Plus there's a small back entrance that will probably be closed off once I get some barrels filled with water stashed away. I only put it there in the first place to ease the burden of getting water inside. With barrels the trips don't have to be as frequent.
I do that too. Ease of entry while building then walled off later.
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This run, Num Muddyboots mainly statted up attributes and skills through hack and slash combat. Even though I had left his combat preferences at default settings, he was still developing a 1-2 level stat gulf between shielder user and dodger, as recovery combat requires that you opt to manually shield block attacks to trigger opponent recovery.
Now the best way to even up the gulf—or better yet, push the gulf in favor of dodger (key were I to ever turn this character over to AI in fort mode) is shooting bandits at point blank range (equipped with ranged weapon and shield) and auto-defending.
At dabbling marksdwarf, the firing delay produces around 16 unanswered attacks and up at legendary marksdwarf, 8 and under unanswered attacks. To remain un-hit and uninjured during this 16-to-8 action interval requires a good stat gulf between your character and the bandit. If bandits are say between
level 1 and 3 (novice-to-competent), your character needs to be at Adept-Expert (level 7-8) in shield user and dodger to afford a good margin of error. The before:
(click thumbnail to expand)
If your character is large for their species, any charge attacks by the enemy NPC cannot knock you down. If your character is average for their species, you'd likely want to ground them with a foot/leg shot before shooting and auto-defending. If used versus a night troll which has level 6 stats across, it's better to have level 8+:
Besides dodger, the other skill that most benefit from 8-16 actions of movement per turn is Armor User, so gains in strength are common as well.
In this last shot, shield user is only level 9, while dodger is level 15.
A funny little non-macro'd grind.