Bay 12 Games Forum

I did some experiments with the different damage types modded onto trap comps, ones. I didn't find MUCH out-certainly, comps designed to "burn" or "heat" damage didn't set stuff on fire. However, I did find one thing out, which explains why whips, scourges, and most bite attacks are useful despite low damage counts:

Gore damage (whips, a lot of bite attacks) is friggin' hardcore.

Quote from: riffraffselbow on August 19, 2009, 11:06:11 am

Quote from: Rowanas on August 18, 2009, 07:33:40 pm

Every bar of iron is a special and precious commodity. every block of obsidian, copper, silver and kimberlite is special, because without it, your craftsdwarves would make platinum piccolos

See, I hold a differing opinion. I do my best to try to steer the crafters in to the most expensive components; I'm never in a critical shortage of, say, aluminum, so it's not a problem. I had a crafter make a Steel crossbow, with Blocks of native Aluminum; I considered this a great success. I love added wealth.

Personally, I hate added wealth by artifacts. To see my fort of about 400k wealth suddenly make a 1mil adamantine artifact makes everything else seem worthless. That, and I believe more wealth=more goblins.

But when you think about it, isn't that the way it is? If a fort produces a thousand masterwork steel swords, then you'd have a reputation for good swords, people would come buy your swords. If a fort produces one singular piece of work, a solid gold blade inlaid with precious stones and with craftsdwarfship beyond any other...

Look at it this way, then. Renaissance era. In three centuries, there must have been thousands of individual pieces of art created, buildings, portraits paintings, sculptures, and what have you. But you don't REMEMBER the white noise. You remember the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel paintings, and you remember da Vinci and Michaelangelo. If you make something good but not great, it fails to rise above the crushing seas of mediocrity. Only by creating a work of art so great that people centuries later are still awed by it do you really distinguish yourself. So yes, it makes perfect sense to me for one artifact to be worth more than the rest of my fort put together.

Note though that right now the game doesn't have very good controls for war animals-I don't know how exactly it works, but when assigning war animals to a dwarf, there's no option to assign a specific type.

Add the [trAINABLE] token to them and you'll be able to train them as war jaguars. My current fortress has war dogs, war cougars, war jaguars and war black bears. [trAINABLE] is a fun little token to apply liberally

I can trump that. One of my fortresses has war monkeys. War jaguars might be dangerous, but war rhesus macaques make you wish you'd never been born.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhesus_macaque

How would you like to get torn to pieces by fifty of those?

I have a friend who likes to browse the Internet a lot. He points me to a lot of different stuff. Including shock websites on occasion-this is also the guy, I'm pretty sure, who introduced me to lemonparty and Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Anyway, he told me about DF and I've been playing ever since the 2D era.

See, when I got my first orc siege on this one fortress, I had been setting up this immense diversion route-something where, when I closed a set of floodgates, all traffic in and out of the fort got diverted from a one-tile-long route from staircase to staircase, to a huge hallway a couple hundred tiles. I locked the front door, then rigged it into a drownitorium by diverting the plumbing for my farm (fed by a windmill/pump from a brook, this setup being contained in a walled enclosure). This worked pretty well, and this fort broke several sieges until one day one lucky orc wrestler and his GIANT WOLF SPIDER MOUNT broke away from the pack and got out before the chamber sealed. He was eventually beaten, but he killed like eight dwarves and nearly put me into a tantrum spiral. I got tired of the fort, since several of my better workers got eaten by the spider and the rest of the dwarves were being whiny brats about their poor lovers and best friends getting spidered to death, so I opened the floodgates and diverted the brook into the fort.

Stayed awake for two hours watching the place flood. It was glorious. The last batch sheltered in the drownitorium, built butcher shops, and butchered all the surviving animals, then waited for the water to claim them. One dwarf, trapped in his bedroom with 5/7 water, survived long after two or three entire levels above him were completely submerged. Made it to proficient swimmer before he died of either thirst or starvation-I remember finding that dwarves wouldn't drink water on their own level.

Won't they attack the foals? I remember reading that horses who gave birth during a siege attacked the foals.

I just set my immense miscellaneous-labor gang to Siege Operator. It gives me a good pack of highly skilled siege operators-twenty, perhaps, depending on fort size. It gives one of my primary sources of hauling labor a lot of experience. And it means that I generally have a good few dwarves who can be pulled off of tasks to go lob stony death at the orcish infidels.

I think that if you sling them into a pit outside of a cage, beakies will breed so long as you've managed to catch at least a breeding pair. Judging by the number you've caught, I'm pretty sure you have.

I've never toyed much with beakie breeding, though. The few beak dogs that blitz through the magma shower ahead of the lever-puller dwarf usually get thrown to the monkeys. (Pit full of tame rhesus macaques; I don't care if they're tiny little monkeys, they still have teeth and poo flinging!)