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[smips63]

Thanks for the responses everyone. Sounds like I need to break out of my comfort zone and start learn the more complex aspects of the game now .

[Farmerbob]

Would dwares react stupidly if I place my farmer's workshop outside of the pasture and try to milk the animals inside?
What'd happen if I try to milk and the only milked animals are roped animals?

As of the most recent version, I've never done it any other way than what you describe.  I never put any workshop outside, of any type, and never put workshops in pastures.  As for roped animals I'm not sure why you would rope them?  Are they guard cows? (not kidding, lol)

However, roped animals, as of the last version anyway, would simply be dehitched, dragged to the workshop, then milked.  Sometimes the animal gets away for a short while, but it's still assigned to the rope, so the dwarves will eventually find it and put it back where it belongs.  I used pastured in the current version, not ropes except for guard wardogs, so not sure what the reaction of a milker to a rope would be this version.

[Farmerbob]

3.I have 10 crafters right now. It's a lot, but it's a good way of removing excess stone.

How do you keep up with producing bins to put everything in? I would plow through wood like crazy if I did that...Or can you make bins out of more than just wood?

Bins can also be made out of metal.
Although, in this case I think Prologue is not using bins at all.

Wouldn't not using bins clutter the floor just as much as the stone would? Or is that not the purpose for removing the excess stone?

Four possibilities off the top of my head.

1) Really Honking Big stockpiles make bins less necessary when your dwarves are still slow crafters, but eventually stops working well.
2) Two stockpiles.  One small one, one large one.  The small one is by the trade center, the large one is underneath an atom smasher.  Masterwork and Artifact goods go into the small one, everything else goes to the big one and every now and then trigger the smasher.  They should both be very close to the crafting center, or your dwarves will eat up huge amounts of time simply hauling mugs around.
3) Declare a garbage pile in the middle of a stockpile.  When the stockpile is full, remove the stockpile designation and immediately designate everything there as dump items.  Dwarves come and stack everything into one pile.  Re-designate stockpile & let it build again. Let items stay dumped until the caravans come, then undump them and tell the dwarves to take them to the traders.
4) Magma.  Works with most rock & other materials.  Anything that won't melt, sell to traders.

[rephikul]

Rotate your stonefondlers into siegefondlers. They can work with colored boulders days and nights and still wont consume so much of them.

[Imp]

3) Declare a garbage pile in the middle of a stockpile.  When the stockpile is full, remove the stockpile designation and immediately designate everything there as dump items.  Dwarves come and stack everything into one pile.  Re-designate stockpile & let it build again. Let items stay dumped until the caravans come, then undump them and tell the dwarves to take them to the traders.

What's the advantage in removing/replacing that stockpile?  I use a method quite similar to this, except I do not remove the stockpile, and each time after designating the dump, I undump and unforbid the center garbage tile itself.

If you don't undump that center tile, each time you mark a dumping, everything that was already in the garbage dump gets dumped again - a quick task as the item is simply picked up and immediately dropped again - but if you have 1000s+ of items on that spot it can still eat a lot of dwarf days.  When you unforbid the items, the dwarves leave them alone - because they are already on a stockpile tile that is set to accept their item type.

Once dumped, items are marked as forbidden, so at some point you'd need an unforbid if you mean to haul them off or otherwise interact with them again.

[revier]

Bees! I haven't messed around with them much yet, so I have a couple of questions:

How often can I expect to be able to harvest from a hive, on average? Am I looking at once a year? Once every couple of seasons?

How many hives set to split should I keep per hive set to harvest to maintain a fairly steady supply? I know I can also collect wild colonies, but I'd rather not rely on it.

[smips63]

1. So my fortress just hit year 3, and all I've seen are a few goblin snatchers and a goblin thief. Is this just because I picked a peaceful starting area? I was expecting some type of siege by now...

2. Last night I had a dorf with a fractured foot. He sat in the hospital for a season, though 6 other dorfs got diagnosed and cleared in that time frame. I had to remove the bed from under him and wait for someone to carry him to another bed in the room before the doctor would see him and fix him up. Any particular reason why, or did I just hit a hiccup? Just FYI, all he needed was cleaning, a splint, and a crutch which I had the whole time.

3. I dug out channels that go 3 z-levels down to an arena. How do I safely dump caged goblins and such down there? When I designated the caged goblins to the Pit, the dorfs removed them from the cage and then dragged them to the Pit, all while the goblin was smacking him around. My militia came over and beat him to death once that all started. While it was interesting, I was really hoping to have some !fun! with him in a locked room...

[Garath]

it sometimes works if you put the cage close to the pit, build it one tile away. Before the goblin knows what is happening, it's dumped inside

[Jorshamo]

You could also build the cage in the arena, and link it to a lever.

[Telgin]

1. So my fortress just hit year 3, and all I've seen are a few goblin snatchers and a goblin thief. Is this just because I picked a peaceful starting area? I was expecting some type of siege by now...

2. Last night I had a dorf with a fractured foot. He sat in the hospital for a season, though 6 other dorfs got diagnosed and cleared in that time frame. I had to remove the bed from under him and wait for someone to carry him to another bed in the room before the doctor would see him and fix him up. Any particular reason why, or did I just hit a hiccup? Just FYI, all he needed was cleaning, a splint, and a crutch which I had the whole time.

3. I dug out channels that go 3 z-levels down to an arena. How do I safely dump caged goblins and such down there? When I designated the caged goblins to the Pit, the dorfs removed them from the cage and then dragged them to the Pit, all while the goblin was smacking him around. My militia came over and beat him to death once that all started. While it was interesting, I was really hoping to have some !fun! with him in a locked room...

