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?

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?

My dwarves are on an all-aquifer map.  They were invaded by undead in year two.  Their lives were harrowing and difficult.

Occasionally, a particularly hearty immigrant would figure out how to survive on the surface for a while.  She'd salvage food and liquor from destroyed wagons, and always run at the right moment, to evade the rampaging dead.

After my military was better trained and equipped, I would sometimes tear down the wall at the front gates of my Old Dirt Fort Above, where the dwarves lived, before they pierced the aquifer.  We would briefly open the doors, slaughter anything dead that came through, and then welcome these most mighty of all immigrants.

UNFORTUNATELY, during one of these Running of the Dead festivals, Sibrek Atiramud, Hammer Lord, daughter of two Hammer Lords, slayer of Fightculred the Zombie Dwarf, and Mother of TEN broke her dagblasted arm.  There, she dropped to the ground... right next to the doors, and began to REST, with her newborn baby in her arms.

No one recovered her to the hospital.

There she has stayed, in a cloud of miasma, as the Parts of the Dead rotted away around her -- too numerous for her kinsmen to remove in a timely manner.  Dwarves have come to feed her and give her water, but still nobody takes her to the hospital.

Now, we could just LEAVE her there, to heal... eventually... but, there's one small problem:

Due to an incident with a tree many years ago, there is a hole in the ceiling above the door that she is lying next to.  Occasionally, intruders fall through that hole, and enter the Fort.  The only way to secure that area is to wall it off.

However, while she is still lying there, we can't.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we might get her away from that door, so we can get that area locked down?  If she gets killed by some random rotting detached hand dropping through the ceiling, it's going to cause an incredibly destructive tantrum spiral involving multiple deadly Hammer Lords.

I have a ten-year-old fortress, where the food stockpiles have just plain stopped working, regardless of what subsets of food they store, and regardless of what Z-level they are on.  I can put a general food stockpile RIGHT NEXT TO a farm field full of ripening plants, and Dwarves will still walk over the plants to harvest them, flash a question mark, and then walk away, because they can't find anywhere to put the plant.  Before someone helpfully suggests to me that I need to turn on "Allow Plant/Animal" in "Additional Options," this is turned on, for ALL of my food stockpiles, and these stockpiles were working fine for many fine years of Dwarven fun.  Now, my prepared food and drinks stockpile is running out of goods, my prepared meals are rotting in my kitchens, my vegetables are rotting in the fields, and my meat is all rotting on the butcher's block.  It is a tragedy to waste all this good stuff, and I don't think my 161 Dwarves can survive like this indefinitely.

I have tried ripping out these stockpiles, and re-placing them.  I have tried making new food stockpiles.  I have tried reducing my number of food stockpiles.  I have tried making the food stockpiles less specific.  I have tried putting a food stockpile immediately right next to the food source.  Absolutely nothing seems to work.  Food Stockpile and store-in-barrel jobs never even show up in the job list.

My questions are: 1.) Has anyone else run into this recently? (I found a post from 2007 that sounded passingly similar, but there was no resolution in it for me.)  2.) Has anyone found a good workaround?  I would like to rescue this fine fortress, but I don't know how, at this point.  I'm afraid that if I start a new one, this will just happen again.