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[wuphonsreach]

I think the site browsing needs to be reworked a bit. Maybe by splitting "metal" reporting into "precious" (gold, silver, platinum, electrum) and "non-precious" (iron, copper, tin).  The latter category would be the key one as it consists of metals that you can make both armor and weapons out of.

That or the caravan arc needs to finish so that I can actually convince the traders to bring me 100 bars of iron or steel in a single season instead of a handful of bars.

[Kravick]

Somehow I had no problem with finding sedimentary layers when embarking for my first fortress recently. I've spent 40 minutes looking for a spot though, mainly because search filter take so much time. I was looking for jungle (to get much wood), calm environments, no aquifers, soil (I've chosen deep soil location manually), flux stone, deep metals and river (manually without search filter that one) and three biomes, which accidentally were virtually the same. I got ideally what I wanted. Nice hill to the west, nice river (4 tiles width) to the east, two or so layers of soil, and mostly dolomite layers below, with tons of limonite. Only problem I have is I didn't get any coal, but with plenty of wood it's not so big deal. I think that flux stone is the key, because it is sedimentary.

Either I don't know how to read the search filter/embark information or its broken.  Either way it has become a huge exercise in frustration.  I just tried to do what you said here.  I even generated a whole new world just in case the old one just generated no surface sedimentary layers.  5 more embarks using the above mentioned parameters and I end up finding the exact same thing as before.  Metamorphic layers with no iron and marble for flux.  I cannot find sedimentary layers anywhere.  This is not fun.  Not fun at all.

[UberNube]

I don't imagine they would remove something like that simply to boost the difficulty, since it doesn't really make it harder, it just makes it less fun.

snip

As it stands, the military is optional,

snip

I suppose this comes down to the two main types of players: Those whose objective is to survive in a hostile environment, and those who prefer to thrive in a less-hostile one.

And how long have you played DF again? Cause it seems like you're missing a few crucial elements.

Hard IS Fun.  So is Losing.  That's part of this game.
Most of DF (other than ideas and some assorted code) is made by one guy.  There is no "they" to remove things.
The "Shallow/Deep Metals" thing WAS put in to make the game harder, absolutely true.
And there is only one kind of DF player: Psychotic.

I used 'they' because the person I was responding to used it. Sorry if this offends you.

Hard is fun, yes. I guess it's a pity that DF has undefined difficulty since there is no stated objective to achieve. Everyone's definition of difficulty is subjective because, as I pointed out, it is trivial to survive indefinitely simply by walling yourself in and having a farm plot+brewery+kitchen running constantly. Conversely, it is incredibly difficult to, say, conquer hell. Any ideal difficulty which Toady wants to aim for must come with some 'standard objective' which all players are expected to aim for. I'd be very surprised if many people stuck precisely to that stated objective, especially one as obviously experienced as yourself.

All I am asking for is an init-option, eg: [MAP_LAYER_DISPLAY:<NONE/BASIC/STANDARD/DETAILED>] so don't worry, you can continue to embark on freezing maps with no water, soil, ores, magma, sand or caverns and only 3 stone layers (for extra difficulty, and hence fun, of course).

I have to agree with you on the DF players though >.

[Byakugan01]

I have to agree with you on the DF players though >.

What are you talking about? Most of the players seem perfectly reasonable to me.

[UberNube]

I have to agree with you on the DF players though >.

What are you talking about? Most of the players seem perfectly reasonable to me.

Really?

[RTiger]

What I like about DF is the widely variable difficulty.

You can embark in an area that has flux, a river, no aquifer, metals, lots of wood and vegetation. Pretty much everything a fort needs from the start and simply flourish, or you can embark in a terrifying glacier or scorching desert and colonize Hell, or anything between those two.

Point being, if you don't got Iron, then deal with it. Best way to boost this chance is find a place where multiple biomes intersect.

[Byakugan01]

You do realize we've done some pretty !!SCIENCE!!y experiments ourselves? I see nothing wrong with his endeavor. Afterall, it will result in a hugely valuable artifact, hopefully a dwarf bone sword. The goblins shall literally be slain by the dead!

[dirty foot]

I don't imagine they would remove something like that simply to boost the difficulty, since it doesn't really make it harder, it just makes it less fun.

snip

As it stands, the military is optional,

snip

I suppose this comes down to the two main types of players: Those whose objective is to survive in a hostile environment, and those who prefer to thrive in a less-hostile one.

And how long have you played DF again? Cause it seems like you're missing a few crucial elements.

