Bay 12 Games Forum

Since I was trained as a swordsdwarf, I switched to the masterwork short sword and  reserved the spear (and the 500 adamantine coins, heh heh) for distance work.  The sword has a tendency to overkill anything I meet.  It doesn't *always* kill *immediately* with the first shot, but it usually does.

Recently, however, I "bought" a basic craftelfship alder short sword from an elven "merchant". (Read: stole from a guard).  It's now my favourite, since it actually allows me to hit things repeatedly, thus increasing my sword skill quickly.

As an aside the rest of the elves actually drew blood!  Couple of pine arrows in the hand.  That's the first time I've been hit with this adventurer, and he's been through dozens of cyclopes/minotaurs/trolls/ettins and hundreds of ---men. (ant, rat, bat, trogs, etc.)  I've taken out a handful of elite gobbo bowmen, but I was always careful to sneak close and spear them.

I'm currently on a quest to find a bronze colossus, but he's in a HUGE cave system, and so far I've only found caveswallowmen, ratmen, antmen, trogs, naked mole dogs, rats, goats and the like.

I want to wrestle him  

Oh - I haven't tried it out, but I *did* make two adamantine/birch ballista ammo.  I figure they ought to do good throwing damage.  Didn't find them on my first visit to my fort, and I got spooked by that demon.

Fear the were-carp.

An entire typical town adventure would be:

- Move on top of a * on the main map - let's say the town that other Humans have named as their capital.
- Press '>' and appear on the smaller-scale map amid dry grass and mudholes.
- Start walking around.  Meet a couple dozen humans, most soldiers, the rest unhelpful.
- Systematically visit every part of the local map (takes about 4 minutes or so).  I used to run off the sides / bottom of the local map since they seem to be unmarked, but I've learned the trick of using 'C' to recenter on me as I approach an edge: if it's a map edge, I'll stay off-center.
- Eventually try walking off of each of the four map edges.
- Go back and serach for special map tiles in case I'm missing a door or something.

For reference, I think the local map is perhaps 5 screens wide and maybe a dozen or so high?  Completely covered in grass, mud, occasional trees.  Populated by a dozen or two humans, most soldiers, some unlabelled, occasionally a merchant.  And often a horse and a cow or two.

Thanks for your quick reply  

(I adventured off to a cave in the meantime because they seem to be the only places to get water... I can drink from the cave river between mudmen)

Anyone have any tips on finding toughies to fight?  I'm interested in seeing how well a trained-up dwarf compares to the various megabeasts.

But I'm not able to efficiently find opponents.  I tend to ask for quests at all the towns and cities, typically of the mayor and/or the king.  Most often they're just for semi-megas or goblin/kobold fighters.  I've only found three moderately tough critters:  The bronze colossus, who managed to tire me a bit, a modest swarm of tentacle demons, which didn't, and one fire-breathing demon, who scorched me some.

A great old one sounds like just the thing.

Doctor Lucky

I punch back to the magma as soon as I have a productive farm running.  It takes a couple of years of steady operations to make a legendary weaponsmith "the hard way" and even longer for an armorsmith.

I decided to try out the magma + chasm thing myself this last fortress.  I didn't time it precisely, but a single channel fountaining into the chasm took upwards of a year, I think, to fill the centre.

During this period, the attacks from the chasm denizens (antmen) were numerous and heavy.  I built a set of four parallel 1xN bridges across the chasm:  My corridor narrowed to 2-wide at the chasm to allow for doors, and the extra width prevents dwarves falling off when startled or punched.  The individual bridges provides some insurance against tempramental dwarves in tantrums.

As the previous poster suggested, I used an animal chained in a niche (so as to be out of the central traffic flow) at each corner of the bridge.  Anything will work: cows, kittens, whatever you've got.  The main reason I have the animals there is to keep an eye on the antmen once they appear so that I don't get interrupted by a single ambushing antman 25 times, once for each dwarf who spots him.

