Bay 12 Games Forum

I'd like to at least see both Adventure Mode and Culture handled in the future. (listed them alphabetically, so you can't determine my preference  )

It is said that one night Rome was saved from destruction by a fortuitous watch-goose.

The advantage/disadvantage of the animal watch strategy is that unless you go to the precaution of positioning them in choke points and surrounding them with glass windows (they can spot enemies through those, or fortifications), you are guaranteed to have losses - be sure to forbid the watch animal corpses or prevent refuse gathering.

I did this with guard grizzly bears; the best part was letting my bone carvers then turn the resulting bear skulls into valuable goblin bone-encrusted trade goods.

Is temperature on?

Edit: ah, then clearly it merely lacks a melting point of any kind, even the default one.

By the way, the Foodmaster appears to be one of the oldest cats left in the fortress other than the Leathermaster, and in my turn she got married, became expedition leader, was later elected mayor, and is about to have a child/children. I think she was the hero of my turn (other than the cat who killed the berserk sheriff).

This place is a crowded and indefensible mess, and I'm going to do something about that.
There's a nice, wide tunnel ending in a hall that borders the outside world. Is it okay for me to break a wall and turn it into a visitor center for the rape and pillage tourism industry?

I think this was its intended purpose before it was left incomplete.

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Turn:

The first things I noticed were the meeting zone in the zoo and the large, well-decorated dining hall. The zones were too large, in my opinion - I have played baby-splosion-type forts before, and normally I'd set a 3x3 dining room and a 1x2 tile meeting zone inside it.

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All of a sudden I get a message that a tanner has died. I zoom to the spot, but the only out of the ordinary thing there is a cat chunk. And tons of blood.


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Since cats have 8-18 years to have kids, however, I decided we could afford a second distinct meeting area in the zoo around the cage in the room across the hall from the dining room.

They appear to be hanging around a single Shared Cage in the center of the room, riveted by its motley contents.


 After setting some production orders for statues and ordering the smoothing of the hallway to the south, and the digging out of new storage rooms, I decide to check out the cage for myself.


That's the Sheriff for Laoick's sake! And from the looks of it, she's also our expedition leader. She's lying in a miserable heap on a pile of bones at the bottom of the cage. Along with a kitten. Who knows what horrible things the other cats had been forcing them to do to each other...

I quickly set about releasing her with a lever in the hallway. Unfortunately, she refused to re-acclimate to normal life, and promptly went berserk. Our unfortunate leader was shortly thereafter splattered against the walls by a passing recruit.


The worst part was that she was our only appraiser.

In other news, I noted the accomplishment of the recruit by giving him a title.


Speaking of the military, I noticed that most of our military units are organized into groups of 4 and have nervous injuries. I reorganized them so that all the healthy wrestlers were in one unit, changing the titles of the nerve-damaged to "Crippled Warrior" before further drafting another 8 cats. This problem is caused by the fact that we lack large quantities of armor better than leather, and that our armory is lacking in key pieces. I attempted to remedy the problem but ran out of leather in the process.

Also, at the end of my turn, some of the healthy cats were further crippled.


I might recommend undrafting some of the cripples to let them get married, so they can still be productive in some way.

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By the way, seeing the many animals in the fort, and the breeding pen one z-level down, I decided to help with the future drain on our fps by cutting off the animals' pathfinding map via a channel and drawbridge, linked to the lever that I had used to release the sheriff.


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Taking stock of legendaries, we have a legendary mason, stone crafter, and miner. Another cat got a bonecarving mood and is now legendary in that (good for the bones we'll have from slaughtered animals.) Our best warrior is an elite wrestler with nerve damage.


I left the Sheriff position blank to discourage feline justice, and in spring the Foodmaster was chosen as the new expedition leader, before being elected the first Mayor of Screamtortures.

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I took a hauler in the fort and appointed her the broker. By the end of my turn she was performing competently in her new profession.


I mostly traded stone junk and old invader clothes, and bought wood, food, leather, and metal. I remember requesting tons of meat, as well as leather bins.

Given the fragile nature of the lives of cats, I might recommend future overseers train back-up appraisers; it's not hard, just have them be the first cat to view the goods of each passing trader, before switching over to the real broker for actual trading.

p.s. What I wouldn't give for a migrant clothier to actually make use of the bins of cloth I erroneously bought off the elves...

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Huh, what's this?


So that's who's been killing random cats...

By the thing the markscats got there, the ranger was dead, and the culprit was nowhere in sight.

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Four artifacts were created during my turn, and our fortress value has rocketed to ~1 million from 32,000.


I set them up in the middle of the central hallway so passing cats can rub themselves against them in ecstasy.

Due to this jump in value, a small army of cats has migrated to our fortress, increasing our population by about 50%:
1 Glassmaker
1 Ranger (leather armor!)
6 Peasants
1 Butcher
1 Animal Trainer
1 Animal Caretaker (??)
1 Animal Dissector
1 Armorsmith
1 Metalsmith
1 Child
1 Woodcutter
1 Potash Maker
1 Fish Dissector
1 Craftscat
1 Engraver
1 Mason
1 Thresher (so useless...)
Pets: 3 horses, cat

For a total of 22.

Also, a kitten was born:


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I got bored waiting for the faraway magma forges to fill up, and so I dug out a new set of magma forges nearer to the pipe. Hopefully they will be fully online during the next  overseer's turn. If not, you try try obsidianizing the magma to block off the extra connection.


Finally:

No attacks at all - fall was strangely quiet, with neither sight nor sign of dwarves, though I had the wrestlers  patrolling the fort against the possibility of attack from the hordes of snailmen outside.

Also, for ease of viewing, I bound some important locations to F1-F5, like the entrance, the forges, the depot, and I think the dining room.

P.S.
It looks like the foodmaster is due to give birth during ACP's turn.

Short of killing the dwarf in question? No.

However, I believe if they have a room and a cabinet they will store their spare clothing there, so that might help. Dunno if they'll gather their discarded underwear though.

Recently, I've noticed that even dead dwarves retain ownership of their items, preventing me from getting rid of the XXpig tail sandalsXX that litter my fort. Your only solution may be magma cleansing or atom smashing. Setting them on fire via dragon breath might also work.

Ok, I have the save:
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=1593

I will do the write-up a bit later, but the important stuff is already included in my previous posts.

There was no military action at all during my turn. But autumn and another chance for dwarf sieging is coming up. Good luck to ACP!

From my own experience with modded flying baby snatchers, the [flier] tag does indeed screw over path-finding upon spawning for ambushers, and has strange effects on special units like thieves.

If the flier spawns on the ground, its path-finding is normal. This leads to epic attacks.

If the flier spawns in the air, it becomes stuck and never moves or attacks, probably because it cannot path to the ground. Ambushers or other stealthed creatures frozen like this will not move again, even if discovered, unless they are injured to the point of unconsciousness or otherwise knocked to the ground, where if they recover they will act as normal.

By the way, despite the fact that my baby-snatcher fliers did indeed practice baby-snatching in world-gen (among other things, their leader was an elf baby-snatcher stolen by a former leader), they never sent thieves to my fort, nor did I discover frozen thieves during the sweeps my military made of frozen ambushers.

It might therefore be better to remove the [flier] tag from harpies.