Hard IS Fun.  So is Losing.  That's part of this game.
Most of DF (other than ideas and some assorted code) is made by one guy.  There is no "they" to remove things.
The "Shallow/Deep Metals" thing WAS put in to make the game harder, absolutely true.
And there is only one kind of DF player: Psychotic.

There's a difference between "fake difficulty" and a "true difficulty," the former being the one responsible for every broken video game controller in my personal history. The latter, of course, being the source of some of my most favorite video game moments.

The military in this game is so glitchy and unpredictable in the "fake difficulty" area of things, that making it harder to equip them with strong gear exacerbates an irritating situation--like dying to your first wave of goblins because you have strip mined 20 z-levels and found no metal at all. Hell, I haven't had a map since .19 where I had more than lead/silver as a metal source. This is not fun or Fun. Having Fun, or fun, would be losing to a goblin siege because your bronze-clad army chose to pick a fight with them near a volcano, and half your dwarves dodged into magma. Or you had a dwarf start babbling and pull a lever that rose a bridge your military was crossing at the time.

It's honestly getting kind of annoying having to rely on traps to defend against nearly everything in the game, because I know that my under geared military will just all die and cause a tantrum spiral while the goblins break everything in the background.

[Byakugan01]

I don't imagine they would remove something like that simply to boost the difficulty, since it doesn't really make it harder, it just makes it less fun.

snip

As it stands, the military is optional,

snip

I suppose this comes down to the two main types of players: Those whose objective is to survive in a hostile environment, and those who prefer to thrive in a less-hostile one.

And how long have you played DF again? Cause it seems like you're missing a few crucial elements.

Hard IS Fun.  So is Losing.  That's part of this game.
Most of DF (other than ideas and some assorted code) is made by one guy.  There is no "they" to remove things.
The "Shallow/Deep Metals" thing WAS put in to make the game harder, absolutely true.
And there is only one kind of DF player: Psychotic.

There's a difference between "fake difficulty" and a "true difficulty," the former being the one responsible for every broken video game controller in my personal history. The latter, of course, being the source of some of my most favorite video game moments.

The military in this game is so glitchy and unpredictable in the "fake difficulty" area of things, that making it harder to equip them with strong gear exacerbates an irritating situation--like dying to your first wave of goblins because you have strip mined 20 z-levels and found no metal at all. Hell, I haven't had a map since .19 where I had more than lead/silver as a metal source. This is not fun or Fun. Having Fun, or fun, would be losing to a goblin siege because your bronze-clad army chose to pick a fight with them near a volcano, and half your dwarves dodged into magma. Or you had a dwarf start babbling and pull a lever that rose a bridge your military was crossing at the time.

It's honestly getting kind of annoying having to rely on traps to defend against nearly everything in the game, because I know that my under geared military will just all die and cause a tantrum spiral while the goblins break everything in the background.

This is part of the reason I back up my military with GCS.

[GuudeSpelur]

There's a difference between "fake difficulty" and a "true difficulty," the former being the one responsible for every broken video game controller in my personal history. The latter, of course, being the source of some of my most favorite video game moments.

The military in this game is so glitchy and unpredictable in the "fake difficulty" area of things, that making it harder to equip them with strong gear exacerbates an irritating situation--like dying to your first wave of goblins because you have strip mined 20 z-levels and found no metal at all. Hell, I haven't had a map since .19 where I had more than lead/silver as a metal source. This is not fun or Fun. Having Fun, or fun, would be losing to a goblin siege because your bronze-clad army chose to pick a fight with them near a volcano, and half your dwarves dodged into magma. Or you had a dwarf start babbling and pull a lever that rose a bridge your military was crossing at the time.

It's honestly getting kind of annoying having to rely on traps to defend against nearly everything in the game, because I know that my under geared military will just all die and cause a tantrum spiral while the goblins break everything in the background.

I was having many of the same problems with minerals and stuff until I remembered that the site finder was updated.  So I genned a new world, set mineral abundance to the second highest, asked the site finder for flux, shallow and deep metals, and I found a perfect embark: river, trees, iron, flux, tons of other metals, and I even got magma in the third cavern layer.  So if the maps you choose are giving you trouble, don't be afraid to gen a couple more worlds and use the site finder.  Or you could even go find some good embarks that people post here on the forums or elsewhere.

