Arghy:
Your set up seems trap intensive. Will trap-avoid civs still dodge weapon traps in order to fall into your pit, or do you only use the guard tower/ranged military set up to stop them?
So you have 1) The maze entrance, 2) A one tile wide walled snakey entrance, and 3) the main entrance for traders with guard towers. fortifications for ranged military, and another bridge to trap things inside it?
Thanks, something to think about. I try to have one main 3 tile entrance with cage/weapon traps and dogs after a curve to prevent them being shot. Then once that is squared away (year 3 or so before it's totally complete) I work on an "invaders" entrance with a one tile wide snakey tunnel with better weapon traps. I know entrance only needs to be 1 tile wide but wagons are gonna come back at some point so it seems a good idea to be used to their size requirements. For the snakey tunnel I need to experiment with bridges to be able to easily clean it up because it takes forever for my dwarves to weave their way through it. This is problem one. Problem two is often the invaders stop coming and just sit around waiting for me. I have found that is NOT the case with a wider entrance, another benefit to the three tile wide relatively straight heavily trapped one.
Deon: I started with one Steel dwarf and one Shield dwarf. Shield seemed actually better to me but you're saying Steel is better? I also got two Moss and an Aspid (worthless). I was hoping for a Schroom dwarf to increase farming yield. I did put one of my two Obsidian's in metalworking, though two at this point is a bit much.
Again, where is the most updated info on the new crops? The first post of this thread and the manual don't list all of them. I like the sheet in the manual that says if everything can be eaten raw, cooked, extracted, or brewed, but don't know how to figure that out for the foods and seeds not in the manual.
Edit: While I'm on that, some of the new metals are unclear to me, too. I saw your "relative value" page but wasn't sure I was reading it right. Are you saying in your mod Bronze is a better metal than Iron? Because it's shown as superior to Iron by weight/density (what happened to Silver? - not on your list) AND by edge. That's not how it is in vanilly, right? You put that the only think Iron is better than Bronze at is compressive yield/fracture, but I don't even know what that means. In short, aside from spoilerite, best blunt is Black Bronze, with Copper of all things being second best, and best edged is Red Steel, followed by Black Steel, followed by Steel, then Sun Gold? So for example the first traders to reach me were Dunedwellers (still listed as Ezrakim in the manual) and they had Sun Gold up the wazoo, so that actually will make me pretty high quality armor and weapons while I forge steel and its derivatives?
Thanks!