Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: darkflagrance on November 17, 2009, 12:57:12 pm

Also, worldgen is epic just because of all the wars.

I just modded in orcs, and I just got a battle where 123 treants attacked a 83 orc settlement. 62 orcs perished, but they kill all 123 treants...apparently the cause of the war was the inability to communicate and form treaties...and the treants still keep coming somehow - the next year saw 141 treants come, only to be all turned to kindling.

In that same worldgen, I see a battle where a young boy, Laulug Lutetest, just barely come of age at 12, was the only defender left between his home and a tribe of vicious werewolves that constantly raided his village between elf sieges. 59 of them came, while he alone stood at the gates, protecting the children inside. And yet this young boy held firm, killing 24 of these vicious monsters before the wolves turned tail and fled, and thus earning the name "The Execution of Sheens."

These are the same werewolves that the people in Sparkgear fear to fight without champions or bridge traps.* Bear in mind that humans are size 7 (I nerfed them a bit to act as traders and added in superhumans) and wolves are size 9.

Later that same year, he and 6 other children were mercilessly shot to death by a siege of 355 elves.

Haha, I know!  My favorite is when you see two civs at war that have babysnatched from each other and everyone else for so long that their populations are an equally proportioned mix of gnomes, dwarves, goblins, humans, ogres and giants.

I also wonder how exactly worldgen battles are calculated.  It seems like everything can make a difference--type and quality of equipment, size, damblock, natural attack damage, etc--but you still get a lot of stuff happening that never would in fortress mode.  The treants, for example, will trade equal casualties with the elves pretty routinely, but if that battle actually played out the guys with the wooden arrows wouldn't stand a chance.


edit:  I missed some old trigger tags in (of course) the treant entity entry.  If you downloaded earlier they had the trade and progress triggers, but were only intended to have a population trigger.   Sorry!

Quote from: Aspgren on November 07, 2009, 08:40:47 am

It is however untested and not guaranteed to work.

Hrmmm....

Quote

patients have a nasty tendency to get out of bed and run to the other end of the fort to sleep in some barracks

That's because (I believe) they are drowning.  This wakes them up.

My design is 4/7 depth, which is less than drowning but still swimming - it's the "user friendly" depth.  A dwarf can still rest in bed and learn to swim - it's better than magic, it's science!

The challenge is to avoid a "wave" of 5/7 water flowing out from a floodgate/door, which will trigger the "OHARMOKHELPMEI'MDROWNING!" reaction which sends them out of bed and running.  So, it requires the water to come up thru grates - which do double duty as drains.

Hm... can dwarves sleep in any amount of water?  Given all the essentials are provided, plus maybe a zoo or statue garden, I would make an entire working floor of my fortress a swimming pool.

You could try a ballsy idea.  Build a number of cages equidistant around a desired perimeter, and assign a stray, non-cat animal to each one.  After a while, release the animals from their cages.  They'll stick close to the cages for quite a while, with a bit of room to roam, providing you with a statistically significant better chance for detection than a chained animal.  Goblins don't necessarily head for the closest kill anyway, so chained animals aren't the best choice unless there are a lot; you need something that can bump into the invaders.  As the animals deviate too far, or if they manage to get adopted, just assign a new one to the cage, wait, and release.

As a less ridiculous idea, train up a healthy number of steel-clad, wrestling and weapon-trained champions.  Assign them in squads of three and have each patrol a section of the perimeter.  One champion wrestler can take down an entire squad of goblins with little trouble, and three watch each others' backs.  You'll lose some when the bowgobs come, but hey, wrestlers train quickly!  For a 6x6 unmodded map, I can attest that three steel-clad champions can clear a siege on their own before it reaches the center area (bar bowgobs).

Use the right-side map to get an idea of holes in the perimeter: blue tinted tiles contain a fort native on some z-level.

Yes, you can do it multiple ways with cave-ins, and I wrote a whole post on that before realizing how overcomplicated and relatively useless it is. Then I promptly realized no one would want to read it, and deleted it.

Started work on my sea'o'cage-traps plan. In effect, I plan to flood every unused tile in my entire fortress with a cage-trap. Invader tries to enter? Cage trap. Dwarf goes berzerk? Cage trap. Clowns knocked out by military? Cage trap.

Also tied into this plan is my invader-zoo. I currently have three pikegoblins, a hammergoblin and a goblin wrestler in my zoo.

-Try to figure out why such a small fraction of the military bothers to spar.