Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm using a pair of high-level adventurers to wipe out all the non-dwarven civilizations, or at least weaken them so that I can finish them off with missions.

So far it's extremely tedious. The civilians don't defend themselves until I strike first. Elf 2 will do nothing while he watches me hack the limbs off Elf 1. There doesn't seem to be a central leader that I can kill to disband the site. The only way to end the war seems to be grinding down unarmed civilians one at a time, by the hundreds. It's tedious to kill them all, and it's even more tedious to find them all.

Am I missing something here? Is there some way to make all the residents of a site attack me? Is there some way to empty a site without murdering every animal and civilian? Is there some faster way of winning these wars?

REVISED Sep 5, 2020

I'm preparing to retire a fort that I intend to later unretire and play, after my adventurers have had their fun. This is my second time to do this. The first unretired fort got a bit messy, so this time I'm trying to do it better to make the fort unretirement as smooth and stable as possible. These steps haven't all been tested carefully. Many are based on rumor and speculation. But if stability is your goal, then these steps seem like sensible ways to eliminate potential bugs.

This list is a work in progress. If I've missed anything, please point it out.

Preparing for Retirement

• Nobles. After retirement, DF will assign dwarves to all empty noble slots. Those nobles will probably be unable to migrate during retirement. So fill those slots with dwarves that you want to remain with the fort.
• Burrows. Remove all assignments of dwarves to burrows and cancel any civilian alerts.
• Activity Zones. Delete all activity zones that might attract visitors, meaning taverns and libraries, and possibly temples and guildhalls. Visitors who arrive at your fort during its retirement will probably be bugged, meaning that they stand around and do nothing. Setting the zones to "citizens only" doesn't help.
• Scholars. If you haven't deleted the library, then scholars assigned to it will keep on researching, and are probably less likely to migrate. So leave the scholars in place if you want them to keep researching at that fort, or remove their assignment if you want them to migrate to a new fort.
• Pastures. Delete all pastures. They will lose their animal assignments and need to be rebuilt.
• Bins and Barrels. Items in bins or barrels remain in place, but outside their containers. The AI relating to stockpiles has a hard time dealing with this. So when possible, use stockpiles without bins or barrels such as QSPs.
• Chests and Cabinets. On unretirement, all chests and cabinets will be un-built. The furniture item will still be on the same tile, but it'll need to be rebuilt. So if you plan to later unretire and play a fort, don't go overboard with chests and cabinets.
• Stockpiles. Some stockpiles may stop working after retirement. I saw one definite case of a broken raw fish stockpile. So keep your stockpile setup simple with the expectation that you'll need to erase them and start over. Maybe set your (o)rders to not mix food, so that you can easily make complex food stockpiles later. More research is needed here.
• Pending Orders. Delete all digging designations and dump designations. Complete all orders for building or constructing. Check the jobs list, and complete or delete all suspended jobs and anything else related to construction.
• Rooms.Delete all specific room assignments: bedrooms, dining rooms, offices, barracks, tombs, etc. Assigned/claimed rooms in particular are said to be buggy.
• Workshops. Delete workshop profiles. These are reported as mildly buggy.
• Visitors. Wait for any merchants to leave. Lower the visitor cap to zero and wait for all the visitors to leave.
• Items for Adventurers. You may want to visit this fort as an adventurer to collect your best armor, weapons, waterskins, backpacks, food, booze, and other useful items. So gather those items in an easy-to-find location. Remember that your fort may be difficult to navigate in adventure mode with its limited vision. If you plan to deposit items into the fort as an adventurer, then you definitely want to leave some empty display furniture close to the surface. Items left on the ground at fortress retirement stay in place, but items dropped in the fort on the ground by adventurers will be scattered each time the site reloads.
• Booze and Brewables. As a consequence of the great barrel-and-bin dumpout, all your booze will be gone on unretirement. If you intend to unretire this fort and resume playing it, make sure that you have plenty of brewable food on hand.
• Hostiles. Every creature in a cage or on a chain will be released and scattered around your fort. So dispose of all hostiles before retirement. The creature scattering might also move a hostile from a sealed-off section of a cavern to a not-sealed-off section, so be prepared for that possibility.
• Sealed-Off Areas. If any open tiles in your fort are sealed off, you may want to open them back up. This will minimize the effect of bug 1871, which un-reveals those tiles. On the other hand, maybe you don't want to leave your fortress open to their caverns and their subterranean wanderers. And you could deliberately use this bug to un-reveal HFS that are harming your frame rate.
• Fluid. If the fortress map started with a natural lake or river that you drained or dammed, that fluid will suddenly reappear on unretirement. This could cause major flooding.
• Entry. If you might visit the fort as an adventurer, make sure that there's a way in.
• Back up the game and copy it somewhere safe. You may want to reload it later to recover from any problems, to remember what was in the old fort, or to navigate the retired fort in adventure mode.

