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Author Topic: Reclaiming Battlefailed  (Read 96742 times)

Urist Imiknorris

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #45 on: February 05, 2011, 04:10:17 pm »

How many artifacts have you gotten so far?
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Bryan Derksen

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #46 on: February 05, 2011, 04:39:00 pm »

How many artifacts have you gotten so far?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: February 05, 2011, 04:42:33 pm by Bryan Derksen »
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Bryan Derksen

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #47 on: February 05, 2011, 04:42:21 pm »

How exactly did the FB look like? I'm in a drawing mood right now^^

Buqui, the Lurker in the Depths, Hurricane of Caves? I screenshotted its desc in the log above, see
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
from before it stepped in the deadly puddle and
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
for right before it died.

Since it had a title I was planning on checking Legends to see what it had done to earn it, but haven't got to that yet.
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Darvi

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #48 on: February 05, 2011, 05:10:11 pm »

Well f*ck. Inkscape crashed right when I wanted to save  :-\
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Darvi

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #49 on: February 05, 2011, 05:50:15 pm »

Got it finally done.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: February 05, 2011, 06:05:45 pm by Darvi »
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Bryan Derksen

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #50 on: February 07, 2011, 05:39:54 pm »

Got it finally done.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A terrifying beast indeed. :)

Sorry about the delay with the next update, BTW. Combination of a busy weekend and a siege that brought my FPS down to 8 for a season. Hope to be done the year tonight though, should have a few things to write about.
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Bryan Derksen

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #51 on: February 11, 2011, 05:47:14 pm »

I've also got year 524 played out already, but I figured I should post the written log for 523 as soon as it was done rather than waiting to do both at once. FPS is rather sluggish now, I've passed 200 dwarves. :)

Year 523

The year opened with a bit of a startling false alarm. "Kikrost!" Athel Edemanam came rushing up to me in a panic. "A forgotten beast! It's destroyed a granite door!" I had taken care to seal the caverns in such a way that Beasts couldn't get in to any destroyable barriers, so I immediately feared another potentially-fatal oversight and rushed to the scene down in the third cavern layer.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Silly Wothana, that door's been sealed by masonry since forever. Still, it's interesting to note that now that the water level in that twisty warren of passages has dropped below waist height the Beasts that had been lurking there have roused themselves and begun wandering. It seems that although Forgotten Beasts don't drown, a healthy application of water can at least make them quiescent.

Anyway, the moment of alarm past, it was time to begin work on our reservoir issues. The current reservoir is still mostly full but we've got the manpower to spare so it's good to get these things done early. The current reservoir appears to get its water from a stack of 12 manually operated pumps, which is not exactly an optimal arrangement but which I'm not going to reengineer right now; it shouldn't be necessary to run these often.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Looking at the schematics reveals an interesting opportunity. The pump stack is located directly underneath the main food storage and preparation room of Lower Battlefailed:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Adding one more pump to the stack will allow this room to be repurposed as our new dedicated drinking reservoir. Furthermore, if you look one more level up on the maps, another nice alignment is revealed:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The new reservoir extends directly underneath the main dining hall. This will allow wells to be constructed right there where everyone's eating and drinking anyway. Convenient!

The loss of the current food storage room will require a new home for all that food to be found. After a thorough examination of the rooms of Lower Battlefailed, it appears that there isn't really any good place for it - by this point we're thankfully well beyond the "store everything anywhere that you can cram it" phase of Battlefailed's reclaimation (at one point I had to resort to storing cages with goblin prisoners in occupied living quarters - I'm told a lot of dwarves slept poorly as a result of that decision). So a new room will have to be excavated. Battlefailed is no longer just reclaimed, it is now growing!

There's already a large set of staircases in the dining hall that lead up to unbroken ceiling. Presumably the old Battlefaileders had expansion plans in that direction anyway, and checking the maps shows ample clear space above the main dining hall, so in the same style as the storage attic that was dug for the magmaworks I ordered a food storage attic to be dug directly above the dining hall. As with the new well location, this moves food and drink closer to where it will be consumed.

