Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, I held off a goblin invasion with a little defense I was tinkering around with. I thought this was amusing enough to share~

This is an overview of my current fortress in it's 6th year-

Home Sweet Home

One of the more prominent things about it is the large... ummm... sword-like water moat in the front ->

   

My dwarves call it the Giant, Big, Large, Super Huge Sword of Death, or GaBLe in front of polite company, and 'the BIG one' in front of elves. It has multiple bridges for a nice, scenic view and for traveler comfort. The water is clean and pristine, and is a nice, surprisingly warm temperature despite being next to the river.

Not only does it look nice, it also has a special feature for the more... unclean guests that drop by->

 

Yup, that's 3 groups of goblins on break dogs accompanied by a group of trolls, all coming to pay an unexpected visit.

... uh oh, something wicked this way comes...

   

Yeah my timing was a bit off, but....

   

I counted ~7 survivors from the initial raid that managed to limp off with injuries, which was pretty good for my second time around in using this thing. Once the lava gets to the river, it seals it off completely with steam, making escape (or entry) impossible without serious injury.

The fortress is not completely impregnable however. The overlord handbook building codes insist that for any impregnable castle/high rise building/death star built there must be a sewer grate/ventilation duct/exhaust port for easy backdoor entry just in case the overlord locks himself out of the fortress.

So, as you can see, there's a small, unattended drainage gate down south that pumps water into the moat when the river freezes over. When refilling the moat in the winter, this tiny channel can empty for a small window of opportunity for the castle overlord, or an intrepid band of adventurers to sneak in.

Just in case this happens, every bridge on the parallel lava channel can retract with one switch, trapping the annoying band in a deadly maze with their only hope of salvation being an impossible to find switch to lower the bridges in the middle of the maze, guarded by wild beasts and traps (eventually anyway). The bridges lead to the kennels/armory where the fools will have to fight off war dogs and soldiers in a small, tight corridor that nullifies the number advantage of my soldiers.

Or alternatively, they can try to navigate down south of the maze to a deadly, steam filled bridge that requires heroic timing and ungodly luck to get across and leads almost straight to the control room with no resistance but for a few traps.

Both are impossible, so I'm pretty safe on the defense side, right?

So, anybody else care to share their defense systems?

[ September 27, 2006: Message edited by: IronStorm ]

Well, I noticed that one of my cooks managed to hurl out a masterpiece roast, which has me a little worried, since it's going to be one of many that follow.

Anybody know if these things can be eaten without him going nuts? If they can even be eaten?

There seems to be a fair amount of overlap when reporting bugs- I think maybe it would be nice if we had a stickied post where we could post a more standard way of reporting bugs and where those that were fixed could be deleted? I'm sure it would help Toady out- the buglist on the dev side seems to be massive, as it also contains suggestions.

i.e. something like:

Poster name:
DF version: [22.107.21a]
Original Link to Forum:
Priority: [CRITICAL] [NON-CRITICAL] [ANNOYING] [TRIVIAL]
Description:
Reproducible: [YES] [NO] [HOW]
Links to similiar bugs:
Fixed: [NO] [IF YES -> [DF VERSION] ]

So instead of a confusing mishmash we could have something like (using examples from the last page)

POSTER: Mechanoid
DF VERSION: 22.107.21a
ORIGINAL LINK: http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000469
PRIORITY: [TRIVIAL]
DESCRIPTION:  

quote:

---

Job screen fails to terse past the [title], and ends up placing the job name PAST the status of the job. "Encrust finished goods with rose quartz" and equally long job names cause this issue.

---

REPRODUCIBLE: [YES] : Graphical bug on the job menu
LINKS TO SIMILIAR: [N/A]
FIXED: [NO]

Poster name: Rylen
DF version: 22.107.21a
Original Link to Forum: http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000455
Priority: [NON-CRITICAL]
Description:  

quote:

---

Last year my dwarves kept planting seeds until winter came around and destroyed the plots. This year, I didn't want to waste any effort on uncessary work so, mid-autum, I converted the fields to fallow (z), deselecting any crop. This didn't stop them, though. They kept generating and filling plant seed commands. I tried going into the unit screen and removing workers from the farming jobs. They kept signing back up.

I didn't turn off Growing in all the dwarves. It would probaly work but is too inefficient and I might not manage to get all of them to turn them back on.

Rylen

---

Reproducible: [YES]
Links to similiar bugs:
Fixed: [NO]

Poster name: silsor
DF version: [22.107.21a]
Original Link to Forum: http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000461
Priority: [TRIVIAL]
Description:  

quote:

---

I accidentally flooded one of my earlier fortresses yesterday and all my dwarves but one died. The last peasant stood on the door of his bedroom where he had woken up, spamming drink cancellations from underwater, as he had foolishly filled his own doorway and bedroom with water. He never died and I just abandoned the fortress.

---

Reproducible: [?]
Links to similiar bugs:
Fixed: [NO]

I know there's a few bugs that's been brought  up that I consider 'critical' that I don't see here that might have been lost in the mishmash and that might be nice to put front and center- i.e. Dwarves dying in jail, Sherrif/Captain/Hammerer killing dwarves, Aquaduct channels, etc..

I was playing around with an old save that had 205 dwarves, and to my surprise, I had an immigrant wave of peasants/miners come in with some nobles. It's been stated several times that the population cap is 200, so this is probably a bug.

A couple of names were in purple, so this might have something to do with that particular bug:

Here's the pop at 209 (I had to take it when the immigrants first arrived)-

purply names:

and the final tally:

I think some of these might have been mentioned before. Sorry for any redundancy.

Aquaduct channel pathfinding:

Dwarves seem to treat the aquaduct channel of both water and magma as empty. I've had a mechanic drown trying to install a floodgate mechanism next to the channel, then several dwarves leap into (the then) magma filled channel trying to get his stuff before I managed to seal off the aquaduct with doors.

Siege Operation spam:

Building a ballista and having no ammo produces a potentially machine crashing message spam about no ammo. The game crawled to a halt and it reached over 14,000 messages before I managed to locate everyone with siege operation on.

Chasm Pathfinding

This one was kind of strange. I thought breaking the chasm refuse pathfinding involved multiple bridges- I built only 1 5 x 5 bridge over the chasm (didn't build any others over the chasm before it) but I still got the 'can't find path' spam when I set to chasm skulls.

Goblins 'Trap':

I'm 90% sure this is NOT a bug, but... a couple of goblins killed an elven caravan near the edge of the map in an old game of mine and just hung around it, waiting for my dwarves to pick up the cloth and armor that was dropped. I sealed up my fortress for around 3 seasons I think, before deciding to venture out to try to kill them with disastrous results. I had my soldiers run at the goblins 1 at a time, making for a slaughter line that anhilated my army.

Just wanted to know if goblins hanging around dead caravans is a bug, or a nasty little trick they have for the item-greedy dwarves~