Ideas for After Fort Retirement

• Reset the graphics. Adventure mode is unstable with the fancy graphics packs. So turn the graphics down to CLA 18px for stability in adventure, then turn it back up for fortress unretirement. Only change graphics in between forts or adventurers, meaning that you have a "Start Playing" option on the main menu. Always unretire a fort on the same graphics that you used to retire it. It's easy to forget this. And since retirement immediately wipes out your save, always back up your game before retiring.
• Item Transfer.
  
  • Have an adventurer pick up high-quality gear from your retired fort, then go kill things with it.
  • Have an adventurer carry items into a fort that you plan to unretire, such as books, artifacts, or other nice stuff from an old fort. It's best to drop them into a container, such as a pedestal. If you drop items on the ground, they'll be scattered and re-scattered each time the fort reloads. Manufactured items such as armor and weapons are slightly bugged. Your soldiers can't equip them unless you strip them trader and foreign flags from them, and then dump them. Raw materials don't have this problem.
  • Have an adventurer drop items onto a site where you will later start a new fort. The dropped items will stay in place.
  • Pack animals help with item transfer. And adventurer's carrying capacity is proportional to both strength and body size, so a large animal-person adventurer can be very useful. While there seems to be no upper limit on how much weight a pack animal can carry, carrying more than about 500 items in adventure mode will destroy your FPS.
• Win the War. Have an adventurer massacre civilians in sites belonging to an enemy civilization. Legends Viewer helps with this. It doesn't feel heroic, but it may be the only way to defeat a site that's too tough to handle in fortress mode.
• Specialists. Create one or more adventurers with obscure skills, then retire them into the fort that you intend to unretire and play. With this trick you can hand yourself experts in hard-to-develop skills, such as doctors and artists. (Most of the scholar skills are not available.) You can also design these adventurers psychologically to avoid stress and work hard in the area that you've chosen for them.
• Hero Preparation. Create a new combat adventurer and immediately retire him into your future fort. He can get military training while you play that fort, then you can retire that fort and play him in adventure mode as highly trained killing machine. Or you could use adventure mode as the training ground, and then retire skilled adventurers into a new fort to jump-start their military. If you want to retire an animal-person adventurer into a fort, be aware of bug 9588. Retiring a fort with an adventurer assigned as militia commander will make it easy to later recruit companions from that fort in adventure mode.

Steps for Fort Unretirement

• Start making booze.
• Re-create your food stockpiles. Some of them might not work.
• Free and reassign rooms for nobles, especially bookkeeper and manager. If you left noble positions vacant at retirement, they will be filled with random dwarves. Remove or replace them to your taste.
• Set bookkeeper to All Counts Accurate.
• All cabinets and chests have been un-built. Start rebuilding the nobles' rooms first, then the hospital and tavern chests, then the general bedrooms.
• Re-designate pastures and their animal assignments. Re-assign animals to chains.
• Cooking/brewing preferences are gone. Set them back.
• Re-create your other stockpiles. If an old stockpile held items in bins, then you may want to re-form it somewhere else. The items in bins will still be where you left them, but they won't be in the bins any more. If you leave the stockpile where it was, or if you re-create it as it was, then those tiles will be jammed. They won't work properly with the usual flow of placing items into bins. So either move the items off the stockpile and bring them back, or move the stockpile.
• Restore burrows, workshop profiles, activity zones, squads, rooms, and anything else you removed before retirement. Check details on hospitals, barracks, tavern, and library.
• Review the visitor cap.
• Save and load the fort to fix some graphical bugs.
• Some items may randomly pick up TSK flags, which can cause "Item blocking site" messages. Forbid and unforbid those items to clear the flag.
  