1. It's taken me as long as 4 years to get a siege.  I usually got a few thieves before then, and ambushes seem to be very rare for me for some reason.  Just hang on, it'll get Fun soon.

2. I saw something similar recently.  I had a (pony, not a dwarf, but whatever) soldier get a busted foot (hoof).  She stayed in the hospital for close to a year without ever getting any better or anything being done for her.  The doctor was continuously diagnosing and cleaning her, but her crutch request never got fulfilled and she just stayed in bed.  I got tired of it and tried deconstructing the bed, which didn't help either.

I then realized I didn't have any bone doctors.  I turned that on for my chief medical dwarf (pony), and presto: soldier gets a crutch and leaves the hospital.  She started recovering after that too.

I don't know if it was something else and may be a coincidence, but it was pretty strange regardless.

3. Linking to a lever is probably the best way to do this.

[Imp]

1. So my fortress just hit year 3, and all I've seen are a few goblin snatchers and a goblin thief. Is this just because I picked a peaceful starting area? I was expecting some type of siege by now...

It can vary a lot, especially related to how far you are from the other civilizations that want to take a chunk out you and your population and wealth details (and there's the random factor too).  While selecting where to embark, you can use tab to cycle through a list of screens, one of which can verify that you're in a territory that each race can or can't reach (it'll also show if you happen to be at peace, cold war, or outright war with the ones that can reach you, which also has an effect on getting attacked).

And you can also make enemies of your friends, if you wanted to.  Abuse a few non-dwarven caravans, that's likely to get a nice war started.

3. I dug out channels that go 3 z-levels down to an arena. How do I safely dump caged goblins and such down there? When I designated the caged goblins to the Pit, the dorfs removed them from the cage and then dragged them to the Pit, all while the goblin was smacking him around. My militia came over and beat him to death once that all started. While it was interesting, I was really hoping to have some !fun! with him in a locked room...

Thieves are 'special' and struggle.  Later when you get non-thieves you'll have a much easier time pitting them.  The plan to build the cages in the arena and use a lever to open them would work, but is pretty slow to set up, so here's an alternate idea which you might want to try -

This assumes you intend to have friendly units of some type (your military, your warbeasts) killing the gobins in the arena, and not some other sort of torment intended down there.

Stockpile the goblin/other victimtype cages in the arena, with your intended friendly combatants stationed or pastured in there as well.

Place a pen/pasture in this arena (if one's not already there).

Assign your victim to the pen.

A non-military dwarf will release the victim and attempt to move it to the nearby pasture/pen.  That handler will attempt to flee as soon as the victim is out of its control - be that from escaping or being placed in the nearby pasture/pen, and the gladiators will move in at this point.  If you want this to happen inside a locked arena, just lock it after the handler enters it.

[Lockem Shoto]

1) When I was trying to trade with my first caravan (I REALLY relied on food from trade because my fortress was a mining colony with 6 miners and 1 woodcutter at the very beginning) and when I had selected all of the options that I needed, they said that I couldn't truly have them. What the buck happened? I kept trying, but they eventually got impatient and left.

2) On my last mining fortress, I tried making a really deep Spartan pit under a drawbridge. Before I knew it, they had all started to die of thirst. Do any of you have any tips regarding channels? I'm probably building it ALL wrong.

[Telgin]

For the first one, I'm going to guess you didn't offer them enough in payment.  If you don't give them enough, they might counter offer, or just get mad and leave.  Especially be careful about trading wood stuff to the elves.

For the channel, that depends a lot on what you did exactly.  Best advice I can give is dig it one z-level at a time and make sure that there is a ramp or carved / constructed stair case at each level so the dwarves can get out.  If you channeled down after channeling down, you may have ended up with a z-level with no ramps leading up to the previous level.

[smips63]

2. I saw something similar recently.  I had a (pony, not a dwarf, but whatever) soldier get a busted foot (hoof).  She stayed in the hospital for close to a year without ever getting any better or anything being done for her.  The doctor was continuously diagnosing and cleaning her, but her crutch request never got fulfilled and she just stayed in bed.  I got tired of it and tried deconstructing the bed, which didn't help either.

I then realized I didn't have any bone doctors.  I turned that on for my chief medical dwarf (pony), and presto: soldier gets a crutch and leaves the hospital.  She started recovering after that too.

I don't know if it was something else and may be a coincidence, but it was pretty strange regardless.

Nah, it was nothing like that. My doctor just wouldn't even look at him. He sat there undiagnosed for a long time until I removed his bed and whatnot while the doctor just sat in the dining hall drinking, eating, and I think he threw a "Hooray for dorf malpractice" party too.

As for my third question, I was thinking that you could have your dwarves carry a caged creature to a pit, then they would dump it from the cage directly into the pit. Oh well! Now I know not to do it to thieves at least

Thanks again for the help folks.

Edit:
Okay, more dumb questions.

I caught three Goblin Thieves. I learned that I shouldn't designate them to a pit because they will fight back, which is fine. I tried striping them and dumping the cages, but I don't think anything happened. I reclaimed them and they got moved to an animal stockpile. Hoping that they were disarmed now, I set them to be dumped, but no one would come to open the cages...What am I doing wrong?

[Lockem Shoto]

I understand that making squads of 4 dwarves will make them train faster, but how do you guys usually attack goblins during a seige?

Do you let them sit or do you target kill goblins one by one? It feels like I'm using more strength than I need on a goblin when I do this ... I don't know how to evenly distribute damage