While work began below, an Elven trading caravan arrived with an extremely welcome load of wood. We hustled them inside, and none too soon - right after them came a goblin siege force, no doubt in hot pursuit of the caravan's valuable logs.

The goblins have axes in abundance and can travel to the nearby forests. Why do they instead come here to die? No matter. Fortunately the entire population was busy hauling food barrels and trade goods at the time, so nobody was caught outside. I sent the marksdwarf squad up to the sprinkler head to deal with the invaders. After some time had passed with no reports one way or another, however, I began to get worried. The elves were done trading and looked to be getting a bit edgy about being trapped in our toxic delvings. I took a few hours off of the reservoir project to go topside and see what was going on.

The marksdwarves were all in the sprinkler head, crouched alertly in front of the fortification slits and watching the army of goblins camped below. The army of goblins was watching back. Nobody was shooting, or moving all that much. I asked the captain of the guard to explain the situation.

"No bolts," Stukos grunted. "So we're just hoping our reputation will drive them away."

"But you should have plenty of bolts. I bought a couple of binloads off of traders last year. Decent bronze stuff, not bad for human work. I told you guys to reserve them for combat."

"Yeah, and that's why we couldn't do any organized archery training lately."

"Right. So..." I noticed the adjective Stukos had thrown in there and sighed. "You used them up on your own time, didn't you."

Stukos nodded. "I'm getting really good. See that blighter way down there, with the copper scourge? I bet I could land a solid groin shot on him."

"If you had any bolts, that is."

"Yeah, if I had any bolts." Stukos cocked his head. "You gonna get on that, manager, or what?"

The magma forge was still out of commission while the new channels underneath were being dug, and I was in a bit of a grumpy mood from Stukos' carelessness so I wasn't eager to waste precious metal making them a new set. "They want training bolts, they get training bolts." I put in a large work order to have bolts made from the bones that Battlefailed has in vast abundance.

Eventually the marksdwarves were resupplied. Then they brutally butchered the siege force and the elves were free to depart in safety. The elves nearly committed suicide by pressing up against the inside of the drawbridge, which for some reason opens inward instead of the more traditional outward direction. They backed off just in time to avoid being crushed. Then, as they left, a migrant wave arrived. So everything worked out just about perfectly.

The bone bolts were surprisingly effective. I examined a few afterward and was very impressed with the quality of their manufacture. It seems Battlefailed as quietly cultivated an extremely skilled force of bonecrafters, I've had them continuously crafting skulls into totems so that they can be stored more compactly in bins. Finally a use for all this bone!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I also got to see the ballistae in operation against live targets, due to a fortunate choice the goblins made in where to camp during the siege. Not bad - took out a few goblins at extreme range. The effectiveness of the ballistae were reduced by the cowardice of the operators, unfortunately - whenever a goblin got too close they'd panic and flee their posts, despite being in control of the most massive weapon known to dwarfkind and being protected behind an impassible fortification. I've added ballista improvements to my to-do list - we need more of them to cover a wider field of fire, and a better control system for the fortification covers.

In the meantime the new reservoir is finished and the new pump is in place. I had an extension dug southward, running under the western edge of the dining hall, to allow for additional wells. An additional dwarf-powered pump is in place to fill it, draining the old reservoir into the new one. Three wells have been installed in the dining hall, two of native silver and one of gold.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The year ended much as it began, with a goblin siege arriving at our doorsteps.



For years Battlefailed had thwarted goblin assaults by cowering behind its walls and waiting them out. It had become a bit of a tired ritual really, a stalemate in which nobody really won and nobody lost. The siege that Spring had shown that the game was changing. The gates had closed quickly and the goblins had set up camp, as usual. But then Battlefailed had gone on the offensive. Crossbow bolts rained down from the old overhanging sculpture of a giant skull, and a number of ballista bolts lanced out from apertures in the walls. Now, not even a year later, even more ballista apertures had been carved.

