Bay 12 Games Forum

IIRC, smoothed natural stone walls will not be climbable, so a 2-tile ditch dug in natural stone on at least the fortress side should stop most invaders. Better yet, deep, cast obsidian moat filled with magma or speeding minecarts.

I think I'll have a lot more fun with trap design in this version. Most certainly some fun with design flaws as well.

My first dragon was a big letdown, once it appeared I scrambled to get everyone to safety and put my military in the staging areas. Before I got very far, a 1-year recruit marksdwarf ran into the open, with an intention of "getting equipment", and ended up slaying the dragon. Somehow he managed to block the dragonfire with his shield while popping a few bolts in the dragon's guts. Once it passed out from pain, the recruit proceeded to bash the dragon with the crossbow.

The recruit got tired and ran off to get some rest and drink, leaving the dragon beat to a pulp but still alive. It died before the rest of the military managed to get there and finish the job, so I had a bunch of champions pass the now-marksdwarf and run up to the still warm carcass to evaluate the scene.

On topic, I made extensive use of minecarts in my obsidian farming operation. I built stairwells beneath the obsidian casting chamber, leading 2 z-levels down to a room with designated obsidian stockpiles with tracks running through them and trackstops in the middle. I put hatch covers over the stairs before filling the chamber with magma, then I'd have dwarves fish them out of obsidian rubble and place in nearby stockpile. I also had to re-dig the upped downward stairwell.

First I'd make a 44x44x2 squares worth of obsidian, then I'd mine it out, burrow a bunch of dwarves to move the obsidian to the stockpile beneath the chamber and finally assign minecarts to the hauling routes linked to the stockpiles to move all the obsidian many z-levels up and sideways from the obsidian generator.

This was a significant improvement over manual or wheelbarrow-assisted hauling, also resulted in multiple fatalities due to silly dwarves crossing paths with speeding carts filled with obsidian. The size of the operation called for a nearby well, hospital, dining hall and dormitory, all equipped with masterwork obsidian furniture of course.

@OP
best bet - read about it on DF wiki. Overwhelming, I know, but that's the only way to make sure you get all aspects of it right.

In short, and in my experience, the important stuff is:
1. get them in metal armor! steel is best, but anything is better than leather and is absolutely critical to ensuring dwarves survive a fight.
2. put them in training sooner than later, especially since they take a while to grab all the gear they need.
3. make sure they actually wear what they were assigned, they don't need to wear stuff under their armor.
4. make sure you have a hospital ready (with soap, buckets and water supply, preferably also traction benches), otherwise minor injuries can kill your dwarves.
5. until you're sure about the strength of your military, set up some traps. Stone fall traps require almost no prior setup.

The Minotaur has become enraged.
The Minotaur vomits!
The Minotaur is no longer enraged.

tl;dr to get your vampires to stay long enough in traction benches to heal, lock them away from any other dwarves as soon as they are put in traction.

The story is, I was lucky enough to get a non-useless queen sent to my fortress, great metalcrafter, furnace operator and professional weaponsmith. Also, a vampire, which was announced first thing when she arrived. Unfortunately, spending a lot of time with dwarves has made me a bit greedy, so I felt like capitalizing on the vampire part, drafted her into the military in hopes of getting a pretty unstoppable dwarf. Since I wasn't aware of the bug that made military dwarves not wear armor, she went to combat wearing mostly full steel armor, except for the wool shoos she preferred for some reason. So the next time there's a siege, her combat reports show most hits glanced off the armor, but eventually a voracious cave crawler nearly chewed off her foot. That's where the trouble started. Broken left lower leg, overlapping fracture in left ankle, left foot cut apart.

Initially she got taken away to a hospital like any other casualty, got cleaned up and her left lower leg dressed and sutured. Then after spending a while in hospital bed, she split, went to sleep in some other dwarf's bed. She spent over a year in there, before I decided to deconstruct the bed. Doctors took her back to the hospital, started fixing her lower leg, then after a while she was gone again.

My first attempt at dealing with this was to burrow the doctors over the queen vampire, so they'd get the work done before she walks off again. This worked for the lower leg fracture, which only required splints and a cast, but wasn't enough for the overlapping fracture.

Next attempt was to lock them in the hospital, that is the chief medical dwarf, the bone doctor and their lame queen. This worked pretty well, she got evaluated daily, so by enabling the diagnoser labor on the bone doctor he built up a decent skill in the three weeks it took him to get tired. Just after the bone doctor went off to take a nap in one of the hospital beds, the queen crawled out of the traction bench and got in bed with him.

That's the point it all clicked - I've found her in some random beds by that point, so this was a perfect explanation - as soon as she sensed some dwarf went to sleep, she targeted the bed and crawled over to feed. By the time she got there, the target was long gone, so she just crashed in the bed and got stuck there.

Armed with a solid theory like that, I put together a tiny hospital room with just a traction bench and chests for supplies, deconstructed all other traction benches, and waited for the queen to be brought there. I found her at the other end of the fortress, chilling in some fish cleaner's bed. Deconstructed the bed, she got brought to the only traction bench available, I walled her in and just left her there for a few months. Without the temptation of fresh blood, she would finally stay put long enough for her ankle to heal. Success!

What I learned in the process:
1. To ensure vampires stay put long enough for bones to heal, they have to be locked away alone.
2. Dwarves in traction benches generate obscene amounts of evaluation requests, good for training the skill in dwarves. The fracture rebreaks fully when leaving the traction bench early.
3. Vampires with this bug can't feed, become effectively deactivated once they crash in someone's bed.

I'd actually like for most of my dwarves to be gay or lesbian, so they'd stop breeding so fast!

Because this dwarf is already an adventurer, with everything this entrails code-wise. All that needs to be done is partial conversion to a fortress-dwarf for the duration of the embark, then back to the adventurer-dwarf mode. Everything that has no direct parallel in fortress mode would simply be appended to the save file, for use when leaving.

It just appeared to me as potentially easier to implement than allowing every dwarf from the fortress to be picked to leave as an adventurer.

Also, I do like the idea of making it possible to leave the fortress as an adventurer only if you started in the adventure mode and actually worked your way to the point of being able to embark.