupid cats the migrants brought in just spawned three kittens where are the butchers

[Halceon]

Oh, not much, just zombie carp and lamprey everywhere.

[Poojawa]

currently at 23 Adaptus Astarte, and 47 Elite Adaptus Astarte. Working on Terminator squads now (hammer dwarves)

That, and City walls are almost finished, the Orkz will never take the compound now.

[Grendus]

Ohgod the skarps. My last fortress suffered the same bug with RA where it wouldn't save, so I did a fresh install. For some reason, the site finder is bugged as hell so when it turned up a map without an aquifer I jumped at it. Terrifying jungle with what I thought was a brook. Turns out, it was a river full of skarp and skeletal sea lamprey's. So I had to find a new site.

Ended up in another terrifying jungle. Everything is dead but the fire imps in the exposed magma pipe, should be interesting.

[Quantum Toast]

The Pointless Tower is progressing exactly according to plan, which is impressive since I don't have a plan for it.

Found some bauxite up by the brook. Pity that I don't seem to have magma.

The elves brought nothing but cloth again. Pity that I don't seem to have magma.

Also got made into a barony and got hit with five new nobles at once. The miners seem to be putting off digging out the tax collector's future room.

[The Architect]

A new migrant wave has just come in, and I am hurriedly trying to force my dwarves to grow more plump helmets, or at least harvest the ones that grow. Booze is running low and they will NOT be getting more. A dwarf who cannot bring a stack of -cat tallow biscuits- from the kitchen to the food stockpile does not deserve alcoholic drinks. Those biscuits sat there until they rotted, which is inexcusable because every single one of the little jerks had food hauling on. On the plus side, since it's a reclaimed fortress, I have 200+ traps. So I'm not worrying that much about sieges.  Also, there's a friendly goblin swordmaster running around in my fortress.

This is entirely your fault. I had the same problem once before someone explained it to me. And yes, captured creatures in cages have the odd habit of lingering as friendlies when reclaiming. Don't put all hauling labors on all your dwarves, and don't put food hauling on all of them. Only put it on ones in the industry or dedicated food haulers. This is not covered well in the wiki; in fact we need a whole page of organized "need to know" info like this there. I savescummed and fought some idiots in one of my fortresses over an hour trying to get them to pick up some 30k giant eagle / hydra roasts because I didn't know this, but the real solution is not forbidding them. That's just a way to force certain jobs to get done once you have allowed a backlog to take place.

The proper solution is to restrict hauling jobs to appropriate dwarves. The reason is that if you have 30 dwarves set to stone hauling, the game will que 30 stone hauling jobs. If you have the same 30 set to food hauling, it will also queu 30 food hauling jobs (causing low-priority jobs like moving seeds to be assigned along with your high-priority jobs, whereas if you only have a few dwarves hauling food the high-priority jobs are the only ones queued). You can view this phenomenon with the {j}obs menu. To sum up: your dwarves will have a huge backlog of jobs all the time, and your food will be neglected while stone is being hauled, etc. Please don't get bogged down in the fact that you may never haul stone; it's just an example! It can be any hauling labor. We can't prioritize jobs for dwarves or groups at the moment, so you can't handle jobs by having everyone do everything. I wish we could.

SO, in short you assign all your farmers food or food/refuse hauling (if you don't have mass dumping going on or your farmers just don't have enough to do) and maybe a few dedicated peasants to food hauling only if you still have a food hauling backlog. You can even rename their jobs to "Food Hauler". You don't allow anyone else to do food hauling, or you'll get a big ugly queu that will ruin your labor balance. Similarly you have craftsmen and furnace operators/wood burners/lye makers/soap makers/potash makers and so on do just item hauling and furniture hauling where appropriate (only the jobs related to their tasks, in other words) and you will never experience a backlog in your critical functions. If you find you have too many dwarves hauling items and end up with idlers, you assign craftsmen to make more crap (90% of the time they'd rather make crap than haul, making this an easy fix). If you find the shops getting clogged, you take the craftsmen off manufacturing to move the crap.

Using this system (not really original, no doubt) I don't experience any backlog (ever!), and I don't have idlers. In the future it will be possible to use the laborers just like you want, by prioritizing some tasks for certain individuals or groups. Until then, you have to specialize your haulers and workers to keep things going smoothly.

[Retro]

The Pointless Tower is progressing exactly according to plan, which is impressive since I don't have a plan for it.

Ah, I'd been looking for a sig...

[Grendus]

The elves brought nothing but cloth again. Pity that I don't seem to have magma.

Pansy, lock them in the fort and bludgeon them to death with two soldiers and a wardog.

Also got made into a barony and got hit with five new nobles at once. The miners seem to be putting off digging out the tax collector's future room.

Pity you don't seem to have magma.