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[penco]

Can anyone share strategies for getting good weapons and armor production in a non-volcano embark? It seems like without magma it is impossible to have enough charcoal to share between burning, crafting, glassmaking, smithing, and steel smelting. For one, it takes ages to mine out lots of bituminous (lignite is basically worthless), and it's a logistical nightmare either hauling it all to the forges or having smiths running back and forth forever.

[Eagle_eye]

... import metal?

[penco]

Do people even bother playing without lots of nearby magma? It seems like everyone is constantly talking about magma forges.

[Angry Bob]

Dig straight down to the magma first thing.

[Ivan Issaccs]

Aye, are you running in 40d?
Since 2010 its nearly impossible to a get a map without magma.
(Barring that rare occasion I designated an up ramp below a marble layer and breeched HFS)

[Namfuak]

It isn't that hard to just go down to the magma sea.  I've built fortresses where it has a ramp going down to the trade depot, which is between the 2nd and 3rd caverns, and then I build a separate path that doesn't open to the caverns into my fortress proper, which farms in the caverns and uses the magma sea for metal.  No reason to use the surface at all, by the time sieges come you can just close the gate to the outside world forever.

[penco]

Yes, I know about the magma sea, but I am generally wary of digging that far down until I have a decent army.

So, basically, no one even tries to play without magma forges?

[Ivan Issaccs]

Id just dig down.
Like Namfuak says, the odds of actually having a problem are pretty slim, granted in my last fortress a lone troll got in but that was because I was being careless and six war dogs I brought from embark made short work of him.
If you breech a cavern just build a wall/floor as you go and your golden.
If you wanna risk it you can just tunnel straight down and build walls around vulnerable stairwells too, I used too but as I use long ramps rather than a central stairwell its not usually any easier.

[Man of Paper]

I always do fine without magma.

I just focus on making stone crafts and importing metals.

[twilightdusk]

If you have a sedimentary layer, it's pretty easy to get the fuel you need. Just dig around the layer to find veins of Bituminous Coal and Lignite, build a few smelters, and set them to turn the coal and lignite into coke on repeat (having first burned a single unit of wood for initial charcoal). Let that run for a while, then keep one or two smelters constantly making fuel to power other reactions with.

[Ubiq]

I prefer flat embark sites myself so I usually start with a fair supply of bituminous coal myself to keep things running until I'm ready to dig down to the magma sea.

[Vercingetorix]

Getting to the magma sea is no problem if you just wall/stair off the times when you break in to the caverns and keep digging down.  Sometimes you can get lucky and hit a magma pipe in the first cavern, although if you're fast you can easily wall off a third-cavern site without much difficulty.

[Hans Lemurson]

Do people even bother playing without lots of nearby magma? It seems like everyone is constantly talking about magma forges.

That's because of 2 things:

Firstly: Magma is extremely valuable.  It's unlimited heat, unlimited fuel.  Just a tank-full of it can provide great bounty to your fortress forever more.  Charcoal is only used as a reactant for steel, it makes it so that the only limiting factor in smelting is simply the availability of the materials themselves.  It'd be one thing if it simply made smelting "cheaper".  It would simply be "nice to have".  But magma makes smelting FREE.  In fact, it makes metalworking free too. It makes the RECYCLING of metal free!!!  Magma = Free unlimited fuel.  Value?  Priceless.

Secondly: Vertical movement is easy.  It takes your dwarves the SAME amount of effort to walk up 100 flights of stairs from the bowels of the earth to the bright surface as it does for them to walk from their bedroom to the dining hall, get drunk, and stumble back to their beds again (actual distance may vary).  Vertical travel provides no obstacle for dwarves compared with any other dimension.

So, given that magma is extremely valuable, and not difficult to obtain, it dominates people's strategies.  In fact the ONLY reason not to immediately try to get magma would be if you were roleplaying, or had for some reason not "gotten around to it" yet, like if you're stubbornly trying to pump it to the surface rather than relocating to where the magma already IS.

From a game-balance perspective, I would actually go so far as to say that magma is "Totally Overpowered" and needs to be "nerfed" somehow.  I also believe that Farming is overpowered and in need of some serious nerfing too.  As is vertical travel.  It should be about 4-5 times slower to go up a staircase or ramp than to step over one tile.

[Reese]

Well, considering, unless you embark with a flux layer, flux stone is harder to come by than wood for charcoal...

If you chop down all the trees on your embark and always order max trees with your diplomat, you can get a lot of wood and make a lot of charcoal, and there's always the possibility of making an underground tree farm by breaching the caverns and sealing them up to get the spores going.

sure, the fuel requirements are tripled without magma, but it's really easy to get 3:1 or 4:1 wood:flux from merchants since they'll have maybe ten to twenty types of trees but there are only five possible flux stones, and they aren't guaranteed to have access to all of them.

and, if you embarked on a flux layer... I dunno... use a mix? steel for the most important armor, bronze for less important armor and for weapons

[cog disso]

I rarely embark on volcanoes, because I like the control of knowing when and where my enemies will come from. I just make sure there's enough sand and trees to make the entire business worthwhile.

Start with a mug/mechanism industry, enough to last until the first caravan. Then get the supplies necessary for a glass/metalsmithing industry.