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[Mister Always]

I don't mind less metal around, i quite like it a lot infact.

But the lack of flux and cokeable materials are annoying me.
Seeing a pile of hematite standing on the stockpile mocking my furnace operators because there is no coal to be found and also no wood to be burned.

But i will cope with it and dig on.

Can't you still request wood from the caravans? I haven't upgraded yet, but in my experience, the three yearly caravans always bring massive FUCKTONNES of wood (if only I could launch it from catapults at the elves as they left...if only). Now with the start of the caravan arc, I suppose they've stopped that (the mayor may have to spend more time with the liaison than shouting "booze 'n dogs! Same as th' year b'fore! 'n tell the peasant an' cheesemakers tha' we'll throw th'm in th' Chamber of Pointy Things if they come!" over her shoulder while mining out a gold cluster), but can't you still request it?

[Mantonio]

I don't like it. I use pocket regions (because I like them) but you're screwed over in terms of sites if you do. In my opinion, making minerals suddenly super rare without having the necessary trading framework to support it is a massive mistake. Because without it you're embarking without copper tools (so you have to fork over 3 times as many dwarfbucks for some picks and an axe) and sometimes your civ doesn't even have iron or steel, so no anvils! And even IF you now find a site that has metal (a rare find, compared to last version!) why are you not allowed to know what type of soil or stone or metal to expect? What, so my civilisation knows that there's deep metal there, but they can't tell me that the topsoil is loam and the cliffs are microcline, or what that deep metal they've found is? Seriously!? And what if I want to make a fort out of microcline? I have to constantly savescum to get a nice site, because for some completely arbitrary reason I'm not allowed to know what the bloody top stone layer is!

How deep am I supposed to dig anyway? Apparently my map has deep metals plural, but how many levels should I be expected to dig before I find any?

[idgarad]

I don't mind less metal around, i quite like it a lot infact.

But the lack of flux and cokeable materials are annoying me.
Seeing a pile of hematite standing on the stockpile mocking my furnace operators because there is no coal to be found and also no wood to be burned.

But i will cope with it and dig on.

Can't you still request wood from the caravans? I haven't upgraded yet, but in my experience, the three yearly caravans always bring massive FUCKTONNES of wood (if only I could launch it from catapults at the elves as they left...if only). Now with the start of the caravan arc, I suppose they've stopped that (the mayor may have to spend more time with the liaison than shouting "booze 'n dogs! Same as th' year b'fore! 'n tell the peasant an' cheesemakers tha' we'll throw th'm in th' Chamber of Pointy Things if they come!" over her shoulder while mining out a gold cluster), but can't you still request it?

I have 3 wood furnaces going constantly, the amount of wood a caravan brings wouldn't last a month not counting the hail of wood arrows I have to churn out for the damn near endless seiges. I go through at least 2k arrows a year. Without coal now, even with some copper I can't keep up metal arrow production. The minerals are shot in .19.

Go back to .18 and simply reduce the economic ores by a given %. The new method is garbage in my opinion.

[tolkafox]

I, Personally am loving the changes.  I like the fact that I can pick a layer to build my housing and temples in that is free of interfering veins and clusters.  I know it takes a little more work to get a good site, but the game itself is improved imo.

My hematite veins are still smack dab in the middle of my dining hall/stockpile. None in my bedrooms, thankfully.
I also found two clusters of black zircon 2 Z levels under my fortress, I have never been so happy to see a "Hey we found something" message.

Due to the lack of processing iron and fuel, I didn't get armor/weapons made before the first ambush in spring of Year 2. Wait scratch that, a goblin childsnatcher cut off the right foot of one of the immigrant children the first autumn, stabbed a dog to death, then stole the child. The child's blood still litters my fort. Spring of Year 2 a goblin ambush appear with 5 axegobbos and a hammerer, a fortress of 41 unarmed/unarmored dwarf charged them all at once. 21 dead dwarfs, 33 dead cattle, 6 dead wardogs, a dead llama, a dead elf merchant, and a dead axegoblin later my dwarf are hiding behind a line of hastily put up floodgates.

In the Elf merchants defense, he died valiantly after we let him out of our floodgates. After we seized everything he had.

[FearfulJesuit]

Honestly, I think that the only reason we're complaining is that there's such a mismatch currently between the geology and the caravan arc. We haven't gotten the caravan arc started yet, and that means that caravans are still odds-and-ends; we can't rely on caravans to pick up our metal deficiency.

However, once the caravan arc gets started we will be able to, and this will be much, much less of a problem.

[Sunday]

For me, having less metals is a good thing. In the older versions, I would tend to dig in and not explore a ton. This way, I generally explore the caverns (to try to find exposed veins), and have been constantly doing exploratory mining. Makes it more interesting for me.

[Blind Wolf]

If they're really that bad, then I guess I'll be skipping out on new releases until it's fixed. I've expressed just how much I hate this elsewhere, but suffice to say, I refuse to play if I can't even outfit a military without years and years of trading. I like the type of fun where I get a dragon in my dining room because I left my construction project open to the mountainside, not the type of 'fun' where I get slaughtered by goblins because I couldn't even make enough armor.

[Mickey Blue]

I think its great, one of my biggest gripes about the 2010 version was the overabundance of nearly every metal you could possibly need.  I could pick any given embark at random and odds were good I could outfit my dwarves with as much steel as I wanted without having to trade, this was lame IMO and made the game predictable and easy.

