Planning a new fortress

So I've gotten my first fortress to the population cap (and the lag has set in), and learned a lot about dealing with some of the new threats, vampires and necromancers.  Since a new patch just came out today, I decided it was time to generate a new world and start a new fortress.  I've been thinking about writing up one of these stories, and since this succession game blog seems to have dropped off the rails, that I'd use it for this purpose.

To begin with, I lowered the population cap to 100 from 200, and generated a new world with the default parameters except I bumped the Savagery and Metal Abundance up by one level each.

My self-imposed goal for this fortress is to defend the fort with dwarves. The doors must stay open all the time, and the main entrance will not be trapped.  This means that military development will need to start before embark, and not just wait until after I have magma forges set up, like I usually do.

Vampires are annoying, but can be dealt with by careful screening of migrants.  Necromancers, however,  are genuinely an existential threat.  Dealing with them will require more of a perimeter defense than my usual setup, and while I intend to still keep corpses in a large pile outdoors, I will make sure that the above-ground entrance to the pit has plenty of cage traps that are out of LOS of the refuse stockpile. While I won't trap the entrace to the fort, I will allow myself bridges to smash walking dead (since currently, chopping a zombie in half just results in two zombies. Stealthed necromancers are completely broken.)  I also plan to use a large force of marksdwarves behind fortifications to deal with goblins sieges, and outdoor livestock pens behind fortifications, to drain Goblin Elite Bowmen of all their arrows.

I am also going to try a more DIY embark setup: enough food and booze to get started, 3 turkeys (for eggs), 3 dogs (to start breeding; they will be trained to war dogs once I have time), and an anvil, with the rest of the points being spent on logs, bituminous coal, and ore (bismuth, tin and copper, to make bismuth bronze -- the most cost effective weapons-grade material) along with a couple bars (fire-safe material to build smelters before I have picks to get stone).  I will start out by burning a log for charcoal, then smelting coal, bismuth bronze (the most cost-and-fuel effective material at embark), then forging two picks, two axes and two full sets of bronze armor, so I can have a fully equipped military right off the bat.

The lower cost of materials will allow me to start out with maxed out skills for the dwarves:

• 1 miner/mason (will become pure miner once migrants arrive)
• 1 miner/carpenter (will become pure miner once migrants arrive)
• 1 armor/weaponsmith
• 2 Axedwarves (5 axeman, 2 fighter, 1 shield, 1 armor, 1 dodge)
• 1 farmer (2 cooking, 3 brewing, 5 growing)
• 1 misc crafter (3 mechanic, 2 stonecrafter, 2 leatherworker, 3 furnace operator)