I mean come one, if by day 3 you dont get a survivor each day, you lose. By day 10 you must have gain 9 survivors, have 4 soldiers and each job type occupied, or put 4 guys in soldiers and watch your last worker sweat to death, nothing advancing.
It means you dont have time to build something nice, ever (when they dont bug in addition), since after day 10 you’re under pressure all the time. And the toughness of the ennemies, please dont send big golems on day 8 because i mined a bit too much. My 2 soldiers in cloth armor cant kill it unless i send the villagers too… and that’s just before daybreak, so i miss the wealth by 42 points out of 3300, one more day to do without an additional worker? well i’m done, that’s it, i needed an herborist, cant, defeat.
I dont want to play with 4 soldiers and 0 workers on day 5, reduce the health of the monsters, goblins and everything.
Normal footmen. Alone can pretty much never take a good hard mode play, you’ll need to progress though combat classes pretty fast to get a sturdy defence
For wealth, buildings give a Ton on worth to you.
If you’re low on wealth and you need some hearthlings Asap, build a medium sized house, perhaps add more wealth by placing some furniture inside, or even build a castle wall around your town(assuming it’s not on a totally open plane) that will boost it waaay up, but be carefull, if you boost it too fast, the enemies will get rapidly stronger, try to keep it in pase untill you can take some hefty enemy attacks
The golem on day8 is pretty rare, but can happen, just be carefull, ad protect your workers
Hard mode is absolutely beatable. Get a cleric as soon as possible and you’re fine with 2 footmen. Walling off your city will make things much easier since a lot of minions won’t be able to break in and simply stay at their spawn point.
Try to get knights and archers as soon as you can and in the meanwhile, make your taylor weave some armor and hats. Your stonemason can create a hammer for your soldiers and your carpenter offers shields for them.
Also, make sure that a herbalist can heal your soldiers after combat with potions.
I think he was not in hard mode (he didn’t mentioned it)
His problem is he didn’t have any healer (potions or cleric[quote=“gorezin, post:1, topic:25443”]
well i’m done, that’s it, i needed an herborist, cant, defeat.
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@gorezin you can try the easy mode, here: Easy Mode difficult
I’ll give you the same tip I give newcomers to Dwarf Fortresss: Moats are your best defenses. 
Digging a moat is a relative easy task that can be achieved on day one, and proves to be a real problem for enemies trying to get to your hearthlings!
Here’s how you do it:
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Pick a easily defended location, with a bottleneck. With this, I’m talking about valleys/cliffs with only one, narrow entrance leading to it.
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Dig out a moat at said bottleneck, with the ramps leading up to your side of the moat, so your miners can get out. Enemies can’t go up or down walls/cliffs that are taller than 1, so a simple 1 wide, 2 deep moat will hold all nasties out of your town.
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Whenever you feel ready to allow the outside world in, construct a bridge over the moat, and go from there.
This keeps enemies out, yet allows for new settlers to spawn in your town, since they can spawn right in the middle of it.
This tactic works well in waaaay harder games like Dwarf Fortress, and will work well here. 
Hope it helps!
This. Building houses takes way too long early on, and you can easily get your net worth up by just crafting stuff that is actually useful as well. Personally I do not build any buildings before I reach max inhabitants and have a small squad of 2 Knights, 1-2 Clerics and 4-6 Archers. This squad should be able to wipe out most raiding squads with you not even paying attention on normal and might need a little micro-management here and there on hard. Do NOT keep footmen in your army unless you really like to micromanage your battles.
Once you’ve got a good army for defense you can now take all the time in the world for constructing your dream town. While building up my army I usually keep 0-2 Workers in my town (1-2 before mason, 0-1 after mason, 0 after blacksmith). You only need to make sure you have got at least one guy that can mine in your town (mason and blacksmith mine afaik).
Your hearthlings are 100% as happy to sleep in a bed in the open as they are to sleep in a bed in a house. I usually don’t build my first building until about 30-45 game days in, and that’s usually a defense tower. Houses don’t usually get worked on until game day 90 or so. There is no point in building houses. They are entirely cosmetic.
Let me offer you a great map for a defensive game, in the forest biome: world seed 2114328170. Try that one. You’ll start off with an amazing bottleneck on a modest-sized area with a lake. If you’d rather not have the lake and want to maximize space, 813039962 is pretty much the same thing without the lake. Immediately throw some stockpiles down all over the place in that nice starting nook, and chop down a few trees. Make a carpenter and a few beds, and dig out a moat at the bottleneck, or just make a footman and an herbalist and have your farmers plant some herbs so your herbalist can begin cranking out potions. One footman alone will defend that bottleneck for at least the first 6-8 days; make a second one and you’re good to game day 15-20. By the time you need a cleric, you should have one. A knight, an archer, a footman, and a cleric will defend that bottleneck on Normal difficulty for at least 90 days. Even Ogo won’t get through if you moat things up and only give a small walking area, and have an engineer to set turrets and traps.
The game isn’t super easy, that’s true, but give it a little time, learn how to work with the rules. You’ll get it.
