Year 9 (133)Astute readers may remember that I ordered all sorts of colored stones from the caravan - kimberlite, kaolinite, olivine, bismuthinite, and so on (plus gold, of which we have none on the map). The goal of that was to have “all 16 colors of the 4-bit rainbow”, as I put it once; and the reason I wanted that, was that at some point in a fort’s life all the guilds and temples pile up, and blend into one another. Some topical floor art goes a long way towards keeping track of the entire mess.
HopeWork has, at this point, 6 guilds (farmer, crafts, ranger, stoneworker, bonecarver, mason); we’ll also create 6 temples (for fortresses, minerals, jewels, metals, wealth and mountains). We
won’t be creating a temple to the goddess Vesh, despite her having 26 worshippers in this fort; she’s responsible for an awful lot of trouble that has befallen civilization in general, and us in particular.
As a first action for the year, the naked dwarves get booted out of the military. Of the five squads, only the marksdwarves are left unmolested (they weren't sent on any raids). For the melee troops, two squads are only emptied; I like the names and want to keep them. The last one is destroyed, it had a silly nonsensical name anyway. While the now civilian 30 dwarves go around picking clothes, the rest of the fortress is hauling the building materials into what will eventually become the communal temple:
The floor art is kinda hit and miss, in my opinion. Of some of them I’m proud -- the plump helmet in the farmer’s guildhall, the amulet in the crafts dwarves' guildhall, and the fort tower in the temple for Kogsak, god of fortresses. Others are kinda meh -- that glorified dot at center left is supposed to be a chunk of dug out ore, and denote Id, the god of minerals; the skull for the bonecarver’s guild looks a bit derpy, and the cut gem decorating the temple to Kadol is a bit too tall (but if I make it shorter, the detail will drop significantly).
Some are just ugly -- the crossbow for the ranger’s guild did not come out well, and the ring for the stone workers' guild is rather bland, and not necessarily intuitive. The masons’ guild hasn’t been decorated yet, as I don’t know what to use for them; going by what they do in this fort, I should put down an image of cut stone blocks.
Autumn. The dwarven caravan arrived, and was given some 30,000 dorfbucks. That should be enough to meet the capital requirements.
Winter. We have a new invasion, and a new kind of undead:
A
Beast of Night (Q) is a non-sentient undead created by Eman from mules. At least one of them is not trap-avoid.
A bunch of experiments originating from animals rush ahead of the army; they’re pelted by arrows from the tower, where crossbow dwarves had been training before. Since these enemies have neither armor nor any particular resistance, many get killed in this way. Those that make it in demonstrate that they are, in fact, building destroyers; it just takes them a while.
Another interesting thing happened while the invasion began: we nearly got robbed.
A former human, and current empty butcher, has visited our fort last year, and has been leaning on our dwarves to secure an artifact cat bone pickaxe. Unfortunately for her, the patsy she has picked was seen stealing said artifact from its rightful place in the temple of minerals.
An investigation was conducted, and the patsy was condemned to jail for theft; the instigator, despite having been caught red-handed, cannot be punished through normal means.
But the twenty military dwarves that remember to wear armor can still inflict their own brand of justice.
Meanwhile, the rest of the siege is just loitering on the north-eastern corner, where they spawned. They don’t move for nearly two months, and by that time, I’m deeply frustrated with my army.
The skilled troops have been reassembled into their old squads as soon as the invasion started; but they’re still not wearing any armor. There are plenty of excellent armor pieces, which lay unused -- I’m beginning to suspect these raging primadonnas will only accept masterworks. That’s a problem, because all masterworks are currently in use, and I’ve long ran out of steel bars.
My first solution, if it can be called that, is to remove some 20 of the ~30 raider dwarves out of the military. Instead, the squads are filled with less skilled, or unskilled, dwarves; these guys also don’t pick up any excellent armor, so they get booted right back out.
Since military operations cannot await for dwarven sensibilities, the squads will still be sent out - despite being either unarmored but armed, or fully kitted out but understrength. Eventually, the first of these options wins out, on the grounds that they’ll be facing the relatively weak vanguard of non-sentient experiments.
These tend to go down reasonably easy, and this stage is completed without any dwarven deaths. Then the corridor is cleared, and the traps are reset. Now the military can rest, until the invaders finally move.
