Bay 12 Games Forum

Another goblin siege, again with 3 squads and some trolls, menaced the mighty castle of Daggerplayed.
This time though, I wanted to try the new high pressure pumps at the river. They sucked up so much water that the river went almost completely dry and the trolls just walked right into the main pump chamber, and smashed some gear assemblies, destroying the unsupported waterwheels. Now the river does flow again, but the whole pump stack has to be reassembled. The last time I built something like this was before streams got ramps on the sides, so it was a little unexpected.

Still, nobody died. Only the new mayor walked outside, caught and arrow to the hand and puked all over himself as a result or maybe due to cave adaption. I still want to keep him, because he only ever mandates buckets to be made. No slade crafts or crystal glass scepters - just good old buckets. I hope he's happy to be drinking out of lovely buckets in the hospital.

We're at 252 dwarves now and 100 of those are children and babies. Still no idea what to do and the dorfplosion gets worse every month.

Any ideas or solutions that don't involve a nuclear dorfplosion?

Could you do this one please?

A kea has stolen a ☼iron breastplate☼

It's somewhat frequent in Daggerplayed right now...

I tried it on an old laptop from around 2002 when mine was broken - 1,2GHz and 768MB RAM. World gen happened pretty much in real time and the highest FPS in game was around 5 in the very beginning. Is that playable? Absolutely, if you have the time And after trying this, I can really appreciate 30-40FPS. Everything under 15 gets annoying.

1. Daggerplayed is now at 226 dwarves and there's rarely a week without another child being born. It's annoying, to say the least and I have no idea what to do when the children start to kill my FPS.

2. All of the legendary miners got crushed in a cave-in or rather fell 9z onto massive granite after a something collapsed. The toughest one survived heavily wounded but died later at the hands of my doctors. I'm not exactly sure if the chief medical dwarf (former butcher) is the right choice, but he'll learn eventually. Now there are only 5 adequate/competent miners that need to dig out the main spiral ramp and supply 80 masons with enough stone to work with. They'll learn too, I hope. Every piece of mudstone, granite and jet is immediatly turned into blocks and built into an above ground structure for which I have no real plan except "just keep building".
The spiral ramp is only down to -36z. I planned to have it go from  ground level to the magma sea at -100z with a continous 11x11 chasm in the middle... that may take a while but at least the miners will be legendary by then.

3. A militia captain and legendary swordsdwarf got wounded in battle. She lost her left foot and right hand and is now a skilled crutchwalker, wielding the crutch, the +iron shield+ and *iron shortsword* in her left hand. I can hardly imagine how the fighting looks, but she performs remarkably well. Oh, and she gave birth to another son while kicking a kobold so hard he died. I'll have an eye on her... that's one fine dwarven lady.

4. Again, the planned elven siege didn't appear for almost a year. I'm afraid I scared them off.  The goblins are also too peaceful for my taste. I need some sieges before the defensive walls are ready or I may get bored.

5. On a side note: I thought kea men bringing everything to a halt were strange. Now my soldiers are chasing giant bushtits all over the place

Give someone a crossbow (wooden with bone or wood bolts is enough) and station them near your entrance. The unskilled crossbowdwarf may not hit much until he got some practice, but it's good enough to scare most wildlife away. Keas actually harming someone has rarely been a problem for me, but all the suspending of important jobs is extremely annoying.

In Daggerplayed, my current fort with a lot of outside constructions, there is a regular invasion of keas, kea man and other flying annoyances, so I have at least 6 crossbowdwarves stationed near any building site - no problem with 213 dwarves. The very beginning was pretty rough, though. I just had my woodcutter hack anything apart that came to close to the ground and drafted the whole first wave of migrants into the militia.

I like building castles with just one or two entrances, but I don't wall off big parts of the map just to control where enemies can go. The best defense are 40 dwarves with the very best training and equipment, stationed near any entrance. Woodcutters still have to risk their lives most of the time, but if I want to do bigger projects outside the castle walls, I'll just station a squad of recruits there as first response team. They may not hold their own against a siege, but they're good enough to protect civilians until the real soldiers arrive.
I used to build walls around the whole embark area with entrances with lots of weapon traps and separate paths for wagons, but that became boring after a while. The only acceptable trap for me is an elaborate system of magma landmines or watercannons - or anythings that only a !!mad scientist!! could imagine.

This discussion has been around for years now... I think, the best explanation is the difficulty of finding an elegant solution that works in the game. Since Built walls are made out of items (blocks or raw stones), the question is whether the engraving is applied to the tile (the built wall) or the item. If it's applied to the tile, what happens if you deconstruct the wall? Is it simply destroyed? How do you explain engraving the same blocks over and over again without losing any material, if you destroy and rebuild a wall?
Or is the engraving applied to the item and you get engraved blocks that can be torn down and rebuilt into another (engraved) wall somewhere else? And what if you rebuild those engraved blocks into a bridge, do you get engraved bridges and should bridges be engravable, too? Is it practical (or even doable) to track engraved items for all blocks in the whole fortress? And how do you manage the building material list with all the different kinds of engravings?
You see, it's not just a flag that says "this wall/item is engraved" but a rather complex part of code that contains the complete description of the engraving. This is not as easy as it may sound. It would probably require rewriting of large parts of source code for a feature that's really not that important. Some day it might get done, but at the moment it's very low priority.

If you really need engraved above-ground structures, you'll have to do it the hard way for now: Get some magma and water to form obsidian.