Bay 12 Games Forum

I installed fortress defense and it was pretty darn entertaining watching the sieges of dark stranglers. First, the moment they saw incoming dwarves they bravely ran away, climbing up trees. Running was extremely wise, because whenever a dwarf punched a strangler the struck part would explode in a mess of gore.

Combat training seems to have significantly changed. I was using a squad of 3 all who embarked with proficient weapon user and proficient discipline and I did my standard small-squad sparring thing, and after a year or so weapon skills had only increased by a few levels, and one had even become a wrestler, because her wrestling and unarmed skills had surpassed her spear dwarf skill. Fighting skill had developed normally. It seems dwarves must be showing a much greater tendency to using non-weapon attacks, especially striking. I don't believe general skill gain was any slower - as mentioned one had become a talented-ish spear user, and an even higher level wrestler, so had gained plenty of skill, just not in stabbing things. Observer skill now appears in the list, and discipline skill trains quite quickly.

It appears that personality has more affect on dwarves. Early on I was surprised to find my miner taking a nice break. I checked his profile and he like totally didn't believe in working hard. His break was both longer and came earlier than other dwarves. I suppose such guys naturally belong in the military, or as haulers. It was okay because later he fell off my magma stack to his death.

In my game I had the caravan arrive, but the game said "No liason, how odd". A bit later an immigrant woodcutter spontaneously became King/Queen (in one place it calls her the King, in another place the Queen).

So I built a magma pump stack on a heavily forested swamp type map, coincidently this exercise confirmed that things like piercing aquifers and pump stacks work just as before, no surprises or new behaviour at all. Having built the stack the next logical thing to do was to set the forest on fire for the sake of !!SCIENCE!! ala seeing what happens.

First of all, it's about as cool as you'd imagine, the fire sweeps up into the branches then spreads through the canopy and stuff. It does not appear to jump gaps, but only spreads from one burnable tile to another (in 3-diminisons)

But then things start getting a bit weirder.

The fire isn't very destructive and when a tree is burned out the parts all show as 'dead XYZ' (i.e. dead trunk, dead branches, dead twigs), oddly enough the bottom z-level of trunk does not burn and does not become dead. If you cut down a dead tree you still get logs. After a while the dead trunk and dead branches spontaneously come back to life, this appears to rely on a percentage chance per tick that the tree will return to life, as it can both happen nearly instantly after burning, and take basically forever. A regrown tree is immediately flammable again.

Tree regrowth is fast, within one season a fully burned out forest will look pretty normal again. It's fast enough that trees come back to life before the fire has finished sweeping the map, also there are hotspots which keep burning for a long time then re-ignite the regrowth meaning you could conceivably have a permanent forest fire. But as noted above, fires don't appear to jump gaps nor burn dead trees, since it takes a while for twigs and leaves to regrow, the regrowth fires have more trouble spreading.

As before, trees are generally unperturbed by being flooded with magma. They don't even catch on fire if there is nothing flammable below (like a forest fire has already swept through recently), it probably requires grass->leaves to start a canopy fire. I have not built the stack high enough to dump magma on a tree from above, but that is the next logical step.

There is one serious disappointment though, as trees burn the game will announce "Something on the surface has collapsed!" and pause . This means you have to hit resume about a bazillion times a second. Unless you turn CAVEINS off, this makes forest fires totally unplayable until toady fixes this or DFhack is back in business - with autoresume it would be pretty cool. It seems the 'collapsed' bits are branches or perhaps twigs, as a fire seems to outright destroy a percentage of the canopy tiles leaving other bits unsupported. This results in big bombs of dust which in the rare times when it's not pausing it's ass off looks pretty cool to watch unfolding. It would be awesome to set a forest on fire when the elves come and have them burnt alive and bombed by their beloved trees! Right now though, the caving in thing just makes it uncool.

Here's a picture of the forest fire:

Yeah it works pretty well but the raws need to be updated if you don't want your walls to look like boulders or other random things. Also treeroots and leaves look like fish. I suppose you could just clobber the raws with the last version, but you'd probably lose some content that way even if it doesn't break the game.

Others have commented on wood but no one has emphasized the magnitude of WOOD! When you embark on a heavily forested area and chop down the trees in like a 20x20 tile area you'll have like 600-1000 logs. And the best thing is the trees slice themselves up into conveniently sized logs!

Trees in caverns can also be absolutely huge, if the ceilings are high enough. I found lots of cavern trees growing in 7/7 water, I know this happened in .34 too, but now it kind of looks better because the tree just has its roots in the water but it grows in the air. Harvesting such trees would almost qualify as a stupid dwarf trick.

This sheer magnitude of wood changes things. On heavily forested maps you could easily eliminate your dependency on the magma sea, even when smelting heaps of steel. Also wooden items become cheaper than dirt (like literally, logs are so much quicker to cut down, than rocks are to dig up!).

edit: The other thing. Did some above ground herbalism. You get all sorts of gross sounding booze, like turnip beer or something.

