Bay 12 Games Forum

Thanks for the information.  I wish I could use planned and unplanned cave-ins with them having logical results instead of having them off. I know the bee hives and honey system were based on information from an actual expert... wish cave-ins were more accurate instead of being deadly overkill.

If you want to simulate something more realistic, may I suggest dropping a cave-in next to the targets... I've always found the chaos of nearby units being knocked about, stunned, and covered in dust pretty good.

I've been playing FD for about ten years now, I can definitely state War Elephants are a serious deal.  It's not the skills in their case, its the extreme size combined with plate armor combined with their numbers.  Legendary dwarves can reliably win in a 1x1 but when there are 100+ WE's you quickly start reaching 2x1 or 3x1 odds (my military tops out at 50 dwarves, or 1/3 the fort).  Against extreme sizes, certain dwarf weapons become fairly ineffectual for killing blows even in the hands of a legendary user - axes and swords in particular.  They can kill, it just takes forever and exhausts the dwarf.  Conversely, extremely large units wielding blunt weapons deal serious damage - if they can land a hit.  However, the War Elephants only have GRASP on their trunks, and these can be sliced off to render them less deadly.  Maces, war hammers, and spears are the only thing that reliably can kill WE's in a reasonable time.  I use a mix of weapons for this reason - axes and swords to distrunk the WE's, and war hammers and spears to finish them.  The WE's take a noticeably longer time to kill compare to smaller invaders, which can lead to exhaustion against a large siege, which leads to potential dead legendaries.  Normally I use the bridge separation technique to divide up a siege to solve the exhaustion problem but in my current fort the challenge is to never 'seal' off any entrance or escape.

How can you tell when a Fortress unit is prone?  I'll keep an eye on that in the next siege.

Quote from: Werdna on July 09, 2018, 01:34:21 pm

I agree with most of what you wrote, but would like to say that this tactic above works well for any number of squads.  I use it frequently.  As Sethatos mentioned, given well-equipped and trained squads, I find exhaustion or separation becomes your primary killers, and maximizing the number of bodies on the front line alleviates those.  The more bodies you have, the less they will get exhausted (fewer drawn-out 1x1 combats), and the less dangerous it is once they do become exhausted.  Since the dwarves seem to happily fight even when packed multiple to a tile (and with no apparent combat detriment that I can notice), I regularly throw 40-50 dwarves into spaces like these and watch them gobble up large invasion groups like Pacman. It becomes even more important if you add in enhanced invaders from mods.

I didn't mean that this tactic is only good for small militias, I just wanted to say that, in my opinion, you can get much more out of a larger military by using more elaborate tactics instead. The frontline tactic will, indeed, still work, but a lot of soldiers will stand rubbing their necks, when, instead, they could've been mowing down enemies from the opposite side at the very same time.

Hmm, I've lost you here.  Why would the soldiers stand around?  I've never seen that - the moment an invader is in sight, it's go time, whether there is 1 soldier or 100.  Oh - are you thinking they stand around because there is no room (1 dwarf/tile)?  In my experience they will gladly jump into the same tile with another dwarf, and fight stacked on a tile with no combat impediment that I can detect.  In fact sometimes after they kill the last invader they can see, they'll all stand on top of its corpse in one tile momentarily - I like to think they're all taking a quick leak on the corpse.   

( Edit: as for more soldiers allowing for more elaborate maneuvers, I certainly agree there! )

The simplest, perhaps, is "a frontline", as described by Sethatos, and is best suited for a small (10-20 troops), well-trained, well-equipped military.

I agree with most of what you wrote, but would like to say that this tactic above works well for any number of squads.  I use it frequently.  As Sethatos mentioned, given well-equipped and trained squads, I find exhaustion or separation becomes your primary killers, and maximizing the number of bodies on the front line alleviates those.  The more bodies you have, the less they will get exhausted (fewer drawn-out 1x1 combats), and the less dangerous it is once they do become exhausted.  Since the dwarves seem to happily fight even when packed multiple to a tile (and with no apparent combat detriment that I can notice), I regularly throw 40-50 dwarves into spaces like these and watch them gobble up large invasion groups like Pacman.  It becomes even more important if you add in enhanced invaders from mods.

Formation-wise, the game just doesn't have anything (yet) besides what amounts to a mob of 5 year olds chasing a ball around a field.  Given that, tactically you want to create the tightest grouping of as many dwarves as possible, and consistently put it up against the most divided up grouping of invaders as possible.  The fun to me is in the fort designs such as the ones Sver mentions, and coming up with clever ways of achieving the ball vs string that I mentioned.

Any tips on disposing of sentient corpses en masse without traumatizing the whole fort?

Perhaps turn your military into civvies during the later months of a season, when invasions don't occur, and use them for corpse-hauling.  They typically are hardened to death.

Sorry Dame.  FWIW, I did find the source where I first learned about the 'valid curve', there's a graphic in there that shows how a cart will sail over all manner of invalid tracks until it turns at a valid curve - PeridaxisErrant's 'Use of Minecarts'.  You'll see that a T-junction is one of the ones that it goes past.

If you're trying to create a 50-50 switch track I think you are going to need to build a repeater, and attach its output to one of these designs:  Minecart switches

On some embarks it really does feel like some blind guy is beaming the wagons down to the surface...

One of the things I do at embark, before I even unpause the game, is paint every square of water with d-o-r to keep the dwarves off any potential ice as much as possible (it doesn't outright prevent them from entering those tiles, but makes them prefer the unpainted tiles and walk around when possible).  Just don't forget to unpaint any bridges you later add.  I avoid swamp embarks for this reason, it's just too much to paint.