Now sure, you can use self-limiting tactics, but I prefer it this way as I have to go in with more unknowns.  "How much metal will there be? What kind will it be? Will there be coal?", these make me have to adapt my play style, not just rely on the same thing over and over, or use self-limiting which is nice but you still know exactly what you are going in with.

I also like how your parent civ has to have the necessary metal for you to embark with, so sometimes you don't get everything you'd want.. That said there does appear to be a bug where they can have steel but not iron, or bronze without copper, etc which can be a hassle.

I'm not saying there aren't some things that need hammered out, but moving to low resources instead of easier mode high resources (sorry to those who find the term insulting but I don't know what else to call going from resources being rare to them being literally everywhere in every map to the point that digging in a line downward towards magma has me go through several metal veins just by chance) is a good one and makes the game far deeper, more complex (in the sense you have to adapt your strategy) and of course, fun.


Lastly, yes I do think that getting the full caravan arc will make the rarity in metals more balanced.. However keep in mind Toady chose to release this in parts instead of one huge one waaay down the line.  This is good for us as we get to experience some of the updates sooner rather then later, and good for him as his legion of beta (alpha I guess..) testers can look for bugs on individual parts.. However the obvious flaw will be its going in piecemeal.  If people don't like that they can always use 31.18, its not like its gone or anything, and wait until things reach a point they like to upgrade.

-MB

[Lagslayer]

Metals were a bit too easy to obtain in .18, but .19 is incomplete without the caravan overhaul.

Also, there should be a "random embark" option, which at the very least completely randomizes your starting location.

[Blind Wolf]

I'm not saying there aren't some things that need hammered out, but moving to low resources instead of easy mode high resources (sorry to those who find the term insulting but I don't know what else to call going from resources being rare to them being literally everywhere in every map to the point that digging in a line downward towards magma has me go through several metal veins just by chance) is a good one and makes the game far deeper, more complex (in the sense you have to adapt your strategy) and of course, fun.
-MB

Oh, right. Because I don't want super rare metals I must OBVIOUSLY be a wimp who wants metals to be as common as trees! That's totally what I said. No, I want something in the middle. Not everyone wants 'easy mode' just because they disagree with you.

[Mickey Blue]

Fair enough, fixed it to say "easier mode", which is about as accurate as I can think of as having more metal vs. less can only be called easier.

ETA: I think some of us here are a bit thin skinned about this.. I mean there have been countless changes that make the game easier (elephants are no longer homicidal, the undead aren't as challenging, etc, etc) and somehow I and others can prefer it without feeling the need to accuse everybody who likes the harder versions somehow talking down to us.  The game was easier with more metal then it is with less, seriously, its not about being insulting, its simply a fact.  We could debate if its buggy, incomplete, less fun, etc, but it is easier.

-MB

[Blind Wolf]

Fair enough, fixed it to say "easier mode", which is about as accurate as I can think of as having more metal vs. less can only be called easier.

ETA: I think some of us here are a bit thin skinned about this.. I mean there have been countless changes that make the game easier (elephants are no longer homicidal, the undead aren't as challenging, etc, etc) and somehow I and others can prefer it without feeling the need to accuse everybody who likes the harder versions somehow talking down to us.  The game was easier with more metal then it is with less, seriously, its not about being insulting, its simply a fact.  We could debate if its buggy, incomplete, less fun, etc, but it is easier.

-MB

I don't have a problem with difficulty. Most of my time spent modding DF is used to mod in overpowered creatures from myth to tear apart my dwarves. I just don't like this type of difficulty. And yes, it's obviously incomplete (and probably buggy too). I assume it'll move up from 'pain in the ass' to 'moderate annoyance' as long as caravans start bringing a lot more metals than they do now.

Fun is subjective, so I wont argue that point. It's obviously less fun for me, because being forced to use the armor equivalent of tissue paper (bone) is not entertaining in the least.

Finally, I'm going to be thin skinned when you sound smug. That's the way it is.

[Hyndis]

I don't really like it. Sites others than your fortress need that metal to last them 1050 years. You're burning through 1050 years worth of metal in only a few years, so of course it seems like you have endless metal at first.

Once your fortress has reached the 100 year mark I don't think you'll be complaining about too much metal anymore.

Also if we can order stuff in bulk from caravans then this wouldn't be a problem. If I order just iron from a caravan and nothing else I want the caravan to be like 90% iron. A few other things here and there is fine, but don't bring 4 iron bars and then a whole bunch of useless garbage. Right now you can't rely on caravans for anything. They bring whatever they feel like. The trade agreements really don't do much.

[Mantonio]

At the end of the day, scarcer metals can work. However, it really needs the rest of the caravan arc, because at the moment you're extremely limited where you go in terms of metal (especially since you only get one caravan with a few measly bars every year) and most civs are stuck in a stone age with no access to copper or iron.

If metal scarcity is the difficult but rewarding magma, then the caravan arc is the floodgates and piping. While you can just about do it with the former, but you really should build the latter first, otherwise everyone just gets burned.

[Dutchling]

In my first fort in .19 I embarked on what seemed to 3+ z levels of magnetite. Now I've deleted the save (genesis was updated) and I haven't found  any metals yet, that's without exploratory mining ofc, cause that would ruin my fort