Bay 12 Games Forum

Play without projectile weapons.

For me it always turns into me selecting whole waves of migrants and turning them into unarmoured spearmen and sending them into the fray with no regard for casualties. Every battle I lose dozens of dwarves that nobody cares about because nobody is attached to them.

Call me old fashioned, but I have the whole wave drafted and sent to the proving ground, a tower with a one-square-wide walkway at the top, with access controlled by a locked door, and an armour stand up on a side-platform to make it a barracks. They spar with no weapons (unless they came with a weapon other than a crossbow) and gradually fall to their deaths.

There can be only one, and that one is the lottery winner for that wave of migrants and gets their green card, ie a sword and suit of armour and shield and a place in the People's Army.

Thanks bud that's all I needed to know

All my forts in the last two years without exception have been aboveground towns/cities. I'm on dialup right now so I cba to go find any screenshots i have right now but I could when I am on high speed somewhere. I don't know what it is but for me, making surface cities has just ruined underground forts for me and I don't enjoy digging in anymore, heh.

It generally starts with my first six or seven buildings being two-level houses, the first level being an essential workshop (carpenter, mason, etc.) and the second floor being a bedroom for one of my original seven dwarves, usually the one who corresponds to that workshop. The next building is a two level inn/dining hall, which is decently big and in the bottom has a dining hall and in the second floor are community beds.

In most of my buildings I dig out a basement for storage stockpiles.

I'm also all about social classes. My original seven become families of the Citizen class. As soon as possible they get pulled from work duties and just laze about. Other circumstances can lead to other dwarves being promoted to being citizens. Generally as soon as possible a district of the city gets built that is just a bunch of stone villas for the Citizen class. The less fortunate dwarves are all the third estate. They either become well-to-do dwarves with trades, or meagre peasants.

I always build huge slums for the poor, usually with a dining hall/inn that is supposed to service that community only. The idea is that hopefully since that meeting place is closest to their houses and places of work, they will congregate there and keep trouble to a minimum.

My favourite one was in a city I ended up calling Berlin because of its division. A tantrum spiral after a goblin siege (I take a lot of casualties because I consider traps and crossbows cowardly except in emergency use) led to basically an all-out riot in my city of 120+ dwarves. When it got out of control (ie basically a pitched battle between an overwhelmed force of guards and rioters) I had the city divided and brought maybe thirty happy dwarves to the west side with all the valuables and walled off the east side where the main statue garden/meeting place had turned into the wild west. I planned to let them just kill each other off while I got the fortress going again properly from the west side. I kept drafting the happiest of the east siders into the fortress guard where they used a limited supply of crossbows to try and maintain order the best they could.

A siege ended up coming where I needed a full united effort so I broke down the wall and drafted everyone and sent them into combat stalingrad-style and fought of the siege. The battle unified the city and remarkably I managed to survive another siege after that, but the next siege after that one was the end of my fort as everyone was slaughtered. It was the most fun i've ever had in dwarf fortress though

Not really in the vein of a traditional mood, but what about moods of criminality? Not like just throwing a tantrum and all but like, a dwarf actually going temporarily insane to do a crime.

The crime can be as simple as theft or as complicated as dressing up in a clown suit and abducting every male child in the fort, cutting off their penises, peeling the foreskins off and wearing them like finger puppets and secluding oneself in a workshop where one just sits there making little plays with the finger puppets. The fortress guard would then find him and take him into custody.

The first time I had a fell mood it was fucking incredible. I had somehow never actually read about it so I was absolutely shocked when I saw one of my dwarves murder another one and make something out of him.

i just put a lot of faith in plate armour, as I create new sets of plate armour I add new dwarves to the academy. The weapons are usually silver or copper but in my current fort my training weapons are iron.

it's better than the Charles Darwin School of Combat i used to put on.

I once killed off almost he entire population of a fortress in a similar manner.

I built a very, very tall tower only a few tiles wide.  On the stairs along the way up the tower were storerooms with steel & iron hammers in them.  on the open top of the tower was an armor stand ow weapon rack that was used to make a barracks.

Everyone was drafted & assigned hammers.  Everyone made their way up to the top to spar.  Almost everyone died.

Even the skilled dwarves would die, as they'd dodge right off the tower.

I called it The Tower of Destiny.

Fuck me I might just do this then. I've already got a suitable tower, I have a little temple complex above a tunnel down to an HFS, including a big tower of olivine and cinnabar.

I've got adamantium, a queen, and a satanic temple situated over a vertical tunnel down to HFS.

During that whole time I didn't bother building up a good hand-to-hand military... so i've had to violate my usual aversion to crossbows and rely on them for defence while I get my sword and axe regiments ready.

I have withstood my first siege, it was a bit too easy to be honest. The goblin squad of maybe 15was advancing toward a bridge over my moat. Along beside their path was some of my castle grounds that my force were being dispatched from, so my marksdwarves picked off six of their number before they could even get face to face with my men. The goblins then decided to not even go over the bridge, they instead veered away from my fortress to try and pick off dwarves that were stranded in the woods outside. A few marksdwarves continued to shoot at them while my sword regiment ran in and cut them up a bit, then charged into the retreating goblins. Overall they left I think eleven corpses and had a few guys get away.