Yeah… I’ve been pretty busy lately and it’s taken me a lot longer than I expected to get to the point where I can tell a dwarf from a hole in the ground. Sorry =/
Would you mind going next FlyingRat? I know that messes up the “amateur-newb-pro” order we have…
I say ratty should go right ahead.
That’s no problem. I’ll try to get started tonight (and whip these lazy dwarves into shape, muhahaha… cough)
Heheh. Sorry about the booze - my fault - but it hasn’t been that way for long, so things shouldn’t be too grim hopefully. And in related news, I’ve never really gotten into using the manager properly - I should really learn to do that properly in my next game. 
So Babale’s apparent laziness is my fault, not Babale’s.
The messiness of the entrance hall is totally all his fault though. 
Question for experienced players, by the way… since learning how to play halfway competently, has anyone ever had any problems with food? I ask this because as noted in the other thread, I had some pretty large farms going on, but I’ve never quite gotten the hang of what a reasonable size is because well… food never seems to be a problem. I currently have a fortress going with well over a hundred dwarves, and I haven’t really lifted a finger to feed them besides building a fishery. All the food is coming from whatever migrants have happened to show up with the fishing skill enabled, occasionally sending a dwarf to collect some plants on the surface, and randomly trading for cheese every now and then. Even when the surface is completely frozen/waterless/lifeless, the most pathetic tiny farming operation seems to leave me with more food than I know what to do with. What’s the verdict? What kind of food operations do you guys usually have going on for a 100+ fortress?
I never have food problems because I always have one hunter per fifteen dwarves. He’s actually there for leather and bones, not for food, but on most maps I don’t even need a farm.
Heh, no problem at all. My dwarf needed an excuse to be outraged about something. I played through spring and most of the summer last night, and got some alcohol from the elves (feh) and finally got the barrel backup mostly solved, I think. The manager interface is very useful in general, but for some things it’s easier just to assign the job directly if you need something quick and don’t want to take the time for the manager to approve.
That entrance hall will be clean enough to eat off of by the time I’m done!
Food…hm. I’ve always been able to manage with a couple of small farms, by which I’m talking 3x3, supplemented (or replaced) with whatever else is brought in. I don’t think there’s any actual harm to larger farm plots, but small ones are easier to fertilize, if that’s something you do. My typical approach is usually to start out with plant gathering and brewing, then take the resulting seeds and sow them in a couple of surface plots until I can get the underground farms started up (and even after, as the surface plots provide some useful alternatives to the underground plants, especially for alcohol). It’s never not worked in the past.
I should add: we have insane amounts of meat right now. Insane. (Read: almost 1000 units.) It looks like the traps, or the hunters, picked up at least one elephant and a few dralthas, and those have a lot of meat on them.
I’m actually having the miners chisel out my pet project, which is a fighting arena so we have something to do with all those untameable caged critters. The cages with the captured goblins are mounted in one of the staircase halls so everyone can point and laugh as they walk by.
My current non-succession game has a bunch of traps and many hunters. There’s a long list of thirty or so dead deer, five or six dead wolves, three dead foxes, and about 10 captured… er… Those red things with multiple limbs that live underground. Can’t remember their names. Good eating, though.
That fort actually convinced me that I need NoExotic, since I really really really wanted to tame all those things.
Oooooh. I’ve never really played with mods (except for the Lazy Newb Pack), but I might have to start, just for this.
(I think the newly trained war elephant needs a name, at least.)
Stampy.
You guys are so nice, with your fancy military rotations. In my fortresses, the military gets no breaks. They report only to the barracks, the archery ranges, and the captive kill chambers. If they’re lucky, I’ll engrave their barracks for 'em so they can look at pictures of drowning dwarves all day, and I say, they’ll like it!
But then, I give 'em all six-tile quarters with furniture and nice engravings, so they usually STFU and get their soldier on.
I always end up with a huge meat surplus if wildlife’s available. It’s the only way to get enough leather. I just cook up a few thousand roasts and then let the rest rot.
Yeah food surpluses can be the worst. My modded race i normally play has it set so they can eat sentients, this leads to around 3k food by 2nd year as i kill everything on the map including incoming traders.
