Bay 12 Games Forum

Ironically, I got a gateway error when I posted that and wasn't sure it had gone through. I didn't dare F5 it though.

Quote from: DompR on December 01, 2012, 01:01:28 am

Quote from: Lich180 on November 30, 2012, 10:55:54 pm

Or if you don't want to worry about traps jamming at all, build upright spikes, link them to a lever, and set the lever to be pulled repeatedly. Its what I started using my last fort, works very nicely.

Is there any way (other than physical separation) to keep my soldiers from charging over the spikes and making the walls all pretty-colored? Most of them have high quality steel armor, so maybe making the spikes copper could reduce the danger to them but still be deadly to gobbos?

Don't let them see the invaders when the most obvious path to reach them crosses the spikes.  If you want them to take the fight outside for some reason, don't use a Kill order, use Station orders to move the squad step-by-step along a path to the battleground which does not include the trap corridor.

For keeping them from charging prematurely, switchbacks are your friends. An airlock can be used for the second suggestion.

Dwarves are always the cause of tantrum spirals. Having only one dwarf schould solve this problem 
(Maybe an interesting idea for a challenge: One-Dwarf-Challange. Everything have to be done with only one dwarf, all others must be killed as soon as possible.)

Another way to look at it is that with only one dwarf, every tantrum is a tantrum spiral, but they always stop after one tantrum-related death.

You can use military scheduling to have your marksdwarves stand within a specific area:

First, set up a burrow containing the tiles you want the marksdwarves to stand on while defending the fort, i.e. those right behind the fortifications. Name it something easy to identify, like "Marksdwarves station" or soemthing. Do NOT contain any other tiles in the burrow, e.g. "walkways" into the fort. That will cause this method of stationing not to work properly.

Second, go into your Alerts screen (m -> a) and create a new alert. Name it something so that you'll know it's the defensive alert. Then go into the scheduling screen ('s' from the military interface) and use / or * to scroll to the alert you just created (which alert you're on is displayed at the top of the scheduling screen: "Squad Schedules: [alert name]"). It should be blank, i.e. full of "no scheduled order." Scroll left or right to your Marksdwarf squad (use / or * if necessary) and press o to give an order, which should start at "Defend burrows." Select the burrow you created for your marksdwarves, change the minimum and preferred soldiers if you like, and issue the order with Shift+Enter. You should now have a single "Defend Burrows" order on your marksdwarf squad's list: press c to copy it, then scroll to each other month and paste the order in with p.

Now whenever you need your marksdwarves to move to the fortifications, just select the squad in your Squads list and press 't' to cycle through the alerts to the one you made. Your dwarves will activate and rush to stand in the little strip behind the fortifications, and won't move away from there except to get provisions, IIRC. At the least, they won't wander around as they would with a Station order.

This can be combined with a separate alert to put them on a patrol, as roy suggested. That'll keep one or two dwarves (however many you assign) nearby and stocked up at all times.

Hmm... If he survives the tournament, arm him with whatever your standard equipment is and send him to do all the dangerous stuff you don't want to lose more valuable dwarves to. Give him the custom profession name 'Arbiter.'

One could also make entire squads of shock troops formed from such outcasts. Assuming there are ever more than one alive.

I have a squad of marksdwarves who consistently one-shot their enemies... by shooting them in the thighs and opening major arteries. It's like they know the bone bolts will just bounce off the metal helms so they say "eh, next best thing" and bleed them out on purpose.

I generally use something similar to this when building vertical underground forts. When possible, I leave the hallways out and just do rooms on the corners of the staircase and cut the doorways directly into the stair shaft. It's quicker (pathing-wise) than traveling along a hall then up into the room. If you need more than four rooms, you can also do a small-ish lobby of sorts and do eight rooms, one on each side and one on each corner.

I also only use stockpiles to get materials to their workshops. When possible, I put workshops that rely heavily on each other side-by-side: tanner's workshops next to butcher's workshops, loom-dyer's-clothier's areas, etc. That way I don't have to have separate piles for everything: for example, I put a stockpile next to the loom for thread, and one next to the dyer's workshop for dyes, and that's it for that industry. The looms pull thread from the stockpile and weave it into cloth; the dyer takes the cloth straight out of the loom and dye from the nearby pile; the clothier takes the dyed cloth from the dyer's shop to make clothes or whatever. If you had stockpiles for everything, there would be an extra hauling job in between each of those things, to take the cloth to its stockpile. Another example, furniture doesn't generally need a stockpile in my forts: I make it, then I build it, and that's it.

Along those same lines, you might consider planning out your floor order so that interdependent industries are near each other. If your farms are at the top of your fort but your clothing workshops are at the bottom, the extra hauling time to take the pig tails, dyes and bags back and forth can cut into your efficiency. If you put the mason's workshops at the top of the fort, that's that much farther to haul stone from the mines. Et cetera.