Bay 12 Games Forum

I thought nobles would only get angry if people had nicer things than they did. They don't care about the peasants' nice things, as long as they're not better than their nice things.

Nobles get iffy if an underling has nice stuff AT ALL. If a dwarf has a particular room that's valued to be above his station (i.e. over a specific limit in regards to his place in dwarven society; the peasants get less than the mayor, who has less than the baron, who has less than the duke, etc.), barons and kings get iffy about this, even if their rooms are platinum-plated, diamond encrusted dens of decadence.

Underground water never freezes, and the caverns usually have water in them, along with other things...

Quote from: numerobis on May 01, 2011, 06:03:55 pm

For the challenge.

But I just realized I'm saved: the wagon is made of wood!  I'd forgotten about that.

Not only that, but you can also make training axe out of that wood, making it easy to bootstrap any embark with bare hands (just buy anvil and pick from first caravan, log cabin for early shelter, build palisades if needed).

Careful with this assumption; any embark that forces your dwarves to land on a sharp incline will lose you the wagon, along with those valuable starting logs.

God damnit now I have to do this, since I recently figured out just how to make this work. However it will be grindingly difficult, require a shite-ton of magma-safe floor grates, pumps, bridges and mechanisms, every room do have a natural stone pillar every 3 tiles in every orthogonal direction, and will STILL be gratingly slow to use.

Unfortunately once the caverns are breached, trees, shrubs and fungus (grass) will grow on any underground soil or muddy rock that isn't covered with something, 'something' being any buildings, constructed floors, roads, bridges, or any other such thing. So for example, I tend to pave my underground aqueducts with stone roads, which keeps trees from growing in them if they are ever drained (trees won't sprout in 7/7 water, although the cavern lakes will be full of them). To keep your fortress free from plant life, just dig your fort through stone, not soil, and keep it dry unless you intend to use it for farmland, and pave over any area that may grow plant life if you don't want it to.

Keep in mind that this spore effect can be quite handy; my current fort has a tree farm in progress, so that my dwarves don't have to climb the 30+ z-levels to the surface or wait for a caravan for wood.

My current fort had some trouble with badgers at the beginning (mostly because I'm very particular about grand entrances and usually take 2-3 years designing and building them; this one has a spiral ramp tower of ice descending directly into the riverbed at the bottom of the canyon). Honey badgers, specifically; bastards would never run away. Waddle-waddle-waddle-RAGEGRRKILLPLANTERS!-waddle-waddle-waddle. I eventually handled the problem by getting an immigrant trained with a mace and sending him about to deal with the beasties. He went on to become my most valuable military dwarf, and currently has a steel pyramid dedicated solely to him; it will be a memorial hall for memorable military leaders, but he's the only one of note who has perished.

I think the biggest issue with maces vs. hammers is that maces aren't made for killing unless you're bashing people in the head; they're made for breaking bones. This helps incapacitating enemies, but unless it's specifically aiming for the head, it won't help much in killing them. Since there is no taking prisoners of war in DF (if your military engages, they will fight to death one way or the other), breaking your foe's kneecaps won't speed that process, and since dwarves focus on an enemy until it's dead or something else attacks, a quick death is preferable to a quick incapacitation.

If there was an option to let dwarves favor conscious enemies to unconscious ones, I believe maces would see more use.