Bay 12 Games Forum

In my current fort I set a legionnaire and another guy up to train out of the first migrant wave.  They had no weapons or armor.  By late fall, a 20 strong dark strangler siege came and those two wrestlers, not even guilded as such, destroyed the strabglers to man.  With a broken foot from training before hand.  Wrestlers have uses.

I lost two to warlocks ambushes, but my war drakes did a great job on the 'locks.  I am looking forward to setting up new wrestler squads with lamellar armor to go after future ambushes while I train a proper militia.

The basic draining is finished.  I ended up using a hybrid method.  In addition to the drop chutes, I build a bridge across the river and mounted screw pumps, pumping out of the flow source direction into tunnels made of walls that then dumped back into the chutes.  I did this because the central flow of the river seemed to defeat the edge-chute draining.

In the end it took well into Autumn of the second year of the fort to drain down to the river bed.  This was in part due to a failed attempt to rescue a corpse from the bottom of the chute.  I failed, unfortunately.  This led to a month or so of one chute being empty.  There was also a Dark Strangler siege that lasted about a month.

The most interesting finding was that you cannot build constructions on the river bed.  You need to somehow remove the river bed tiles via stairs or channeling or whatever, build a solid construction platform, such as walls on the z-level below, and then build your walls, bridges and what have you on top of that.

Tomorrow I will post pictures of the setup for anyone who might be interested.

Alternatively, cast obsidian around your spire.  I assume it is surrounded lava, and that is why you cannot get in?  Dig some water tunnels from the caverns above and carefully cast your way down.  Unless this trouble level is the one directly above the SMR.  Then i have no alternatives to what others have posted.

So I picked a nice embark with a river running across the middle, a major river about 11 tiles wide.  I want to build my fort as two towers with a connecting bridge across the middle.  And I wanted to get this done early, as once you reach a certain population/wealth sieges become non-trivial obstacles to above ground projects.  So this means once the initial basics are set up, time to get cracking on the river project!  I'm documenting the progress here to show another potentially useful river containment method.

Goal:  Dam the river with the ability to control the flow after the dam is complete.

Initial Design:  Build two walled in water control stations to channel water off map, draining the river.  Then, build a bridge across the river bed to provide easy control.

Initial Report:

After getting farms and a dormitory dug into a hillside, construction began.  I dug tunnels under the river from the temporary fort, and they surface on both sides of the river.  Walls have been erected to completely enclose the tunnels from all but flying hostiles.  Once this was complete, each water house had a 1x7 raising bridge built at water level, and a 1x7 drop chute built behind the bridge.  The drop chute falls to the first solid stone layer, to prevent future cavern breaching from causing trees to grow in the drainage tunnels.  From the drop chute, 1 tile wide tunnels were dug to the map edge and fortifications were put in place to drain water.

After these constructions were complete, the tiles on the river edge were channeled to provide a river outlet.  So far drainage is going as planned.  The river has fallen from 7/7 water to 4/7 water downstream, and 1/7 water at the edge of the map.  This has taken 2 months.

A further progress report will follow once riverbed begins to show up.

Your quote about the portals made me think of this:

"This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space.  If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today."

http://xkcd.com/1133/

So... does building two portals crash the game, or just scatter the various pieces of teleported stuff between the two portals?  With Monoliths or an evil embark this could actually be a very interesting bit of controlled chaos.  Add the script for conserving momentum and a minecart with a skeleton or ghoul, and you have a teleporting gibbet shotgun of reanimating death!

Huh.  I assumed phylacteries were permanent vessels.  But i suppose that would require more steps, with one item for full and one for empty phylacteries.

I've seen drow with bloodsteel weapons cut an arm off through adamantine armor.

Best of luck .  A few random notes I remember:

The phantom dump zone is by the brazier spot outside the walls to the NW of the fortress.

Some levers are no longer linked because of bridges burning.

The depot is full of useful and useless stuff.  There is also lots of forbidden mithril and bloodsteel items outside, if you care to try and get them.  There was also a hidden drow ambush to the NE edge of the map.  In my alternate reality, that ambush cut of my arm through the adamantine armor.

The wells are a threat, and some of the stair shafts looked like they had potential diagonal access.

Your missing units might also be spawned (town portal'd) units.  Meph posted a script a few pages back that I think addresses things.

I had no idea where to start, but praying for water or using a brewery to get some from booze are good ideas - you have many injured with all the surface water frozen and the wells are a long haul.