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[jerank]

I consider myself a veteran DF player by now. I know just about every game trick from exhaustive wikitrawling and personal experience, I've modded the game quite a bit, and to date I've gotten about seven fortresses to their tenth year intact. Vanilla gaming was starting to get rather dull by then, so I decided to try something new; a cavern fortress.

Embarking on a glacier, I immediately began tunnelling straight downwards to the second cavern layer (Openess Min/Max 15/100) and started a settlement. Despite my previous experiences with caverns (once getting my entire fortress slaughtered by a massive swarm of crundles, of all things), this particular set seemed to be astonishingly passive. Enemy creatures were few and pretty weak, allowing my defences to be solidified by a few stonefall traps, and ore of just about every type was fabulously abundant. Within four years I've boosted my fortress up to 138 inhabitants with legendary +5 metal, armor, weapon and blacksmiths, at least one legendary in every other profession, plus a mighty military wielding masterpiece level adamantine weapons and encased in masterpiece steel and adamantine armor. I've lost maybe three dwarves the entire time, and not only that, I seem to be playing host to an earthly god.
I’ve heard a lot about dwarves with godly stats being made over years of hard labour, but this guy was a lowly migrant animal trainer. About a minute after the migration finished, I got a titan attack. It was a swamp titan, a crocodile with four tusks and around ten legs, with a lethal fire breath attack. At this point, I had military training with wooden weapons, I was essentially defenceless. I ordered every door to the outside world walled up, shutting everything out, including this animal trainer (Fikod). Fikod, far from being afraid, walks up the central staircase, meets the titan on the surface PUNCHES IT TO DEATH in three strikes, then for an encore decides to decimate the native polar bear population. He had zero combat skills, and was described as only ‘strong’ in his profile, and quite susceptible to disease. His anti-bear rampage lasted for every last one of the beasts and left him with zero wounds. He killed a forgotten beast AND about five polar bears, at migrant-level skill, with no combat attributes, with zero injuries. Fikod is now a legendary axedwarf, with an artefact quality weapon and full adamantine armour. In his entire tour of duty he has never once gotten a negative stat (tired, wounded, etc) and has about forty kills to his name.
My fortress has also never been sieged, only raided, and seems to have more ore then rock. I have around 4000 stones and 4.600 bars of smelted metal, nearly a quarter of it platinum and a substantial percentage more of gold. My farms are insane productive, and slaughtering polar bears and cave animals has given me a food stockpile of over ten thousand units of food. I’m not bragging about my skill, but it seems like everything I do turns out fabulously in this embark. My first artefact was a jade table worth over 100k in dwarf currency, my third was an adamantine shield worth around a million. I’ve never encountered anything nastier then a cave crawler, and even my nobles seem content to issue mandates for pretty mundane items. Is it even possible to be this lucky in DF, and why was Fikod so tremendously awesome anyway?

[cerapa]

You were blessed by the RNG.

All hail the holy one!

[Julius Clonkus]

I am sorry to inform you, but now that you said it, you should not expect your spree of luck to continue. I hope you have experience with instakill syndrome dust cloud of death giant inorganic blob FBs and tantrum spirals.

[jerank]

I have experience crushing them under huge instant-death caveins. 

[Dwarf]

Your fortress seems to go quite well. Obviously, it's up to you to create some FUN.

[NW_Kohaku]

I think part of the challenge of caverns comes from (A) giving them a few years of survival of the fittest to make sure that only the nasty cavern-dwellers are around when you crack the cavern, and (B) making many cavern threats become based upon fortress size or created wealth, like with seiges.

I've actually run plenty of "experiment" fortresses that were perfectly fine almost entirely run out in the open.  Heck, just carving off all the ramps around a little hill, and living in that secluded area is almost enough to prevent almost all problems with defense, and as long as you don't do too much work to generate too much wealth, and don't attract too many immigrants, a handful of dwarves living out on a hill can live a perfectly peaceful life picking berries... (So that's how the elves do it...)

Anyway, maybe you were just personally kissed by Lady Luck with tongue right before embark, but maybe you should start thinking about a Dig Deeper style mod to spice life up a little?

[Double A]

I am sorry to inform you, but now that you said it, you should not expect your spree of luck to continue. I hope you have experience with instakill syndrome dust cloud of death giant inorganic blob FBs and tantrum spirals.

You just had to link to TV tropes, didn't you?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've been there ever since I read that post... when it was written.

[Julius Clonkus]

I am sorry to inform you, but now that you said it, you should not expect your spree of luck to continue. I hope you have experience with instakill syndrome dust cloud of death giant inorganic blob FBs and tantrum spirals.

You just had to link to TV tropes, didn't you?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've been there ever since I read that post... when it was written.

I always wanted to link someone to TV tropes and steal some minutes hours days of their life.

Obviously I haven't succeeded yet and need to continue doing that.

[Double A]

Hours worked.

TV tropes is deadly, man.

[Sir Finkus]

I'm still on it you bastard.

[Greiger]

Yea what's wrong with you, I hate you all.  6PM to 11PM.  I was enjoying playing x-com you monster.   

I somehow ended up on a page about Captain Obvious, I have no idea how I got there.

[iceball3]

Yea what's wrong with you, I hate you all.  6PM to 11PM.  I was enjoying playing x-com you monster.   

I somehow ended up on a page about Captain Obvious, I have no idea how I got there.

don't they have a trope about that?

[Thief^]

Must... resist.......
I'll be late for Iceland if I don't resist...

[jerank]

I think my problem is that I'm far too sensitive for Dwarf Fortress. I hate it when my dwarves die for any reason, so I tend to be ultra-ultra-ultra careful whenever I expand. The first thing I did upon breaching the cavern was to bunker down in a tiny area and seed the passages with an obscene number of stonefall traps, which killed a lot of early opposition. I took the penalty of hugely cluttered workshops and expanded very slowly, always making sure that I had secured an area completely before moving on to the next, building small stockpiles behind me and walling off sections that had no further usage. By the time really hostile and deadly wildlife showed up I was more than capable of defeating them with a crossbow-oriented military. Forgotten Beasts were locked outside the fortress, or lured into obsidian farms. By the time I was getting champions I'd already gotten several megatons of steel and iron due to magnetite deposits. The iron was used to train up my smiths to legendary +5 skill, and the steel used to forge an all-masterwork series of armor suits for my new axe and speardwarves. Essentially, I turtle on DF like nobody else. If a plan hasn’t had absolutely every last variable ironed out of it (including dwarven idiocy), it won’t be used. My early defences generally consist of war animals, with little to no dwarven military support. Buying/capturing elephants are always my first priority, as is getting them to breed. Elephant calves make excellent cannon-fodder, and give a nice haul of meat and bone if they die in the attempt. After seizing everything from an elven caravan three or four times in a row, they almost always start bringing savage-area tamed wildlife with them and stop bringing worthless cloth and wooden werapons. It’s a great little strategy for building up a non-sentient defence force while your military trains up to champion level with no risk to itself.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

I'm usually a callous monster in DF, playing almost the stereotypical demanding Old Testament God. I build opulent structures for a few chosen or for no reason at all, and most dwarves live squalid lives in the tunnels of my fortress.