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[agatharchides]

Oh, right. My bad.

 The thing to remember about the new information display is that the old style listing of rock layers would not be particularly useful anymore. In the previous version a type of rock meant you would have every metal that could occur in the rock, here it means basically nothing. This system needs some work still but as I turned it over in my mind, the only thing I can think of would be to specify the particular metals "shallows iron" rather than "shallow metal". 

[mcdonaldjord]

Ok am about to mine out an entire map, i want to see how much metels there are in this new version.

[Girlinhat]

I think I'll just way for DFProspector to update instead.

[IT 000]

Lack of metals is killing me. A beehive is worth 20-30k so ambushes are coming first year.

1st embark. marble, marble, marble, horn silver... siege by modded civ before the first dwarf caravan

2nd embark, modded the civ out, cobalite liginite, goblin ambush

3rd embark dwarf killed by a hungry yak, liginite, cassatrite! ... Copper? No? No bronze for me, Goblin ambush.

4th embark Platinum! Yeah! Weapon? No... zombies? Oh you bet.

5th embark tetrahidrate! Oh my gosh this is the best day of my dwarven lif----   

g   : )
g   : (

Overall I agree with the people that like the game, up until embark 4 I was about to throw my computer out the window and go back to playing .18, after embark 5, I realized that I had never had so much fun finding a metal, before whenever I was digging, I would be saying to myself 'silver, zinc, copper, iron, gold... meh' now I'm struggling to grasp even a small boulder of the stuff. I am enjoying the uniform walls too.

That said, I went through four embarks to find copper, COPPER! Each embark took me at least two hours to put together and I played hours after that 4/5 of my embark sites churned up useless non-weapon grade metal, and the fifth one didn't have time to put it together when I did find it! I hardly feel my time was worth it. It would be nice if you were guaranteed copper, and either iron or tin much like that of adamantine, having two or three at most that can be reached in the first 5 z-levels. This way you don't end up like the hundreds of dwarves that died because the best shield I had was made of willow.

A lot of people in the 'This is a good change' side were 'it's just like 40d without the 40d part!' well I've played 40d and that was back when you had a magma river flowing 100 squares in and obsidian was as strong as steel. This isn't 40d. They were also saying you could just use a simple drop trap or a line or of atomsmashers. I consider atomsmashers an exploit, except in stone deletion, and what do you do if your making a megaproject like an above ground village? Or a human castle? I enjoy these structures more then I enjoy building a thriving fortress in a cliff. Drop traps just erase the feel for the castle. But in the new version these are my only options for an early or even a long term defense! An ineffective trapdoor that requires a dwarf to dash across the fortress hoping he can make it in time or using a bug to your advantage. Overall, metals need to become more common one way or another.

Hopefully Toady will address this problem and iron it out. Assuming he can find the ore for it. Anybody got some hematite on them to donate?

[strongrudder]

Looks like I might be waiting a few versions to update.

I don't mind cutting back useful metal ores to make the game a little tougher. But it does concern me that there's a good chance I'd have to depend on trade for a few precious chunks of weapons-grade ore a year. If I were playing humans, okay. But I'm playing dwarves! They're supposed to have an uncanny knack for mining. It seems undwarfy to have to beg the mountainhomes for ore if you roll cinnabar veins, or worse: to beg for it from the humans. X)

I wonder if there can be some resource that humans and elves would supply through trade that would be scarce for dwarves, valuable enough to hand over iron and steel for. That might allow us to keep our metal and not mess up the world economy.

[Max White]

You only option is to import chalk, limestone, dolomnite and marble. I assume you have access to coke?

I'm in the middle of a forest, and have a few guys running around with only furnace operator and wood burner enabled.
It won't do forever, but for now I have coke.

Oh, right. My bad.

 The thing to remember about the new information display is that the old style listing of rock layers would not be particularly useful anymore. In the previous version a type of rock meant you would have every metal that could occur in the rock, here it means basically nothing. This system needs some work still but as I turned it over in my mind, the only thing I can think of would be to specify the particular metals "shallows iron" rather than "shallow metal". 

So what you mean is, I keep finding tetrahedrite, and very little other stone at all, because it is one of the few selected stones in my biome? Well I feel ok with this, atleast for now. It makes goblinite more important then ever.