As for the military, the only time I ever had trouble with it is back in the early releases when dwarves would literally not pick up their equipment no matter what you did.  The only problem I have with this version is a bug or something with marksdwarves: when I tell them to do archery training, they interpret every single bolt fired as a separate task, and take breaks, stop to spar, go get food, etc. after every shot.  If you're really having so much trouble, I don't know what to tell you other than apply traps liberally. If you think traps are too boring, invent some incredibly elaborate method.  For example, when I was training my non-hammerdwarevs (hammerdwarves get a month in the caverns fighting the nearly-immune-to-blunt blobby things that are down there), I replaced my entrance with a one-tile wide bridge covered with weapon traps with low quality spiked balls.  The goblins would dodge or be knocked down into a pit with spikes at the bottom, and upon their impalement my soldiers got some free training dummies. 

[Ghills]

It sounds like you might be having the same problem I am also having.

My issue is linked to a desperate need for a volcano in each embark I choose.

Behold...Volcano World: 

[WORLD_GEN]
   [TITLE:Flat volcano region]
   [SEED:1237524024]
   [HISTORY_SEED:4252085152]
   [NAME_SEED:3787295952]
   [CREATURE_SEED:508840976]
   [DIM:129:129]
   [EMBARK_POINTS:1274]
   [END_YEAR:100]
   [BEAST_END_YEAR:200:80]
   [REVEAL_ALL_HISTORY:1]
   [CULL_HISTORICAL_FIGURES:0]
   [ELEVATION:1:400:1600:1600]
   [RAINFALL:0:100:200:200]
   [TEMPERATURE:25:75:200:200]
   [DRAINAGE:0:100:200:200]
   [VOLCANISM:0:100:600:600]
   [SAVAGERY:0:100:200:200]
   [ELEVATION_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [RAIN_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [DRAINAGE_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [TEMPERATURE_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [SAVAGERY_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [VOLCANISM_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [MINERAL_SCARCITY:100]
   [MEGABEAST_CAP:5]
   [SEMIMEGABEAST_CAP:30]
   [TITAN_NUMBER:9]
   [TITAN_ATTACK_TRIGGER:100:0:200000]
   [DEMON_NUMBER:10]
   [GOOD_SQ_COUNTS:25:251:503]
   [EVIL_SQ_COUNTS:25:251:503]
   [PEAK_NUMBER_MIN:4]
   [PARTIAL_OCEAN_EDGE_MIN:1]
   [COMPLETE_OCEAN_EDGE_MIN:0]
   [VOLCANO_MIN:150]
   [REGION_COUNTS:SWAMP:260:1:1]
   [REGION_COUNTS:DESERT:260:1:1]
   [REGION_COUNTS:FOREST:1040:3:3]
   [REGION_COUNTS:MOUNTAINS:2080:2:2]
   [REGION_COUNTS:OCEAN:2080:1:1]
   [REGION_COUNTS:GLACIER:0:0:0]
   [REGION_COUNTS:TUNDRA:0:0:0]
   [REGION_COUNTS:GRASSLAND:2080:3:3]
   [REGION_COUNTS:HILLS:2080:3:3]
   [EROSION_CYCLE_COUNT:250]
   [RIVER_MINS:100:100]
   [PERIODICALLY_ERODE_EXTREMES:1]
   [OROGRAPHIC_PRECIPITATION:1]
   [SUBREGION_MAX:2750]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_COUNT:3]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_OPENNESS_MIN:0]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_OPENNESS_MAX:0]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_PASSAGE_DENSITY_MIN:0]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_PASSAGE_DENSITY_MAX:0]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_WATER_MIN:30]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_WATER_MAX:70]
   [HAVE_BOTTOM_LAYER_1:1]
   [HAVE_BOTTOM_LAYER_2:1]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_GROUND:15]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_1:5]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_2:1]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_3:1]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_4:1]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_5:2]
   [LEVELS_AT_BOTTOM:1]
   [CAVE_MIN_SIZE:5]
   [CAVE_MAX_SIZE:25]
   [MOUNTAIN_CAVE_MIN:15]
   [NON_MOUNTAIN_CAVE_MIN:25]
   [ALL_CAVES_VISIBLE:0]
   [SHOW_EMBARK_TUNNEL:2]
   [TOTAL_CIV_NUMBER:40]
   [TOTAL_CIV_POPULATION:15000]
   [SITE_CAP:1040]
   [PLAYABLE_CIVILIZATION_REQUIRED:1]
   [ELEVATION_RANGES:0:0:0]
   [RAIN_RANGES:0:0:0]
   [DRAINAGE_RANGES:0:0:0]
   [SAVAGERY_RANGES:0:0:0]
   [VOLCANISM_RANGES:0:0:0]

I got this from a post here in the forums. It has volcanos pretty much all over, so I almost always have an embark with flux somewhere.  Also, DFusion's Embark Anywhere is an awesome tool to open up more options.