User:Mixtrak/Strategy/part 1

With the disclaimers and preamble out of the way, let's talk details.

World generation and site choice

First, choose your settings and create your world. I'd go for medium size, short to medium history, high sites and civs, abundant minerals, anything around medium beasts, and medium to low savagery. That should result in a good mix of challenge and opportunity.

When it's done baking, you can either dive right in with Fortress mode or - if you want some background before choosing a civilisation - load Legends mode and use [Utility:DFHack|DFhack]] to export the data into Legends Viewer. Personally, I like to read the history of a few civilisations and choose one which sounds interesting, and around which I can build a little story about my fortress. Once you're ready to choose a civilisation, read some advice on choosing a good site. It's worth taking your time with this! You want it not too dangerous, useful temperature, flora and fauna, flowing water of some kind, fair expectation of caravans and migrants, no aquifer, all the metals and flux you could desire, a few layers of soil, and so forth. It's also worth confirming your proximity to your own civilisation, trading partners, and potential belligerents (in particular, maybe avoid necromancer towers for now).

Embark loadout

Once you have a good site, it's time to kit out your dwarves. The loadout below is focused on the equally urgent needs of any early fortress: security and self-sufficiency. You need to excavate your fortress, secure its entrance, and obtain sufficient food and drink. There are a few more long-term considerations as well, particularly as regards to crucial supplies which are, for one reason or another, difficult to manufacture early in the game.

Supplies

Let's first look at supplies*.

I've usually found the default quantities of food and drink to be quite adequate. Some of the other items, however, should be removed or replaced:

•  Replace your two iron picks with copper picks. These are cheaper and do the job of mining just as well. Iron (and better, steel) picks do make excellent weapons, but we're not expecting to need that particular functionality just yet.
•  Ditto the axe. You'll need a single copper battle-axe for your wood cutter.
•  Ditch any crafted wood items (buckets, crutches, splints, stepladders etc.). These are extremely easy to make.
•  Now for some useful items which are somewhat difficult to obtain in early-game:
  •  Take small stacks of soap, thread, cloth, and gypsum plaster for a hospital.
  •  Ensure you have a single iron anvil. Making an anvil requires an anvil, and although you can usually trade for one early enough it's safest to bring your own.
  •  Bring four ropes: two for tying up guard dogs, one for building a well, and one for making a traction bench (again, for the hospital).
  •  Bring two iron ingots for a dragon-fire-proof bridge - one for the bridge, one for the mechanism.
•  You'll want some animals, too:
  • Bring one male and one female sheep, both adults. Sheep are the most versatile livestock - they don't require a lot of pasture, and they are the only starting livestock which can provide wool, milk, meat, bone, hide, and horn (llamas and alpacas are similar, but without the horn). If you bring a pair at embark, they'll multiply and eventually sustain a livestock industry.
  •  Similarly, bring an adult male and female war dog. War dogs serve two important functions. First, we will be using them as guard dogs to detect and frighten off sneaking kobold thieves or goblin baby-snatchers. Later, when a few of their pups have grown, we can train more war dogs and assign them to dwarves for protection.
  •  Again, take an adult peacock and peahen. An egg industry is very simple and self-contained way to ensure a steady supply of food, even if it's at the cost of a little cooking labour. Depending on the species, a single female should produce sufficient eggs for a young fortress. Blue peafowl are a balanced choice: they live an extremely long time so you won't have to worry about replacing them for a while, grow to maximum size quickly in case you decide to use them for meat (especially excess males, which are essentially useless), and have a moderate but consistent clutch size.
  •  Bring a single male cat. Cats kill vermin and so protect your food stocks. Their population is difficult to control, however, but at least tom cats can be gelded to prevent breeding.

