Bay 12 Games Forum

To Momuz Anametur

You have Feed Patients/Prisoners labour enabled. You have no other labours enabled. So please explain why Goden Dorenniral just died of thirst in the jail cells.

On second thoughts, just report to the lowest level of the fort, where we are about to channel into the magma sea to create a disposal chute for all the Voracious Cave Crawlers, Jabberers and so on that are cluttering our cages. You will remain restricted to that burrow with no food, water or bed, with the job of pitching each beast into the magma, until one way or another it results in your demise.

Yours sincerely

Your friendly fortress overseer.

Gildautumn is a great name for a fort that has oodles of gold nuggets to turn into trade goods for the dwarven caravan. The fort just faced its third goblin siege. The way I did that was to lower the drawbridge, let the gobbos start moving across the bridge then lock the door at the other end of the bridge, pull the lever, and watch them drown in the river below. This worked quite well, apart from a couple of flaws.

First flaw: a miller was interrupted by a goblin axeman who crawled out of the river and came through the waterwheel power transmission conduits into the food processing area. Well I was semi-prepared for that and the goblin's mount, a giant olm, was captured in a cage trap leaving the goblin himself to be finished by the fort's militia in training.

Second flaw: while slightly distracted, one gobbo and troll made it past the end of the bridge. Two of my best hammer-dwarves charged into them, past them, and onto the bridge. There was then an almighty confusing battle for a while until one and then the other hammerdwarf were body-checked off the bridge and into the water below. While drowning, they kicked and punched and went down fighting. One of them became a hammerlord just seconds before expiring.

A troll got into the waterwheel power system too. I learned a few things: (1) when a troll deconstructs a water wheel it leaves the component logs in a neat heap on the riverbank. (2) after destroying a horizontal axle, a cave sapling was waiting to immediately grow to adulthood and block the tunnel.   (3) after stationing a squad behind it, a woodcutter suffered no fear chopping down the tree with the troll on the other side. (4) trolls are fast, or just single minded as it rushed past my military squad to continue destroying machinery. We got it in the end... a decapitation strike!

Preparing to open the drawbridge and rush the goblin siege... the second one this fort has faced.

This time, the goblins arrived mounted on various beasts: giant olms, cave crawlers, jabberers. Wow! I haven't seen mounted gobbos since very soon after I started playing. Also they came with some trolls, and I haven't seen those either since about the same time. I dimly remember them smashing down my remote back entrance door and surviving row after row of stonefall traps, back when I didn't really understand how to build a secure fortress.

This time, there's no way into the fort other than the way blocked by the drawbridge, and thankfully most of the siegers got bored with waiting outside while being turned into pincushions. I still have to face -- and hopefully clear out -- a squad of gobbos and a few trolls who found their way into the entrance tunnel before losing their route into the fortress. It's year 4 of the fort so I've had chance to train a few legendary axedwarves and hammerdwarves. I'll drop the drawbridge when I've managed to forge a few more *steel helm*s

Fun in 3...2...1...

Of course, I fully expect that the instant I drop the drawbridge, my military will decide to kick off their boots and socks, leaving them lying in the middle of the hallway, and pay a visit to the armour stores.

Also, now might be a good idea to re-design my marksdwarves' patrol route. Just as the siege arrived I noticed a marksdwarf on the *wrong* side of the perimiter wall. No, Urist McSharpshooter, just because it's only a few tiles from the waypoint doesn't mean it's a good place to stand...

I'm in the second winter of a new fort and I'm doing so well that the outpost liaison has already arrived to offer to make my fort a barony. No thanks, perhaps later. So I was quite suprised to receive an alert that a fish dissector had gone melancholy. I looked up and down the announcements list to see if a pet had died. Nope, that wasn't it. I wanted to find the dwarf on my unit list to see what had made him unhappy but he wasn't there. Then I found him, away from my dwarfs, reported as 'friendly'. "That's new!" I thought, It does make some kind of sense, but it's a pity the game now loses the info about dwarves' friends and happiness when they go insane".

So I unpaused the game. Then I got a message that a diplomat had left unhappy and it dawned on my what had happened. I embarked in a savage freezing biome. With no reason to go out on the surface I'd barricaded up the fort for the winter... with the outpost liaison inside.

I was playing Battle for Wesnoth. Excellent game. For those who don't know, it's a wargame based in a fairly standard fantasy setting with elves, dragons, undead, and of course dwarves. Plenty of user-generated campaigns too. The gimmick for the campaign I just downloaded and started is that you have an unusual form of magic, elementalism, not seen elsewhere in the game. So there I was in a cavern learning how to summon an army of water elementals, fire elementals, and so on, and then... the dwarves broke into my cavern while mining for a particular rare and magical metal! I looked in stunned surprise. Every now and then a campaign scenario will suddenly change the rules leaving the player out of position and unprepared. And then I started laughing! I am the HFS! Mwahahaha! And then I crushed the dwarves.

Desperately hoping my food and booze will last out until the second dwarven caravan.

I embarked on a freezing glacier with the standard 'play now' settings. Those settings really don't work for this environment. The only logs are those that make up the wagon and there isn't quite enough food and drink to last until the caravan. Another source of food/booze is required. After digging a rudimentary shelter -- so cramped I have to keep deconstructing and rebuilding workshops -- I started digging down looking for the caverns and magma sea. Well I didn't find any, so by the start of the first autumn, all 15 dwarves were thirsty/dehydrated. I neglected to brew all my plump helmets but I'm not sure it would have helped having starving dwarves instead.

Late autumn is when my dwarves started dropping dead of dehydration. So when the caravan arrived I put all 15 dwarves on hauling duty, hauling stone junk up to the depot one item at a time (no wood for bins, no magma for metal bins) My expedition leader keeled over in the middle of talking to the outpost liaison. "A diplomat has left unhappy". A replacement expedition leader tantrummed, started a fist fight and attacked a guard dog chained up by the entrance... with his axe. I was down to three dwarves (from 15) before I managed to get any trading done. And one of those, yet  another expedition leader, had taken to "resting" in the one bed, a second was waiting at his bedside with "attend meeting". My sole remaining useful dwarf managed to complete a trade for the single barrel of booze the traders had brought and immediately quaffed some booze, the bedside hoverer then went up to the depot, berzerked, and was dealt with by the caravan guards. The bedridden dwarf expired.

My single survivor (I renamed his profession "survivor") spent the winter hauling food from the depot to the stockpile, building native gold coffins and burying the corpses.

And then spring came and twenty-two migrants arrived. *facepalm*

With the replacement miners occupied with s..l..o..w..l..y digging exploratory passages, the living and working quarters are still cramped. Despite the mass dumping of lots of dwarven clothes and stone goods, getting them closer to the depot in the process, I have lots of idle dwarves. That led to three marriages, one of them including my survivor -- a very rapid courtship!

I had a load of plump helmets from the caravan and just enough logs to turn into barrels to restart booze brewing. Of course the elves and humans didn't show up. Autumn has begun and the dwarves haven't run out of booze yet but it's going to be close.

It's the most fun I've had with a fortress in ages.

I smooth the lava channels too. After all, it's the last chance I'll ever get to do that. I suppose I could just do the floors and leave the walls for later. Funny how you can dig a parallel tunnel and smooth the walls from the outside.

For water channels, I've started laying down constructed floors. Only because constructed floors are a way to prevent tower caps gumming up the pipes when there's an underground water source. Of course I use smooth blocks.