Bay 12 Games Forum

Any thoughts on running an effective military in a low metal environment?  So far, my leather wearing axedwarfs* have been slaughtered during seiges and ambushes.  I'd rather not go back to the bad old days of cowering behind a trap line, but it seems like the only option without access to good armor.



* generally around competent for most military skills

Also, white/light grey is drowsy.

Wrestling actually does help against missile attacks.  It's not great, but it's better than nothing.

Very high-level wrestlers will actually be able to "go matrix" and dodge incoming bolts and arrows.  They're not as good at it as they are at dodging melee blows, but like I said, it's better than nothing.

Also, don't discount the value of stat boosts.  It won't prevent damage, but a dwarf with good endurance will be able to keep going a little longer so that they can finish opponents off.  In a close fight, it could easily make the difference between death on the battlefield and getting dragged back to recover in bed.

With that said, I personally prefer to start with marksdwarves.  In general, I prefer to train up at least a couple of these before I worry about melee troops.

Of course, the real absurdity to any dwarf fortress player is the idea of a noble doing anything more productive than setting mandates.

From an article today in Cracked.com:

One tells of Phung Thi Chinh, a pregnant noblewoman in their army who gave birth on the battlefield, and fought the Chinese with her baby on her back.

Dwarfiest thing ever.  They just needed some magma to complete the picture.

A couple bits of advice:

First and foremost, don't be afraid to fail.  Remember, "Losing is fun".  A lot of the best and most memorable stories involving this game are all about the mayhem as a fort crashed and burned.  Since the game generates a semi-persistent world for your forts, a failure is just another interesting place to go explore in adventure mode.

With that in mind:

The wiki will be your best friend for  a good long while.  It goes into deep detail on a lot of the more complex points of the game, and is a pretty fair source of strategies for both beginners and advanced players.  If you run into a mechanic that is confusing you, there will probably be a page somewhere on this wiki that explains it.

The two most likely failing points for your first fortress will likely be booze and food.  Your dwarves prefer to have a large stockpile of alcohol available, and will be slower and less happy without it.  Even worse, there are maps where your only good source of drink will be alcohol, so if you don't have enough you will lose dwarves to dehydration.  So early on, figure out what you need to produce food and booze, and you will have a much smoother run.


If you make it the first couple years, your next major threat will come from goblins.  They will come in either small hidden groups, or large visible sieges.  Either can kill you if you aren't careful.  While I consider a strong military to be the most fun way of dealing with them, it is also fairly complicated to get up and running.  Instead, look up the page on traps, and build a whole bunch at the entrance of your fort.  If you have enough, the goblins will take such heavy losses from them that they will retreat.

Once you're experienced enough to deal with these, you're probably be advanced enough to figure out the rest on your own.

the result is the same. VB code takes more space but it's easier for someone.
If you want to talk about native, both C/VB are not native, the native is IL (Instruction list).

Err...... do you want to doublecheck what you said there?  C most certainly compiles down to native code, unlike vb, which compiles to bytecode that is executed by the CLR.  Perhaps you were thinking of C# or managed C++, for which everything you said would be true?  But for normal C, your post is not correct.