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Author Topic: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins  (Read 1763 times)

floofytrainnerd

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small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« on: March 26, 2020, 06:24:11 pm »

hey all,

this is my first post here. it's been a long time since i've been on any sort of forum, but i wanted to share something that i've just found. i'm sure this isn't even close to the first time something like this has been posted, but i recently generated a small world to make an adventurer fort in, and my first observation upon loading it into legends viewer is this:

it's absolutely fucking coated in goblins.


a couple of things were immediately obvious when i looked at this (after the 2-10 second delay my brain takes to process things)

1. the only remaining dwarven civ has only 4 dwarves, the other 5,681 civilized pops are entirely goblins. the same goes for basically every civ, there's a handful of non-goblin pops mixed in with (a frankly ridiculous amount of) goblins.
2. every human civ is dead. i haven't been playing for too long (maybe a month or two at this point), and i'm sure this is a very common thing, but i'd never seen this happen before.
3. there's so many goblins that the pie chart wheel on the right (i'm sure it has an actual name but i don't know it) is entirely green except for a small white space (representing the extreme minority of anything but goblins).

looking down a bit, we can see the numbered list of pops, and it's goblins.


as for the one remaining dwarven civ, they have one site, and from briefly skimming through their history it looks like all they've ever done is throw competitions, performances, and ceremonies. i don't know what they're celebrating, but it's probably goblins. surprisingly, the king isn't a goblin, but his mother was a vampire so i'm not sure if he counts.

i settled my fortress a ways to the east-southeast, and dubbed it "Legendloaf the Last Bastion of Beer". it's meant to be a tavern, i originally intended to start adventurers from it but i don't know if that's going to happen at this point.

currently it's the year 251 (the 9th of granite, less than a year since we settled in). not much notable has happened to the fort itself (other than our liaison being a goblin, but that's to be expected), but looking at the population numbers something odd has happened.


for one, somehow in the span of less than a year, the population of every race has increased dramatically (there's a bit of purple on the pie chart wheel now from the kobolds!), except for the goblins where ~5000 of them died off somehow. i didn't look into any events yet, but i feel like that's a lot of goblins to die in that short an amount of time.

the second thing is our civilization has reclaimed two fortresses nearby, yet when i check in fort mode it looks like we're not at war with any goblin civs. i'm not sure if i'm missing something there, but i figured i'd mention it.


again, this is my first post, so let me know if i messed something up, or if you want to hear more.

EDIT: fixed the images, sorry about that

EDIT 2: here's a link to a google drive with the legends exports. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_uNBU50CKiefgRnGnJWtsx890bLQdZoK?usp=sharing
i'm still figuring out how to read it, so i'm sure i missed a ton in it.
« Last Edit: April 06, 2020, 03:43:01 am by floofytrainnerd »
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mko

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Re: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« Reply #1 on: March 26, 2020, 06:45:14 pm »

I was not investigating it deeper. But it appears that there are huge differences between how world behaves in worldgen and once player started playing.
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delphonso

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Re: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« Reply #2 on: March 26, 2020, 08:36:02 pm »

That's an odd spread of civilizations.

As for the jump in citizens, the game will generate a handful of historical figures when you start a fort or if anyone visits. Mostly it's diplomats and noble positions that weren't filled before. Not sure about the kobolds...

The humans being wiped out is actually pretty odd. In my experience, they're the most hardy after dwarves and goblins. Kobolds are usually the first to die, then elves.

DrCyano

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Re: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« Reply #3 on: March 29, 2020, 03:35:40 pm »

I hate it when the goblins over-populate the world, and it's pretty common for them to do so. As I understand it, the underlying cause is that goblins are immortal and do not require food.

In other words, in the absence of war to thin the goblin numbers, every world is destined to turn into an ever-increasing ball of goblins until critical mass is reached and the resulting nuclear fusion creates a new star. This is the origin of stars in Dwarf Fortress.