[Skivverus]

First/current embark: 2x2 desert with a stream running through it; impromptu fishing industry working rather better than anticipated (seem to recall it being bugged in a previous release where all the fish would die off after the first year; this hasn't happened). No fatalities yet, although some livestock were lost to starvation, some early digging work was lost to a lack of respect for water pressure, and the fort came a little closer to dehydration than I would have liked due to poor planning the first winter.
Fortunately, the place isn't entirely devoid of trees, so I can smelt what I trade for into more useful items (and with the grid mining I'm doing, I've got plenty of stone for crafts and mechanisms to trade).
We'll see how it goes for the first ambush, though. Suddenly even elven armor seems like something worth trading for.

[Girlinhat]

A beehive is worth 20-30k so ambushes are coming first year.

You'll NEVER guess the solution I just came up with.  Lesse, if you're getting ambushed too early, and beehives are triggering ambushes...

[Ethicalfive]

A beehive is worth 20-30k so ambushes are coming first year.

You'll NEVER guess the solution I just came up with.  Lesse, if you're getting ambushed too early, and beehives are triggering ambushes...

Train your bees as war bees?

[Eoganachta]

A beehive is worth 20-30k so ambushes are coming first year.

You'll NEVER guess the solution I just came up with.  Lesse, if you're getting ambushed too early, and beehives are triggering ambushes...

Train your bees as war bees?

They're vermin so you can't... Unless... Time to put on my modding hat!

[Psieye]

There's always the mundane answer of not building bee hives until later years.

[Babylon]

I don't think rare metals is a problem.  It's obviously vital for trading and makes the game challenging in interesting new ways.

Not knowing what is in an embark on the other hand is.  Wanting to set up a fortress to mine iron, or platinum, or what have you, and not being able to find out if that is likely is just making the game frustrating, not fun.  Sure, you shouldn't be able to have iron and flux and platinum and gems etc. etc. but you should be able to ell what you have before you commit to the site.  After world gen embarking is the part of the game that takes the longest for me, it always lags on embark.  I don't want to have to sit through lag after lag as I abandon fortresses after making exploratory digs to find out if what I want is there.

If I just want more metals I can mod that in, but even then I can't tell if what I have modded in is actually there, unless I mod in cheater reactions too, and then the game is just boring.  Impossibly hard and stupidly easy should not be the only options.

[Eoganachta]

I don't think rare metals is a problem.  It's obviously vital for trading and makes the game challenging in interesting new ways.

Not knowing what is in an embark on the other hand is.  Wanting to set up a fortress to mine iron, or platinum, or what have you, and not being able to find out if that is likely is just making the game frustrating, not fun.  Sure, you shouldn't be able to have iron and flux and platinum and gems etc. etc. but you should be able to ell what you have before you commit to the site.  After world gen embarking is the part of the game that takes the longest for me, it always lags on embark.  I don't want to have to sit through lag after lag as I abandon fortresses after making exploratory digs to find out if what I want is there.

If I just want more metals I can mod that in, but even then I can't tell if what I have modded in is actually there, unless I mod in cheater reactions too, and then the game is just boring.  Impossibly hard and stupidly easy should not be the only options.

That is what a lot of the fuss is about. You arrive, spend a few days IRL setting your fort up and then only find you have silver and gold or copper and nickel ores. You also don't know if the flux label means layers of chalk or a few seams of marble next to the spoilers. Really you have to start by trail an error.

[Festin]

Metal scarcity will probably be fine once we get improved caravans. Still I definitely do not like the "limited number of metal types per embark" concept. There should be more room for surprises, like routinely digging a tunnel in some deep level, and suddenly striking a vein of something rare and valuable.

Limiting information available while choosing the embark site, on the other hand, is NOT fine, and will never be. It just wastes time on manually investigating and abandoning while contributing absolutely nothing to the gameplay.  I hope this change gets reverted soon.

Overall, a reasonable change, but definitely needs some extensive tweaking.

[Kaelem Gaen]

I personally do a rather undwarfy (undwarvenly?) thing to avoid ambushes...
I just turn off "Invaders" in the init option, I play for the build/architech/sim aspect, not so much the war content.  Also I use the finder now and check for metals,  my dwarf civ some how has no access to iron but can still make steel objects, oh and pig iron... O.o  vanilla style too.