Me any my desert-living folks are envious of your fancy bowmen! But we’ll have steel soon enough, and carpenters! Realized that building a new market stall out of clay at every chance I got was a good way of keeping the wood flowing.
The advice given to me (seems to work) is to rush a Cleric as fast as possible. A Footman with leather armor, wooden shield, stone maul, backed up by a Cleric will be more than enough for the first week or so, especially if they are backed up the rest of your town. Get a second footman when you can and promote when ready. So take the trapper knife, get a mason and weaver ASAP, get an herbalist shortly thereafter and promote them to a Cleric as soon as you can.
I also disagree with the ‘no buildings’ policy; I agree you do NOT need them immediately, but they are by far the fastest way to get your net worth up. Right now on hard mode I’m up to 50-ish days, have 20 Hearthlings, 8+ buildings, and 2 full combat teams (2 each footman, knight, cleric, archer) and everything that comes to face me dies a horrible death.
-Will
I agree it can be hard on normal. Maybe need a easier level between sandbox and normal.
This picture is from normal, was a hard task to defeet them…
I do believe you are just cursed by the SH rng gods
I just started an Alpha 18 Normal playthrough last night; The game isnt too tough though I do believe it should be a bit more forgiving. I had a pack of sapling treant things, one of the armored lizards, and a stone golem all spawn within the same day; Needless to say my footman almost died…It was then that i realized you NEED an Herbalist as soon as you make a footman. Once I got 2 footmen to level 3 the game became a bit easier after a goblin camp gave me 2 iron pikes early on(huge buff to my soldiers) then I had to grind away my carpenter to get the archer bow lol
I use the easy mode mod that BrunoSupremo made which makes it a bit easier to survive
I understand the game is in alpha and they need to work out balance and stuffs, but if you want to concentrate on the building aspect which seems to be the primary focus of the game pretty much, the default “normal” mode is unforgiving, constantly having to defend makes for poor building game enjoyment.
If you want to focus on building than Sandbox mode is what you want or whatever it is before “Normal”; It lets you build without the fear of monsters[quote=“Unatan2, post:13, topic:25443, full:true”]
I use the easy mode mod that BrunoSupremo made which makes it a bit easier to survive
I understand the game is in alpha and they need to work out balance and stuffs, but if you want to concentrate on the building aspect which seems to be the primary focus of the game pretty much, the default “normal” mode is unforgiving, constantly having to defend makes for poor building game enjoyment.
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Peaceful mode is the 0 enemies mode you’re talking about.
Early on, especially in hard mode, I’ve found that I need to rely on militia a lot to kill enemies. All those workers beating on an enemy do kill it fairly fast. Fortunately your footmen are fairly good at maintaining aggro.
Get an herbalist as fast as you can and one of your first priories is leveling them to a Cleric. Also I’m going to state the blatantly obvious, but make sure you are selecting high stamina and spirit individuals to be your footmen. Use walls (or fences if you want to help level up your mason/carpenter) to cordon off your hearthlings and create choke points.
I never found combat on normal mode to be very taxing, especially once you get your first knight & cleric. On hard mode I kept getting my butt kicked but sometimes you can just get lucky. I just beat a general’s gong for the very first time in hard mode. All it took was 4 turrets, and 3 parties each consisting of a knight, a cleric, a footman and two archers.
I find normal too easy but with hard after day 10 hits I die. I’m still trying different strategies, and I have some luck getting daily new hearthlings first 3 days etc. but I’m always struggling to get a shepherd (I assume I need one to make an archer). My biggest challenge is that I can’t get my footmen levelled up in time. They are usually still level 1 when day 10 hits, and i’m not able to keep up with the attacks (usually 3 attacks happen on day 10 or 11 all at once in same night, 3 games in a row, so i’m guessing its not just bad luck).
I could really use some tips to (1)get my footment levelled up to be ready for day 10 pressure and (2) getting other classes levelled up quickly enough (herbalist seems to be luck-based on how many flowers i can get to craft into those level 2 for cleric)
No, you don’t need a shepherd to get an archer, just to make power up quivers. Day 10 is still fairly early, but when you do get attacked, check off militia on for your villagers and use them to help kill the enemies. (This is something I only have to do in hard mode).
I wrote out how I play hard mode here.
Since I wrote this Radient have made hard mode even harder, they reduced the frequency of the attacks in the early game to “make the game easier”. Sounds like it will help, wrong. Now you don’t get attacked as much, so you can’t level up your combatants enough before the harder enemies come around the 15 to 20 day mark.
Another problem at the minute is once you have beet the first goblin campaign there is too much of a difficulty disparity between it and the following ogre raids. E.g the first ogre raids now can wipe you out your 2 footmen, archer and 2 clerics without you killing a single one of there archers or footmen.
Even so I hope it helps.
It would really help if the monster spawns would distinguish between stationary spawns like the treasure guarding zombie and attacking spawns, such as the goblins. This way, you could level up your soldiers when you are ready for it instead of being exposed to randomly occuring attacks.