Bay 12 Games Forum

It seems that the real rule is that they choose an edge of the map to spawn, and then find an accessible tile. So if they're spawning in the west, you can't force them to spawn in the east.

This appears contrary to forts where I restricted the caravan to appear in a corner of the map it didn't usually appear at via channels, but those are only anecdotal memories from a while ago.

One could simply run a fort for a few years and see if the caravans actually come from all map edges or just one or two to test this.

Quote from: Hobbie on December 09, 2009, 02:51:58 pm

First death on my new fortress was a baby falling down a soon-to-be well.

T_T

Its parents probably died. They tend to suicide if their folks die.

First death

Quote from: Zaranthan on December 08, 2009, 10:32:17 pm

Quote from: Skorpion on December 08, 2009, 09:51:49 pm

But do you get migrants or sieges with no other civs around?

You shouldn't. I've personally experimented by capping the dwarven population at two, letting world gen run for 300 years (so the only two dwarfs on the planet die of old age), and embarking. You get seven dorfs cast by the hand of god, and then nothing further. No migrants, no caravans, no nobles. It's worth noting that these seven (and any descendants they might produce) must be killed off, otherwise they form a wandering civ, and further embarks will get migrants and caravans from...god only knows where.

Hmm. I've had a game where I picked a dwarf civ that had no sites (having been wiped out by the elves). I got migrants and caravans from...a refugee camp somewhere, I'm guessing. Perhaps a civ with no sites and scattered population is handled differently than a civ whose population has literally been made extinct. That was actually a fun scenario, since I was still at war with the elves and chose to build my fort on a very small volcano in the middle of the elven forest. (Unfortunately, the presence of a GCS and a metric buttload of troglodytes *and* fire imps *and* elf raiding parties proved to be a little too fun...)

This is true.

I once tried to play as a civ that had been wiped out in world gen (The Bronze Orbs, in case that rings a bell for anyone) but the game refused to list it.

It's likely that sometimes seemingly "extinct" civs have simply been reduced to wanderers.

Although that doesn't change the fact that people can still embark from civilizations that have truly died and therefore never send anybody.

To get dwarves to come, copy the tags with [progress_trigger:blahblahblah] from the human/elf entity to the dwarf entity.

Civ switching does not require regen. Trap components do require a regen.

As for curtain walls, building a wall should be fine if you're only facing goblins. Against faster enemies like orcs (which I fight), you must start by digging a trench around your starters.

I personally like to play a style where part of the fort is underground (the dungeons and catacombs), and the stone dug up is used to built great towers.

There might be a diagonal across z-levels similar to this:

.###
#...
#...
#...

where # is solid space, like a wall, and . is empty space.

This still allows flying creatures to pass through, as attested to a poster who once complained about having giant eagles flying into his throne room.

I would concur that your title is now more attention grabbing.

I also must say the layout of your fort has inspired me, though you were lucky to find such a sheer cliff face (I've only seen this kind of this once in my personal world gens).

Please allow me to claim Dastot Ablelbomrek, renamed to Dastot Memrut Ablelbomrek, the Bonecarver by profession, who seems to have been a brewer, nurse, mason, and all-round cancellation spammer in your latest screenshots.

I look forward to story developments involving the struggle against said king.

What happened to the hunter?

Leather armor trains armor user. The reason I suggest leather is mostly a cost thing, I'm usually training two or three squads at a time and when I start I rarely have enough steel or even iron to make them armor. A lot depends on your time table, when you start building a military the first fall you rarely have the infrastructure to do the smelting to make lots of armor, but leatherworking has no overhead except getting the leather, which I usually embark with, it's pretty cheap. I guess dig deeper has conditioned me, against goblins you probably have time to get mid to large scale metalworks going.

However, you don't need heavy armor to train wrestling. Dwarves can train wrestling naked and almost never (I mean, less than .01% chance) kill or even injure each other. In all my forts, I've only had one death caused by a wrestler (and it was a fortress guardsdwarf, ironically). Training armor is just for skill ups, you can worry about real armor later if you don't have it already.

You do want to start training early though. Draft a few useless dwarves out of each immigrant wave until you've reached your goal. Ambushes can start within the first two years or so, possibly earlier (I've seen them with only the starting 7 before), and even wrestlers in leather can take down 8 goblins.

Quote from: Durin on December 08, 2009, 11:32:54 pm

Well, yeah.  I guess military to me is optional because you can do as good as a military with traps and constructions.  Heck everything's optional if you get down to it.

Yea, everything's optional. I've played forts in dig deeper with no military, just had a giant drowning pool. Worked great until some goblins showed up, but that was my fault, should have had mechanical traps too. The military is fun though, I'd recommend everyone give it a try at least once. It's really awesome to watch your marksdwarves cut down orc squads while your hammerdwarves knock them 40 tiles away into a tree, or to see speardwarves instantly turn enemies into corpses and just move on. It's an interesting infrastructure challenge to get enough steel to make armor early (especially if you're into military challenges, like orcs) and have a dominant military before the enemy even shows his face.

It's also nice to have the flexibility. It takes a lot of traps to protect liaisons or guard the dwarves cleaning up the traps after the last ambush was butchered. I've lost haulers when a second ambush arrived on the heels of the first and attacked before the jammed traps were cleared. With hammerdwarves, I can spread my squads out (I like lots of 4 dwarf squads) to blanket the area. Goblins try to path to the nearest dwarf, in my experience, which will mean a champion, so my haulers can work in relative safety.

OK, the leather makes sense as a cost thing, and I wasn't particularly sure before about the ability to train armor user via leather. The main reason why I suggested starting off with heavy armor was that my own personal experience seems to show minor nerve injuries more with lower levels of armor, and that said, there's no reason why you shouldn't start off newer squads training with full equipment and shields if you can.

As for orcs, my own strategy is to prepare bone/wood crossbows and bolts and snipe them from battlements the first year, while robbing the first dwarf caravan of armor, so cost isn't an issue. But it does depend on how you want to play the game (as does the OP's question, in a way), and it's interesting to hear how different people deal with the same military situations...

My own strategies for sieges and ambushes are to lure them into killing fields that can be sealed off from the outside with ease, and to use chokepoints so that ambushers are intercepted by the two or three champions I place on duty at the start of each season (which I set to carry food and water). I then wait for a siege to end before I send haulers to collect loot. I'll admit that I haven't got a good solution for liaisons spawning all the way across the map in the path of ambushes, but that problem's also partly related to the size of the site.

Ultimately, once you get past the beginning, there's no hard and fast solution; as everyone else is saying, in the end it's down to your personal playstyle and preferences.