Bay 12 Games Forum

Only prob is how are u gonna get the dwarves to piss in it?

Make 'em vomit in it.  In fact, why not just make a huge Roman-style vomitorium:

• Make sure all your dwarves are cave adapted.
• Give them a massively opulent dining room, with easy access to an outdoor gold-lined vomitorium.
• Feed them the most exotic food and drink you can buy off the merchants.
• Now free the dining room and designate the vomitorium as a meeting area.  Watch as they all run outside and puke their guts out.
• Flush the vomit away with liberal applications of floodwater (bonus points if it drains into your cell-block), then repeat.

Congratulations - you now have a bulimic fort!

Titan, then.  Appears above-ground, no special attacks, and initially shows up as "visitor".

I switched from 5x5/3x3 stairs and halls to 6x6/4x4 because I realized the number of squares on the map is even, and there is no dead-center. 

Wait... what?... nnnngggggggggggggg my lovely 3x3 layouts WILL HAVE TO BE CHANGED

Steel armor is a major advantage, but it doesn't result in invulnerable dwarves.  Blunt weapons can do bludgeoning damage right through armor, and even edged weapons that don't penetrate can break bones and wear your dwarves down.   It's best to think of armor as a last-ditch-defense: it's often life-saving when your dwarves are outnumbered, stunned, fallen, or injured, but it's not something you can rely on for 100% protection.   Instead you want to train your militia up (trivially easy with individual combat training and barracks), and only send skilled fighters into combat.  A skilled fighter without armor will typically do major damage, dodge or parry lots of blows, and then fall to a lucky strike.  A skilled fighter with armor (especially steel or bronze) will cut a swathe through goblin hordes, and need several lucky strikes to take down.  In my experience the only way a dwarf like that dies is when they end up fighting several goblins alone.

Edit: and an unskilled fighter in steel armor against goblins is relying on a lucky strike against every opponent they face - if they don't get it, they'll soon succumb to a hail of blows that they can't dodge or parry.

I don't know how much the player actions affect the rest of the world, but this might work:

• Generate a world with a lot of history, open it in legends mode and find a dwarven civilization that goes to war with its neighbors.  Note the starting date of one of those wars
• Regenerate a copy of the world with the exact same seeds, but stop history 3 years (say) before the war
• Embark.  You now have 3 years to get your defense in place before the war starts!

I've got a red C and a green H on the left hand side of the DF window, inside border that goes around the screen. What does it mean?

The C means that combat has happened
The H means that hunting has happened

Hit "r" to see the reports

Huh... come to think of it, the game really does need some flying monkeys.

We need above-ground rhesus macaque traps... big retractable bridges that funnel whole troops of the little thieving monkeys towards something shiny they want to steal... and then the first one off hits a pressure plate and WHEEEEE flying monkeys SPLAT ex-flying monkeys.

Damn.  Now I need to do a temperate shrubland/savannah embark just to build this.

Agreed.  If you drive a hard bargain and just leave them "willing to trade", they seem to come back with the same size caravan the next year.  If you let them have lots of profits so they leave pleased or better, the next time they bring more stuff.