Bay 12 Games Forum

Adding it to soil layers would be a bad idea...

I thought that was the point?

"You have died of old age."

Not difficult with modding, but the thought amused me.

On an unrelated note, if you make a fort over the town where your adventurer retired, will they show up there? Bonus points for being decked out in adamantine equipment and totally overshadowing your military.

I can see it now. Entire Fluffy Wambler Civilizations!

YES.

Did anyone ever manage to get that wagon fort off the ground?

Yeah, I'd enclose a a "tree farm" around the military bunker with walls or trenches. Just leave a three-block entryway for the caravan, preferably right near the entrance to the bunker (so that entering ambushers encounter the military first). Note that walls do have a little advantage over channels - while they both block entry, walls also protect your dwarves from bolts, arrows, and panicking at the sight of the goblin on the other side. For that matter, make a trip through the barracks the only way to get into the rest of the fort - individual sneakers might get past (and will die after someone inside notices them and they try to run), but not finding an ambush with a modest military force is unlikely.

'course, this also means military casualties when you get archers, which can also cause tantrums from military dorfs spending time chatting when they aren't sparring. Avoiding combat on the whole would work best even if it isn't very Fun. A long trap corridor leading into the fort accomplishes this beautifully, and they can hit ambushers before they're even revealed - if you see a sudden corpse appear in the entryway, start forbidding the traps and other loot, bring everyone inside, and put the army on alert.

Also exploity but nice: chain an excess stray animal in a trapped corridor that leads to the animal and nothing else. (1-block line of traps all walled/channeled off.) Sometimes goblins will path to the critter and get slaughtered along the way rather than heading for the main fort, and dorfs tend to not particularly care if a stray creature dies if they DO reach it.

You can also "trap" enemies by closing floodgates or the like around them, or in blocking off the entrance to the fort. A raising drawbridge over a channel works great. This makes it easy to keep enemies out, but then you need to actually kill them... fortifications and marksdwarf snipers work, or you can set up a way to dump water or magma on them. A bit more entertaining than watching them get slaughtered by the traps.


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Civilians with the "Hunt" job will don armor and grab weapons (if they're set to do so - set them to something higher than "clothes" and an appropriate weapon if it can be spared), but they'll also spend most of their time outdoors trying to kill the local wildlife. This depopulates the stuff outside eventually due to a flaw in the animal population code, but until it runs out (or if everything on the map is undead or unfit for food) you're going to have a lot of semi-armored civilians running around outside with minimal combat experience. But at least they'll be armed.

On the other hand, I've heard that hunters are somewhat suicidal when encountering enemies. They might fight the ambush squad on their own and will probably die doing so. But they'll help soften 'em up for the military. The only real problem might be the extra junk items to haul back if they die.

I think hunters spend less time socializing since they tend to like going out to hunt rather than going idle. (Also rather than doing most other sorts of work, so it's a bit of a double-edged sword.) This makes them less of a loss going out but limits their usefulness to hunting and an early warning system - assuming they get ambushed instead of the other civilians doing treecutting and wood hauling and looting and whatever.

Also if you try to armor up your entire population you're simply not going to have the materials to do so. Putting it on particularly popular people (if you can find 'em) or those that are likely to venture outside (disable wood hauling or other outside activities for everyone that isn't armored and have them mostly specialize) might be a good compromise.

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oh god why am i doing this i know nothing about this

When I first saw the topic, I thought it meant forum threads.

Carry on.

Elf trading material isn't very good, and the sieges aren't especially threatening...

But the trading material is generally better than the siege loot. Especially if you only buy animals to get some help building Noah's Ark.

It's not completely insane to use up 200 logs, especially if you have carpenters that aren't doing anything better. Barrels are almost always in short supply sooner or later, and wooden bolts are good crossbow training. I've tended to have coal/charcoal shortages as well, but I've never played on a map with magma and I use most of it melting down goblin junk. If nothing else, bolts and charcoal should use up less stockpile space since they're binnable.

What else are you planning to use that wood for, and how quickly could you replace it if you needed to?

It's a bottomless pit. You fall at terminal velocity until you die of dehydration/starvation.

You know, temperature changes aside, I wonder if a vanilla cheese injection would be like the victim eating cheese, i.e. feeding them.