Bay 12 Games Forum

i didn't even realise vampires were in the game.

i was trying to work out how someone was drained of blood and had to go looking around the wiki.
I wondered how he managed it cos in my first forts everyone slept in one big room.

pretty sure my vampire was fairly useless.

Quote from: Bigheaded on November 25, 2012, 06:53:34 pm

accomplished is NOT enough, because dodging/armor user/shield user will be low (perhaps "adequate") these need to be adept, proficient at the least, to block most of the ranged hits.

Accomplished in a weapon skill / Fighter?

indeed, accomplished in a weapon skill, will mean low defensive skills almost every time as it takes longer to gain.
I usually grab 2 military on embark, 1 with proficient dodge, which takes 1.5 years to pass across to the other guy. Which is enough if armor user/block is high also, so at 1.5 years i'd say the 2 dwarves can take on ranged enemies fairly well. i.e i'd bet on them against ~6-8 ranged gobbos.

Open field warfare just isn't a strongpoint in this game, which is a shame.

It depends if sacrificing dwarves as "fodder" is an option for you. I've taken on 40+ gobbos (range + melee) in the open (no mounts) with 10 "idiot" dwarves in full leather and 6 proper military dwarves in full steel and massacred the lot with losses of about 6-8.

To begin with welcome!

from that i guess you mean you're going to try and shoot goblins off of a narrow bridge into a deep pit using ballistas?
then a staircase from the pit back up so if they survive they can do it again?

sounds amusing, will take a fair amount of effort to dig the hole that deep, probably easier to do only ~5 z levels and dump spikes down there to impale them on the drop.

I think several people have a "similar" setup. although it's usually placing traps along a 1 tile wide bridge, where goblins will often "dodge" the trap and jump off the edge and into the spikes below.

good luck with it, not sure what you're looking for here though, encouragement? more ideas?

squad training helps.

I just started a new fort and the first year has only just ended and i have a legendary hammerdwarf.

To be fair, i did check to choose the best of my starting 7 dwarves to see which was the best military pair, put them in the same group. I also find hammerers get more "sparring" (what you want to go up in skill very very quickly) than swordsdwarves.

You can set it so they train in pairs, i find this is less effective (perhaps easier to do though, seeing 10 militaries of 2 dwarves can be annoying) than splitting them up into separate militaries.
I also keep a pair of dwarves near my exit in leather only, they are there to slaughter thieves, one is "exceedingly agile" so due to lack of heavy armor will literally leg it out and generally catch thieves with whom are ~30 tiles away from the dwarf and map edge. It also causes much amusement when they actually get into the fort and get "found" by these guys, they get 2 squares away before dying, or less.

some screenshots to show some good tips for finding good military dwarves and training schedules:
First dwarf therapist, to show high military skills % = fast learner (1 year = legendary +3!!) not even a "berserker" or "legion" or whatever the other caste is on masterwork.


Next is the training schedule you start with (to access, press "s" to go to squad menu, select a squad (i.e "a" to select first squad) then "s" for schedules, this is the screen, default is 10 dwarves as seen:


Instead we want to remove that order (or change it) and add 5 of the following orders:


This then lets you just chuck them all in the same military, i very much suggest you keep each squad with the same weapons, some 1 squad for swords, a different one for axes etc.


very much agree with loud whispers also, make sure that ranged enemies have huge difficulty in firing on your dwarves, fight the fight in your base, if you have dwarves running around on the surface and you wish to save them by sending the squad out, make sure you hugely outnumber them and are well trained.
accomplished is NOT enough, because dodging/armor user/shield user will be low (perhaps "adequate") these need to be adept, proficient at the least, to block most of the ranged hits.

I have managed WITHOUT marksdwarves, but this does usually involve fair losses of 2-5 dwarves whom were poorly trained (i.e fodder to give much better chances of my main legendary dwarves to kill the enemy)

hope that helps

What if you don't even bother with half of the industries?

Keep it to as few as physically possible
so for me i could imagine:
1. food production
2. cooking (i'd recommend it for happy dwarves)
3. armor/weapons production (clothes needed too?)
4. Carpenter (one is all you need, for beds mainly)
5. Stone craft (would probably be on same dwarf as carpenter)
6. 1-2 miners.
7. Mason
8. Engraver?! can probably be skipped.

possibly as few as 7 dwarves needed.

I loved the idea of having some form of "mercenary" style fort, as in imagine 7 mercenaries with weapon skills just plonking down and decide to just live there.
Would make me think:
Above ground
Raid caravans (all? maybe not dwarf?)
small houses.
Very few industries

yet to try it, but can't see why it wouldn't work.

cavern animals which sit in lakes are the bane of my existence, i love cave crocs and stuff!

might edit the raws so they can't breathe or swim, that would be amusing.


on one of my saves i removed bugbats (just so many of them!) pond grabbers and some other annoying water dweller. Got me a decent amount of GCS/rutherers and stuff. bugbats are usually a pain to kill/catch due to being flier and coming in large packs, harder to kill 8 of them than just a single giant cave swallow (which are awesome to catch)

if they have a consistent training partner, they will become friends with them.

I had two "lover" legendary swordsdwarves in one fortress.

I don't really see the problem of them just getting it on in their squads

the only other thing i can think of, is that they've been given to military slots and count as "weapons" not an "axe for chopping wood" and need to be removed from the military to be able to get reassigned.

i.e lets say you have 10 slots in your military, you assigned 4 of them, then realised you needed 2 of them to do something else so unassign them, it's possible the axe is still assigned to a military spot which previously had a dwarf in it.
Remove all equipment from the empty slots usually fixes this.

If you haven't been doing much with military, i doubt it will be this.