So I recently got into DF. I first read about this game over at TVTropes a while back, and it sounded interesting. So about two months ago, I finally decided to try it out. I grabbed the Lazy Newb Pack, and looked at some of the YouTube tutorials linked in the topic.
My first fortress didn't last too long, I was goofing around with it while watching the videos and didn't like the way the first fort was turning out as I learned more about the game, so I soon abandoned it and started a new fort. The next few embarks I abandoned, because they were all in colder environments and pools and such were frozen up, I thought I was on a mountain glacier or something and didn't realize they'd thaw (and I didn't know about moving the embark square around on the local area map either. So I finally got one in a warm region. This fort was named Flickerbodice, and I took it about three years until I got dissatified with my inexperienced and inefficient delvings on that fortress as well. It had some nice veins of gold right at the surface, but I never got around to utilizing them much, as I only had the most basic industries figured out and was still learning how to set up a metal industry. Then I learned about reclaiming and decided to try that out, and went back to one of the initial forts I abandoned, Saintroughness. I don't know why I abandoned it, it was in a warm climate, and it had a nice valley between some low mountains which looked pretty defensible (and I improved on it a bit). It also had some nice resources when I dug in, lots of magnetite and lignite. But when I made the world I made it pretty small and turned stuff like savagery very low so I wouldn't get overwhelmed too soon. But it was also dull, and I wanted a world that perhaps had better challenges, so I generated a new one.
I named my new fort this time, and named it Geshudrash, Fortressdeath. I've been working on it for a few weeks, and I'm in my fifth year. I've gotten the hang of the basic stuff, and tried out most of the dwarf industries (and learned which ones were lame). I've fought off a couple of goblin invasions, and got a nice pitting/drowning chamber set up for them. Fortressdeath has some gold below it and it's been bringing me in some wealth, but unfortunately I have no iron ores, so it looks like it's goblinite for me. I'm in the process of setting up some outer fortifications to further harm the goblin scum, I'm building a tower where're I'm going to put a sculpture garden to help fight off cave adaptation, and I'm working on a pump stack to bring up magma from the depths. Short term plans are to add a magma delivery system to the pitting chamer (cleaning up all those dead goblins is taking a lot of time, and the corpses generate misama as well), and learn how to make a water reactor.