I admit, playing "Dear Abbey" with DF is a real kick, but finding a suitable letter to respond to can sometimes be challenging. I have more fun responding to letters than I do seeing events that would warrant writing my own.

Ah yes, the truth is that most cases of dwarven death are preventable through efficient overseership. It doesn't change the fact that dwarves are angry little suicide monkeys that have zero survival instinct and seem hell bent on killing themselves if not kept in a the equivalent of a children's playpen with no toys small enough to choke on. And then there actually are the ones which mood up a larch earring, or demand a fine pewter bed in their office, which really just makes dwarves a realistic reflection of humans, right down to adopting a bazillion cats then going stark raving mad because the authorities take all the cats away and put them down.

I prefer to replace Dodging with one of the lesser-trained skills. Dwarves sparring with nothing but armour will level their Dodge skill quite quickly through lack of other options, but getting them to train at kicking and biting is always difficult. I'm not sure how effective biting is in its own right, but it can produce some neat results.

Preliminary testing indicates a hierarchy of combat skills:
Weapon User > Fighter > (Shield User, Dodger, [Armor User]) > (Striker, Kicker, Biter, [Armor User])

Weapon user is better than every other skill combined, in other words if in arena you make a dwarf who is a proficient weapon user, and make another dwarf who is proficient everything else except weapon user, then the proficient weapon user will win more often than not. It would appear the game, when doing combat rolls, compares 'combat level', and if one combatant 'out skills' the other, the more skilled one basically wins, if he outskills by a lot, he thrashes the opponent. hence 'skill optimization' basically comes down to trying to make your dwarves weapon skill as high as possible as quickly as possible.
Fighter is better than all the lesser skills, but not hugely better. A proficient Fighter will tend to lose to a proficient Shield User and Dodger.
Skills like Biter and stuff are so bad, that if you make one dwarf is who proficient weapon user, and another who is proficient weapon user and biter, striker and kicker, then it is difficult to see a statistical difference in win/loss ratio. This is unlike the Fighter and Shield User / Dodger skills, which do have a discernible affect even if it's slight compared with the overpowering affect from weapon user.
Armor User sometimes appears to have a benefit, for dwarves who are very heavily armored. For dwarves who aren't loaded to the gills with armor, it doesn't seem to do much, and I don't know how much it does for very strong, very agile dwarves who shrug off the weight of even the heaviest full plate. In the best case it's about equal to dodger.
Regardless of how good skills like Biter are (and as testing indicates, they are so poor they barely register), there is another serious consideration: Whenever a dwarf has a skill, he might see fit to do demonstrations for that skill. Whenever a squad is doing demonstrations, they aren't sparring, whenever they aren't sparring, they aren't gaining weapon and fighter and shield user skill. In other words, your dwarves are spending time skilling up nearly totally useless skills, which prevents them skilling up very useful skills. Demonstrations for weapon user skills (only dwarves who have that weapon equipped will attend, others will spar or drill or hang out) may or may not be a better use of time than just sparring. Normally in small squads I cross-skill (one has axe, the other hammer) so they can't do demonstrations for their weapon skill. Unfortunately even if weapon user demonstrations are a good use of time (and I suspect they are decent), it's hard to get a high level weapon user instructor, who doesn't also have a bit of striker and kicker and stuff, and he'll waste a lot of time teaching those useless skills.

There is a DFHack command which will boost the skill gain rate by larger squads, this makes it possible to use large meelee squads and while they still waste lots of time teaching learning completely useless sh*t (hey, just like real life education), the hack increases the experience gain for large squads, so when they are doing useful stuff, it counts for a lot more.

The basic conclusion is that what really matters is becoming a legendary +5 weapon user ASAP. As noted above, additional skills on top of weapon user, barely matter, basically the only thing which matters is how high your weapon user skill is. Fighter is also a good skill, but it always skills up faster than weapon user when sparring, so you can't micromanage anything to make fighter improve faster. Shield User skills up pretty quickly, at about half the rate of weapon user. It's a decent skill but probably not worth micromanaging the squad to try and improve it faster because it wont be far behind weapon user anyway. Dodger is a decent skill too which skills up quite slowly, however once a dwarf is legendary +5 Weapon User, Fighter and Shield User, then adding every other skill under the sun wont make a discernible difference to his combat performance, hence rather than messing around un-equipping his weapon and shield or whatever, it's probably better to have him always combat-ready. Of course if you're the kind of player who likes to make full masterwork armor, then you might anyway, but that is perfectionism for the sake of perfectionism, not for practical effectiveness.

This is what the fall of my last fortress 'Gilded rain' looked like:


Note the zombies (bottom right ish), flooding everything with magma was the only way to be sure!. May they all rest in peace.