So, looking through the weapon mods for Dorf Fort, as well as browsing the rather limited amount of Dwarf Fortress weapons there are in vanilla, I couldnt help but think of some weapons the game needs in it's arsenal!
Firstly, I saw these in Stal's Armory Pack and instantly fell in love; Mattocks. In essence, a mattock is what would happen if an axe and a pickaxe got drunk with each other. It's a digging tool that also has a head good for cutting wood. I don't know, I just find these really cool!
Continuing the digging trend I just made up, shovels and sledgehammers! Pickaxes are cool, but logically, shouldn't they be a bit slower at breaking through dirt? That's where shovels could come in, digging dirt much easier, but having more trouble in stone! As for sledgehammers, they could always be much better in stone, but have a much lower chance of leaving salvagable boulders, more likely completely shattering the rocks they strike!
As for weapons, the first things that come to mind are from LC's Terrible Weapons; Pitchforks and torches. I imagine pitchforks as great weaponry to mass produce for your ill-trailed speardwarves; They arent combat-oriented so they can't do as much damage, they'd likely be cheaper (Maybe using one set of bars and a log as material?), and you don't have to worry about your militia dwarves using them falling into your lava moat and thus destroying a weapon worth more than them! As for torches, they could be made of wood (or metal and wood, as torches within metal holders exist), and they could be a kind of last-ditch "Okay, the fort has next to no hope, this invasion is too massive, lets burn the place down", kind of weapon, where they can be lit and used to ignite things like those prissy elves' armor and hair, or less !!FUN!!, they could be used as less-powerful maces.
Another weapon I thought of is the ancient egyptian Khopash, essentially a cross between a sword and a sickle! Once Parrying mechanics and the likes with swords are added, these could be a great thing to import from other civs' caravans. Given the game's heavily western influence however, I would live without this obscure type of blade.
Getting heavier in weaponry, I thought of battering rams as well! I for one am tired of raising the bridge before i finish my moat and expecting everything to be okay! Once seige weapons are added, though, I'm sure this is inevitable.
I said it once, I will again, it would be cool to see seiges, especially naval ones once those are implimented, using Greek Fire. To those who arent a fan of ancient weaponry, Greek Fire was essentially an ancient Roman flamethrower. Misleading name, huh?
This ones a much less ancient seige weapon, but... Does anybody else want a Trebuchet? I mean, I can even imagine the assembly steps they would need being more like making an instrument than a seige weapon! Perhaps you would have to craft separately special ropes, a leather cup for the boulder to sit in, and the various wooden/metal parts it would use. Adding on, they could be an outdoors-only weapon, firing their stones with more height and range than a catapult, mostly meant to attack invaders really early in their attack, or used by invaders as a pre-emptive strike before sending their soldiers in!
This is more a feature than a weapon, but I remember hearing in multiple history classes and documentaries that the Hun would frequently catapult corpses that had the plague over the walls of enemy cities, and that that was one of the bigger causes of the bubonic plague killing most of humanity (that and the Christians of the time commiting cat-genocide) Anyways, am I the only one who thinks it would be amusing and !!FUN!! for goblins to lay seige by flinging corpses infected with Forgotten Beast or HFS Syndromes, or worse, evil husk dust, at us?
This ones also more of a feature, but what if each type of settlement had a different type of military structure! Dwarves could have Garrisons (Is that the proper term?), humans Forts (not to be confused with the dwarven settlements of fortresses), elves, the pathetic creatures they are, would only have either camps, or if making their military structures a challenge is what one would want, I dunno, Tree Forts made of trees grown to be as wide and tall as buildings? and Goblins already have trenches. Expanding on it, though, perhaps each civilization would only set up these structures in easily defensible locations (for example, a small area surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and the fourth by an island/lake, leaving minimal ways of getting in), or in area contested by one or more civs (For example, if the humans, elves, goblins, and dwarves were each in one corner of a pocket-sized map, and all four hated all three other civs, then the middle cross section would be contested area due to proximity, and, to put an old WWI term into use for it, No Man's Land, an area that, if you walk into without intent of invasion, youre as good as bombarded by each side's catapults, ballistas, and trebuchets. In fact, maybe if you settle your fort in no mans land, you get a bonus wagon in the starting caravan full of varying kinds of discounted equipment, due to how screwed your fort is
This one is a lot more of a stretch (To the extent that I'm just gonna mod it in since it will never be a vanilla feature), but... War Colossi. Specifically, the ability to take metric tons of some form of metal (Like, tons of mining plus 3 consecutive dwarven caravans begging for the metal at max priority), and shape it into a colossus, not unlike the bronze ones, but under your fort's control. If you thought Bronze Colossi were scary, imagine Goblins or someone else who raided multiple divine vaults, finally getting fed up with your fort, and alongside their seige, sending a masterwork quality Searing Metal Colossus.
I suggested this in my terrible suggestion of ideas that are almost all unoriginal, but... Trojan Statues. Once furniture is eventually added to caravans (I'm sure eventually it will be), perhaps some civs would send you gift statues if you frequently trade with them favorably (For example, what I always cheat and do, giving the civ twice it's trades' value in Adamantine Anvils and wafers), but since goblins snatch babies, they could do something evil; They could send snatched babies of [race], in disguise as normal members of [race] with a masterwork statue [race] would trade, but, during the event of the next seige, the statue would be destroyed, and some amount of goblin soldiers would come out. Of course, if the statue is prematurely destroyed in your fort's magma pit or melted in the furnace tested for booby traps in a safe. sane way, you could catch the invaders before you have to deal with them alongside having rotting corpses flung over your walls, your drawbridges being bashed down, trebuchets wiping out any poor civilian to be outside at the time of the invasion, AND a colossus wiping out dwarves to each side.
This ones a very major one,I never got an answer to asking if it happens, but seiges should check petvalue, and send only amounts of war animals and mounts proportionate to the value of your fort; that way you dont get struck down by elves sending in the currently removed Giant Desert Scorpions when you trade them grown wood and attack their caravan ONCE in the first year, before you even have Cotton Candy.
So what do you all think? I'm sure several ideas, even those that arent already in mods, have been pitched before (not in the top 3 or 4 pages of the forums that I saw, but I doubt many people really thought about so many underhanded things goblins could do. Imagining all of these ideas combined actually scares me a little, thinking about how even the best defenses could be taken down, especially combined with invaders being able to climb, and I forgot, is invaders digging vanilla or DFhack only?
Author
Topic: Specific expanded weapons and warfare (Read 710 times)