Bronze is better than iron so if you can find cassiterite (tin) you can make a bunch of armor from it. Bismuth bronze has the same stats so if you've got some bismuthinite you can double how much bronze you've got to work with (though you just about have to embark with bismuthinite in your wagon to find it.)
As you've heard metals have more properties than they used to. Armor still works in a very similar way because you care about if another metal can cut through it or not. For weapons that don't cut (Hammers) you instead want something very heavy. Silver used to just make garbage weapons but it's now the best material for hammers.
You can also make training weapons out of wood and this means with just a wood log you can make an axe to cut down trees with, if you feel like milking your embark points for everything they're worth.
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As for training your military there are two reasons it is slow: The first is that each squad just does one thing at a time, all as a group. If this is someone giving a demonstration then they have to wait for everyone to show up and moving around wastes a ton of time, especially if someone was already in the middle of eating and wants to finish first. The simple solution is to only put 3 of them in squads. 2 of them will practically always be sparring with the occasional demonstration mixed in.
This takes one other thing though- you need to learn the military menu. The whole squad control thing doesn't pause the game when you go into it but instead of +ing through your squads you select them with letters starting at a and going to, well Z I would presume. The military screen is very different. You first appoint the leader of your army and then every first guy in a squad gets his own mini-noble status under this guy. There are also uniforms (pain to work out quite how that interface works but after that easy to make things happen,) and alerts. The game starts you with two default alerts call inactive and active/training. You can delete both and make a bunch of custom ones if you want but inactive will effectively undraft everyone set to it and active/training defaults with training all year round (orders from the squad menu, such as "kill this yeti" override this.) You can also set civilians to a particular alert where, say, they are confined to a particular burrow. This is a lot like the old stay indoors command but much more versatile.
The important part of the 3 member squad system is to change those training orders just a bit. The game lets you say how many members of a squad need to be actively doing what they are told to. No more having posts abandoned when the leader wants to go take a nap. You can say that five of them must always guard a particular spot while the excess go off to eat, drink, or haul junk around. Well, they do solo practice sometimes. In the case of training you want to just require two of them to be active so they'll spar without a third wheel sitting around wasting space when he could go off an eat.
-Now those demonstrations can make a big deal of difference. If a dwarf actually has really high skill in something then it's going to spread to the others pretty quick but if he only has a smidge more experience in it that others it's probably not as good as sparring. Whether this has everything to do with it or not they will still gain skill much faster if they have a skilled dwarf around so instead of a team of 3 recruits it is better to send one of the veterans in to lead two newbies. If you last long enough you'll split these groups up a bunch of times.
Or there is the very tempting route of training soldiers through experience. Genuine combat increases their skills disgustingly fast compared to standard training. This means that if you strip a goblin of his weapon and then send in a pile of dorfs with wooden axes to hack at him for a season they should all become pretty good with an axe. There is the slight worry that the goblin can become a legendary wrestler this way so you need to send somebody in with real weapons after awhile if the trainees aren't killing him.
But at the same time weapon traps give this same kind of experience (dodging or deflecting the weapons, or maybe even getting hit by them.) A pathway of of all training sword traps would most likely just train a sieging army up to legendary skill levels but as for dwarves you can take advantage of this with upright spear traps and a repeating lever. One training spear per trap or ten, both seem to work pretty darn quick, though you'll want to lock the doors if you have any sympathy for pets and children.
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The underground features are not nearly as dangerous to open up as things in 40d were. Well, that light blue one is pretty similar. It feels like letting out the fire spirits a lot more often now but you still sometimes get the equivalent of those amphibian ones. The 3 caverns though, those are very similar to the surface world. They can all of their ground muddied for convenient farming and tree choppin and almost all of the creatures in them work the same as aboveground: a herd of obnoxious goats or whatever come in from one side, interrupt your workers in the middle without fighting them at all, and walk off some other edge. Well, underground has different things than goats but you know. Likewise you'll sometimes get a troll that will maim some of your workers if you don't send someone out to chop him up first but they're pushovers to some metal armor and weapons like most of the predators aboveground. Rarely something hard to kill will show up but chances are you can have some walls up by then and it won't even bother you. The underground also has it's equivalent to titans and these show up quite a bit more frequently than titans ever seemed to- lots of FUN there that I won't spoil.
The mostly non-migratory denizens of the below that you have to worry about are animalmen tribes. They usually have ranged weapons and some decent combat skills so you don't want to mess with them. They're the most like the bunch of snakemen jerks sitting in your underground river so really don't let your weaver go wandering through them to get at some web on the other side of the cavern.
Some places aboveground are full of animals much more dangerous than you'll usually find below ground and sometimes below ground you'll get unlucky and be killed by local wildlife right off the bat.
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As for aquifers you get few of them by not having the land quite so surrounded by oceans. If you generate an island region expect to just about have to embark on a mountain tile to not have an aquifer to pierce. 0 edge oceans and an increased minimum elevation so that it is more like a few lakes around. This keeps the aquifers fairly under control for me and by messing around with meshes and variance I can still sort of get that oceans look and feel. Plus it keeps the caverns a lot closer to the surface.
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Topic: General tips for DF2010? (Read 1875 times)