I'm kind of just starting this new fort to give myself some fun guidelines. I'm kind of making up rules and stuff as they come up I suppose, but feel free to play along or whatever. I'm not Urist McMayor.
RULES:
1.All citizens barring lazy nobles must serve a mandatory 3 months/year military service
2.All weapons, armour, ammunition, traps, etc. must be fort produced. Any migrants caught with any of these goods must be relieved of them, and the goods melted or forbidden immediately.
3.By 50 population, a "Full Time" Fortress guard must be maintained - a full squad of 10 dedicated fighters with a maximum of 2 months scheduled inactive per year (which must be covered by another full 10 man squad)
4.Every calendar year, you must send a raid with minimum 10 participants to a goblin or Elven site (starting calendar year 2)
5. You may only embark with points in military skills (extended to teacher and student, and medical skills)
OPTIONAL FUN:
-Evil/savage embarks
-Cavern diving
-Human wars
-Vampires, necromancers etc.
-Copper (Or one metal) only
-Volcano
etc. etc.
UPDATE 0: Preperation and embark
I'm doing this in my pre-existing world, in which I've had a couple of brief forts and another comfortably retired after perhaps 5 or so years that I just kind of lost direction with. Before even booting the game, I made some changes to my default boot options in LNP.
I'm keeping it at 80/110 population cap to save some frames down the track, and I always feel less involved the larger my population gets. Have and will continue to consider lowering this further. I also bumped up the invasion numbers just for fun. I'd like to have to try and deal with deaths, repopulating, and keeping everyone happy
Exporting my world into legends and having a look around, I've found this absolute goldmine of a fun sub-region.
You can see here most nearby "civilised" settlements being Goblins, with just a couple of Human settlements, and Elves in the surrounding fringes. The only Dwarven civilisation has a cluster of settlements a bit further to the west, but I'll be well and truly out in the wilderness here. On top of that, there are a number of lairs, caves, labyrinths and shrines. Shouldn't be hard to get my military some hands on experience. Now to jump into the game and find myself a site in this little area that I would like to play on. I would like something with high savagery, but I think I'll stay away from evil, and if I can get some nice minerals and flux stones without any aquifer, I should be in for a good time.
Geographically, it's not a particularly interesting region, mostly marsh, shrubland and savanna, so I've found myself a decent looking 3x4 embark (saving all the frames) that I think will do nicely.
If you refer to the legends map I posted earlier, the area is 3 tiles north of the mountain next to the goblin cluster. Easy raiding distance.
A little heads up for this next spoiler, there's several screenshots contained. Basically everything relevant from my embark.
The plan is to temporarily set up metal industry to immediately get an iron battleaxe for tree cutting, and a couple of pickaxes to start mining. The fourth magnetite ore will be for a magical pair of leggings for if I find myself in a bit of trouble as far as a metal industry goes.
Time to get playing! Stay tuned for updates, let me know if you give this a go.
Update 1:
Should not start something like this at 2am, forgot I can't use wood and in fact need fire-safe material (stone) for the metal industry to get built, I'll pick it back up tomorrow with hopefully more or less the same embark +stone -wood.