Skills

Now it's time to assign skills to your dwarves. The following list covers all the essential core skills for a self-sufficient fort, and matches them by workload (so a high-demand job, like masonry, is matched with an occasionally-needed job, like architecture). You'll notice there are no military skills in this list. In a fairly benign embark, you can usually go at least a year or two without needing much of a military, and if you do attract unwanted attention, then many of these unpredictable threats are just as likely to eat your Proficient Axedwarf as they are to succumb to them anyway. That being the case, this strategy relies on barriers and traps to overcome any unexpected early-game fun. If things go unexpectedly sideways before the defences are in place, we have some ways of dealing with that in the next section.

• Two dwarves will get the maximum 5 points of mining skill, and nothing else. Underground space is a precious commodity in an early fort, and you will not be able to spare your miners for other labours for some time - especially if you embark with only a thin layer of soil, in which case you may soon be cursing every meal, siesta and mug of booze that your overworked pick-swingers dare to indulge.
•  One dwarf should get 5 points in mechanics and 5 in stonecrafting. Your mechanic will construct mechanisms (of course), bridges, levers, and traps - all essential in sealing and protecting the early fort. When they're not busy with these tasks, stonecrafting is a versatile skill to make use of the resource you will definitely have in massive excess - stone.
•  Another dwarf should get 5 points in masonry and architecture. Architecture is used in designing certain buildings - principally, for the early game, trade depots, bridges, and wells - and well-designed buildings make dwarves happy. In any case, the skill is required to build these things, and it's rather difficult to train - why not start off Proficient? But this dwarf's main job will be masonry. Stone blocks are going to be necessary in great abundance for all manner of building projects, as well as sundry stone tables, grates, hatches, chairs, doors, and so on.
•  Another dwarf should get 5 points in each of wood cutting and carpentry. In the early game, your carpentry needs are, apart from some odds and ends, mostly confined to storage bins and cage traps, so in fact your carpenter needn't be particularly busy at first. In which case, they can spend their time happily wielding the Axe of Elvish Irritation and getting as much timber on the ground as possible before those blasted tree-huggers can upbraid you for the senseless slaughter of nature's precious children, or whatever.
•  Nearly there. Another dwarf should get 5 points in each of herbalist and brewer. Although your dwarves absolutely MUST NOT run out of booze, for various reasons you won't want your brewer working 24/7 at first, so your brewer should have a fair bit of time to frolic in the meadows collecting posies of amaranths and baskets of apples to supplement your stocks until the farms are ready for harvest.
•  Finally, a dwarf should get 5 points of planter and 5 of cook. Now, it'll be a little while before you get farms and a kitchen up and running, but it doesn't hurt to have a general oddbody hauling stuff hither and thither early in the game. Your herbalist and egg-layers should soon supply the ingredients for your kitchen in any case, and once the farms come on-line this skill mix represents a good balance of labour time. Cooked meals have many benefits - they're worth a packet in trade if you can spare them, are easier to store, make more things edible, and can add to dwarven happiness.

Some of these pairings might not make a lot of sense at first. For example, why wouldn't you separate your carpentry from your wood-cutting, so there's a steady stream of wood coming in and products going out? Because carpentry products aren't actually needed so much early in the game so it's more important to get trees on the ground, for later. There are certainly other ways to match labours - for example, any two of herbalism, cook, planter and brewer should make a pretty well-balanced division of labour. But this setup is a solid way to make sure your basic needs are met as quickly and efficiently as possible in the early game.

As for which dwarves are suited for which labour, that's complicated. Check the dwarves' Thoughts and Preferences pages. If they like a material or product associated with a particular skill (e.g. oak wood, mugs, quarry bush leaves) then it's a good bet to match those up. Other characteristics can also be important - you ideally want miners who are slow to tire, for example. On the whole, however, it's not likely to make an enormous difference, so by all means bury yourself in the wiki but if you haven't the patience then nobody will blame you.

Leftover points

You may find you have some excess points; spend these however you like, but I'll just say that, despite my earlier nonchalance about victuals, no fortress ever failed by having too much food and booze…

• NB: I haven't actually added all these up yet, not sure exactly how the points situation ends up.