Bay 12 Games Forum

Hey guys.  Did I say Friday night?  Yeah, I really said Saturday.  You know, jynxed and all.

Damn, ninja'd to the Cousin Itt picture.

Anyone else planning to let hair go the way of worn clothes, and just let your dwarves turn into naked hairballs?  Castaway Fortress.

That's another thing to change.  They should be crosskobolds.

Embarked on another cave.  I'm determined to clear out one of these for a proper kobold dwelling.  This is actually my third attempt - on the second try I managed to land on a cave that already had kobolds living in it.  Sorry guys.

But number three doesn't have any undead wildlife or native kobs.  Just a one-armed bronze colossus.  Luckily the fisherkob managed to run across the map before being obliterated, so the camp might yet survive.

EDIT: Ah crap, here he comes.

EDIT: Well, the colossus just went back to his spawn point to chill out, so I left him be and went to business building a house.  Then I made a coffin for the dead fisherkob.  The cave has some giant rats in it, but they weren't near the entrance so I decided to be cute and put the tomb right under the colossus.

Turns out bronze colossi have ground penetrating radar.  Didn't know that until he was chasing the hunter deep into the cave to paint the walls with him.  Then he startled the crafter who was trying to inter the corpse, which in turn started a dwarf-like "must stockpile" reflex among the other kobs until I forbid the corpse.  Even so, the colossus was hot on the trail of three kobs when he emerged from the cave.

Then, I don't know what happened, but I think a kobold knee-capped him.  He's stuck in lying-down mode and moving slowly.  Sensing weakness, I ordered the remaining five to battle (which combined with the two deaths sent everybody into unhappiness).  They're still there now, pounding ineffectually on the colossus' bronze hide while he occasionally throws a punch at the one trained wrestler and misses.

EDIT: The colossus has yet to stand up, but he had two big advantages.  First, he may have crap speed and aim, but he only has to connect once to completely mangle a bodypart.  Second, he's made of bronze, and can't choke or tire.

It took a while, but he methodically pulverized the kobolds, who could only bruise him for a few moments at a time.  Now the only one left is the axekob, who's stuck in a wrestling loop with the colossus choking him.  They've been at it for ten minutes now, so I guess I'll have to abandon.

If you want to be really leet about it, there's a built in solution to the spear thing.  Go (V) (L) (S) and tell the spearkob to use two weapons.  This actually defines how many hands he's allowed to use, otherwise he goes in a loop of "I need a spear - I'm holding too many weapons - I need a spear - I'm holding too many weapons" etc.  Not the most elegant system, but Toady supposedly fixed it for next time.

EDIT: For even more weapon fun, you can use the method described here to make bows count as crossbows, but still use the bow skill.  Just change this line-
[RANGED:BOW:ARROW]
to
[RANGED:CROSSBOW:ARROW]
You can do the same to blowguns (be sure to add them to the entity file) and similar things with daggers by adding a ammo line (with a dummy ammo type) tagged to SWORD.

One side effect is that if the kobold loses the weapon they were using, like a bow, they'll pick up any weapon keyed to the same ammo-skill, like a blowgun in this example, which they won't be experienced with.  But hey, they're kobolds.  You can't expect too much.

I'll break the trend and say that I'm all for it.  I get the feeling that DF is set up to track every last bit and piece, and removing abstraction would help gameplay by adding that much more of a challenge.  Certainly if you're trying to emulate starting a settlement from scratch from such a "low-level" view as DF, you can't just assume your dwarve conjure hardware out of the air.

I'd also like to add a tangent, that stone doors always struck me as a cheap cop-out.  I've never heard of doors being made of stone - I'm not even sure how you could and still have a door a person could easily open, like you'd want in a bedroom.

Depends entirely on how much you like everybody.  Personally, I've a few blueprints I like using.  One is the THLawrence apartment blocks from the wiki.  I expand the model so that each room is 3x3, with one square being the door.  For nobles, you can turn each three room corner into a suite with doors in between them, with bedroom, dining, and office.  For really high ranked nobles, you might need something bigger, but appropriating more of the floor with fewer walls could work.

I've never tried the fertilization mechanic, so I can't say much about it.  However, irrigation is completely unnecessary if you have natural earth.  Anything you can plant on will be arable forever, no matter the circumstances.  If you muddy a cavern floor one time, you can grow there to your heart's content.