Bay 12 Games Forum

i forgot to lock the doors to the first floor of my giant cave spider silk farm, and a curious puppy just had to wonder in and so got webbed from friendly spider fire, and promptly falling 1 floor down due to the repeating retracting bridge. The puppy sustained horrible, horrible injuries due to the fall and due to all the webbing that fell on him, but now there was no way for him to get out at all since the second level's bridge is only activated by a manual lever and was another retracting bridge. So i pulled the lever so the puppy could get out from the last level, which is where my dwarves retrieved the silk. The puppy took another round of falling with all the accumulated silk on his back, one of which broke his lower spine so he started suffocating. The puppy soon died, letting out one last muffed "yelp" and his corpse made my dwarves wander into the silk collection area since they wanted to store his corpse in the refuse quantum stockpile. Now my silk operations are shut down for this time since i was doing a stockpile overhaul, and soon there was massive job cancellations, children, other pets, and items getting stuck in the collection zone due to all the webbing and dwarves getting webbed trying to get stuff from it. I ended up just forbidding everything and leaving the door open as well as making the area low traffic, so no more dwarves went inside and the children/pets slowly wandered out. But dam, it was a hell of a mess, so many items stuck in there, clothes, logs, corpses, rotting food, and the place was full of miasma, which proceeded to sink into my central stairwell due to the close proximity to the collection zone.

all because 1 puppy had to be curious...

hmm, im starting to notice most ppl like to build alot on 1 Z level. Am i the only one who hates using planar space too much?

If you place a lot of fast-eating grazers on the layers, they'll clear out the fungus/moss for you. Just make their pasture also a sand or clay collection area, and whatever bald patches they create will be available to your dwarves.

this is the best way, i have a flock of ewes that provide me with wool and milk (and occasionally meat and bones, for the older sheep and to prevent sheepsplosion) grazing on my red sand collection zone to keep it clean of moss.

If you have no grazers and have slaughtered them all, consider catching a draltha or elk birds from the caverns and keeping a few (1, if draltha) as a pet on the sand area so they eat all the moss.

lucky...im about to abandon my kobold vampire outsider despite him being stronger than a demigod now and can solo dragons (he started as a peasant) since its so boring that everyone (including bandits) is at peace with him and respect him since he performed many "heroic deeds" and is not a member of any civilization, that anyone might be at odds with (outsider).

some ppl get all the FUN, i wish my adventurer had more =(

So, got a goblin siege, no big deal, I lock the doors and position my fighters behind them and the archers at a vantage point. They brought trolls, so the doors were going to break, and when they finally did, rather than stay at their stations and wait like I wanted them too, all my dwarves rush into the newly-created choke-point, with a swarm of goblins on the other side, and twenty or so of them die, one-by-one in a neat little line, bodies piled in the doorway.
Is there any setting like the old "stays close to station" option to prevent these suicide rushes? it seems like dwarves will chase an opponent to the ends of the map and back, no matter what their orders are. In older versions I could set them to stick close and a defense like this would hold up, but there seems to be no way to prevent suicide charges now without specifically building blind-spots so your dwarves don't see the opponent.
This is probably the worrse siege I've had, and it should have been simple, but because they wouldn't keep their station, choosing to go single-file into the goblin meatgrinder, I lost over half my military in a matter of minutes.
I tried to deactivate them to get them to flee but they kept their line moving for whatever odd reason.

should have positioned them further, this is a classic example of dorf dumbness.

im not joking when i say goblin squads are more coordinated in their movements and attack than dwarves, at least they constantly follow their leader instead of needing to complete 1 order before following another if you issued a new order (such as if they first order would bring them too close to the enemy, and you issue a second move order to move away, they MUST move towards the first order first and THEN follow the second order). Dwarf squads are also almost never together, at most you get like 8 out of 10 squadies in a group before one of them runs off to drink or something. They also tend to rush ahead of each other when issued a move, especially marksdwarves, resulting in enemies closing the distance fast and causing 1 or 2 casualties in the rushers before the rest of the squad comes and puts the enemy down.

i think a better use of your melee dwarves would just to be to have them hang in a pit, a arena of sorts while you control a lever and drop parts of the enemy's army in at a time while they finish off the pitted enemies while they're stunned from the drop.

The problem I now have is that I don't get that much satisfaction out of the game.

you'll start feeling it when you crush attempted goblin sieges and pit their siege commanders in poking chambers and lava-pit slow cookers (slow-cooker is a design where they only have contact with magma briefly, allowing time for them to writhe around and burn to death slowly).

oh yea i forgot to mention i have my child population capped at 20% of my adult population, so i dont have that many children either. Its worth noting im looking for population growth (my fort was built with a capacity for at least 400) not just simply sustained growth to death ratio.

i really dont want to mod the vanilla growth rate for children cuz i view it as kinda exploitish, but my fortress's civ is a special case. I have not received new migrants for the last 3 years now, despite having the population cap at 300, with only 159 working adults at the moment and almost 10 million wealth. My fort's civ does not have any important leaders and although the civ was available to play, i could not identify any sites that the civ actually occupied on the world map when it started out. I also got very limited migration the first few years when migrants did come, and almost every migrant wave had merchants migrating it, presumably because of the limited number of civilians the civ had.

Now almost every early season i received the message "the fortress attracted no migrants this season", and over the last 3 years i received more forgotten beasts (i had a record of 6 beasts in 2 months) than i did migrants. So the question again, should i mod the growth rate of children to be lower so i can see a timely population growth? because atm my fort isnt even 12 years old yet.