Bay 12 Games Forum

It is also kind of fun to just lock them up somewhere...muhaha!

I don't use traps much either.  I opt for more intricate ways of killing enemies, although caging them and then hurling them off pits/into lava is somewhat fun.  If you do use stone traps make sure you don't let mechanics try to reload them *while* they are killing enemies.

On one particularly large seige, I lost ALL my mechanics to this.

The economy is not bad at all, as others have said just build cheap rooms, or turn rent OFF.  I leave it on, but don't use coins, I tried coins once and it nearly drove ME into a strange mood!

As far as work goes, in my fort some workers are more valuable than others.  They get more jobs to do.  I work Masons to death, miners usually stay busy, and anyone involved in food/booze production.  For mechanics if I have alot of traps I just have them remove some and then re-add them to keep them busy.

I throw 1/2 my peasants on pumps (that don't actually pump anything) until they are legendary.  Everyone else has their hauling on (note I turn it OFF for legendary and workers that I keep busy).  Then I make a huge room somewhere in the fortress and assign half of it as a stone stockpile.  That keeps them busy.  When it fills up I remove it and put it on the other side of the room.  This keeps them hauling and not bitching about "no work".

The Mayor sounds like he is taking complaints from the people who don't have enough work.  You'll see this as: "Mayor takes request from miners guild".  This means that they are complaining about not enough work.  If you don't give them work then the Mayor will mandate that you have them do something.  Under the noble entry you will see something like: Complete Miners job (11/11) and then you just go have them dig something and that mandate will be satisfied.  At least this is how it appears to work to me.  Not sure if 100% accurate :p

I always build a prison like this:

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
|C|C|C|C|C|C|C|C|
..........................D
|C|C|C|C|C|C|C|C|
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

0-0,| - Walls
D - Door
C - Cage 1x1 tile wide used for Justice.

I do not engrave the walls/floor of the prison.  Not sure about current versions but in versions past criminals could deface the engravings causing the dwarf that engraved it to throw a tantrum.  After all, it's prison, it should not be a vacation.

Also note that having a jail/prison does not necessarily mean that they won't ever face the hammerer.  I had a peasant that was to be thrown in jail the other day, a guard was assigned to haul him in but the hammerer found him first.  I'm still picking up the pieces of that dwarf.

So I got my first siege after re-embarking like 50 times lol.  I had decided right before this to clean up a ton of the items littering the country side by designating all of them to be dumped.  When the siege came I ordered all dwarves inside (I think the actual option was "Soldiers can go outside")  And I set the Refuse orders to "Dwarves Ignore refuse from Outside".  Which according to the wiki should prevent dwarves from doing the dumping until I turn it back on.

90% of my dwarves abided by this, and I got the cancel messages about not being able to dump items because it was a forbidden area.  But two things happened that confused me:

1.  When I ordered dwarves inside I had a few outside, they immediately stopped in their tracks and did not move another inch until the siege was almost on top of them, then they promptly got killed.  I remember in older versions when you ordered people inside ALL dwarves outside dropped what they were doing and made a mad rush for the gate.  Doesn't seem to be the case now.

2. Despite my orders 5 dwarves of various professions went out to gather refuse.  And yep, you guessed it, they walked right past the army of goblins marching on the gates and promptly got wasted.

Has anyone else seen this behavior?  I am using 40d16.

Keep in mind the quality of the siege components has a big impact on their accuracy. Crap components make for crap catapults. This unfortunately means you need to spend a lot of wood on making useless siege components.

Ahh..that may be it.  I took a peasant and made him a Siege Operator/Engineer and then just assembled the first catapult he built.  Luckily this map has tons of tree's.  Going to work on a Legendary Siege engineer and then see if this works

Just out of curiosity, were the rocks passing through the second layer of fortifications?

Yes.  Some of them passed right through the prisoner

So in looking for creative ways to kill prisoners I came up with an idea based on a post here on the boards.  I set up a long deadend hallway with walls at each end, the walls had carved fortifications.  A catapult was built on the North end and a small "prison cell" on the south end. It looked something like this:


     C
=0FFF0=
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...
=0FFF0=
    .E. D
0====0

C - Catapult
F - Fortifications
=0 0= - Walls
E - Prisoner
D - Locked Door
. - Floor

I put the prisoner in the spot at the bottom in a cage and then linked the cage to a lever.  I locked the door and then pulled the lever.  The prisoner was freed and started milling around in the space down there.  I set a guy to siege operation and let him target practice.  I waited for the prisoner to be crushed by a rock but it never happened.  Technically this should work, right?