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Author Topic: Your first "___"  (Read 776 times)

Roflcopter5000

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Your first "___"
« on: November 27, 2010, 09:28:13 pm »

Do you remember the first time you finally pulled off a crazy project? What was it, and how many useless suckers poor dwarves died to build it?

I'll start:

I was inspired today by finally completing my very first magma smelter... Building the pump stack was a long and frustrating debacle, full of idiot masons walling themselves into corners. I had just begun building the watermill array to power the stack, and as I was channeling an access shaft to construct the power train, I accidentally designated an aquifer tile... Of course, one immediately adjacent to my central stairwell. The resulting flood claimed 4 dwarves, 2 cats, and shut down half my fortress... Luckily, I had quite a few haulers still on the surface, so I enabled mechanic, architect, and carpenter on all of them, built an emergency workshop, built a pair of pump components, and re-routed my power-train. Quite a bit of luck on this one, I had constructed my store-rooms towards the top of the fortress, so there were some rock blocks still laying about in an area that wasn't too flooded. Most of my fortress population was trapped down in my dining hall, about 6 z-levels below the storerooms... But that played out to my favor as well, because I had a pair of near legendary miners hanging around to dig a relief channel into the caverns. Without their heroic efforts, my emergency pumps never would have finished in time...

But, all in all, loses were primarily cats and useless migrants. I did lose one of my miners, which was a damn shame, and there is a horrid miasma cloud wafting up from the flooded cavern, but plugging the aquifer tile and finishing the rest of the construction was a snap! Now I have my very first magma smelter!
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Zrk2

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Re: Your first "___"
« Reply #1 on: November 27, 2010, 09:55:08 pm »

Building a trade depot on a platform above some spikes.
It just looks beast. Especially because it is steel.
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He's just keeping up with the Cardassians.

Alastar

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Re: Your first "___"
« Reply #2 on: November 28, 2010, 01:45:05 am »

I really loved my first universal plumbing system which allowed me to toggle off/flow only/pressure to every water/magma fixture and its corresponding drain, as well as global pressure settings on each level as failsafe (which ended up getting abused for convenience, with the local taps wide open. Not always a good idea).

I thought it more elegant to render each part of my fortress unlivable at the switch of a lever without dedicated death traps... doom would flow from the same things that would normally function as as innocent magma supplies to my smelters or decorative waterfalls. Unfortunately, this meant if something went wrong... it went HORRIBLY wrong.
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Rowanas

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Re: Your first "___"
« Reply #3 on: November 28, 2010, 08:11:13 am »

I decided to embark on a volcano for the first time ever, and for once I'm going to utilise magma in my defence. The surface area will be surrounded by an innocuous little wall, but, when the time comes I'm not just going to release magma over the map (as is the fashion), the plans are all drawn up for a magma reservoir that will flow gently into the forge area (built by placing floor tiles over the magma in an active volcano) and return to the volcano whence it came.

Since I usually like to keep things simple and safe, this is a bit of a departure for me.
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I agree with Urist. Steampunk is like Darth Vader winning Holland's Next Top Model. It would be awesome but not something I'd like in this game.
Unfortunately dying involves the amputation of the entire body from the dwarf.

MonkeyHead

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Re: Your first "___"
« Reply #4 on: November 28, 2010, 10:43:43 am »

my first stupid dwarf trick (which i now try and incorporate into every fort) was a pressure plate operated device which diverts waterfalls into my entrance corridor, flushes whoever set it off over a huge cliff to thier doom, with a reset based on the water reaching the bottom of the cliff. took a few turns to get plates/emergency levers in the right place so it wasnt an "invaders flood the entire fortess" trap. doest work so well with magma.
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moki

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Re: Your first "___"
« Reply #5 on: November 28, 2010, 10:58:47 am »

My first project to be proud of was a trade depot suspended over a 10z pit back in .39c, I think. It worked nicely for elves, but once I wanted to drop some humans and the wagons forgot about gravity and just hovered where the depot used to be. That was also the first interesting bug I encountered... I wasn't in the right dwarfy spirit though and abandoned I while later when some Fun happened. If something like that happened now, I'd build a temple to the magical floating wagon and treat it as an altar to whatever god defies gravity ;)
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But my good sir, the second death was for Dwarven Science!