Bay 12 Games Forum

Can I possibly continue? Is it wise to enable all labors for the mayor and have him run the whole fort?
 

Yes, quite easily, provided he isn't already insane with grief.  If he's pretty sad arleady, you may want to get him burying bodies asap.  Otherwise, keep him safe inside and leave the body-burying for later when migrants arrive.  Give him the biggest damn bedroom, dining room, and office if he doesn't have them already.  Once that's done, you want to dispose of or stockpile anything inside the fortress that might rot, fortify the defenses with more traps (as migrants won't do you any good if an ambush is sitting outside your locked gates).  Seal off any breached caverns as you can't deal with a forgotten beast, and ensure you've got plenty of booze or a water source for when migrants arrive.  Not necessarily in that order, either.

that's awesome.  A typical tale of newb woe would have ended with dwarves dying of thirst and trantruming over Keas and Miasma, but you threw in the undead too.  Also soldiers expiring on a forsaken assignment to kill an immortal being held invulnerable inside the pocket universe that the game's simulation of cages.

make the walkway two tiles across.  Gobbos will still take the inner path and dodge off.  You can also use mechanisms to expand the pathway to 2 or 3 tiles when not in use.  That's actually a good solution to the caravan issue... you can have a 1-tile walkway with traps, and put 3-wide retracting bridges along the entire way (accounting for ramps as you change level.

while you're reading, due to the way training works, its highly recommended to split your large squad into several smaller squads of 2-4 dwarves.

Quote from: Button on June 17, 2013, 08:00:53 am

Background info on the bone, tooth and shell material definitions: they're pretty much identical. Their densities in all states are identical; their important temperatures and spec heats are identical; their weapons-related properties are identical. The only differences in the raws are:

Toady is always happy to receive (well sourced) numbers for the properties of different materials since some of them are place-holders. If you know or find something you can PM him and he might incoorporate it. This way those materials might diversify

He would still have to change the system moderately (although all doable through raws) to institute, at the very least, various tiers of shell, tooth/bone, and leather/skin.  Also, I don't recall how thickness is implemented currently.  Does an elephant get thicker skin by virtue of its body size?  Or is it the same as chipmunk skin.  There's also the issue of pain resistance, I recall an infamous test where 3 hoary marmots nibbled an elephant to death in the arena because the pain inflicted caused the elephant to pass out permanently, and it eventually bled to death through skin tearings.

What we really need is to get vomit to behave like deadly spittle, which is actually a combat thing.

water at the bottom will lessen fall damage, meaning they can spend more time in the grinder.

The spiral/shaft design means you have room for all kinds of tasty modifications and access-ways.  A marksdwarf room could have a field of view over much of the trap, you could blast water/magma, you could set up a GCS or Dragon turret.  You could even make a windowed meeting hall and when a siege enters, lock the doors, forcing whichever of your frightened dwarves that happened to be there to watch the ensuing chaos.

At the top you could put a retracting bridge for caravans that is protected by latch-operated pressure plates (or just manual access with plenty of guard animals to give you time to retract it, if PP's block caravans like other traps).