By now,
Obsidian has begun, and the sentient portions of the siege finally are moving towards the corridor’s entry; the marksdwarves are in the tower, dutifully launching bolts one level below. This has the unexpected effect of causing the Soldiers of Eman to start using their own spitball attack -- but they don’t aim at the archery tower, for some reason; they’re throwing globs of extract in all possible directions, including into the shields of their fellow undead. They’re also delaying, and I’m starting to think that’s the most important thing that happened at this stage of the invasion.
The end of winter sees very few invaders going into the corridor; instead, they’ve chosen to spread out towards the west. There is a pack of wild boars over there, but still. Priorities, guys. Twenty skilled marksdwarves have been shooting at you constantly, and there’s a fort of juicy dwarves at your feet; is this really the time to go running after bacon?
Year 10 (134)My rhetorical question was answered with a resounding yes; they did, in fact, go running after bacon. And they also ran in the corridor. With enemy forces conveniently split, my sub-par military can charge them, and hopefully not die.
For the next two months, the army of HopeWork engages isolated clumps of experiments and zombies. After sitting in a compact mass for almost all winter, now the invaders have rapidly spread out over two edges of the map; mostly to the north and west. The military manages to slaughter all of them, with only two casualties from the melee squads.
The invaders did manage to show a flaw in my defenses: fortifications can be climbed well enough, if there is a floor on top of them. That’s a flaw I need to fix after the end of the invasion.
The invasion lasts until late spring, much like the previous tower invasion; at 5 months and change, it’s the shortest one so far. And much like the previous tower invasion, it resulted in a spectacular amount of large clothes for the human caravan.
At the bottom of the world, the unusable excellent armor gets marked for melting; I estimate some 350-400 pieces. There are also some excellent weapons that are lying unused because there are always more masterworks to be picked up; they go the same way. We did manage to create some masterworks, but they are still not being picked up; I don’t see any other choice, but to start disbanding squads and hope that whatever bugs they have will vanish with them.
Autumn. We are, at long last, the mountainhome. I missed screenshotting the message (and it wasn’t logged in announcements either), but it was the usual “the king and his entourage have arrived”. The king, I have to point out, is one of our founding seven, so no he did not, in fact, arrive; he’s been here for a whole bloody decade. What did arrive, however, was the outpost liaison along with two bodyguards; he proceeded to demand nobiliary rooms only one hair below the king’s. Well, I needed to dig some marble anyway.
Winter. The goblins are back, this time from the south. There are some 250 of them, and they don’t seem to want to move. The trolls are heading towards the entrance, but not the beak dogs and goblins.
Once again, about half the goblins are skilled and the second half are recruits; this seems to be the norm for tossers. More interestingly, I get the first proof that invaders have some permanence -- one of the beak dogs that I turned into a plague ghoul has returned:
This makes it possible for me to maybe wipe out the offending goblin civilization; looking at their holdings, only the central Dark Pit of BadDabbled has any significant numbers; the other four can conceivably be ruined by motivated dwarves:
Which is all well and good, except for one tiny detail: half our army is still mostly naked.
So I make some harsh decisions: the last two melee squads get disbanded. This marks the demise of all squads that have been raiding; our active military right now consists of two marksdwarves squads. I wait until mid-winter, and the goblins have not moved from their spawn point; if anything, they’ve gone slightly towards the East, in the opposite direction to the entrance.
Alright then. A full military reorganization is underway. All existing squads are disbanded, and all commanders are dismissed. For good measure, DFHack is involved, to run
cleanowned X a few times; the main purpose is to force the now-former squaddies to relinquish their meals. It also forces a few civilians to ditch their tattered clothing so all is well.
Anybody who’s unhappy is marked as such, and won’t be re-enlisted; at this point there are 5 such dwarves; they can go carve totems until they calm down. Six new commanders are picked - four melee, two marksdwarves; half of them get squads too, from the most skilled dwarves. And lo and behold, all of them pick armor without problems; most of it masterworks, but there are some excellent quality items here and there.
Obviously, this all takes time; the goblin forces have been ignored, and they ignored us in turn. Winter is ending, they will soon leave, and I still intend to come to them at some point in the future. This fortress was initially made to wait for any demonic activity from its poor neighbor; I have to fill the time with something, don’t I?
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Topic: [Completed] [SinglePlayer] The Doomed World of Sil Kodor 125-184 (Read 24756 times)