Bay 12 Games Forum

See bottom for tl;dr.

So I took the time to generate a large world and am killing all of the megabeasts before proceeding to general citizenry.

One such beast was a Mountain Titan located in the frozen asshole of nowhere, out in the middle of one of those perpetual blizzards. Just getting to the shrine was an adventure, since I could never see more than one square away from my adventurer on the overland map.

Once I get there, I advance carefully into the shrine. I can still only see one square away from me, due to the fog and snow. My companion spots the beast and leeroys it. Damn AI, not having to actually see something to interact with it.

I advance a little further and notice a red soil wall. I think, "What's a red soil wall doing in a frozen wasteland, and in the middle of a shrine?" I [l]ook at it. Fire. Okay, that explains a lot.

I head in the direction the fire came from, and see the little red 2 that denotes gibs. I look at it. It's my companion's leg. Moments later, my companion crawls back in my direction, down one leg, and most of his skin melting.

And then the beast itself comes marching out of the mist. In any other game, a towering three-eyed wren with large mandibles, a regal bearing, and fluffed puce feathers(Beware its fire!) would be something of an anticlimax. It kept running around, so I only got a turn or two at a time with it in my line of sight before it skipped back out of my line of sight.

The actual fight with it was really just it swinging at me or spitting fire at me, me blocking it, and me hitting it in the head with a steel pick that I'd picked up somewhere. After a while, it died. I butchered it, just to say I had, though I didn't end up taking any of the preposterously heavy products with me. My companion somehow survived, though was in pretty bad shape.

Since it was a mountain titan, most of its victims had been dwarves, so I entered the place with basically the clothes I has started with, plus some +iron gauntlets+ I had picked up in a night creature den, and left with almost full steel gear.

tl;dr 1: The right environmental effects can make a fight cinematic, even to a player who's normally more interested in the mechanics of combat than the "story." Though reading the megabeast descriptions is always fun.
tl;dr 2: Always take the time to loot mountain titan lairs. They kill a lot of dwarves, and dwarves have steel.

Using dual shields, are your troops twice as armored?  If so, use two-shield soldiers to take the aggro while marksdwarves rain fire.

I don't know if you can get a dwarf to equip more than one shield. That's something to try in Inkybarbs. I do know that if you use an exploit in adventurer mode involving removing items from packs, you can wield as many items as you want. It doesn't give you more attacks, but I don't remember if more shields meant a better chance of blocking. It did give you scads of opportunity shots, though.

Quote from: Angry Bob on June 09, 2011, 06:26:51 pm

A good starter is wooden shields, since you'll likely have it right off unless you're on a glacier or something. No need to wait for a metal industry.

Maybe for you people who send woodcutters outside it works like that, but I always find wood is much more precious than sub-steel metals, as you need it for beds.

Of course it depends on playstyle. I use a danger room for training, so I only need one guy(one shield) to begin with, and I need my wood for the ninety training spears that go in the danger room. Beds can wait.

Then again, I've plain forgotten about beds until the third year for a few of my forts, so there you go.

A good starter is wooden shields, since you'll likely have it right off unless you're on a glacier or something. No need to wait for a metal industry.

Actually, civilians retreat.  Military do not.  If your dwarves become civilian, by canceling their orders and putting them on an inactive schedule, they will flee wildly like any pansy civilian would.  And probably die as well.  If they're schedule is to guard a location, and you order them to move somewhere, then you cancel the move order, they're still active military who are guarding the location, and will engage.  Keep their schedule inactive to allow for some form of aggro management,

Keep in mind that retreating dwarves don't so much "retreat" as "pick a random direction and run." I had a guy try to "retreat" straight through a squad of axegoblins. Guys were Placing Item In Tomb for the next few weeks...

Woodcutter nothing. I once got a legendary weaponsmith migrant in the second migrant wave on a map with copious iron, coal, and flux. Too bad he didn't like steel. I don't think he liked any metal.

We'll need a massive military, then.

Nah, just a danger room to throw interruption spammers and other useless/annoying citizenry into. Create disposable legendaries armed only with a wooden shield, a no-quality weapon we don't mind not seeing again, and whatever they were wearing when they were drafted.

Rule: Anyone generating unresolvable cancellation spam will be fed to the spike trap. This includes "Cancels store item: item misplaced," "Cancels clean self: area inaccessible," and "interrupted by <insert harmless animal here>" repeated more than twice in one day.