Bay 12 Games Forum

Observations from a long-term (56 year) fort:

The fort in question, Ringlabor, is in 44.12, so some of these may no longer apply, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of them do as they are things that only come up after long-term play.

*Encumbrance: With most dwarves in a militia and uniforms set to replace clothes, most individuals are carrying few things. The exceptions are miners, woodcutters, and a few others that I've kept out of service due to their skills. After nearly 60 years they are loaded down with page upon page of crowns, bracelets, amulets, earrings, rings, etc., and take forever to get anywhere.

*Historical figures: Historical figures of mortal races are dying out. All of the visitors are old; new performers, scholars and hunters are not being generated, so if I keep this up eventually I'll have no visitors except for the occasional troupe that includes elves and goblins. (This may also be reflected in the lack of offensive action elsewhere in the world: the leaders have died off. I'm puzzled by the occasional attacks I see on the map on sites I know are empty; why haven't they been taken over?)

*Geriatric human mercenaries: I wish there was some way to gracefully release mercenaries from service, or that human aging was a bit more realistic. Currently there are 13 humans at Ringlabor, all between the ages of 75 and 114 (every new year I expect half of them to die, but they're still kicking). It'd be kind of nice to let them go home to their families, or at least recognize that 114-year-old archers are probably going to be more of a problem than a solution no matter how awesome their stats are (and with decades of doing nothing but training, these are some killer centenarians). (Or maybe these guys think of Ringlabor as an awesome retirement community.)

*Professions liable to anger and frustration: I take an "activist god" role with things like remove-stress, and have been recording who needs it for 15 years. The individuals with the greatest propensity to get red arrows are scholars and marksdwarves. In the former case, it's because they refuse to do anything else but scholarly work (one of the favorite topics is the retort, which I know is a vessel for distillation, but it's funnier to imagine them working on snappy comebacks instead). In the latter, I think it might have to do with marksdwarves being confined to sealed bunkers during combat, so they don't get any benefits of physical combat.

*The curse of the traveling scholar: The propensity for anger also extends to visiting scholars. After decades of wandering from place to place, they've gotten cranky. Several have gotten into fights over the years, resulting in visits from the friendly guard squad. These visits are brief and emphatic.

*The curse of the traveling scholar, part II: Apparently visiting scholars and performers are recruited to serve when a site is under attack. With the dwindling number of historical figures, a site's defense may be nothing but scholars and performers. I have discovered that in several cases squads from Ringlabor, tasked to raze a forest retreat or dark pit, have killed a string of historical figures that turned out to be visiting troupes and scholars (sometimes scholars who have visited Ringlabor numerous times). Oops.

*Putting on different hats: Conquest of other sites has led the Duke to decide he's duke of these other places, not Ringlabor. (He still demands production of battle axes every so often, so his head's in the right place.) Meanwhile, a couple of times a human performer has been elevated to a lord of somewhere else, but functions more or less the same except for apparently being treated as a squad in their own right if a militia member. I've had to manually add them back when this happens. There probably should be a function such that individuals who become nobles while at a site are recalled to wherever they're supposed to be ruling (or maybe for RP purposes they were named nobles because the people who elevated them knew they weren't coming back).

*Rules for raids:
1) Copy save before beginning a raid, just in case
2) No production of weapons or armor occurs while squads are offsite, to avoid equipment issues
3) Squads are stationed and then unstationed before they are sent so they aren't carrying anything
4) Squads that go offsite always have armor set to replace clothing
5) Never save a game and quit while a squad is offsite
I don't know if any of these help, but I've never had a crash. The tedious bit after a raid is reassigning cemetery space (I just let them pick their own bedrooms again).

*How to make monster hunters apply for citizenship: I have tried this twice successfully:
1) Accept petition from monster hunter
2) Send monster hunter to another holding
3) Eventually monster hunter returns, under a different profession
4) Monster hunter will now apply for citizenship two years after return

Recent intelligence (Legends Viewer) indicated that the forest retreat of Webbedsatin had only three elves, making it seem like little more than a speed bump, something to keep up practice. All concerned were surprised when the Diamond Papers returned having killed 18 elves, four dwarves, three humans, and a goblin. It turned out that no fewer than seven performance troupes had decided to stop at Webbedsatin for the winter. So, long story short: we wiped out five bands. (Bizarrely enough, practically the same thing happened to the same performance troupes 36 years before at the exact same forest retreat.)

Upon setting up a library, a noble from the Scribes' Guild arrives to make sure that no unauthorized copies are made. Doing so is a hammerable offense. If the justice system is not set up, the noble sends a siege against the fortress. Due to a bug, it is impossible to petition to make authorized copies.

There may be a work-around if you've really, really got to have a specific mercenary/monster slayer as a citizen, you don't want to overtly cheat with DFhack, and you don't mind waiting a while in-game:

I once had a monster hunter who wasn't hunting monsters, so I sent her off to an allied site. Unexpectedly, she returned a year or two later, but as a peasant, and later petitioned to join as a citizen. I've never tried to reproduce it because I haven't had the need to gain citizens this way, but if it's a general thing and not a fluke I suppose it might be helpful for mercenaries and monster slayers in long-term forts who are edgy because they can't craft.

One of the most underwhelming sieges of all time arrived at Puzzlingcrafts, consisting of five goblin crossbowmen and three goblin bowmen. It was so feeble that if I didn't know better, I'd think it was a group of defecting or refugee goblins. Five of the group head immediately for the one open entry, while the others loiter around the edge of the map. As the five draw near the entrance, one gets clobbered by a weapons trap and the rest immediately pull up. At this time, Puzzlingcrafts's militia arrive on the scene. Usually, they are only too willing to attack any enemy visible at practically any distance, but this time they just stand there. There is no cover, no walls, no trees, just roughly thirty tiles of open field. The goblins, all armed with projectile weapons, offer token fire. The marksdwarves, all Legendary, themselves put up token return fire. The melee dwarves do not charge even after kill orders are issued, except for the swordmaster Kogsak Zimnish who goes into a martial trance, runs across the open field, and slaughters the waiting goblins with a series of artful decapitations (except for one poor sap who seems to have gotten on her mean side; I didn't know you could explode someone's eyeball by slapping with the flat of the sword, but after that kicking the guy in the same eye just seems like overkill). With no goblin backup on the horizon, the squads are then ordered to engage the lurkers at the edge of the map. They dutifully begin, except for Kogsak, who seems temporarily overwhelmed about the whole thing and just stands there, although she does eventually recover with enough time to spare to behead yet another suspiciously inert goblin bowman. Like I said, if I didn't know better, I'd think these goblins were trying to surrender, which would explain why they were so few and so inept, and why the militia hesitated.

I've seen this in 31.25: my legacy fort has a room with a glass forgotten beast that I use for crossbow training. I'll station a squad within shooting range, have them shoot for a while, then turn off the station order. They leave after exhausting their bolts, but later on, if they have nothing to do and have not been stationed anywhere else, they return to the chamber of their own volition and shoot at the FB some more. I picture it like soldiers or cops going to the shooting range for practice. The basic principle, as far as I can tell, is that military dwarves with nothing else to do may return to the last place where they were stationed and saw combat.

Heh... Truly I am skilled in forbidden arts!

Really, I figured they might as well go together. A new thread would certainly be warranted once they publish the whole thing in all of its weird awkward glory.