Bay 12 Games Forum

In my previous for on this world, I had had a dwarf get bitten and infected by a were-zebra. I locked him in his bedroom and built a wall across the doorway and just left him there. He then had a strange mood, which I didn't let him loose for, so he turned melancholy. So that's how he was when I retired the fort, a melancholy were-zebra, walled into his bedroom.

Fast-forward a bit, and in my new fort, I'm seeing a number of immigrants from the old fort. getting a legendary stonecrafter, already nicknamed "Stonecrafter' in the second wave was nice, as were the legendary glassmaker and miner in the third wave. They must have liked my leadership or something. Maybe it was the cookies. Anyways, I'm watching a new batch of migrants appear at the edge of the map, and as one of them appears, he suddenly turns into a N with a ~ over it, and I get the notification that "DucimWere!" has turned into a were-zebra. Uh-oh.

Great timing, hitting the full moon right as he steps on the map, as part of a wave of 17 migrants. I figure it's going to get messy out there, so I order my entire military to get out there and kill him. I then watch to see how bloody it gets before the military arrives. And I watch the were-zebra wander slowly off to the side, as more new migrants appear and rush towards my fort. He's not attacking them, and he's not even headed towards the fort. huh? So I check him with v->g, and it tells me he's melancholy. Even in his were form, he's still melancholy. Ok, I'll take that.

A couple of migrants, a farmer and a potash maker, rush over and start punching him, but he doesn't respond. Too melancholy. Then the troops show up and after getting beaten on for a while, he gets a spear stuck in his neck, followed almost immediately by a hammer to the neck. This seems to be a bit too much, as he becomes enraged! But an enraged melancholy were-zebra is apparently still too melancholy to fight back, as he continues to do nothing. Eventually someone sticks a spear in his head and he dies. yay. No one even got bit.

So I turn off the alerts and get ready to start processing the new arrivals, when I see "Doren Rajustteshkad, Hunter, has been found dead." Huh? No one was injured in the fight, I was sure of it. I check the reports, and discover that my military is going after each other. Looks like killing a melancholy were-zebra has kicked off a loyalty cascade. Looks like this fort is going down.

I recall someone (I'm pretty sure it was LoudWhispers) who had a situation like this, where a dwarf had lost an arm. He had a captured necromancer, so he dumped the arm to where the necromancer could see and raise it. He then captured it in a cage and installed the cage in the dwarf's bedroom.

It seems like every time I get a scholarly type immigrant (not visitor), he always has 3 points in some melee skill as well. I guess those academic debates can get a bit heated at times.

This always causes me a bit of a problem, especially early on in the fort when I really need military. I'd like to assign him/her as a scholar, but I really need the troops. So I end up with a military full of astronomers and chemists. Eventually, when I get a library set up and my military is strong enough to spare them, I'll start reassigning them as scholars.

But it just seems odd that every one I get arriving at my forts is a soldier/scholar. Anyone else notice this?

You see, the dwarves are simply better engineers, so their wagons have disc brakes, while the human wagons are still using drum brakes. That's why they overheat every time they stop.

I've managed to overload a caravan with wagons. Had a lot of Galena on that map,so I made a lot of silver stuff, leaving me with 100s of bars of lead. So many that the dwarven caravan couldn't carry them all when i decided to get rid of them. I guess I shoulda made them all into goblets.

Build marksdwarf towers around the edges, so your marksdwarves can quickly take down fliers.

You may need to draft a few more marksdwarves than most forts typically do, though, depending on how long your land borders are.

Yeah, just dump a goblin corpse in his bedroom. He'll get a nasty shock when he wakes up for the next few days, but pretty soon he'll get used to it.

Hope he likes miasma.