Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Psieye]

A slightly less dwarfy answer than those posted, but it seems to work for me.....

Bring a stone-crafter(5) dwarf. His job is to sit there, make trade goods, get fed and drunk. He helps clear all those bloody useless stones out of the fortress pathways too. That will make migrants like you. Make him the expedition leader if you want, he won't move much when liasons come. He might even know how to brew drinks. What a legend.

It doesn't generate wealth fast enough for me. I bring a metal-crafter(5) instead and have magma forges up and running by the first summer (I don't embark on volcanos, it ruins sedimentary layers). Gold is easy to find and after pumping out a large batch of gold toys, I hope to get my 20+ migrant wave next spring. I've not really been disappointed so far. I can't run a fort the way I want to without some 60 dwarves minimum.

[sambojin]

I will admit that the "magma-rush, cheap-wealth" thing kind of turns me off DF. Just my style of playing. I love this game because you can do so many things. Bringing bronze components will sicken as many other players as magma-rush will for myself.

The advice I give is just for a novice player (I revise my advice for myself regularly because I'm at this skill level in-game).

Cheap, embarkable bronze= good, no digging, no advanced skills necessary.
Magma forges= lots of work, digging, planning, "dig-deep-rush".
Cavern layers=scary without goodish weapons. Caverns tend to come before magma. Goblins tend to come before magma for an early player.
Easy trading=more migrants
Was answering the OP's question from what I think of as a similar view.

The game is in a nice, happy, flux period (literally and ore-ally in a way) that adds ALL features to a fort for you to test. We're in the "society/dwarfen/world relation" development phase currently. The game is a barrel of laughs, the world it is played in is starting to catch up. I don't think the "perfect everywhere, but with lots of aquifers" thing will stay forever. It is up to us to LEARN how to breach aquifers though, for SCIENCE and all.

DF has created enough meme's in the world that even real-life stories can sometimes be told in DF framework. Poorly, and without the required amount of magma.

[Varnifane]

I usually bring
-The Boss (Urist McSpirngstien)
-3 miners (with armor/weapon/blacksmith respectively),
-a stone/metal crafter (this guy churns out stone goods until I get my magma forges up and running)
-A brewer/something (i forget)
-A farmer/cook (or vice versa)
-60ish wood
-various assorted sundries

Immediately on embark I set the boss, the miners and the brewer digging out an underground farming layer near a murky pond.
The crafter and farmer build workshops and churn out: 10 beds, 10 training axes, 20 bins, 20 barrels (by the time the miners are done with their second layer of digging.

I build a mason w/s turn out a tale a chair, 3 doors and 4 hatches and then the crafter is set making stone crafts exclusively.

The farmer farms, the miners mine out five 24x24 areas right on top of each other and bring everything down from topside.

The first wave of migrants gets set to clear cut the surface (I usually only embark 2x2 or 3x3) The goal is to have clearcut my area by the time the elves get here the first time. Once I get a bunch of trees cut I make 20 more beds. This way when the elves come and ask me to limit the number of trees I cut to 100 I can say sure. It's not like that many will grow back in the next year anyway.

The second wave of migrants gets there and combined with the first wave, will bring all of the wood inside. If I get a decent gem cutter he/she starts cutting the gems I have found.

Caravan, buy it out With rock crafts.

As soon as the wood is inside, I build 16 mason workshop and set everyone without a designated labor making blocks. By the next season I have enough blocks to wall of the world  so I do and build an access tunnel into the courtyard (to be opened up later once proper dwarfy defenses are set up)

At some point I crank out a bunch of mechanisms and 20ish cages for pest control

Then I go deep...

All this ideally by the end of the first year. But that depends on how big the first 2 migrant waves are. Which is why I want to maximize them if I can.