At least in version 0.47, necromancers sometimes balance the world populations by starting massive wars of global conquest against all living civilizations.
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Sver

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Re: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« Reply #4 on: March 29, 2020, 03:40:14 pm »

I like how "The Bloody Hell" has a population at best 1/50th that of other goblin civs. You can hear them screaming their glorious nations name.
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HmH

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Re: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« Reply #5 on: April 01, 2020, 03:31:29 am »

I like how "The Bloody Hell" has a population at best 1/50th that of other goblin civs. You can hear them screaming their glorious nations name.
Maybe they're the goblin Boatmurdered.

floofytrainnerd

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Re: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« Reply #6 on: April 06, 2020, 03:40:36 am »

sorry about going missing for a while, i got sick for a bit (nothing major, just sapped my energy for a bit) and haven't played much lately. that being said:


In other words, in the absence of war to thin the goblin numbers, every world is destined to turn into an ever-increasing ball of goblins until critical mass is reached and the resulting nuclear fusion creates a new star. This is the origin of stars in Dwarf Fortress.


if that's the case, my shitty little civ is about to cause some goddamn entropy.

...or at least that's the hope. i'm still pretty new to DF, and although i've always wanted to, i haven't yet been able to play much with the war/holdings system, and i've hardly ever been invaded, so there's a good chance i'll be woefully unprepared at the first sign of danger. i've been reading up on defense and war strategies, but if anyone has any tips they would be greatly appreciated.

i'm editing the main post with a link to a google drive with the legends export of the first two years. they're not full exports because i don't use DFHack, but i'll probably install a copy of it just for making an export every year or so. i also don't have a save from when it was first generated, but i put the world gen info in there too, so hopefully that's at least almost as good.

in any case, even though this is common, i'm starting to really enjoy posting about it, so unless i'm being a bother of any kind (and please let me know if i am) i'll post an update every in-game year or two with how the conquest is going. again, sorry if this is formatted strangely, i haven't been on any sort of forum besides reddit in a long time, so i'm still figuring out how to use it.
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delphonso

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Re: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« Reply #7 on: April 06, 2020, 04:55:29 am »

Build a trap hallway full of cheats atom smashers to take care of the first few sieges. When you get more confident, you can fight in person, but not having corpses and instantly destroying goblins is a nice option to have, especially early on.

floofytrainnerd

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Re: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« Reply #8 on: April 06, 2020, 08:57:05 am »

Build a trap hallway full of cheats atom smashers to take care of the first few sieges. When you get more confident, you can fight in person, but not having corpses and instantly destroying goblins is a nice option to have, especially early on.

i debated doing this, but ultimately decided against it. i'd much rather have the risk of goblins wreaking havoc in my fort, and despite the massive advantages the goblins have against us, it feels a bit dishonorable in this scenario.

i do have a second entryway (in the process of being) filled with weapon and cage traps though, so hopefully that'll slow down any potential invasion.


until the last quarter of this year, i was debating just waiting until the next to update, but a lot ended up happening.



normally i don't pay much attention to messages like this, as from my experience they don't usually affect the fort in any way, but i remembered that name from somewhere and decided to check. sure enough, the king is now one of our dwarves. i'm working on a throne room for him, but we're a bit low on gold, so it'll take a bit. other than that, not much else happened.

oh we almost got murdered by a cyclops.



our autumn migrant wave consisted of seven dwarves, whom i put to work as speardwarves. i didn't want to send them out to fight it, as they had only been training for a very short time, so i sealed off our entrances. the beast ended up slaughtering three of our four miners (who had been working in our quarry to the north when it arrived and couldn't run away in time), all of our sheep, and several wild boars. i thought we'd end up having to stay buried for a while, until "The Earthen Romances", a goblin performance troupe, decided to show up directly next to the fucking thing. they were able to do quite a bit of damage to it, so i decided to send out our troops.

everyone died except for one dwarf. they weren't even the one to kill the thing, i guess maybe they just showed up a bit too late or something. either way, we're back to square one with our military, but we can recover. i also decided to let the group stay with us, as i don't think we could have beaten the cyclops without them, and i felt bad that most of them had to die. one of the deceased goblins had a codex with them, which we were able to snag.



unfortunately, i didn't think to check if any of the members of the troupe were the goblins described in this codex, but i think it's pretty cool either way.

also some kid made an earring during the whole ordeal but it sucks.



i have a ton more screenshots, but because i play in fullscreen they're all massive, and it's hard to shrink them while keeping the quality (two of the ones i attached i tried to crop using snipping tool, to mixed results). i might start attaching them in an imgur album at the end of each post.
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therahedwig

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Re: small world, 44 dwarves, 124k goblins
« Reply #9 on: April 06, 2020, 09:23:31 am »

If you have access to DFHack you can use 'forumdwarves' script to get a text file with bbcode formatted text for the currently visible text-screen. That should save on text-screenshots.
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