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Author Topic: Welding the gates shut...  (Read 4168 times)

Randominality

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Re: Welding the gates shut...
« Reply #30 on: April 24, 2010, 11:46:32 am »

I have seen my axedwarves 1 shot gophers by just chopping them in half. I would speculate that could be done to many creatures once axe skill is up enough.

My militia of woodcutters were good enough to chop skeletal cougars in half with one swing after a couple of altercations with the local skeletal groundhogs.
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Lemunde

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Re: Welding the gates shut...
« Reply #31 on: April 24, 2010, 02:47:47 pm »

I haven't been able to test weapon traps because every place I embark has no goblins or kobolds nearby and all the scary baddies from below have the trap avoid tag. I'm getting impatient. I really want to see the combat logs from a creature walking over a weapon trap.

I actually take back what I said about weapon traps.  They are pretty effective if you use the right materials in the right numbers.  On my newest fortress I'm using a 3x5 array of 5x bronze disc traps.  I have a high master weapon smith so most of the discs are high quality.  Goblins usually don't make it past the first row.  From what I gather from the combat logs, most of the discs do mild to moderate damage but at least one manages to lop of a limb.  So they get stuck in the same spot and the trap gets another go at him.  It's pretty random how long it takes a good trap to kill a goblin.  I've seen them die after only a couple of hits and I've seen combat logs take up several pages.  The good news is that they almost always eventually die.  The only times they get through is when the trap jams up in which case the next row of traps picks up the slack.

Now using inferior materials such as glass and maybe even iron would probably prove ineffective which is why I was having so much trouble before.  That's not to say they don't work at all but a 3x3 area of 3x glass disc traps probably isn't going to impede a goblin ambush.  I'd use those in torture chambers or something.
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Welding the gates shut...
« Reply #32 on: April 24, 2010, 03:06:10 pm »

I have ended up in an involuntary case of welding myself shut. See, my fortress is in an aquifer sector. I managed to dig through one slot, and moved everything downwards from there. But now a freak accident has flooded the entrance (and two levels under it, to boot). In the process, I lost part of the lowest level (but I had installed doors just in case, not much harm done. I can also use magma to clear that water away), and my marshall was killed when the current drove him and his dog through a hole which I had forgotten to plug into an open space. This open hole, on the other hand, saved my frotress from flooding so I should be sort of grateful, I guess. By the way, if there are enough z levels, a single level of water wont save your dwarves from a fall (the dog did survive, though).

This has left most of my dwarves stranded deep underground (but safe and cozy.) and three survivors (one of them a doctor) in the surface, barely able to keep up a plump helmet harvest.

If one of the immigrant waves brings a woodcutter, I might be able to assemble new pumps and dig another entrance. At the same time, I am trying to use an alternate entrance to plug the aquifer leak in my regular entrance. If none of these work, then I guess my underground dwarves will have to become morlocks.

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tastypaste

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Re: Welding the gates shut...
« Reply #33 on: April 24, 2010, 04:10:40 pm »

Well it's good to know that materials count because I have several rows of 10x steel weapon traps with assorted components, mostly giant axe blades. Just haven't had a change to test them yet with the lack of goblins and all the trap avoiders. I might embark on a new map closer to the goblins specifically for the purposes of hacking them to pieces with traps.
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Frumple

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Re: Welding the gates shut...
« Reply #34 on: April 24, 2010, 05:24:39 pm »

Keying in on the weapon trap stuff, in that they seem to be doing alright. Material definitely makes a huge difference: Green glass discs couldn't do much to elks and such besides chopping off their feet* and basically nothing to goblins, while steel ones would occasionally rip something in half, even when the steel were considerably lower quality and the target was armored. Also, 10x traps have a pretty good chance of causing something that walks into it to dodge away. Nice bonus if you've got a decent drop right beside th'trap.

* Kinda' funny story with that, actually the first time I've come close to being truly horrified by the atrocities I was committing in this game: I had taken one of my hyperspeed fortresses and built a line of 10x green disc weapon traps across a good 3/4ths of the map, walling off the parts that weren't trapped. What would happen is wildlife, horses, elks, and muskox primarily, would wander in and get their hooves hacked off by by the traps. They would promptly fall to the ground and wander around for a while. This would happen to entire herds more or less simultaneously.

The imagery was just horrific, having a mental picture of six or seven animals, limbs chopped off at the ankle, crawling around on the plains, some of them slowly bleeding out from other wounds. Freaking out and fleeing as flash!dwarves ran up to pick up the removed hooves for craftwork. Probably a good couple hundred animals died to those traps, most of them after dragging themselves a pretty considerably distance from the initial trap that crippled 'em, trailing blood and detritus.

On the bright side, it is a mildly effective way to get craft material without having to deal with actually butchering and storing all the parts that comes from a full animal. Every horse that wanders out of the trap without dying is another 12 crafts.
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BitLooter

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Re: Welding the gates shut...
« Reply #35 on: April 24, 2010, 09:20:07 pm »

Urist McBitLooter cancels read forums: building disc traps
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Well really, if you can't be an insane Dwarven dictator hellbent on genociding Mermaids for their precious bones in a video game, where CAN you?
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