Bay 12 Games Forum

So I have this fort going with population cap 7: five girls and two boys. A few years in, the female leader, Sodel Konosshis, says she personally values romance, but she is still calling Thikut Endokegath, the Brewer/Cook, a "friend". If asked about Sarvesh Ustuthalis the miner, she says she is "on friendly terms" with him. 
And as the years go by, not only is my fortress failing to grow, but worse, I see Sodel slowly sinking into a depression. No luxury furnishment can offer consolation.
(I did assign one of the other dwarfgirls the custom profession of "gelder", hope this has nothing to do with it.)

The mission is clear: hot steamy dwarf love. My tavern clearly isn't cosy enough for them. I am thinking of building a ridiculously large new one with all brass floors, walls, tables and chairs, and lots of golden statues. If that doesn't bring a dwarf in the mood, I don't know what will. Ideas?

My last fort went down because the first trader caravan that arrived had a diplomat with a were curse, who went berserk in my dining hall. I gave up as soon as I noticed what was going on..

So.. how do I prevent this from happening in the future? The only practical defense I can think of against this kind of attack is walling in and never allowing traders into the fortress again. Was this extreme bad luck?

embark on alligator, lasts 10 secs

Said this before, but: I had this happen, too, but was able to beat the thing down. Enlisted all 7 into a squad, wrestled him. Seven dabbling wrestlers > one alligator.

Then again, this method needs some further improvement. Those seven wrestlers didn't manage to actually kill the thing, they only overwhelmed it. In the end the fight lasted so long that my dwarves died of dehydration.

Yeah.. I have a child in one fort that went insane and now refuses to drink, even though he is badly dehydrated. Is there any way to force him to drink something?

Honestly, I get bored fast with the amount of micromanagement necessary to keep a fort efficient at over 50 or so dwarves. Call me a coward, but I generally just set the population to something lower in d_init, and up it if I feel like it later on.

Me, too.. I suck at multitasking. The d_init file is in your "data" folder. I have the population cap set to 12 and the child cap to 3. That seems to stabilize your population to about 20 guys (although I'm a new player and never played a fort longer than about 3 years yet, so not sure).

Hello, newcomer to the forum here. I've been playing for one week, totally hooked now.

I like how all the animals that killed my forts have been mentioned now.

One embark was destroyed by an alligator.. it attacked one of my dogs about 2 seconds into the game. I had just figured out the basics of militia, so I assigned all my 7 starting dwarves to a squad and ordered them to kill it. What happened next was really funny. They pounced the alligator with their bare hands (I had not yet discovered the equip button, so they were 7 little wrestlers), and overwhelmed it. The alligator was scared and ran off. I would have let him, if he had not wounded a dog. A dog!  So I let my dwarves run after him instead to kill it. What followed was an incredibly long fight, where the dwarves just kept pounding and pounding on the beast without managing to kill it. After a few minutes the alligator vomited out his guts, every part of his body bruised or worse.. but he just didn't die. On the other hand he didn't get in a counterattack, either. I had to laugh a lot as I watched the scene. All of my dwarves gained levels in wrestling as it continued.. and then they suddenly all died to dehydration. Lol!

I wonder though: is there a way I could have ordered one dwarf to get booze or water for the others? Learning how to make your dwarves do what you want is really what makes this game difficult. In other games you click on a guy and tell him what to do. In this game, you have to struggle through a menu jungle and hope it somehow influences what your dwarves are doing.

Elk birds have murdered another one of my fortresses, yeah. Fun times.