Also crundles (red weak imp things underground that come in groups of around 4-14) are extremely annoying. They block slots for other things to enter map and they drop scales which do nothing unless you mod them to be used in armour or such.
Okay, my year’s up. Nothing too calamitous happened, except that I did accidentally kill Dinaroozie’s dwarf. 
Sorry about that! It was an accident, I swear! (I forgot that you can’t seem to move captive animals to the Trade Depot without letting them loose, and a Giant Spider escape happened, and you were just in the way.)
I was reading your accounts. So military schedules are working finally? I may have to start up a fortress again in that case. I was getting so frustrated with the inablility to built a mighty army after the new version.
Cool! Autolycus, are you going to take your turn, or should I go?
I think I can go, but at the rate I’m going it’ll probably take me another 2-3 days to do my turn. If you can finish it faster than that, feel free to go ahead.
I just spent the last 5 hours playing and practicing for the first time. I managed to go 3/4 of a year before I accidentally hit F12 and the game closed. I thought I’d try it first w/o reading the wiki and managed to muddle through building, basic task management, mining, slaughtering, stockpiling, and some other simple stuff.
I was stumped by mechanisms and how to dig down a level. I built stairs but nothing happened. Oh, I also wasted a whole season thinking that piles of snows were caverns… derr…
Oh, and ummm… I somehow picked a starting spot with no water or vegetation. Who would have thought snowy badlands would be so inhospitable 
To dig down you need stairs down to a level and stairs up from it. So designate up or up/down stairs on the lower level.
Yeah I umm just learned how to go up and down levels on the map. Progress!
Nah, you go ahead. No worries!
A couple of tips on stairs:
You’ll need to designate digging (if using an area not already mined) on both the level of the stairs you’re on, and the ones that you’re going to. In other words, if you’re digging down stairs, you’ll need also to designate dig an up stairs on the level below you in the same place for them to work. Basically, if you just dig a down stairs, the dwarves will dig down far enough to expose what’s on the lower level, but not actually enough to go down there.
You only need to build stairs if you want them to be in a place where you can’t just dig them out of the stone (such as outside, or in an area already mined).
Also, don’t really worry about mechanisms. You only need them for traps and machines. Traps are easy: just (b)uild a (T)rap and pick a type ((s)tone traps are easiest, they only require a stone and a mechanism). You’ll need a mechanic to do the job. Machines I wouldn’t worry about until you have a command of the basic game - they’re for things like pumps, drawbridges, and so on.
Freezing maps are hard for a beginner because of the lack of farming. Unless you can trade for a lot of booze and quick, gather plants to make booze, or melt the ice, it makes drinking water a real problem. However, your map might melt in the summertime; if it doesn’t, I’d restart. Too hard for you just yet.
One thing I would recommend is getting familiar with the manager interface, as it’s easier to organize most crafting and such from there instead of having to mess with the individual workshops (especially since you don’t have to worry about restarting jobs that get canceled for various reasons).
To access the manager interface, hit “u” (for units) or “j” (for jobs), then hit “m”. You can then use “q” to create a new order-- just start typing what you want and it will narrow it down for you. You can choose to repeat each order 1-30 times. The fortress’s manager has to approve the order (until it is approved, you’ll see a red X next to it) but then it will be “sent” to the appropriate workshops (assuming you have them!) so that dwarves with the right labors enabled can get to it. The orders will continue to be scheduled until they are fulfilled, but keep an eye on the messages (accessed by pressing “a”) to see if there is anything interfering, like running out of a raw material or barrels or something. It’s also worth checking the list periodically to see if an order is approved but not being fulfilled, so you can investigate further.
There are certain things that can’t be scheduled via the manager, such as training animals and creating/engraving slabs. There are other things that it’s just easier not to use the manager for. I prefer not to use the manager for gem cutting/gem setting at jewelry workshops, because from the workshop itself I can easily see (for example) what raw gems are available to be cut. I just create the job there and set it to repeat-- it will be canceled when the raw material is no longer available, which is what I want.