Bay 12 Games Forum

well, i dont know how civ generation works, but flooding the world with migrants of all races should make things interesting.


kudos to finishing up jplur, this thread has had far too many "oh dear disaster skip me plz" events.

also, is it possible to play as a dwarf civ but add things to the raws to temporarily allow them to make weapons/armor that would not normally be allowed for dwarves?

two questions -

1) is the steam in dwarf fortress currently as deadly as the steam in the old 2d version was?

2) does pouring water on this lignite-in-iron-bin device generate enough steam to be useful as a defense/weapon?

because ive wanted to do a steam based deathtrap ever since i read boatmurdered. something like floor grates that shoot deadly gusts of steam out of them.

heh, ive never done the orbital weapon thing. i allways wanted my inventions to be sortof feasable given real world physics.

an interesting one i currently have is every single animal in my whole fortress thrown into a large pit. it may not seem impressive, but if i open the channel and route invaders in there then nothing will survive. even megabeasts will eventually pass out from exhaustion and get kicked to death by a horse. its so funny having a named horse who has killed a titan. next thing to face the pit of cute fuzzy death is going to be the HFS. im praying for spirits of fire, i think they are the only thing that has a chance. ive been quite surprised by this, it was originally ment to be a way for me to get rid of all my excess animals, but they have ended up getting rid of everything else.

other things i have done included huge flushing systems using massive aboveground resovoirs that sent invaders to the depths of my fortress. surprisingly many would survive and have to fight off the chasm creatures that would come into the drainage passage to see where all the water was coming from. that was funny.

another favourite is easier to do then the pit full of animals is a multi shot cavein device. i have several z levels of floor held together with supports, and a row of levers in a control room. i can collapse each level individually. used near a chasm anything that survives the rockfall often ends up swept into the depths by the cavein dust.

my last, and largest, is a dam i made on my current map which has a 30 z level cliff with a brook at the top. ive made a massive dam with passages and living spaces inside it. goblin sieges allways have a group appearing near its base, and i have little grated openings all over the valley floor where when i am done i can hopefully send giant high pressure pyramids of water shooting out of. since goblins dont seem to drown unless you have them in a filled room with a roof, i figure if i turn the water on then off quickly, i can perhaps launch them up into the air and drop them really fast. i hope water can do that. if not, ill just have to settle for the intersting high pressure water traps im making for adventure mode. 30 z levels of water is pretty fun to play with.

most of the ideas here are nice, but shadowloards checkerboard repeater is my favourite. i can totally see something like that as a dwarf fort defense. imagine the haulers sitting under an alcove at the bottom taking bets on who is going to go splat.

Urist: cmon, bowgoblin, bowgoblin, bowgoblin
*CRACK*
Domas: aha, a macelord! you all owe me three silver!
Urist: dawwww.

my current fort is my largest ever at 190 dwarves, and i almost wish i had more. i do what other people have talked about, and check every new migrant, and change their work preferences depending on what i need or want. i tend to put effort into making a few dwarves very skilled, like all of the metalworking skills and gemcrafting, etc. ive also got three fulltime fisherman and four fulltime hunters, all of which are legendary in their respective skills. i made the mistake of drafting one of my hunters to take down a kobolt and couldnt deactivate him as he instantly became a champion. i have a tonne of bone carvers going around the clock turning all the bones and skills from the two humped camels, sasquatches, black bears and giant eagles my hunters bring in, along with several butchers who can barely keep up.

i have a stack of planters, leatherworkers, clothiers and tanners, who make up the bulk of my dwarves. lots of them are legendary, and they are allways constantly working. i have to turn the fields off most of the year because i get way too much food with the fishing and hunting.

there are also 15 dwarves who only smelt the ridiculous amounts of ore i bring in, and several dwarves who spend their entire lives just making things like doors or stone blocks. until recently i had only 6 champions for my entire military and fortress guard, everyone else i had to spare was busy making my latest megaproject. ive now managed to get nearly all my planters etc to dabbling in weapon or armoursmithing in anticipation of more fey moods.

if i have a number of dwarves doing nothing, and am at a loss, then i get them to clear all the stone out of my fortress. you only need a single channeled square designated as a pit, and you can dump an infinite amount of stone into it. the economy and constant employment means even the few peasants around the place are millionaires.

ive also never used the manager screen, i prefer to just have all my workshops laid out on the one level, with workshop profiles restricting some to only legendary craftsdwarves. i keep the stockpiles arranged above and below with a system of locked doors so i can restrict access to more valuable materials.

i think the point of all this bragging is its possible to keep everyone in a massive fort constantly occupied. if you pick and industry and get it going autonomously before moving on you will soon have a massive fort which can buy out the entire contents of every caravan. in my case, just a few hunters and fisherman, or even just importing lots of meat and fish, created enough bones to keep a ludicrous number of workers going around the clock right from the start. if you get things organized enough its possible to keep up a constant production of complex materials like steel and clear glass which, once going, does not really need maintaining so long as the raw materials are in supply. i also planned ahead in creating bedrooms and workspace, so migrants allways have somewhere to live and work as soon as they walk onto the map.

