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[wolfrick]

Ok I need a bit of help.

    I finally got a fortress off the ground(my first since the tutorial and I was doing quite well).  I had a bout 60 dwarves all working and happy.  I had a pretty decent military of 12 or so 6 hammer, 4 wrestler, 2-3 marks dwarves.  So here is where it started to go wrong.

    Something caught on fire in my food stockpile.  How did this happen?  I never saw anything on fire just started seeing smoke(but no fire), but some dwarves started dieing from the heat.  I flooded the area diverting water from the moat and eventually managed to put out the fire(again nothing was on fire, but the booze was "boiling".  I handled that as well as possible and lost 5-6 guys including a legendary leatherworker.

   In the middle of all this the trade wagon arrived from my home city and was promptly ambushed by 8 or so goblins.  They were pretty far from the fort and by the time I could respond by setting a patrol there they were dead.  My strategy of waiting for the goblins to come to me didnt work here.  How do I protect these guys way out in the middle of nowhere? 

   I had some trouble with equipment because I was lacking enough supply of iron ores.  I managed to make some chain armor, a few hammers, and a couple xbows but that was about all i could make.   
I had the marksdrawves practicing with wood bolts.  How do I get them to use the better ammo when I put them on duty?

   Mainly I wish I could explain the fire.  Ive set plenty of dwarves on fire i my first fort so I know what it looks like.  Can the food stocks just catch for no reason?  Any tips on dealing with low iron situations?  Any advice on how I can monitor the equipment my dwarves are using?

 I probably could have kept the fort going, but it got complicated my design was pretty lousy so gonna try again.  Thanks for any comments

[SkyRender]

 If your stockpiles are anywhere near magma or lava, even if they're safely far way from the substance proper, they're still at risk due to Fire Snakes.  Those little vermin will set things ablaze sometimes when they touch them.

 Most players use Goblin equipment as a source of iron, melting it down.  It's been playfully dubbed "Goblinite" as a result.  That's not much help to you at the moment, however, I'm sure.

 As for bolts, simply set all wooden/bone bolts to be dumped as soon as an attack comes, and your Marksdwarves will have no choice but to actually use decent ammo.

[JmzLost]

Your marksdwarves should use metal ammo for real fights automatically, but they will never use it to practice.  If you forbid or dump all wood and bone bolts from the <z> stocks menu, they will only have metal ammo, but they will only get experience when fighting.

You can request iron and pig-iron from both the humans and dwarves, and steel from the dwarves.  You can also buy all of the iron and steel toys, instruments, and +Large Iron Helms+ that they bring and melt it down.  Worst case, <v>iew the caravan guards, check their <I>nventory, highlight their armor, press <enter> and <d>ump it.  The cost will be included when the caravan calculates its profit (or loss), but they won't get mad if you strip them naked and melt their armor for your own use.

To protect traders far from your fort, make sure there is only 1 path they can take to your depot.  Walls and/or channels to the edge of the map work well, as does a tunnel that only surfaces 5-10 spaces from the edge.  Wagons need a 5x5 area at the edge to appear, and can use ramps but not stairs.  Pack animals only need a 3x3, and will happily use stairs as well as ramps. 

JMZ

[Roostre]

The basic thing to keep in mind about fire is that dwarves don't react to it. At all. It's possible all your alcohol got set on fire because Urist McMetalworker was attacked by a fire imp at the magma smelter or Urist McSoldier just walked away from a fight with something that fought a fire imp or dragon earlier. Whatever the case, this dwarf did not know he was on fire as he went to take a routine drink. This is especially nasty since players don't often notice there is a fire until at least one dwarf dies "in the heat," and by then that dwarf has already set at least a few other things ablaze. Fire spreads like a deadly viral pandemic in this game, so treat it like one; "quarantine" whatever burning dwarves you notice as soon as you can.

As for iron and steel, I'd have to agree that the best way to get a hold of the stuff is to just melt down the equipment of defeated goblins. Making steel yourself is a particular hassle.

[assimilateur]

One important thing: if you're low on ores, do not do waste your metal on bolts. Granted, wood and bone bolts have lower damage, but they're effective regardless. You should buy iron and steel bars and gear from the caravans, as has already been suggested, and use that on something important, like armor.

