Yes, spear dodging and zombie mashing happen in different rooms. Here's a picture of my current setup:
As always, it's a result of impulsive experimentation and hasty reworking after hitting some dead ends. One could always come up with much neater design with some thought, but I've basically made it up as I go. I numbered some of the highlights:
1: Youngster training roomThe children enroll here right after they're made their first naked run to the clothes stockpile on their first birthday. They'll live in this room with their peers while getting gently disciplined with hundreds of wooden sticks, five sticks per square to be exact. The spear trap mechanisms are all hooked up to a minecart repeater seen on the lower left side of the picture.
At the middle of the training room is a swimming pool built with willow floors and filled up to 5/7 depth with water. The idea is to force students to dodge into the water when they're crossing the winding bridge in the middle and get swimming training when they struggle to get back up again. The screencap was taken right after I had used dfhack clean command (having some trouble with FPS); before that the water was basically just thick sludge of blood, pus, ichor and vomit soaked off from second level students having a swim after a hard lecture in the combat room.
As you can see, this room is no longer cross-shaped; the students will hang out willingly in the training area even when they're not trying to get to the other end of the room. I briefly toyed with an idea to build the room as a checkerboard of small swimming pools to boost Swimming training speed.
2: Combat roomThis is just an empty room with a retractable bridge forming the entire floor; there are also other features but more about them later. The students get transferred to the combat room when they hit Master in Armor User; at they point they'll also be about Legendary to Legendary+1 in Dodge as well. Here they'll battle anything hostile that I can get either captured or reanimated. If things get too hot or students end up with an unkillable enemy (like a zombie head or reanimated hair) there's an option to retract the bridge and flush everyone down to a lower level room filled with cage traps and built with willow floors to minimize falling damage.
In the screencap the students have just attended a lecture given by two Blind Cave Ogres and an undead Troglodyte. After each lecture I give them some time to cool off since constant encounters with death and undeath tend to have their toll on the dwarven psyche. It also gives me time to find new guest lecturers; they're always in short supply.
3: Zombie factoryIn the screencap the valuable worker and honored guest of Copperfell, the human Fishery Worker Necromancer
Ligir Paddedholds is chained at her position in the reanimation room. Dead corpses would be dumped into this room, Ligir would reanimate them and the zombies would get caught into cage traps while trying to charge into the fortress to kill everyone.
This was basically an attempt to provide a steady supply of training partners; it works with moderate success but most of the time Ligir's services are required in the combat room. This is the problem with a limited resource like necromancers; a reanimating biome would be more practical with industrialized zombie production.
4: Reanimation boothThis is where Ligir ended up later. A lever-operated door would expose the combat room to the necromancer's vision and she would reanimate anything dead in the room. The idea was to get more out of the guest lecturers and reanimate them again and again until they'd get too pulped to reanimate anymore. Only problem is that students tend to be very rough to their training partners and very often nothing reanimatable is left.
One notable success was when I tested the werezombie cloning bug; a head and two hands from a werehyena were dumped into the room and Ligir got to do her magic. The students ended up fighting three identical werehyena zombies in a battle of epic proportions; too bad they pulped all three zombies too badly to get another round out of them. When another werecreature visits Copperfell I'm going to try to clone dozens of werezombies before I let my students at them.
5. Aggro boothsSome guest lecturers like Blind Cave Ogres or Troglodytes need to see a member of the military before they turn hostile. I have assigned a militia veteran to a military observer status and have her stationed into a special viewing booth behind fortifications. The upper booth is to see if witnessing a hostile soldier increases reanimation chances with the necromancer; so far I've had inconclusive results.
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Topic: Dwarven Child Care [Reboot] (Werezombie Cloning Tech (What in Armok's name?!)) (Read 206252 times)