Bay 12 Games Forum

A handful of cage or weapon traps at your entrance will solve that problem - goblin snatchers do not have [TRAPAVOID]

So, a Forgotten Beast shows up, made of filth and with deadly spittle, but he can't get through the walls surrounding my farms in the caverns. He wanders off, but I try to keep a close eye on the Units screen for his eventual reappearance. Two seasons pass, and I gradually check the unit screen less and less until I no longer check it at all. At this point, I've got a dozen dwarves running into the caverns in a bucket brigade to fill a bathhouse inside of my fortress with water from the underground lake there, with water coming into my walled-off region via a channel.

"Urist McBucketBrigade cancels Fill Pond: Interrupted by Forgotten Beast"

With the floodgate open, the FB had run up the channel and emerged in my farming area. I quickly mobilize my military, sending them down the main stairway as chaos breaks out, with the Beast chasing dwarves to and fro, spitting frozen globs of extract and generally making a nuisance of himself before chasing one of the dwarves up the main stairwell into the fort proper.

Where he is intercepted by a pair of hammerdwarves.

They begin pounding on him with their silver warhammers, blocking each spit attack with their shields until the steel-clad sworddwarves show up. Meanwhile, my marksdwarves, who have until now insisted on bludgeoning every single enemy, sit 2-3 flights up the stairway, raining bronze bolts of death on their enemy for the first time ever. Several minutes of frantic battling ensue, until finally, the first dwarf to intercept him cuts the beast in half. With his hammer.

Seeing extract and blood on the stairs, I immediately restrict all traffic to those tiles and designate constructed stairs to be built over them. My masons clean up the mess within minutes, while my now-inactive soldiers duck into the new bathhouse, all traces of the beast rinsed off in the water that other idle dwarves soon clean up and haulers dump the "filth" that was left behind in lieu of a corpse. Soon, no absolutely no traces of the creature remain. No casualties and, one season later, still no syndromes.

So yeah. I feel pretty awesome right now. Can't wait for my first DF2010 siege

If you're still new, I'd stick with making things out of iron for now. Steel is good once you've figured out how to make a lot of fuel (smelting coal and lignite, undergrounds tree farms, etc), but iron's good enough for most situations.

The first step is to make fuel (charcoal at a wood furnace), then a smelter. You can smelt ores into metal bars (as well as make fuel from lignite and coal), but each time requires one unit of fuel.

My experience has been that "Archery Practice" at a target works the way that "Individual Combat Drill" does for other weapons, in that dwarves will generally only do it if they're off-duty. If you set them to train, they look for a proper barracks to lead classes in dodging, armor, etc.

Set the squad at the "inactive" alert level and your problem should be solved.

What I do in my fort is give the crossbow squads two barracks - one with an armor stand for classes, and one with an archery target for shooting practice. Then I make sure that their Training orders on the schedule require fewer dwarves than are in the squad. Most of the squad trains in classes while the others take turns shooting (some more than others).

The problem is that making a simple interface for a complex game actually requires an understanding of design, which ironically, most designers don't have.

That said, that's definitely not what's happening in DF. We've got a complex game with an interface that's genuinely terrible in every imaginable way, but we tolerate it because the game itself is awesome.

Look at how reliant on Dwarf Therapist many players are, myself included. If your game requires a third-party app for people to utilize basic, necessary functions, your game is terribly designed. End of story.

Of course, we shouldn't confuse "bad game design" with "bad game". But DF shines in spite of its flaws, not because those flaws don't exist.

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Back on topic: Tileset for me 

Quote from: absynthe7 on November 20, 2010, 03:14:57 pm

I've got a secretive mood dwarf who won't gather materials... he wants "stacked leather", "shining bars of metal", "square blocks", "rough gems", and "cut gems".

I've got leather, stone blocks, metal bars, and a wide variety of gems both cut and rough. Why won't he gather anything?

He may want a specific kind.
Check his personality for things he likes.

That did it. He likes zinc, and as soon as I made some zinc bars he started gathering stuff. Thanks!

Will dwarves clean paved roads if they're indoors? Or just regular/smoothed rock floors?