the first and biggest thing is to make sure your dwarves have the right skills as soon as they show up as migrants, which is something people have allready pointed out, although i manage to get by without killing any of mine. my surroundings are somewhat hostile, and besides, peasants and soapmakers will skill up over time into whatever you want. the next is having readily accesible workspaces, with nearby stockpiles that make it easy for dwarves to pass items on to the next stage in production (eg, lye>potash>pearlash>clear glass) you can also just have dwarves who only do hauling from one stockpile to another to free up the craftsdwarves. anyways, ive ranted enough, i hope there are some things in my epic wall of text worth taking away.

heh, dragons. the complete idiots of the megabeast world. not a single one has ever made it into my fort proper, they allways manage to die or kill themselves in really stupid ways. i had one avoid my whole fort and find the access shaft to my water projects and underground river setup in the far corner of the map. he smashed his way through the doors and floor hatches, got down to near the bottom z level of the map, smashed a floodgate and filled the entire area he was in up to the surface with water. it took him something like a year to find his way out, after which he wandered into my courtyard deathtrap area outside the main entrance, then attacked a door that led to the moat. he then climbed into the water and sat there for two years until i got tired of it and shot him full of crossbow bolts.

i was so annoyed. i had my entire main entrance walled up with cage traps, as i really wanted a pet dragon. it was a real nuisance trying to keep all the hunters and marksdwarves away from him while he lay around in my moat. dragons are so stupid. this and the four other dragon attacks i got in that fort never made it anywhere near my cage traps, one set itself on fire when it ignited some goblin clothes trying to flame a random cat, and another got nailed with a single high quality bone bolt from a hunter the second after he appeared on the map. i love the wounds system but right now the slightest injury makes even very big creatures like dragons pass out from pain. i long for a bronze colossus, they seem the only extremely difficult megabeast out there right now.

hah! i totally need to get one of those horse heads.

and dwarves are totally weird on rare occasions when it comes to carrying stupid things with them when they change their mind about what they are doing. ive found when i build my shops in funny places dwarves will buy stuff then sometimes go leave it in demented places because they decided they wanted to be somewhere else halfway through hauling it back to their quarters.

unrelated, wrestlers when sparring seem to allways litter the ground with their opponents clothing, and often never reclaim it. and dwarves dont move it because it doesnt belong to them.

worldspawn - there are a few things you can do to help your dwarves out, especially against enimies with ranged weapons.

first, your wrestler may have done a lot better then everyone else because the wrestling skill increases the chance of dodging attacks. at least in melee combat, legendary wrestlers are untouchable. i always put my dwarves in the best armor i have with a shield, and set them to wrestle for a good long time. with high or max armor use, shield use and wrestling they are very very hard to kill, and you can then train them in just about anything else. the armor and shield use along with wrestling dramatically cut down on sparring injuries.

dont use spears. they have a terrible tendancy to get stuck, and your dwarf will stand there trying to pull it out while everything else around him beats him to death. champions with spears do very badly compared to champions with anything else. spears are good at hurting the internal organs of things, so lots of spears against a megabeast may be decent, but not against lots of small targets. any of the other weapons work fine, though i love my axes for their dismembering effect.

last, the absolute best way to take on goblins with bows or crossbows is to have your army wait around a blind corner just inside your fort. a single champion will very quickly tear them apart at close range. shield use and a good shield and plate armor will help a lot against instant kills from ranged if you must fight in the open.

you can forbid weapon stockpiles or lock stockpile doors to try and force your military to spar with wooden or silver weapons, which do only 50% of the damage an equivalent iron one would do. you need to buy wooden weapons from the elves. i personally dont do this anymore, as once my dwarves are good at wrestling, armor and shield they never manage to hurt each other. check the wiki for details on weapon swapping arrangements if you want to use it.

so, for invincible 50 strong phalanx of champions
1) train wrestling, armor, shield first
2) give them the best armor you have. you can get them to wear leather, chain and plate all at once
3) keep melee soldiers around blind corners to force ranged foes to come to close quarters.

you can also retire any minor spine or head injuries to crossbow duty or royal guard, they can still do good there.

ooh, i just looked irfanview up. very sexy, only a few hundred kilobytes for a lightweight image viewer/editor? sold. also, where should i be posting images? i just looked up the gozru werecircle of my engravings, and it turns out he is actually a she. and she has one hundred and sixty kills, including a fair few giant eagles and sasquatches. she downed one of the sasquatches when she had no legs. and no wonder it was only goblins in my engravings. i embarked in a valley in the mountains that has every goblin civ in the world lodged in the valley walls, and no other civs anywhere nearby. no wonder my sieges are so stupidly big and frequent.