Bay 12 Games Forum

This is a thread for investigating unorthodox military strategies... which may or may not involve removing extraneous limbs.

To start off, I decided to create a squad of platinum crutch wielders. It's definitely not a new idea, but I have yet to find a post where anyone details the process or reports any results. I will describe how to create such a gimp squad and give some general impressions on its effectiveness. Unfortunately, I do not know how to test crutches as weapons in a controlled environment, since you can't get them in the arena.


Preparing the Volunteers

The first step is to... persuade each recruit he needs a crutch:


The rig is pretty simple. The floor is covered with weapon traps (red), each with 1-2 green glass serrated discs. The patient must wear full metal armor (steel definitely works, but you could probably make do with iron, maybe even copper), with a mail shirt AND a breastplate. He should wear exactly one boot, which always goes on the right foot, incidentally. To begin surgery, cave in a floor tile behind some fortifications (upper left in the picture). The dust will toss the patient around the room, giving the discs plenty of opportunities to work their magic, i.e. sever the left foot. Amusingly, the dwarf often comes out of the cave-in with both feet intact, only to lose a foot later when he passes out due to pain.

This technique is pretty reliable in safely removing unwanted feet, since the discs only bruise through steel armor. However, the discs can break fingers, noses, and ears, and these will often become fatally infected. I lost 4 of 14 dwarves this way.

Incidentally, the same surgery rig can be used to amputate the hands which own the infected fingers.


Equipment and Training

The easiest way to ensure your recruits get platinum crutches is to forbid all other crutches from the stocks menu ('z'). If you want the dwarf to use his crutch as the primary weapon, he must equip it BEFORE equipping a shield. If he's already equipped a shield, just remove it from his uniform and add it again.

Training pretty much proceeds as usual, although you'll probably want to make your soldiers run some laps to level up their crutch-walking ability. As weapons, crutches use the Misc. Object User skill, so these dwarves will become better shield bashers while they learn to cane things to death.

Dwarves appear not to gain Misc. Object User or Crutch Walker from the upright spear glitch. However, I did have one dwarf gain about 500,000xp in Fighter while holding no weapon besides his crutch.


Combat Performance


These logs were taken from my last siege. Most of my crutchdwarves were in the Adept-Professional skill range for Misc. Object User. Platinum crutches are clearly as effective as any blunt weapon vs. goblins, shattering limbs with almost every strike. Against trolls, not so much--typically, nearly every strike was a bruise until the troll finally gave in to pain, at which point the dwarves would bash its skull in. For the record, that was not a controlled experiment, and the dwarf attacking the troll may have been less skilled than the one attacking the goblin.

I haven't yet had a chance to try these guys out on a forgotten beast. I think they'll actually do better than vs. trolls, since the trolls' extra-thick clothing is probably the reason for the crutches' poor performance.

Conclusion

It's actually a good idea to try to get your injured military dwarves platinum crutches if they're going to need crutches anyway. Deliberately maiming dwarves to make a cripple squad is actually a viable choice for siege defense, but it's not the easiest or the best defense. Still, it's not a bad plan if you want to give yourself...

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a handicap.

Update 1/25/14: Read Part II: A Farewell to Arms!

I've just created a player-operated switch which is functionally identical to a lever. This one is fluid-powered. To build it, you'll need a water source, like a river, and drainage space.

The red pressure plate is linked to both bridges, and the cyan pressure plate gives the output signal.

To start, both bridges are raised. To put the switch in the ON state, "activate" the green bridge. (by "activate," I mean do the deconstruct/cancel thing). This allows water to enter the mechanism, filling it up to 7/7, tripping the cyan plate.

To turn it off, activate the blue bridge. This releases water from the mechanism, dropping the level on the red plate below 3/7 and lowering both bridges, as well as dropping the level on the cyan plate (output plate) below 7/7, causing it to send an OFF signal. Water continues to flow in through the green bridge, bringing the water level back up above 3/7 fairly quickly on the red plate. This causes the bridges to raise again, but the cyan plate does not send and ON signal, because the bridges raise before the water level hits 7/7.

Level 0



Fortifications
OFF bridge
Pressure plate, triggered at water levels 3-7
Pressure plate, triggered at water level 7
ON bridge

Level 1



Directly above ON bridge

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:How_large_a_farm_do_i_need

Basically, there's no reason to go above a 5x5 area's worth of farms for food and drink. Not sure how big you clothing farms need to be, but they certainly don't need to be any bigger than that.

The best industry for trading depends on where you are in your fort's life cycle. For an early fort, it might be most effective to make a bunch of wooden spiked balls, since they're easy and ridiculously overpriced. In a mature fort, roasts are absurdly valuable (a stack is commonly worth 50,000 dwarfbucks or more), but you can generally get everything you need by trading worn-out clothing.

Yeah, the game seems to schedule a megabeast event, then it's totally random what beast actually shows up. Any above-ground megabeast or semi-megabeast might arrive. You can test this by saving right before a megabeast shows up (you'll just have to get lucky) then savescumming.

Aww man, now I really do need to start to come up with some guidelines. Here are some of my thoughts. I'd appreciate some input so I can make this thread as useful as possible.

To keep this list from becoming bloated, I would like to cut any posts which contain information I could just add to the wiki. For example, I (or the OP) could just update the bridge page on the wiki rather than link to the "Bridge materials science" thread. The wiki can reference the thread, so people can see how the research was done.

To minimize redundancy, I do not want to link to multiple posts on the same subject. For example, I would not want to add more than one minecart watergun thread.
--How should I choose? Should I go with the first one, the most informative one, or the one with the best design? Haven't read most of those posts yet, by the way.
--Where to draw the line between similar subjects? For instance, a minecart watergun is really just a minecart shotgun. If I include a minecart shotgun thread, is it redundant to include a watergun thread?

Where is the line between science and (mega)project? For example, I can see the logic in including a minecart watergun thread as a science post, since it puts together a couple of minecart mechanics in an interesting and useful way, but what about, say, an ocean fort?

If I understood the skyfort mechanics correctly that only worked with actual supports attached to the sky, and tree tiles or any other tile for that matter wouldn't have the same effect?

I thought it only worked if you had natural things attached to the sky? Thus why he had to cast obsidian to the sky to achieve the effect?

If I'm incorrect, then yeah, it wouldn't work.

Actually, both supports and natural tiles will work. Fortifications, too, incidentally. Obsidian casting is only necessary if you're also withing 5 tiles of the map's edge, because supports can't be built there, even at ground level.

In any case, I'm betting the new trees just won't reach the very top level of the map. I'm definitely looking forward to playing with the new tree physics, though.

I just did some quick tests, and it seems the bridge is named after the oldest material. Also interesting is that including any boulder makes the bridge "rough." For example, a bridge made with 5 bars of iron and 1 sandstone boulder will be named a "rough iron bridge" if the iron is older than the sandstone.