Bay 12 Games Forum

While losing is fun, I like to wrestle with defeat for prolonged times until succumbing to it.
This is especially true for really good embarking locations, e.g. a location that provides iron, bituminous coal, flux, sand and clay all at once. Depending on the ultimate demise of a fortress, I often found it near to impossible to reclaim a once prosperous fortress.
They main reasons for this are stray insane former inhabitants, settled uninvited guests or violent ghosts that strangle your stone crafter before he even has a chance to memorialize them.

So i'm currently thinking about a design for a safe/panic room that aims to provide the following goals:
-provide safety for up to,say, 10 dwarves from tantrum spirals (together with all other possible dangers)
-keep them alive and happy for prolonged periods of time
-provide them with the means necesarry to memorialize those poor souls outside of the fortress
-help them deal with remaining invaders or berserk dwarves once the slaughter is over

secondary goals:
-double as a forward base for a reclaim in case of defeat in spite of the saferoom
-maybe provide the means to clean up the main fortress prior to leaving the shelter (with magma, if possible)
-if purging the outer fortress should be impossible, psychologically prepare them for the mess outside

I would like if anyone of you ever tried this approach to tantrum-spiral-countermeasure before and can give me some hints to come up with an efficient design. I don't want a secondary fortress, I want a saferoom with restricted dimensions. (say 15*15)
My current thoughts about the contents of the room include:

-A stockpile with enough high quality food and drink to feed 10 dwarves for 5 years.
-a stockpile of clothing
-minimalist legendary dining and bedrooms (maybe out of platinum, if available
-a good amount of slabs for memorializing and a craftdwarf's workshop
-a small dangerroom and some sets of steel armor and weapons
-a back entrance sealed by a wall for easy access after a reclaim
-maybe a dwarf-powered waterfall
-a long corridor to a room full of workshops. A wall of the corridor is a raiser drawbridige to atom smash moody dwarves on the way to their doomed workshop claim

I also would like to hear your estimations of the success chances of the concept. The crucial moments will be the moment a tantrum spiral is about to form, and the moment the dwarves leave the shelter and see the carnage outside. Is there a realistic chance to lock a score of dwarves in the underground Ark before the spiral of madness reaches them?

I searched the arcs and existing threads thorougly for "jusice","tantrum" and "psychology" and failed to find a thread that contains the same idea. Please have mercy on me if i overlooked something.

As it is, dwarfs seem to dish out their anger randomly while tantrumming. If dwarf A is angry about dwarf B killing dwarf C, he might kill dwarf D which was just passing by.
Would it be possible to implement a system of directed tantrums, that make dwarfs go after the (alleged) cause?
In the same example, dwarf A would specificially go after dwarf B, gaining much more happiness for beating him than he would gain from a random anger outlet.
Dwarf-perceptible causes could than be all living beings, so that military dwarfes would have a chance to calm their anger by slaughtering their enemies before going after their squad or civilians.
It might also be fun to have them recognize indirect causes, strangling the doctor for the passing of a loved one in hospital, or blaming the sheriff for a friend starving in prison. (Or even blaming the mechanic for a drawbridge-accident)

The concept could be linked to the justice system, so that the friend or family of a crime victim would go for the (alleged/framed) culprit if they felt his trial was to slow or his sentence to light. Or the familiy of said culprit would storm the jail to free him if they felt that he wasn't guilty or his sentence was to harsh. This behaviour might trigger a PART_OF_ANGRY_MOB tag, that implies the BUILDING_DESTROYER tag, allowing them to breaking down prison/guard captains office door.

There could be probabilities involved in all stages of this, allowing the misperception of the cause and the variation of the satisfaction of self-justice, so that punishing the "right one" might not quench the thirst for blood of the raging victim, still allowing classic tantrum spirals.

Again, sorry if this came up numerous times and i somehow failed to find it.