The antmen really didn't threaten me much, but then again I use legendary engravers to haul stuff, and they don't scare easily.  (try it - set a peasant to engrave-only until they get highly agile or become legendary.  Then set them to hauling tasks.  They move really heavy things at warp speed)

The sooner you 'pacify' the chasm, the sooner your deep delves will be secure!

My initial fortress is between the cliff face and cavern river; I lock the door to the river after discovering it.  This eliminates snakemen problems.  

But I've laid out my initial fortress very carefully - once I move deeper, I remove all the room definitions and workshops, and put in some fortifications, and it's my defense.

I establish the trading depot inside the cliff.  I route river water to a moat, and caravans have to cross a drawbridge to get to the depot.  A secondary drawbridge provides another layer before the main caverns.  Traps abound, and the entire wall of the depot chamber is fortifications, with a moat in front.  The depot is very nearly at the river.

The only excavations I make apart from my main fort are two U-shaped paths cut into the cliffs that my woodcutters must traverse to reach most of the countryside.  A channel from the river stretches to the cliff, forcing them to take this route, which is studded with traps in case they are pursued.

My refuse pile is the only external feature.  After year 3, all my woodcutting occurs underground, too.

Which raises the next point:  What's Dwarvish for "New South Wales"?

- Moving stone around takes up a huge faction of the total work that can be done by my dwarves.  Clearing a 30x30 space often generates 300-500 stones.  That's 300-500 (often long-distance) hauling tasks I really don't need to see.
- My early attempts often ran into trouble when I needed some critical mandate/need filled, and everyone was too busy clearing stone.
- The game seems to use a First-In-Last-Out queue with stone and ore stockpiles; that is, the most recently mined (and often farthest afield) stone gets moved first.  This means that if you rapidly expand, some of the earlier rooms, which you may be trying to detail and engrave, will remain full of stone.
- On the other hand, craftsdwarves and masons requiring stone for work seem to grab the closest.
- The game seems to fill older stockpiles first, even if they are on the other side of the map.  This can be mitigated to some degree using the stockpile (T)ake command.

In my latest attempt, I dealt with things this way:

Until the late game (Magma furnace and workshop established) I did not establish a stone stockpile.  None at all.

Instead, I made certain that each area I was developing had a few mid-sized rooms (3x3 or 4x4).  I would install a mason or craft workshop there, and set them to crank out stone crafts, doors, furniture, or blocks.

Remember that while stone coming *into* a workshop must be picked up by the craftsdwarf, the products are carried off by helpers, so distance from furniture stockpiles, etc, isn't so much an issue.  Plus, it seems to me that furniture uses multiple stones, so you're reducing the overall number of hauling tasks.

If I notice a lot of dark or light stones, I alter the mix of demands.

I do this outside of the normal Manager queue by deleting orders and filling their queue with my jobs.

Very quickly, the area is depleted of stones, and you can pack up the shops and replace them with bedrooms or private dining rooms, or whatnot.

Really, the stones aren't much of an issue unless you are trying to furnish an area or put a building down.  The only place I'm picky is my main corridors, since I have the impression that clutter slows down dwarf movement.  Could be wrong there.

When I require limestone for steel production  way back at the magma furnaces, I do this:
(1) carve out a swathe of riverside limestone, being careful to not hit any other rock.
(2) establish an appropriate-sized stone stockpile right at the furnace (ie: if you carved out 20 limestone stones, make it 4x5)
(3) stop all other non-ore mining activities briefly
(4) let the dwarves fill the stockpile with limestone
(5) remove the stockpile designation and restart mining, etc.  Since this is your *only* stone stockpile, no one touches the limestone.

When the smiths use it all up, do it again.

Remember that once you have some of the nobles (mayor?  manager?), you can set preferences about who works in which shops.  You can use this to pick and choose which dwarves work in your area-cleaning shops.  If you need it done quickly (Impatient nobles waiting for rooms), you can send in your master mason, who spends no appreciable time to knock out masterwork stone items.  If you have more time, assign a few Novices.

The nice thing about this approach is that none of the general-hauling, or worse yet, legendary dwarves get distracted moving rock around.

[ October 01, 2006: Message edited by: Doctor Lucky ]