The goblins knew this could no longer be a stalemate. They had to get inside and make it a melee fight, and fast before the gates had time to seal.

Amxu Gozrudab, the legendary goblin mace lord, led his squad of swordsgoblins in a full-out run across the sandy plain. The past decade's wreckage and litter had been cleaned up recently, removing cover but leaving the ground open for much-needed speed. As the goblins approached Amxu saw that the gates were still open and only a handful of marksdwarves had managed to scramble to their stations. The few haphazard bolts they fired at the approaching goblins were no threat; Amxu blocked the only one that came his way with a swing of his weapon. If they could just make it through the gate...

Amxu leapt across the threshold with a triumphant yell, just ahead of his squadmates struggling to keep up. Then the gate slammed shut behind him and the rest of the goblins crashed to a halt against it outside. Amxu didn't even notice. At last, he was inside Battlefailed! The promise of dwarf skulls crunching beneath his morning star filled him with unquenchable bloodlust and he charged onward into the entry hall.

Paving stones clicked underfoot, triggering traps. Dozens of arrows shot out from tiny holes in the walls but Amxu moved too fast for even their automated reflexes, rolling forward past them. He danced right past the slashing blade traps without even setting them off, and the cage traps had not been reloaded since the mechanics had been busy with other tasks.

There was only one obstacle remaining between Amxu and the helpless civillian popupation of Battlefailed. The marksdwarf Zon Evudkol had been just passing by, rushing to reach her post, when the goblin had burst in upon her. Zon bore the legendary artifact crossbow Silentslick, so named for its impossibly smooth operation as well as how its bloodthorn wood always looked unsettlingly wet with blood, and reflex raised the weapon up to fire a bone bolt at the enemy that had suddenly appeared.

Zon's reflexes failed her. The bolt went wide. Amxu gave a cruel, mocking sneer and hefted his iron morningstar in his right hand. "You are not worthy of weapon," he grunted in broken Dwarvish before charging.

Zon desperately raised Silentslick to block the attack, but true to his word Amxu didn't swing his weapon at her, instead delivering a terrible face-shattering blow with his empty left fist. As Zon reeled back, blinded by the pain and fountaining blood from her ruined nose, Amxu slammed the pommel of his morningstar down on her foot and tackled her.

Amxu rose back up and stood over the writhing dwarf and his cruel smile widened. He recognized this one from reports by earlier survivors of attacks on Battlefailed; this was the dwarf that had spent all day shooting bolts into nonlethal parts of a crippled goblin lying before Battlefailed's gates. Payback would be extra sweet. He swung his morningstar, first bashing Zon's legs to keep her down while he methodically worked her over. Bones shattered and flesh split under the assault.

But Amxu's brutality proved to be his undoing. With still nothing between him and the interior of the fort he tarried to extend Zon's agony, her screams echoing off the walls and alerting her fellows already positioned in the fortifications above to the invader within their defenses. Amxu let her scream, reveled in her screaming, focusing his blows on her ruined limbs. He slammed the morningstar into Zon's foot so hard that it stuck there, and he started kicking her rather than pull it out.

He was unable to either dodge or block when Kib Uzoldakost burst out of the stairwell behind him and fired a single bolt into Amxu's upper back. The bolt tore through his spine, sundering muscle and tendon and nerves. Amxu dropped both morningstar and shield from suddenly-limp fingers and toppled over, a stunned expression frozen on his face. Where moments ago he'd thought of nothing but bloodlust and murder, now he could only think of escape. He struggled to move. It was a testament to his might that he was able to, barely, squirm a short distance back toward the gate.

Right onto the slashing blade traps that he had so effortlessly skipped over only moments earlier. The trigger clicked and weapons lashed out, tearing skin in a dozen places but even now none able to land a fatal blow. Kib fired again, putting a bolt through Amxu's leg, but that didn't slow him down any more than he already had been by the shot to the spine.

