Bay 12 Games Forum

New fort yesterday!  Having learned some lessons from the previous fort's failures, I packed some dewbeetles and plenty of seeds - including some non-cave crops.

Grass does not grow here, roast the seeds.  The only pool on the map (8 tiles) feeds my nearly completed water project.  Pool dries up for the summer before I drain it.  One male beetle might have been enough, but the bucket work order was ignored.  Dwarves getting thirsty.

Reclaim!  A huge wave brings me to about 45.  The trench around my giant above ground area is complete and secure except for one ramp to the mountainside.  Bridges across my trench are designated, and that ramp will be removed soon.  That's a whole lot of frogmen spawning right next to that one ramp.  With 3 living dwarves, I remember that I actually DID build a failsafe bridge underground, and the invaders are chasing a dwarf around the mountain outside.  Peasant throws lever, goes melancholy.  Master farmer/cook starves in the room next to his own food stockpile.  Time to reclaim again!

Lessons learned:
Only male beetles are milked (eww).
Grass does not grow everywhere.
Don't place the only weakness in your fort's defense near the border.
Don't get sloppy and forget the bridges even exist.

I dont get it.

you say sieges are too hard, but you kill your migrants, which would make perfect soldiers and archers?

If you mean me, not really.  I don't think they're too hard.  I just tend to turtle a little, and I know it.  I also had a lot of starvation with this fort keeping me from making much of a strong military.  I wall in and play pretty conservatively for the first few years.  I suppose even if the migrants failed to kill a siege, it would whittle them down and suck up less food.

I also don't usually keep the migrants out.  I let them in and regret it most of the time.  Maybe I just need to embark with more seeds/animals and miss less caravans while my broker sits there with NO JOB.

I have a couple questions.

1.  I'm fairly early, but deep enough that my tiny military of three guys can wreck ambushes and hold their own against sieges if I manage to keep the siege from all coming in at once.  Then comes the magic.  My combat log reveals a pile of body parts next to my axedwarf, a pile of broken mangled bodies near my hammerdwarf, and some very perforated bodies near my speardwarf.  Nothing touches these guys except a cloud of acid.  They get that, they move two feet, and they fall over dead.  Is there any defense against this at all, or am I going to have to make a ton of archers and death trap hallways just for them?

2.  One of my guys made a legendary flamethrower of some sort.  Edit:  Found it in the manual.  It's a cannon that uses blowgun/hammer skills.  It looks like it has a ton of shooting force and pretty good max velocity too (though, I imagine max velocity is meaningless if the ammo is a cannonball).  They any good in practical use?  Do exploding cannonballs kill friendlies?

Maybe I'll put it in a weapon trap for the acid guys to stumble into.



Anyways, thanks.

Flatland untamed wild neutral fort with a good amount of metal - most things except harder mining turned on.  Embarked with two dedicated fighters and a weak copper uniform for each.  I spend a year or two trying to dig out the fort while everyone goes on half rations and occasionally isn't both starving and dehydrated.  I miss a crucial caravan while my broker is endlessly updating stockpile records outside of his trader burrow, and immediately mark all the food and booze for theft (dump) as they pack up.  I get enough to survive for a while.  Next caravan comes and eventually goes mad while my locked gates keep out wrestlers.  At this point, my well is screwed up and nobody has anything to eat or drink with about 40 migrants from the gluttony guild.  I abandon the whole place, cause screw it. 

Well: dug but non-functional and murky
Pastures: non-existent.  The wrestlers already had their way with my booze goats anyways.
Farms functional, but without enough seeds to keep that many gluttons alive.
Defense: minimal.  Those two are tough, but they can't deal with rampaging oxen and a few dozen wrestlers.
Housing: 8 or 10 beds in a dorm, three tables, and 5 chairs.
The smelter level with magma underneath is going incredibly slow.  I think I spent a year trying to restart it with fresh copper picks when my miners dug out the magma cave and starved.  Apparently, those channels were set up wrong to make ramps and I never checked.  Making stairways to fetch the lost picks failed when the three channels all had stones in them.


Reclaim!  This is my first reclaimed fort.  I use the same exact embark profile as before, except with a couple forgotten weasels.
Wow, everything is scattered... fun.  Hey, at least my crops are still growing from before.  Hello two dozen wrestlers hanging out and one very tough angry elf in the main entrance.  Now, lets get down to business.  I have at least two years worth of hauling to do.  Why did I unforbid everything again?  There is also the matter of the ghosts.  The dead outnumber the living.

Things go relatively smoothly, and I finally give up on the stagnant well and use DFhack to fix it.  Food/drink is not in abundance, but we aren't starving often either.  I give a leggo recruit a hammer to go with my spear and axe guys, and set them to perma-train.  My angry elf guard kills off a couple minor ambushes all by himself before finally falling in battle, and my military trio gets some killing done as well.  I have a 30x30 outdoor pasture with a channel around it to keep stuff out (I get spam messages though since it's too close to the entrance where they can see invaders milling about).  I have a working well.  I have good farms.  I have all my workshops and the living quarters in the farm area (same 10 beds and three tables).  Things start getting crowded around 50, but it isn't TOO bad.  My entire downstairs is finished being dug with the magma smelters functional, but the living quarters and other workshop rooms empty.  The hospital is dug, but the beds are mostly not installed yet.  The refuse pit with a 1 level drop is turned on.  This is where things start to go downhill.

Refuse pile shotguns body parts to the bottom where people seem to want to reclaim some of those body parts.  10+ idiots get injured by falling spleens and lay in the 10 dorm beds all day.  I set the remaining happy people to carry beds downstairs to the new living quarters and tables to the new dining room, but they mostly ignore me.  They move about 25 beds and then sit around angry because they don't have their own beds yet.  The gates to the outside have been locked for a while to keep sieging migrants out of my food stores, but too many are inside already.  Idiot went berserk and blew up my brewery; I have no blocks to build a new one.

I spend about an hour whittling away dwarves gone berserk with my military, who re perfectly content to do so.  They've been training for this in their lonely hallway and their armor stand since they got to the fort, and they have no love for the gluttons.  I'm down to about 25 now, but some of those might be migrants locked outside the gate.  My three military are happy, one dwarf is ecstatic, and two or three more are in the orange.  The rest of the fort is on the verge of going berserk and running face first into an axe.  I've never really let a tantrum spiral come to its natural conclusion before, so this is new territory.

My biggest concern?  If my ecstatic dwarf gets killed, who is going to open the gates for replacement migrants?  Surely, pulling levers is below the status of my civilian slaughtering military.

Current status:
Military:  In copper armor with copper weapons and shields.  I have three steel axes, three steel hammers, and one steel spear made.  They have not been equipped in fairness to the spearmaster.  With this state of fairness in mind, they are all happy to kill any civilians that get out of line.
Civilians:  Tantruming and getting a hammer to the spine, mostly.
Living quarters:  More than sufficient for my surviving dwarves, if they stop tantruming long enough to go claim a room.
Metal industry:  The magma is flowing, but nobody is alive to make those last two spears.
Farms:  The fields are planted full and I have so many goats I don't know what to do with - especially without any farmers still sane.

So that's how my fort is going currently.  Hopefully they all die off quickly to make room for some new migrants.  I have the main part of the fort ready to colonize, but I was about a year behind schedule and the peasants revolted over the lack of beds.  Who would have thought a trash chute with a one level drop would cause so much death?


Short version:  A trash chute made everyone kill each other.