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[Manic Typist]

So, I'm on my second fortress. The last one was frustrating and the "fun" wasn't quite fun. I felt like I was waiting forever for the tantrum spiral to end amidst the appearance of multiple goblin forces, troll raiders, and monsters from the caverns below.

So I took my lessons from these boards, that game, and the wiki and started a new one.

For one, I finally have a flux metal! Now I just need to find some ores....


However, a question-
Is there a way, short of building a wall, of completely preventing my dwarves from crossing a particular area? I've built a bridge across a moat, designed to protect my fortress. I want to test it. I do NOT want to fling someone across the map (well, not one of my guys, although maybe that machinist who had just one profession enabled and took such a long break that a guy with no experience with gears and many other jobs finally hooked the thing up....). How can I prevent the dwarfs from constantly streaming across that bridge? (I've tried making it a restricted/high cost traffic area, didn't seem to make a difference).


Also, I've had my first unpleasant interaction with elves. I'd missed the first caravan due to the lack of anything to trade. The second one (elves) showed up and I hauled out my meager supply of cut gems and a cat totem. Set up a trade, and the elves are going to come out 34DB ahead. They refuse. Repeatedly. I keep making the offer because it's a fair deal (well, not really, but for them it's good) and in my last game if I kept offering they would either take it or make a counter offer.

They refused, called my expedition leader besotted, and told him to "think on" the lesson.

He pondered, and seized the goods he wanted.

Should I have bothered to seize ALL the goods? Does the amount I seize in a particular instance affect how quickly they will get annoyed at me?

[Naryar]

Elves are pretty much the official targets of a bunch of players. They won't get pissed and won't siege you if you seize from them, strip them from their clothes (particularly lulz-worthy), cage them, even kill them in hilarious ways, unlike humans.

I do tend to think that treating them well gets them to bring interesting things (aka whip vine seeds, barrels, alcohol and more importantly exotic beasts), however you can be a complete villain to them and they won't matter. Seriously, the elf caravans are punching-balls.

If you do however horribly mistreat the elves, be sure to be evilly affable, tell your awful stories and make us laugh.

[Lafiel]

The most extreme way to avoid having the dorfs cross the bridge is defining a burrow that doesn't include it (make sure it includes whatever place the control lever is in). An easiest way is to make an alternative, and shorter, way across the moat provisionally. A wooden plank for example.

[AtomicPaperclip]

Make another bridge?

[Darkmere]

If the starting spot for your embark (where the wagon was) is on the "bad" side of the bridge, you need to get all the crap hauled to the "good" side, and make a meeting area zone on the good side. The wagon is treated as a default meeting area until you take it apart and set up another one. At least I assume that's the problem, more details?

There are social skills that determine just how narrow a profit margin you can offer. In the beginning a bigger profit for them makes them happy. Later on you'll probably be offering three times what the caravan is worth just to get crap out of your fort. Speaking of value, I do think seizing more stuff makes them more irritable, IIRC it's based on what they leave the map with vs what they entered with. Here's the odd thing, if you want animals, you need a small profit margin for them, because animals are very low profit-to-weight. If you send them off with large profits, they're bring you loads of cloth, which has a high profit for them, but is useless to you (barring tailor forts and bandages). Setting a few of them on fire helps you get more animals, in other words.

[Manic Typist]

If the starting spot for your embark (where the wagon was) is on the "bad" side of the bridge, you need to get all the crap hauled to the "good" side, and make a meeting area zone on the good side. The wagon is treated as a default meeting area until you take it apart and set up another one. At least I assume that's the problem, more details?

No. Dwarves running out to get drinks of water, hunt, gather plants/fell trees, work in a few left over preliminary workshops, etc. I just built a wall to deny access to the area, and the bridge worked fine.

New problem: building a big set of external walls. Mostly done, except for some patches that are now "inactive" because various workers were scared at various times by various animals. So the construction is suspended... at least that's what the initial announcement says. When you look at it though, it says "inactive," even if you suspend the construction and then resume it.

I'd like to find a way to reactive the construction rather than have to go through and delete the construction sites and replace them again. Suggestions?

