The war animal breeding project has finally paid off. In a burst of trainer activity, my 'trained animals' count has finally surpassed that of 'other' animals, including the dozen or so sheep that have fallen into the ditch. Oh, and my total animal count is around 450.
A goblin ambush arrived right at my front door (impossible to close, because it's right on the border) a day or two before the human caravan arrived. I was a bit confused, because a human pikeman arrived at the same time, but that turned out to be a member of the goblin civ. Four ran straight into the cage traps, the remaining two were held up by the war giant jaguars in the gate. After watching the show for a while (war animals badly need a power boost - _giant jaguars_ can't do real damage to poorly equipped goblins) i sent in the backup archer squad. The captured invaders have been released (i.e. dumped through a hatch) into the goblin suite, ten rooms in engraved marble but equipped with the shittiest furniture i could find (superior quality chests, how gauche!) and with some stoneware statues of the hamsters our potter hates so much.
A season earlier, yet another bloody gobbo archer squad had shown up and shoved one of their own into a trap to lure out a dwarf on 'clean trap' duty. The stout woodcrafter took a while to realise her predicament, but managed to get out of bowshot before falling unconscious from a broken middle spine. Fortunately, it was only the bone and healed perfectly. She's suffered sensory nerve damage, but since that doesn't impede her mobility and her legendary woodcrafting skill is completely useless anyway (minimum-size map with mostly mountain, so definitely no wood to spend on anything other than the bare necessities like charcoal to make cummy copper crafts), i don't count it as a problem.
I also finally gave up on trying to train three dwarfs at once. They had run into a neverending demonstration loop getting nowhere: i think they were in fact _losing_ skill in 'active training' mode, because they never did anything but 'organise demonstration', one would walk off to sleep/eat/fill waterskin, the whole shebang would fizzle with no benefit of any kind and they'd start over from scratch. A full year of this, and they were 'rusty' in all their defensive skills, thanks to 'training' nine months out of twelve.
I removed one from the squad, put her?/him? into a fresh two-dwarf squad with a freshly-grown-up girl and edited the minimum training requirement to two. With any luck, they'll actually manage to get past 'adept' weapon user this way. Grrr.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 5862815 times)