Bay 12 Games Forum

My version is really more of a creepy sex dungeon with nothing but food, booze, and beds

I take full credit for this idea

Demons exist in hell, which can only be accessed by digging through hollow adamantine spires. When you first dig too deep and uncover the hollow inside of a spire, a huge rush of demons will emerge from the hole, 100+ in many cases. Demons are essentially on par with forgotten beasts, maybe slightly weaker individually. They are randomly generated in a very similar manner as well, only they tend to have more ranged attacks. You will only have about 5 distinct types of demon, generated at the same time as your worldgen, which will show up when you breach hell. Some of these willm ost likely have a ranged attack, and these ranged units tend to be the ones made out of fire or vomit or snow. However, they also have a tendency to explode in a very harmful manner when killed.

There are, essentially, two ways to approach hell: Climactic battle of epic proportions - 200 legendary weaponlords, veterans of countless sieges, versus the denizens of hell itself... or you can just obsidianise them.

All demons may have the same sorts of special attacks as forgotten beasts: webs, dust, gas, etc. It's a good idea to flood a labyrinth area with knee-deep (3/7) water to ensure that any contaminant instantly washes off your fighters. It also prevents dwarves from being set on fire by flame demons. It's very useful to have a lot of chokepoints, obstacles, and distractions (like statues and doors, which they will spend time destroying) in any battleground you set up for fighting the demons, as this will let your melee dwarves close in without suffering too many hits from syndrome-bearers and other range units. At the same time, you want the demons exposed to some sort of shooting gallery to ensure that your marksdwarves get a good amount of shots to pick out the spirits of snow and fire and such that can do damage from a distance but explode harmfully in melee. The best way to do this while preventing flying demons from getting an advantage, is to have an open area above your labyrinth/battleground ringed with fortifications behind which your marksdwarves stand, and then pave over the open spaces with floor bars so that your dwarves can shoot through - building destroyers cannot destroy buildings from below, unless they can path to the building normally, so this will prevent the demons from simply flying up and around your obstacles and getting the drop on your melee units or killing your crossbow dwarves. Just make sure there is no direct, open path from the battleground to the bars. Best to seal them in with the fortifications your dwarves will be shooting through. MAKE SURE THE BARS ARE OF STEEL, because the high body heat of some demons can destroy flimsy copper barriers. It's a good idea to simply hand all your civilians crossbows and give them a year's training before engaging the final battle. Also, make sure you have as many dogs, bears, mandrills, gorillas, lions, leopards, war elephants - any war animal you can get a breeding pair of - as possible. They make useful meatshields and can occasionally debilitate weaker demons. Make sure you have at least a squad's worth of axelords and swordmasters equipped with adamantine weapons, just in case there're steel demons in the pack.
Also, ballistae are quite capable of skewering a demon, if you can figure out a way to keep your operators from getting mauled.

Side note: despite all this preparation, victory is still not guaranteed. That point the quality of the roof bars is what brought down my first attempt, and steel demons being immune to everything but addy was what brought down my second. Third time lucky, my fingers are crossed for successfully beating the clowncar in DF2014

Alternately, just Google for "checkerboard technique dwarf fortress" to find the easiest way of dealing with the initial rush of demons. I personally have never done this, because while I respect the engineering genius behind it, I like the idea of conquering hell with cold dwarven steel (and candy). Still, it will obsidianise every one of the dozens of angry demons that come out of that hole, leaving you lots of lovely candy to play with.

I'm sorry, but I still think that we're being carried away. All the rather excellent ideas in this thread require major overhauls to the actual game. A little too major, in my opinion.

Not at all. With the raw system I proposed, all the innovations could be put in easily. I'd put it at less than 50 lines of code for innovations to be include-able in the raws, then maybe another 10 or so piggybacked onto the stealth detection/item handling code to make it so that witnessing events or using certain objects can trigger an innovation. Then it's just a matter of slogging through and adding the lists of innovations in raw form. It is definitely a major proposal, and one that will definitely do best after things like item wear and sending out new groups to embark once you're the mountainhome (planned!), but no core systems of the game would have to be overhauled for most of the suggestions in this thread.

Urist cancels drink: too mutated.

WWUD if he became obsessed with someone else's mortality?

Haha ok I take back my anti-bayonet rant.

Quote

If, on the other hand, they live on the top of a small hill containing the only spring in a vast region of desert infested with goblins, they're gonna have to adapt to a life of constant warfare or die.

...if it's the only water, what are the goblins drinking...

That's just it. Without something like agriculture that lets you store up large amounts of resources for hard times, this situation doesn't really end up happening. Without enough immediate resources for both groups, both groups wouldn't be there in the first place. And without a base of operations and, again, largely stockpiled cache of food, you can't sustain an army to march far away across areas without resources in between, nor do you have any reason to, because you couldn't manage the "empire" you win.

That was just a quick example, but you seem to be missing the fact that goblins are incredibly aggressive by nature. If your dwarves live in close proximity to goblins, regardless of the state of their ability to build an empire, the goblins are going to want to kill the dwarves. True, in the stone age they would be equivalent to nothing more than hyper-aggressive chimpanzees who claim a bigger turf than they need, but still.

And, like I said, it's completely moot anyway, because this game can simulate war and it can simulate peace. If it simulates war, there will be weapons. If it simulates peace, there will not be weapons.
The game would, of course, have a system to gauge the strategic value of any location to determine whether anyone would attack it, and that value would gain modifiers depending on the state of the potential attackers' empire-building ability, need for farmland, need for grazing land, natural aggression, distance from the location, etc.
If the goblins attack the dwarves repeatedly, and the dwarves survive, the dwarves will invent weapons. Sure, chances are agriculture will already be around before wars are fought, but there's always the possibility that the dwarves, taken by some madness, decided to settle in the embark tile next to the first goblin settlement.

I have a few preset industry areas that I always incorporate into my forts in roughly the same way, and usually this order, from the surface down:

Maze-like roofed defence thing
Farms
Kitchens (+clothesmakers and leatherworkers)
Dining room
Bedrooms
Industry (masons, jewellers, mechanics, and craftsdwarves with bone stockpiles)
Storage
Forges (with optional magma plumbing beneath)

Carpentry and wood burning may get its own floor, or not depending on how reliant I am on it. Nobles also usually get their own floor or two. Things like cisterns just go wherever's easiest to get water in them, I usually have them quite far away.

I quite like this, but I'm not sure everyone will go for it. But Toady did add that sarcastic legends mode entry for retiring fortresses, so who knows. Still, it would be nice to see dwarves showing evidence of analytic thinking.

The otherworldly spirit known as Skullsploder sits at his adamantine desk and frowns out the clear diamond window in front of him at the events of the mortal realm. The other spirits don't know why he continues to obsess himself with the doings of the residents of Slingblock, but nonetheless, there he sits, fretting and worrying over the actions of the mortals. A ghostly shout rings out.

"ONE YEAR?! It took them ONE YEAR after I organised them a nice safe well defended fortress to go opening a doorway to HELL ITSELF? Oh, Armok, I'm going to have to take control down there again."

Immortal spirits have a lot of time on their hands, the others reason. Let him obsess with those noobs for now. Sooner or later all their souls would be joining them. Or not.

So yeah please sign me up for another go