Hi everyone, I've been playing DF for 3 weeks now after seeing Flarechannel. I played a 7 year fort largly following TinyPirate's tutorial which was a lot of fun. I diverged a lot, and after 7 years there's no challenge left, with my kill pit trap I created - so I got bored. Decided to play another fort and genned a world, spent 15-20 hours before realising the embark has no bauxite, flux, sand and only 10 small veins of iron. Although I'd started the project (megaproject to me, not sure vets would agree - we'll see what you all think when I'm done) when I saw this thread I simply had to use this map.
I tried genning myself with d16 and got crap, so I just downloaded the region save someone posted, from vanilla DF and embarked in my excitement. It's very cool, and I was lucky to arrive near the brook and away from danger. My project is going well, although I'm concerned about not finding iron and only a small amount of flux. I even had a great trap 'o doom idea that follows the project theme perfectly and spent the last 4 days prototyping it on my first fort since it's so stable & safe. (I'll post more about the project before it's finished if anyone's interested, but I assume since this is only my 3rd fort [and a re-do of the aborted 2nd] it might be a bit pedestrian for here)
Anyway, back to my point, I had intended to use the Orc mod (or something) to avoid things getting boring like in my first fort, where goblin sieges are yawn worthy. I'm now 30+ hours into my project and things are going well. It's only first year in game, so much time tracing out the circles I need which is a complete arse across multiple z levels. So, I don't want to start a third time. But I don't want to have no worthy foes - especially for my planned death trap. I know I have GCS's & HFS, but what I really want is hard sieges or megabeasts. Or both. Fun basically.
So, what are my options? What mods or hacking or anything can I do to enable this without having to regen and start again? I'd appreciate the help, so I can enjoy heaven to its fullest. I suspect it'll be the last I play before the 2010 Df is released.
P.S. Struggled for ages with 7 dwarves, got migrants eventually. 19 in fact - brilliant. Right, now where are they arriving. What!! To the right of the top of the chasm? WTF. Within 10 squares of a CGS and 3 ratmen. Facepalm. Okay, so maybe the ratmen and GCS will keep each other busy? What, they're friends?? When did that happen? Ohhh, this is not going well... 10 made it to my fort. I then realised that I was about to lose 3-4 of my original 7 dorfs who were 80% of the way over to the chasm to pick up the stuff I forgot about forbidding. D'oh. I reloaded the backup I made when the migrants arrived and tried not to screw up. Saved 12 this time.
Why there though - it's a 6x6 embark FFS there's a lot of other places to arrive, still I should be thankful that the caravan was okay.
P.S. One more thing - can a square with down stairs support adjacent grates? I'll experiment tonight, but at work right now and curiosity is killing me...
EDIT: yes you can - great for a magma drain system.
(although the downside is the flashing, is there a way to stop this either locally or globally?)