Then Stukos arrived on the scene, the new recruit Onol Dallithlikot in tow. Stukos took one look at what had been done to Zon and brushed Kib aside. "We've got a siege waiting out there," he said grimly. "No time to waste. Vital organs... but not too vital." *Shunk*. Stukos put a bolt through Amxu's right lung. *Shunk*. Another bolt directly into Amxu's guts. The goblin's breathing became as labored as his movement and he looked ready to vomit. A fresh round of weapon traps triggered, further slicing and slashing the suffering goblin's skin. Stukos nodded. "No worries about recovering from that. Onol, quick, see to Zon."

Onol's expression was like that of an Elkbird witnessing a cavein bearing down on it. She had always been a thrill-seeker but had never even seen battle before, she was fresh on the squad, and now this had landed in her lap. She hurried over and knelt by Zon's side.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Zon was barely conscious. "What do I do, Zon?" Onol asked desperately.

"Mercy," the dwarven woman managed to whimper. "Please, mercy."

Onol surged back to her feet and spun to face the goblin who had done this. In a rage, she delivered a kick to the quivering heap. The goblin whimpered too and Onol's rage faded. "Mercy. Right." Onol reached down and gripped Amxu's limp hand.

With a quick, firm pull, Onol slid the goblin's body into position over a slot in the floor. Its weight triggered the trap one more time and an iron scimitar scythed out, neatly bisecting the creature. One last burbling wheeze and it was over.

"Thank you," Zon whispered, finally fading into unconsciousness.

Despite heroic efforts on the part of the medical staff of Battlefailed, Zon would later succumb to infections from her many wounds without ever waking again.

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« Last Edit: February 14, 2011, 05:22:19 pm by Bryan Derksen »
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Megaman3321

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #52 on: February 11, 2011, 09:46:27 pm »

Wow. That's a lot of crossbow artifacts.

I take it there's an elite squad that uses those artifacts? Or are they loaded into traps?
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Bryan Derksen

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #53 on: February 11, 2011, 10:26:37 pm »

Wow. That's a lot of crossbow artifacts.

I take it there's an elite squad that uses those artifacts? Or are they loaded into traps?

I would not demean an artifact weapon by building it into a trap. Possibly maybe if I had an artifact mechanism to make the trap out of, but even then only if there was some specific great purpose for it. All four of my artifact crossbows are wielded by members of my crossbow squad, who man the sprinkler head of FAILCANNON when their services are required. :)
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Scaraban

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #54 on: February 12, 2011, 01:26:18 am »

the dorfiest use of the word "sprinkler head" ever
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zephyr_hound

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #55 on: February 12, 2011, 05:32:47 am »

just posting to say this is some absolutely fantastic writing. The forgotten beast at the bottom of the mysterious flooded stairwell was an incredible story--the whole thing was set up so creepily, and then the horror-movie reveal... I was all "OH HOLY CRAP RUN!" when the head moved. Did you know it was there when you drained the chamber or were you as surprised as the dwarves were?
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Bryan Derksen

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #56 on: February 12, 2011, 06:24:21 am »

Did you know it was there when you drained the chamber or were you as surprised as the dwarves were?

I was caught by surprise. I'd been hoping to find some sort of interesting structure left by the inhabitants of Old Battlefailed, or perhaps the remains of a stockpile with some interesting stuff in it - perhaps even old artifacts. My expected "worst case scenario" was that it would be just a boring empty hole, a disappointment after building up the mystery in the previous log entry leading up to penetrating the place. Didn't want it to be an Al Capone's Vault scenario. Fortunately, it wasn't. :)

I did dramatize the story slightly, of course. In reality, as soon as the miner finished digging the last tile the whole submerged chamber was revealed on the map and he immediately went off to go find some other task to perform without any "awareness" of what he'd uncovered - there wasn't really a frantic race up the dank and still-dripping staircase. But I did get a little freaked out as a player watching Buqui rise like that, "deadly dust" beasts are the worst to fight in close quarters and I had no real military to fight him with anyway. If it hadn't been for that lucky patch of poison Battlefailed would have been badly screwed. So I translated that player experience into plausible representative experiences for individual dwarves.