After an extensive experiment, here are my conclusions on light aquifers:
1. An open tile will receive water if it is N, S, E, W, or down from a light aquifer tile. There is no diagonal transmission.
2. The amount of water received by an open tile is not affected by the number of adjacent aquifer tiles. One is just as good as the maximum of five.
3. The rate of water generation is quite variable. It probably uses a low-chance-per-day system similar to strange moods. The average is four units of water per month, but over a six-month period I've seen the average go from as low as two to as high as six.
4. Therefore, the most efficient way to get water out of a light aquifer is to put it in the ceiling. That way, every open tile will produce water.

The experiment used a small fort with a two-layer light aquifer. I dug out twelve different open tiles and surrounded each with a diffent configuration of aquifer tiles and constructed walls. I put a measuring column 10 z-levels high under each open tile. All the columns were closed at the bottom with hatches linked to a single lever. I left the hatches open while digging the configurations, to avoid premature water collection. Then I closed all the hatches on the first day of autumn 292. I collected data six months later on the first day of spring, and again twelve months later on the first day of autumn 293.

Here's the raw data:

Three of the four configurations that produced the most water over twelve months involved only a single aquifer tile, hence the conclusion that extra orthogonal aquifer tiles yield no benefit.

The fort with the 12-month data is here. The hatches and the lever that controls them are all on z97. You're welcome to dump out the collected water and run it again, or fiddle with the configurations.

Edit: One more detail: Light aquifers do not act as drains.

I thought I understood breakthroughs. I thought that you got breakthroughs rarely from scholars pondering, discussing, and reading in a library for many years. Then this happened:



This is a new fort that just got its first wave of migrants to push its population up to eleven. One of those migrants is a highly skilled doctor from another fort who spent lots of time as a scholar.

This fort is a 1x1 embark, which means lots of interaction with wildlife. A gray langur slipped into the fortress and bit a migrant on the foot. I had a hospital set up, with soap. But because this fort started in mid-autumn, I had no chance to grow pig tails and make cloth. So the doctor has tried several times to bandage the bitten foot, but there's no cloth. He doesn't get XP for the attempt, by the way. He's still a dabbling wound dresser.

So that's the setting in which I found this breakthrough message. It wasn't even an announcement; it just appeared in the combat log. I don't know what to make of it, but I thought I'd share it.

In my world there's a dark fortress with thousands of residents. When I get too close, the game CTDs. I had hoped to exterminate all the non-dwarf civs and usher in the Age of the Dwarf. But this site is goblin civ capitol.

Are there any sneaky ways to destroy this site or pare down its population so that I can wipe out this goblin civ?

Here are some ideas on how DF's mission system could be improved. My goal is not to expand the mission system, but rather to help fill in the gaps in what it's already trying to do.

Messenger - Send an envoy to the site. Best with high social skills. Gifts help. Catastrophic failure could result in being kicked into an huge open pit while being reminded of the site's name.
1) Sue for peace.
2) Demand surrender, so that the site becomes part of your civilization.
3) Demand economic link, so that the site becomes one of your holdings.
4) Demand complete site information.
5) Demand tribute.
6) Demand delivery of specific item.
7) Demand workers. The site must deliver some of its best and brightest citizens to work in your fort. Maybe you can choose them specifically.

Spy - One of your citizens assumes a false identity. Think Burn Notice. These missions would use and train social skills, though Ambusher and combat skills might help in escaping a mission gone wrong. These missions would follow the same logic as what the villains are already doing. Failed spies would generally end up being captured and imprisoned, needing rescue.
1) Surveillance. Stay outside the site posing as a local or traveler, chatting with outgoing visitors and caravans to gather rumors and general information about the site. A safe way to build up social skills.
2) Deep Cover. Enter the site to gather detailed information about it.
3) Establish Asset. Persuade someone in the site to work for you. Crucial for gaining a reasonable chance of success with more difficult spy missions.
4) Steal a specific item.
5) Kidnap a specific individual.
6) Assassinate a specific individual.
7) Rescue a specific prisoner.

