Bay 12 Games Forum

After creating golden spiked ball artifact, 100 goblins decided to siege my fort, way before I was ready. The only defence was 15 military dwarves - rather well trained, but still lacking armor. Epic battle followed, where dwarves were hacking and slashing left and right, dodging almost every attack. But the sheer numbers got them. 11 dwarves died, before goblins decided to retreat. 2 more attacked the last retreating goblin lasher - marksdwarf decided to punch him and died promptly, while the militia commander and axelord... was tired (or just unlucky) and died in 1 shot. We (I mean the part of military that slept through entire siege) decided to let this goblin lasher be.

Around a month after the siege, a wave of visitors have arrived.
150 of them in a single month. They must've been so eager to celebrate this close win and visit tombs of fallen heroes and write songs about this fantastic event!
(Meanwhile FPS dropped from 100 to 30.)
And they kept coming! And they immediately were asking for residency. Except that our mayor could handle them only 1 at a time... So only 1 guest was chasing mayor until he caught up to him and submitted a petition - only then another guest would start chasing the mayor And I decided to accept them all!
After half a year:
We have become cultural capital of the world (note the population distribution)! And visitors still keep coming faster than the mayor can attend to them. Now 200 of them are still waiting in the queue (I suppose they all want to stay... so far it seems true).
Unfortunately FPS dropped to 10. And removing all locations didn't make visitors leave But I'm not even mad. This is actually amazing!
Curiously the dwarves kept up with food and booze production.

You don't like to adjust labors on your dwarves - profession proportions in your fort seem similar to those of migrants. With the exception you have too many miners and too few stoneworkers, which probably means that you were making some large excavating project and activated miner labor on some stoneworkers. Since mining skill raises really fast, some your stoneworkers are now displayed as miners.

You capped your population, but more children are born. Summer 258 - Autumn 259: 13 children were born (no migrants) but one grew up and became your new mayor.

You don't do trading. Very little exported wealth. Maybe caravans are getting destroyed, but more likely (soon explained why it's more likely) you just don't want to trade. Summer 258 - Autumn 259 you exported only 241$ worth of goods. Could be you sold a masterwork stone trinket and a seed. Or someone stole some junk (more likely). Imported wealth looks good, you are killing sieging factions, no survivors, and if a caravan isn't desroyed on its way, you seize most goods.

I think your architecture wealth is pretty high, or at least I always have problems with architecture . I'd guess it's so high, because you made quite a few bridges (they require lots of materials, and have 2 quality modifiers).

Military. You didnt show any elites. You have only 1 squad activated at a time and 5 squads + militia commander total. Which means your dwarves are in fact untrained. But when in danger, you can activate all 45 soldiers and beat anything except sieges with no loses. During sieges you rely on your trap, which involves multiple bridges (mentioned earlier) and no magma (magma would destroy imported wealth). Probably you are just flinging and dropping enemies with your bridges many z-levels down. This would require lots of excavating, which explains, why did you need so many miners.

Food industry. You let all farmer/fisher/hunter immigrants do what they want which causes huge surplus of food. You are cooking it. Most of your wealth comes from cooked food. Lots of animals which produce even more food.

Cooked food is worth a lot, but your total wealth is still quite low as for 8-9 years old fortress. You don't have adamantine. At all. You probably dont even have good metal industry running. Only 9 metalworkers and too little total wealth. Most weapon and armor wealth comes from junk left by invaders, not from your metalworkers. You are porbably waiting (were waiting?) with metal industry until you hit magma. Except of making standard weapons and armor for military. Standard, because held/worn wealth is very low and you didnt train your metalworkers. And maybe even you gave some goblinite/humanite to your dwarves.

No magma and very little exported wealth could mean your fort is cluttered. A lot. Or you're using bridges (you have quite a few of them ) to atom smash garbage.

Your whole population was cave adapted until you built above ground farm...

Screen with water pump stack: we can see some blood, ichor and ichor mixed with blood. So it's surface or one of 3 caverns. Clusters of magnetite never lie deep, so it's surface or 1st cavern layer. Ichor could come from giant desert scorpions (surface), giant cave spiders (1st cavern) or FB, or even something else, so it's not going to tell whether its surface or 1st cavern. You had a little flood there, because something's growing in the middle of magnetite cluster (you probably forgot that liquids can flow diagonally). Looks like you have 5 pumps per z-level pumpstack, which requires a lot of power. And you managed to get that power.

What do they actually have in their quivers?

this.

See if your dwarves have quivers full of combat only bolts.

300 bolts assigned? How many marksdwarves do you have? Maybe try assigning more (I try 100 per dwarf).
Sometimes 1 dwarf from a squad will pick up all ammo assigned to the whole squad I don't know what's the limit, but 100 per dwarf seemed to work (maybe an overkill).

I believe you can muddy constructed floors (or functionally identical tops of walls), just make a scaffolding of sorts and use a pumpstack/bucket brigade to dump water onto it.

If that doesn't work, you can pump magma and obsidianize it. It will create natural rock, on which when muddied, you can farm 100%.

Quote from: Valguris on April 03, 2011, 04:29:21 am

[i ] designate zone and mark it as water source

I was not aware of the zones, now I fixed it. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Also, I have a problem - tidy fetish. I just can't stand having rocks all around. What's the best solution to temporarily "compress" them until I need them again? I'm creating blocks and putting them in bins, but I never seen my crafties use a block - they always go for raw stones.

You can hide them - [d] [b ] [h] and mark a rectangle of items you want to hide. This will make items invisible on your screen after you escape [d][b ] menu, but they are still in game and your dwarves will use them. You can anytime unhid them, either manually one by one or [d][b ][H], if I recall correctly.
Or, as someone else mentioned, you can quantum stockpile them, but it takes a lot of dwarven labor.

Also, what's the best way to clean up my weapon traps - when poor goblin gets into it, there is a load of his stuff laying around - I manually mark as "dump" each of his clothes and items. Is there a more effective way to clean up the trap?

Looks like you're marking for dumping one by one. You can mass dump [d][b ][d]. [d][b ] menu is very useful, see other options in it.
Another way to clean weapons traps? I can think of only flooding with water (but I'm not sure if water will push items) or flooding with magma (will destroy items... and kill your FPS ). So yeah, dumping (or just waiting until dwarves bring items to their stockpiles) seem the best for me.

From the wiki:

According to Toady [1]
Have a caravan leave when your pop is 20
Exported 10k wealth
Created (Imported?) 100k wealth

so there seems to be some uncertainty as to what the actual requirements are.

The bug is at the 'caravan leaves' requirement. Liaison checks if last dwarven caravan that was in your fort left safely. Problem is, that caravan is usually still in your fort, trading. So for a workaround you must delay meeting until caravan leaves.
I just give my mayor a few jobs to do. Attend meeting job seems to be very low priority. OK it doesn't work 100%, but I'll just repeat it next year

I managed to catch ~3 giant eagles and much more zombie/skeletal ones this way:

Just build a row of cages somewhere on the map (I used 4 rows of ~5 cages - 1 row near each side of map), preferably far from traffic. Giant eagles are mostly scared by nearby dwarves.
If GE enters your map, you can wait until it gets close enough to cages or station a military dwarf, so that giant eagle will get scared and fly in the direction of cage traps. If your military dwarf gets too close to GE, cancel his orders (sometimes you will have to remove him from duty temporarily to stop him ). Beware that GE can fly higher when scared, so don't abuse military method.
Eventually you should catch some GEs.

These rows of cage traps are very efficient to get other wild animals as well. Keep them reloaded!