[Toxicles]

Also, you can make swords out of obsidian.

Do keep that in mind.

[Astramancer]

If you have magma and sand, you can easily make unlimited amounts of trap components.  They're only 50% effectiveness (compared to iron) but they're free*!

*just add labor

Traps are somewhat cheap as a way of taking care of invaders because a good traphall will slaughter everything and anything that's not trap immune (but there's still ways around that), and combine with the above 'one path to your fort', and you don't have to worry about defending traders, because those gobbos will be made into mincemeat by your 10x green glass sawblades of doom on every tile.

Also, I noticed you mentioned making crossbows and lack of iron in the same sentence.  Don't make crossbows out of iron.  The material and quality of the crossbow only affect the melee damage dwarves do with them when they run out of bolts and start beating something to death with them.  With a proper setup (i.e. where the marksdwarves can't physically get to the enemy) they won't get into melee so the material they're made from is not relevant.

[Greiger]

Higher quality crossbows give bonuses to the wielder's crossbow skill as well as affecting melee damage.  But yea materiel still doesn't matter until you start beating something over the head with it.

[Skorpion]

Indeed. Wooden or bone crossbows are fine for quick solutions.

Obsidian/wood swords are also handy.

[Beanchubbs]

I'm assuming you have magma somewhere on your map and a fire snake got to your booze stockpile, beware of that. Fire snakes, although they are just vermin, can be more hazadous to dwarvern health than an ambush of goblins. Either that, or what Roostre said.

As for protecting caravans, here is what I do. Whenever I get the message that traders arrive, I put about half my military on patrols along my walls and inner defenses, and 1/4 patrolling the outside (the other 1/4 are usually sleeping, eating, drinking, or partying), then, when you get the ambush message, send the necessary amount of troops to go deal with it. Make sure you have the outside patrollers have the highest agility of all your troops, as they can make it to the action faster.

With the lack of iron, do what everybody else is suggesting and melt down goblin equipment, if you can. If no goblinite is available, do some exploratory mining when your miners have nothing else to do, and you should have enough ore after a while, depending on how frequent iron is in whatever layer stone you have available.

Also, marksdwarves automatically switch to the best ammo available when set to active duty.

[kilakan]

are you guys sure about the crossbow thing, cause I'm pretty sure i read somewhere, that toady stated that the material of the xbow increases it's accuracy, but not dmg.

[Greiger]

Not 100% but it does seem to be the accepted truth.  I would be happy to be proven wrong.  I do recall Toady saying that about quality but I don't recall materiel.

[Astramancer]

In any case, crossbows are ridiculously dangerous due to how combat and piercing attacks work.  no-skill marksdwarves using bone crossbows and bone bolts can still instantly kill anything they can hit (which is iffy if they don't have any skill).  Even if it matters, it doesn't matter enough to worry about.

[assimilateur]

To protect traders far from your fort, make sure there is only 1 path they can take to your depot.

That makes sense, but will this help with sieges? When a siege starts, any potential caravans bypass your site unless you get rid of the siege on time.

So in short, is there a way of making sure your caravans come in spite of you being besieged? Breaking the siege quickly isn't always possible, and even if it were, I don't think it would be a surefire way to get your caravan either. The only way I can think of, that's sort of gamey, is the following: give your invaders different active seasons than your traders. That, however, isn't necessarily a road I wanna go, not to mention that I'm not sure if it will even work.

[Astramancer]

As long as you're still besieged, traders won't come.  If you build walls and make sure that there's only one path from map edge to your fort (you can use raised drawbridges to make walls to the map edge, or hope trees grow there), then I'm pretty sure that's the corridor that ambushers and sieges come from as well.  If that corridor is heavily trapped, and you have marksdwarves stationed on towers at or near the map edge (with guard animals on restraints to reveal ambushes), then you should be able to break sieges more or less instantly.  (they'll path to the fortress, and die under a hail of crossbow bolts, humorously large rocks falling on their heads, and indiana-jones style traps pretty quickly).

Of course, if said traps fail, you should have a way of sealing off your fort, and getting more marksdwarves over the corridor without unsealing your fort.