Bay 12 Games Forum

Train up a legendary blacksmith/mason, leatherworker, bonecrafter, and gem setter. Masterwork statues studded with diamonds and menacing with spikes of megabeast leather and rings of megabeast bone are pretty valuable, should be enough to make your low level nobles happy. Dig out a royal suite in a stone layer though, the king is harder to impress and engraving makes pleasing him soooooo much easier.

If I can make a few comments about your dieing to the orcs.

Orcs are dangerous, but yours sound... worse. Can I ask a few questions?

1. You make no mention of armor. If your dwarves were running around in their raggedy clothing, it's no wonder they got ripped to shreds. Did you just not mention it? By the first invasion you should at least have leather (heck, in a "survival" map I played - starting with an axe and two kittens - I had leather armor before the orcs showed up) and if you build fast you should be up to chain or even plate from whatever metals you've found.

2. Did you draft your miners? If you draft a miner and leave his weapon as "unarmed" he'll fight with his mining pick, and use his mining skill as his weapon skill. Picks may be puny weapons, but a legendary miner can easily cut a swath through the orcs if he's got some good armor, especially since miners tend to be strong, tough, and agile.

3. How skilled were your original marksdwarves? You mentioned you drafted your peasants as marksdwarves, but how skilled were your original 8? An unskilled marksdwarf with wooden bolts will be lucky to kill a kobold, let alone an orc, while a legendary could easily put a bone through an orcs eye from 30 paces.

4. Since you were building an above-ground fortress, why not just wall yourself in? It's how I usually survive the first wave of orcs, they go away after about a season.



As for your questions, magma's easy, deserts vary, and glaciers are tricky.

Exposed magma has a tendency to cause brushfires from the imps, but once you have some infrastructure it's easy. Just floor over it or, if you have a stream, pump water over the top of it to form an obsidian cap. Bonus points for carboniting an imp.

Deserts can be really hard or fairly easy. If they have saguaro or underground water, wood won't be a huge issue, otherwise you'll have to trade for it. If they have a stream, water will be a cinch, otherwise you should write off any wounded dwarf, though booze production will be easy enough. If they have magma, forge-craft will be easy, otherwise it will be nigh impossible (forget about steel, you'll be lucky if you can spare enough wood to make iron armor).

Glaciers are hard, your dwarves will freeze to death and if you have no magma getting water will be a problem. On the bright side, you can build a palace of ice, which is kinda fun. Ice is even considered fireproof (the irony) so you can build, say, an ice furnace.

Gray wounds never heal. If he's a champion, you'd probably be best to put the poor bugger out of his misery. Magma is cleanest, though if he's well connected letting him die to a siege then a proper burial reduces the chance of a tantrum spiral.

A Sheriff/Captain of the Guard is useless to a fortress early on, all they do is lock up useful dwarves to stop a tiny unhappy thought from your mayor. It's when you get the hammerer you want a captain and some metal cages/chains, since even 150 days in a cage is preferable to having your skull caved in by the hammerer.

Justice will activate itself, no need to rush it. The baron brings all sorts of unpleasantness with him, which is good considering that by the time you meet his requirements the fortress will become terribly boring.

At least, I don't remember engraving my last one, and my Dwarves still end up with "dined in a legendary dining room lately."

Depends. The "dined in a legendary dining room" happy thought is not the same as having a "Royal Dining Room" for your dwarves. It's totally up to you, I prefer to train up a legendary mason and have him slowly engrave my wall with an actual history of my fortress. But that's just me.

Quote from: dragon0421 on July 07, 2009, 03:35:19 am

Wouldn't the statues get destroyed by the lava?

Depends on the building material. Most statues would (eventually) melt, but ones made from magma-proof metals and glass wouldn't...though the magma-proof qualities of glass constructions may be a bug.

Glass, to my knowlege, melts in magma. Currently, constructions only take damage if magma is in the same square they are, so a wooden wall can hold back a volcano's worth of magma. However, if you were to try to use, say, a glass grate it would melt very quickly. The only place in magma-construction where things like nickel and bauxite are necessary is for building, say, a floodgate to control an obsidian farm.

Once you have enough dwarves that you can support having 20 or so haulers with health care, treating wounded dwarves should be easy enough. I believe health care is on the same priority as hauling jobs, so your haulers will take care of him. Make sure you have beds that aren't designated in a room, dwarves treat those as hospital beds and wounded dwarves will recover faster in them. You should also look into de-carping your river, a dedicated marksdwarf should manage it in a season or so assuming he's skilled and well supplied (and doesn't try to hammer them).

For the liaison, requesting items doesn't guarantee they will come with the next caravan, but it greatly increases the chance they will. I requested iron anvils one year and they brought me six the next year. Just be forewarned that while requesting items makes them more likely to come, it also increases their price. The iron anvils went from 1000 to 2400 in cost, so the price jacks up fast.