[Trintignant]

If the starting spot for your embark (where the wagon was) is on the "bad" side of the bridge, you need to get all the crap hauled to the "good" side, and make a meeting area zone on the good side. The wagon is treated as a default meeting area until you take it apart and set up another one. At least I assume that's the problem, more details?

No. Dwarves running out to get drinks of water, hunt, gather plants/fell trees, work in a few left over preliminary workshops, etc. I just built a wall to deny access to the area, and the bridge worked fine.

New problem: building a big set of external walls. Mostly done, except for some patches that are now "inactive" because various workers were scared at various times by various animals. So the construction is suspended... at least that's what the initial announcement says. When you look at it though, it says "inactive," even if you suspend the construction and then resume it.

I'd like to find a way to reactive the construction rather than have to go through and delete the construction sites and replace them again. Suggestions?

"Inactive" just means that there are no dwarves tasked to build that particular section of the wall.  They'll get around to it eventually, provided it's accessible, it's just been moved to the back of the queue due to its suspension and subsequent unsuspension.

[Mechatronic]

Presuming you mean suspended rather than inactive, hit s to unsuspend them.

[Manic Typist]

Figured out the issue. They had blocked themselves off from certain sections by building pieces that blocked the further areas. Fixed it.

So, I had my drawbridge set up, with some guard dogs around the bend. Felt very proud of myself. Then the first goblin snatcher showed up, ran off the map, then (presumably) the same one showed up again a few minutes later and stabbed a dwarven child who had gone outside to get water and then ran off with him. Presumably because the knife was stuck fast in his belly.

Just now I noticed what could have been a devastating hole in my security- a diagonal square that completely bypassed my bridge and my dogs.

New waves of immigrants, so I think it's time to finally start my military training regime.

How soon do you guys start training soldier types, generally? I'm always loathe to lose a worker to the military, but I of course really want a military too...

[Naina]

I like drafting most of my third migrant wave - you know, the one that unexpectedly sends you 36 dwarfs Then again, I'm playing with the Fortress Defense mod, so that's about the time I'm getting my first siege

[Abaddon]

The best way I've found of restricting my dwarves is to know what they're doing and how they'll react to when new items pop up, designating a meeting area, making sure they all have rooms, and having death items/corpses restricted is one way I do this.

Another major help is using a quantum stockpile instead of traditional stockpiles, that way I don't get dwarves running all over the map collecting crap I don't care about, and instead I can focus their efforts more easily by designating what I want moved.

[Fredd]

Never sell a elf wooden goods. That goes for stuff in wooden bin, barrels, jugs, clear glass, and green glass Just chose the stuff in the bins, not the bin they are in.
 If you are a new player, set the population cap in Data/init/dinit to 5. Should wind up with 15 dwarves. When you get comfortable with game functions and managing them, you can later raise the pop cap. New players can get overwhelmed with the migrant waves, and have no time to experiment

[Korva]

If you have an unskilled broker, caravans of all races will give you the middle finger for anything less than 50% profit. Yes, that's a lot. But it's not hard to make something valuable -- metal items if you have lots of ore, lavish meals for an easily renewable trade good. As your broker gets more experience, s/he will be able to make better deals. I read that in order to train the broker up faster, it is best to make many small transactions and leave the trading interface after each one, rather than make one big transaction.

[Manic Typist]

I'm a little confused on how to read the military screen. (Yes I've checked the wiki but there are lots of articles on it, especially regarding the military, and they are not all of stellar quality or clarity).

What does the "A" mean, between the unit names and the burrows? I assume it means active...But I want to confirm. In this case I have three squads. I've tried to set one to train and the others, not. When I look at the "Training" alert, one A appears next to that squad. When I look at the Inactive alert, two A's appear next to the other squads.

So, basically, it tells me which squads are "actively" engaged in whatever that alert is all about?

[celem]

exactly.  A means that squad is assigned to whichever alert is currently highlighted on the left.  same applies to burrows.  A means the burrow is active for that alert

squads left on the 'inactive' default alert will do individual drills when they are idle.  squads set to 'active/training' will follow the schedule set in m->s and pretty much shun civvie stuff