The more recent mini-story about the fight between Amxu and Zon stuck much closer to the in-game script, as you can see by the screenshots, though of course I embellished that one in a different way by coming up with detailed motivations for why the creatures did the things that they did in the combat report.

In the next year's log there's going to be another bit of dramatization as Fortress Manager Kikrost "discovers" something that has been revealed to me on the map almost since year one. But none of the reclaim dwarves have ever seen it first hand so I've been purposely ignoring it so far. Still writing that one up, might be able to post it tomorrow. :)
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Grath

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #57 on: February 12, 2011, 08:22:26 am »

This... is one of the best stories I've read in a while.
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Bryan Derksen

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #58 on: February 14, 2011, 02:55:18 pm »

Year 524

The new reservoir has been filled with water pumped out of the old reservoir, emptying the old reservoir and allowing me to descend and inspect the interior.

I have discovered a Temple of Madness.

The water we've been drinking all this time once filled a broad hallway, permeating the strange machinery filling alcoves along the sides. Twin axle shafts run the length of the hall, connected at each alcove by a gearbox. The alcoves each contain a pump, with trenches on each side containing a pair of waterwheels hooked up directly to the pump. The dark, dripping paddles of the wheels have clearly not moved in some time, but from the wear on their bearings they just as obviously have moved at some point in the past.

How? There is no source of water, no sink, no flow save for the gentle swirling as the water had been pumped out to allow access. I summoned Tirist Lazonol, our finest mechanic, to join me in the inspection and explain what I was seeing.

Tirist is of legendary skill, earned the hard way through work and experience rather than supernatural inspiration, and even so he was rather awed by the sight as well. "I've heard rumors of such constructions before but I've never seen one... and certainly never on a scale like this. These are self-contained dual-wheel water reactors. The pump brings water up from below, here, and deposits it here. It then flows to either side, into the trenches, there. And that flow turns the water wheels, which powers the pump. The net result is excess energy, which is tapped by those gears and fed into these two parallel axle lines."

"So, it produces power from nothing?"

"Yes, quite so." Tirist walked with me down the dripping hallway inspecting the devices as we went. The machinery looked intact, though stone rubble littered the floor and half-filled the trenches - the Old Battlefaileders who had excavated the place had been quite sloppy in cleaning up afterward. Presumably this was not something that had been intended for anyone to set eyes on again. "There are eight pairs of dual-wheel units, they all look intact," Tirist reported at the end. He did some mental calculations. "That many waterwheels will produce 3200 Urists of power. The internal losses by the wheels and pumps alone would be 480 Urists, and it looks like the gears and axels collecting the power together accounts for another 127, give or take. So this system - should it be set in motion - would generate a net output of just under 2600 Urists."

I whistled. "What did Old Battlefailed need that sort of power for?"

"There was an axle emerging from the reservoir when we first reopened Lower Battlefailed, remember," Tirist reminded me. "It ran down the hall to what looked like an empty pump stack shaft, the one we used for drainage when reclaiming the apartment stacks and then sealed up because it led directly down to some Forgotten Beasts lurking in the water."

I nodded. "Yes, I recall. We were urgently in need of wood and it obviously wasn't useful for anything so I had it dismantled." Tirist had a pained look at my mention of that but I couldn't feel any regret - as manager of this fortress I had to be pragmatic in balancing our needs and resources. I looked around at the waterwheels and axles filling the chamber. We were pretty short on wood right now, too, and there was a vast amount that could be salvaged from here. But before I gave Tirist a heart attack by suggesting dismantling this ridiculous apparatus I needed to think some more about its purpose.

