Bay 12 Games Forum

Nice, thinking of doing that in my new fort.  Got a couple blue peahens just for that purpose. 

One efficient way of doing it is with an atom smasher.  If you only dump useful items from them, a lot of other killing methods will leave a lot of junk laying on the floor that can hurt your framerate.  So I just mass pit them into a 3x3 room with a retracting bridge and make them disappear. 

Removing just their weapons and using them as training dummies for your military is a good way, too.  I've also stripped them of everything and set my war animals on them, one of my tame Giant Cave Spiders has a name about as long as my arm now because of all the goblin kills. 

Also good to sacrifice on a deconstructions that requires one because they're generally useless. 

Anyone have the link for the dwarven daycare thread btw?

Using featherwood deliberately because my first marksdwarf squad's going to become the fortress guard when I get to that point.  Beatings won't injure my dwarves, but the guard will still be able to deal with any goblins they run into.  My frontline marksdwarf squads will use silver crossbows.  Also, I can't use deend burrow commands because if I set them to anything but inactive they refuse to reload. 

The problem with them being able to kill stuff but not train is that it takes much more micro-management than I'm used to or feel like tolerating.  I haven't even had a kobold show up yet so I don't have any live targets but wild animals, but even with a bunch of armored gobbos as training dummies I can see this being a real pain in the ass when it shouldn't be, especially when I get multiple squads of marksdwarves.  Furthermore, I plan on eventually getting all my non-military dwarves trained at least a little in marksdwarf and carrying crossbows all the time to give them a better chance if they get jumped or my defenses get breached.  Having to make them all reload manually each time would be a nightmare.  Plus, broken stuff needs to be fixed not just coped with in my book, no matter how minor. 

I noticed that when I made my most recent prisoner euthanasia system.  Was just a pit with a 15z drop onto some upright spikes.  Miraculously, some of the gobbos survived and any subsequent gobbos to land on top of them were completely unharmed.  They stayed fine until I dumped socks on them... >.<

I forgot that elves usually don't siege unless you offer them wood repeatedly.  Didn't feel I was ready for an elf siege for 2 animals... as far as damming the river goes, every time I've tried that in the past it's resulted in massive amounts of fun. 

AFAIK bone bolts are still bugged, only stacking up to 5.  They're noticeably more effective than wood, even had them pierce gobbo armor easily, but the dwarf carrying them will only get 5 shots off.  Could be problematic with hunters as well, I've had hunters using bone shoot an animal 5 times and have it limp away while they go to reload or worse engage in melee.  Hunting animals help with this, though.  Bone bolts will most likely cripple the animal, while a hunting dog/tiger/GIANT TIGER runs in to finish it off. 

Side note:  Hunting Dragons = very bad idea. 

Got two questions:

Does the object in question matter?  IE, would a boulder do more damage than a sock?  Or would an edged weapon do slashing damage?  Etc.

Does the distance it drops matter?  Would something be more effective falling from 10 z levels than just 1?

I had an identical situation to the OP (posted in the Biggest Facepalms thread), triggered the DAS in the down position with 1,000+ trash items on it and caused the dwarf pulling the lever to cease to be, as well as killing and injuring several war lions many blocks away.  The items launched (at least the weapons) acted like they would if they'd bee swung at the unlucky target by a creature or weapon trap.  Dunno if the way they behave when launched (DAS fail/win or Dwarven Auto Shotgun which needs a different acronym), or if just falling works separately.  I'll do some science in the morning.  In the meantime, it seems like bolts/arrows would be an excellent choice for this if that's the case.  Can be made in large stacks quickly with minimal resources and do piercing damage that can insta-kill through armor with a little luck.  Also come in large quantities from goblin claus.  Just have to do some more science to see if a stack will be launched/dropped as a stack or as individual bolts.  From my one experience with the DAS mishap it seems like they shoot off individually because I ended up with a couple dozen broken arrows all over the ground after I cleaned it all up and only had a couple stacks in the pile.  Would be nice, just drop a stack of silver bolts on each section of the bridge then each square beneath gets pelted by 25 bolts at once.  If not, then need to find a way to split the stacks into individual bolts.  Would also be really useful for auto shotguns.  Only problem I can see is that a portion would break, unlike socks or boulders, but would still be good for delivering a massive volume of fire at low cost. 

Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness word vomit.  Can't wait to test this though... would love to see a couple thousand bolts shooting out at once and making a whole goblin siege look like Leonidas at the end of 300.  The thousand Mountainhomes of the Dwarven Empire arise beneath you!  Our bolts will blot out the sun!