Bay 12 Games Forum

Odds are you have an underground lake somewhere.  Just dump the river in there.  Most underground lakes go to the map's edge so any excess automatically gets taken care of.

I tend to bevel the corners of my rooms.  I've been cutting back lately for more variety.  I always have separate booze and food stockpiles.  Personal bedrooms are a low priority so I always end up having most of my dwarves sleep in a barracks.  My farms are always above ground.  Lately all of my barrels and bins have been made from nickel and zinc.

They don't bleed, they can't die from bleeding.

They don't exaust, they never fall to the ground from exaustion.

They never fall unconcious, even by cave ins, they just fall to the ground and get hurt (maybe).

They never feel tired.

THey don't feel pain, they never give in to pain.

And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!

Quote from: kilakan on August 20, 2010, 10:04:33 pm

well I just got seriously surprised by the power of spiked wooden ball weapon traps. I set up a single line of 5 traps with no quality mechanisms and 10 low quality spiked balls each, and they just tore the crap out of 10 goblin ambushers, each trap hit one goblin once, and sliced through armor chattering skulls, peircing hearts, and servering limbs... all the goblins died,

Yea serrated disks and spike balls can be devastating in large numbers.  Serrated disks and spiked balls each hit 3 times.  So theoretically with a trap that has 10 of them...that's 30 hits.  And considering that even a single serrated disk made of half decent materiel can cut through armor like butter and is easily capable of severing limbs...yea....

My fortress has a single high quality adamantine disk attached to a artifact mechanism in a weapon trap in front of the fortress.   The goblins usually don't live stepping on that tile until it jams up on bodies.  Fortunately for them it's only one tile of a 3 tile wide hallway.

From what I've seen you shouldn't expect any goblins to get past that trap until it jams.  I've found a single 3x bronze disc trap is enough to cut any goblin to shreds.  So any more than a single adamantine disc in a trap is just a waste of resources.  What you need to worry about is the traps getting jammed and your dwarves deciding to clean them at the worst possible time. (see my earlier post)

Yeah, I've had around 5 of these jack holes running around outside my fortress before.  Mostly because I don't let them in so they can't kill or be killed.  The ones I do get around to fighting vary greatly in their difficulty.  Some are surprisingly easy to kill, some are impossible.  And some die just fine but in death find a way to kill all my dwarves in the process.

Pay close attention to the material they're made of and the gases/secretions or whatever they spew.  If they're made of some kind of normal flesh then they're at least killable.  Avoid blob like creatures.  Like creatures made from jell-o pudding or something.  You can hack on those things all day and it won't do any good.  Creatures made from metal or stone are similarly indestructible but for different reasons. 

As for the gases/secretions...those are a little iffy.  Some of them don't seem to do much of anything.  Others are quite deadly.  My only advice is to make sure to kill them as quickly as possible.

Quote from: iceball3 on August 20, 2010, 11:05:28 pm

Has anyone considered caging them?

It's impossible without modding. They are immune to traps unless unconscious, and they never fall unconscious.

Also, don't bother chaining a dog to a wall in the hopes of using it as bait to trap a forgotten beast in a room using vertical bars.  Just saying.

Just lost a fort to dwarven stupidity.  Several ambushes pop up.  I have traps and stuff to hold them off.  Well one dwarf decides to clean a trap.  AMBUSH!  So instead of running back INTO the fort he decides to run OUTSIDE.  So naturally he get's killed.  OMG!  KILLED DWARF!  WE MUST RECOVER ALL HIS BELONGINGS RIGHT NOW!  So yeah, all my dwarves dart out of my nice, cozy, SAFE fort into the loving arms of a couple dozen goblin archers.

There's probably some way to avoid this using burrows or something.  I suppose I could have forbidden everything on the surface.  But I really shouldn't have to.  This is dwarven idiocy at it's worst.  I really wish we still had the stay indoors option.

For embarking into one of the evil biomes I would say walling yourself in is a very viable tactic.  Remember you don't have to wall yourself in permanently.  I would recommend doing exactly as you said, get everything underground.  Then get a mechanic's workshop going and make traps for a new entrance and set up some kind of gate system.  Stone wall grates work good early on or you can take your time and set up something more complex.  Once you're comfortable that your entrance is sufficiently defended, go ahead and dig out an opening. 

Even after all that I would keep your dwarves excursions on the surface to a minimum.  The entrance in an evil biome should be strictly to allow caravans to come and go and to allow migrants in.  So the gates should be closed the majority of the time.  This is a good strategy for other biomes as well, especially for new players.  The less a new player has to worry about external threats early on, the better.

Since the new version came out I've been doing some variation on walling myself in most of the time.  I also wall off discovered caverns and magma seas as soon as I find them.  I think of all the external areas, the first cavern level is the most tame, so if you need resources you should probably stick to that one. 

Also since I don't like dealing with flooding farms I will usually wall off an area on the surface and put all my farms there.  I send a dwarf out to gather plants and I use the seeds to make wild strawberry and prickleberry farms.  If I manage to get any trade going I also make sunberry and fisherberry and crunchberry farms.  Zero maintenance.  It takes them a little longer to get started as there are fewer seeds but once they do all my food problems take care of themselves.

Make silver Warhammers and force every soldier to use one. They kick ass.

Also I would never make crafts out of metal, it's too precious for that. Stone is everywhere, make stone crafts.

Why not?  Things like iron, steel and bronze I can understand saving for weapons and armor but most metals are only good for furniture and crafts.  Hell, a couple of bins of high quality electrum crafts are enough to satisfy my trade requirements for years.  Often I'll get all of a caravan's wood and booze and several bins of leather and cloth all for a single earring.

Also, trading 1 platinum toy for 6+ platinum bars = win.