Bay 12 Games Forum

Looks like a nice solid start this time. 

As far as questions of what a vampire does with an unconscious hostile in my limited experience with my own vampire, she won't feed on an unconscious foe during battle. She is often the first person to entire the dodge catch pit beneath the trapped catwalk entrance to my fort and thus often encounters wounded and or unconscious foes and I have never seen her try to feed on them. Then again the pit battle situations are always chaotic and usually involve multiple combatants. Perhaps it would be different if she was alone with a single opponent that was already unconscious. The game may also look at being knocked unconscious and sleeping as different states. I really have no clue on that one.

I may try to make Buttercup a couple of immortal hammer dwarf buddies to keep her company just to see how it plays out although at the moment I am distracted with taking vengeance on some rather rude human guests who destroyed my fledgling jabberer domestication project by murdering the only female I had managed to capture during the last siege. In our fort we do not take kindly to foreign guests undermining our future security by randomly killing our hard earned spoils of battle. Their deaths will not be pleasant ones. What was particularly offensive is the fact that dwarven lives were sacrificed to ensure the safe passage of these heathens through our lands during past sieges and now they repay us with such treachery.

That is a very interesting glitch I was not aware of. Depending on the final lethality of the fall onto the spikes my suggest could actually end up causing more problems than it solves.

Yeah, I guessed that the reason he killed it was likely because it was an enemy POW. I still do not take kindly to guests killing each other in my fort, particularly when a rather useless guest kills a very valuable one. The reason he was able to reach it was that the door to its room was jammed open by a nest box that got dumped there probably by some inept hauler or the guy who was deconstructing it. The door was there as a means to isolate the jabberer if need be rather than to keep guests of my fort from murdering it as I didn't think they would do such a thing but it would have incidentally worked to prevent the incident had some lazy dwarf not jammed the door with junk. My other exotic pets all remained safe behind the working doors to their cells. It does nothing to change the fact that I will be killing that guard and everyone he knows as painfully as I can. I always knew that air lock I built around the trade depot might come in handy someday. At the time I was thinking about keeping enemies out with it rather than in but it works well both ways.  

Thanks for the heads up about the reason the jabber was killed. I was already pretty sure I knew why he went after it but its always nice when people take the time to explain things to others and now I have confirmation of my suspicions. My guess is that caravan guards will hunt any creature they can reach on the map that is marked as hostile regardless of whether it has been rendered harmless via restraints. I assume that neutral creatures will be left alone unless they attack first?

It's a shame I don't have an army of chickens. I really like that idea.

I wonder how high of a drop it would take for a jabberer corpse to kill a human? Time for some science.

Quick question. If you wall in enemy combatants will they eventually die of thirst or hunger? It will probably take a while to put together a properly circumlocutory execution machine and I wouldn't want my guests starving to death before I can kill them in proper dwarfy fashion.

Gotta love the stuff people come up with in DF. It attracts an interesting player base for sure. This is a really neat idea although I'm not sure there are any real applications for it, but the thought of turning some vampire dwarf into a obsidian version of Han Solo is great.

Ouch, those evil biomes are no joke.

It's not that I don't like the idea of cage traps as they are the only way to capture beasts for training and domestication, which is one of my absolute favorite things in the game. Who doesn't love breeding some crazy army of outlandish war beasts to unleash upon the enemy or give to little dwarf girls as a pets?

It just feels so anti-climatic when some civilization destroying mega beast ends its century long reign of terror  by stepping in a shoddy cage trap made of sticks. It would be cool if there were still ways to catch the great trainable beasts. I just think it shouldn't be so insanely easy. I don't have any experience with modding the game but from what I understand cage traps are hard coded. It's not something that could be modded easily.

To make a long story short, a highly skilled vampire Hammer Lord immigrated to my fort a while back. She killed two peasants before I tracked her down with a bit of detective work and killed another two while I experimented with humane ways to keep her alive without letting her harm my poor little mortal fortress folk that she is so fond of snacking on.

Anyway she now lives in a very nice little personal sanctum near the entrance of the fort where she can spend eternity in relative comfort aside for never being allowed to feed again and only getting let out to brain any unwelcome visitors. The inevitable booze withdrawal has set in now that shes been around for a good while and although it certainly has slowed her down she still seems quite functional as a fighter and is relatively happy despite her thirst due to her deluxe room and masterwork armor and weaponry that she ogles on a regular basis.

This brings me to my questions for those who have done a little vampire science.

Does the booze withdrawal just keep getting worse and worse or will it reach a steady state at some point and how bad are the side effects? More to the point, do the long term side effects of being a vampire with booze withdrawal outweigh the benefits for a dwarf whose only purpose is to serve in the military? Will the withdrawal finally drive them all mad or can they live with it long term? I've been thinking about feeding some of my other hammer dwarves blood spiked water to give Buttercup some sparring buddies she can hang out with and lead into battle. She must be very lonely with only her war dogs to keep her company and the thought of having a small squad of immortal hammer lords just amuses me to no end but I would hate to convert some of my trusting little dorfs into immortal blood suckers only to find that in the long run it cripples them so badly that they have to be put down.