Stealth - With these missions, the goal is attrition and theft rather than conquest.
1) Reconnoiter - Stay concealed outside the site to observe it and gain general information. A safe way to build up the Ambusher and Observer skills.
2) Infiltrate - This is the current "Raid" mission, though the difficulty should be higher. Sneak into the site as opportunities present to gather detailed information and steal at random.
3) Skirmish. This is the current "Pillage" mission, watered down. Sneak up to the edge of the site. Burst out and attack whomever you come across. Grab anything close to hand, and flee before enemy soldiers arrive. A relatively safe way to build up Military Tactician and Leader skills.
4) Raid. Sneak into the site. Burst out to create panic and confusion. Kill some people. Take control of the site for an hour or two to steal quality items, or specific items. Rescue prisoners. Leave before the enemy soldiers can regroup and counterattack.

Open Warfare - Domination is the goal. Stealth is optional.
1) Pillage. Attack the site. Spare those who surrender. Kill everyone else. Take whatever you want. Get total site information. Leave.
2) Annihilate. Attack the site. Kill everyone. Take whatever you want. Leave.
3) Raze. Attack the site. Kill everyone. Take whatever you want. Destroy the buildings. Leave.
4) Subjugate. Openly march the army to the site. No stealth option. Inform the residents that they must submit to your rule or you'll kill them all.

Peacetime
1) Colonize. Send citizens to a surrendered site to live there and rule over the conquered populace. If colonists don't arrive within six months of the surrender, then the surrender lapses.
2) Send Citizens. Send excess population to any linked site in the civ.
3) Request Citizens. As it stands currently.
4) Request Items. Like a pillage mission, but without the violence. Send some soldiers to take stuff from the target site, such as animals or artifacts.

On a mission with a stealth option, the chance of stealth success should increase with Ambusher skill and should decrease with the number of squads. If a stealth mission involves combat, the stealth adds a bonus if it succeeded and a penalty if it fails. So if you're sending a huge army on a mission, it might be unwise to select the stealth option.

Time to complete the mission would vary with mission type. Messenger missions would be quick. Spy missions would take two weeks or more as the spy establishes his false identity and works his way in. Stealth missions would take a few days. It takes time to find the right moment. In Open Warfare missions, the combat only takes a few hours, though longer if they're approaching stealthily. But the looting after the fighting could take time, and destroying the buildings would take more time.

Sites should have an alert level that would go up when they they realize that they've been the target of spying or stealth missions. The alert level would then decay over time.

Reconnaissance and Surveillance missions should be crucial to building up skills and learning enough about a site to know which missions with which dwarves are likely to succeed.

And a few tweaks to the mission system not related to the above:
1) The player should get a warning if the mission that he's planning could start a war.
2) In multi-squad missions, the soldiers should return to the fort in parallel, the same way they leave for the mission. Currently they return one at a time, which can take a long time for a big army.

On the first day of winter 291, eighty of my dwarves spontaneously decided to take off their boots.

Can anyone explain this? Better yet, does anyone have a trick to make them put their boots back on?

Ammunition should be exempt from the travesty of art defacement.

After a big battle there are hundreds of items to clean up. Sometimes I smash everything. Sometimes I pull out the meltables and smash the rest. I like big battles, so we're talking about hundreds of items. Too many to conveniently pick through by hand.

Cleaning up the battle is far more difficult when my marksdwarves get involved, because some of their masterwork bolts get mixed in with the rest of the battlefield junk. If those get smashed or melted in the cleanup, then my weaponsmith is unhappy.

With other artifacts, it makes sense for the creator to imagine that the masterwork will last forever---with the possible exception of clothing. But this is ammunition. It's designed to be used up. It makes no sense that anyone would be surprised that a bolt was destroyed. In fact, most of the bolts that are fired are destroyed when they hit their targets. Only the bolts that miss survive the battle and end up amidst the junk.