Bay 12 Games Forum

So, I've, uh, got a few superfluous nobles:


Now, I'm not inclined to panic.  Adversity is opportunity.  I had big dreams!  I thought:
I have exactly ten extra nobles.  I'm going to put all of them in a squad together.  I'll call them "The Legends."  I'll send them to fight all the megabeasts together!  If they win, then yay!  If they lose, then yay!

Some of them were already training in the military, so I went to find the one with the best skills to make into my Militia Captain for this new squad.  And then, I discovered the flaw in my devious plan:  I can't make nobles into Militia Captains.  Nooooooooo!

So, that means that only nine dwarves get to be in the squad, and I need to sacrifice one of my other dwarves to be the leader for this surly bunch of overprivileged malcontents.

I'm curious as to your !!FUN!! thoughts on three questions:

1.) What kind of dwarf would be "worthy" of leading this squad of "Legends"?  A competent, steely-gazed fighter with nothing to lose?  A blithering fool with no useful skills? A perpetually rage-filled axedwarf who already murdered another dwarf during a tantrum? The very lonely Vampire who has been slowly building out a personal palace in the first cavern layer?

2.) What unfair, thoroughly arbitrary criteria would you use for determining which noble is spared from the squad?  The one with the most useful skills?  The one with the least annoying mandates?  The one with the easiest-to-acquire set of favorite materials/foods?  The happiest one?  The one with the biggest family?  The youngest?  The oldest?  The one with the silliest name?  Or do I not spare them at all, and instead train them up to replace the first "Legend" who (inevitably) buys the farm?

3.) What should I do with their ludicrously fancy rooms, after they have finished making their mark on history?

Now that the visitor bug fixes have gone in, I thought it might be fun to bid a fond farewell to our unwanted guests by posting about all the Dwarfy tourist attractions we made, to thrill our many visitors.

My own:

Enjoy Dwarven beer, without all the claustrophobia of stone over your head:  Come to the charming open-air beer gardens of Goldenland!  All Visitors are Welcome in the Healing Breakfasts.  Enjoy the stunning view from the cliffs above the Goldenland grand entrance, where you can get a good shot at incoming werecreatures view the comings and goings of a lively Dwarven settlement.  Don't invite your Elven friends, because the entire place is made of rustic native hardwood from the local forests, stained in a rich patina of the blood of former guests hematite-based wood stain.  You'll never want to go home again, and you won't have to -- the Healing Breakfasts will be happy to host you until the next siege for as long as you want to stay!

I have some trained Giant Olms.  My female Giant Olm keeps having twins.  Weirdly, she seems to give birth to fully grown Giant Olms.  Unfortunately, this means I can never tame the darn things.  I can imagine it becoming very time consuming for my poor Trainers to constantly maintain my Giant Olm herd.  Is it supposed to be like this?  Should I try to fix it in the Raws?  Any thoughts?

Good news everyone! Toady has acknowledged this in the bug tracker and it should be fixed in the next release. It seems that this wasn't so much a bug as it was a feature but was in desperate need of tweaking. Dwarves are supposed to take a bit of time to get over being stressed but not to the extent that we're seeing. It also seems that some birds were stressing dwarves out for some reason.

Of course.  Birds don't keep their feet planted upon the stone.  It's just not right!

I'd like to know if a lot of people are having this problem or if it might be something that only occurs under certain circumstances.

I am DEFINITELY having this problem.  Generally, except for my vampire (in Vampire Palace), most of my overstressed Dwarves eventually die, because they are too busy trying to have meetings or throwing tantrums all the damn time, and don't retreat to safety when they need to.  Right now, I do have a soldier who is newly stuck in perma-stress, and there seems to be nothing I can do for her.

I posted a bug on the bug tracker and I'm trying to narrow down the cause to help expedite a fix. Remember, this is something that takes place over the course of several game years so if you just have some dwarves that have been stressed for a few months after only two or three years of gameplay it's probably not a good example of the bug.

My vampire has been stressed for years.  I'm going to get her into some new clothes soon, but I guarantee you that it won't fix things.

My current theory is it might have something to do with artifacts being disabled. The game sends a request for a dwarf to try to make an artifact, the dwarf can't because the feature is disabled, the dwarf mysteriously becomes stressed. This would mesh with the amount of dwarves that are currently stressed in my fortress.

Nope, my artifacts are enabled.  Also, it has nothing to do with doing jobs they don't like (as mnjiman suggests).  My vampire is satisfied at work.  I take great pains to keep people on jobs they're going to like.

When I turn on an alert to get my Dwarves to dive into the fort, Dwarves who are working outside will quit their jobs, and show up as "No Job," while dashing for the door.  Unfortunately, "dashing" doesn't quite describe what happens, quite often.  They insist on carrying whatever was in their hands at the time of the alert being enabled.  Now that cargo weight has a significant effect on the travel speed, they frequently DRAAAAAAG to the door, and get mauled.

I seem to be able to throttle the alert a little to get them to drop things, sometimes.  Is there a better way to work around this?

That's how I treat early nobility who have the NERVE to demand a royal bedroom while other dwarves are sleeping around in the muck.

That's very similar to how I handle vampires -- only, I build an entire small village for them that's walled off from everyone else.  Vampire quarantine.  There's one chute to drop supplies in, and one chute to drop finished goods out.  There's no need to feed them, and they can practice in the barracks or at the archery range when they get bored.

Maybe I should do the same thing with my nobles.  It's clearly a congenital disease.  :-D