Old Battlefailed had been a society under siege, pressed hard from all sides by danger. It had ultimately been unable to muster the force to withstand what had faced them. And yet they had spent a not inconsiderable amount of effort on this thing. Had that waste been their undoing? Or did they have a grand plan that required it, and their failure to complete it had been their end instead?

I returned to my offices to pour over the maps of Battlefailed that I had been compiling. There was the empty pump stack that this abomination had been intended to power. It had obviously never been completely dug out, its top led nowhere. The bottom end descended all the way down to the waters of the lowest cavern level.

Right next to the magmaworks... I blinked. There hadn't been much scouting done in the caverns, of course, but the ongoing renovations to the magmaworks had resulted in a detailed record of the underside of the cavern, where the magma sea's roof brushed against its floor. There was a strange obsidian "stalactite" hanging directly underneath. The pump stack hadn't led to the water, not originally anyway, it had driven all the way through to the magma beneath.

A screw pump made of the right materials could theoretically pump sufficiently fluid magma. I started doing some calculations of my own, and combed the old records of what pump components had been resting in Old Battlefailed's inventory when we'd first arrived here. They'd never completed the task, obviously, but...

I worked long into the night. At several points dwarves came to knock on my chamber doors, and when I emerged in the morning they were relieved that I had not become Peculiarly Secretive. I felt just as inspired as if I had, however.

"Gentledwarves," I announced, "I have figured out what Old Battlefailed had hoped to accomplish here in this terrible place. A project that would have protected them forever. And I believe I have improved on that plan."

It would be a very busy year for Battlefailed, full of industry and activity.

The power generators we had discovered would be kept intact. I directed that additional drainage be dug for the trenches to allow the rubble to be cleared out of it. The floors would be resurfaced with worked stone to prevent the growth of any vegetation that might affect the system's operation.

The magmaworks renovations were nearly complete, but I'd been taking a leisurely pace overseeing the final steps since there'd been no pressing need for them.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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Now there was a pressing need. The magma conduits under the furnaces were finally filled. I had a dozen magma smelters built to clear the massive backlog of old scrap metal that needed melting down - mustn't neglect ongoing cleanup operations just because one new idea has seized my interest - and the rest of the magmaworks were turned over to glass furnaces. We would need over a hundred sections of glass tubing and over a hundred glass corkscrews. The masonry shops were directed to produce a like number of stone blocks. Gabbro and mica preferred.

Tekkud and his miners were given a task too. The fantastic garbage chute they'd constructed for me would need some modifications and expansions dug.

And FAILCANNON... The masons received their orders. A redesign would be needed there. We'd already stripped off the old scaffolding and windmill platforms, so all that was needed now was the construction of new ones. Better ones.

I had long wondered just what the old Battlefaileders had been thinking when they'd constructed that ridiculous giant water faucet. I saw now that that had only been an interim state, a barely-functional stopgap measure. Now FAILCANNON would finally fulfill its promise and succeed.

It was a time of renovation throughout the fortress. And a good thing, too. With the main hauling tasks of cleanup finally finished there had been less and less for the bulk of the fortress population to do, resulting in an increasing population of idle dwarves. Idle dwarves who had plenty of time to fraternize. As a trained fortress manager I could see the danger of this - I hardly need mention dwarven sociologist Urist Kedkol's seminal treatise on the subject, "On the Development of Criticality in Dwarven Interpersonal Relationship Networks". We had finally reached the count of 200 dwarves, the threshold at which even mad Queen Lem realized it was time to stop sending migrants to us, so we had plenty of dwarfpower on hand for the work. Everything proceeded very smoothly and quickly.

There was one interruption this year. During the height of summer our lookouts reported a broad swath of smoke on the horizon, rising through the shimmering heat of the sandy grassland of the Plains of Ooze. I didn't pay the report much mind since no caravans were due, no goods were outside to suffer damage, and even if the fire did find some path through the patchy vegetation it couldn't harm Battlefailed's walls. But soon the heart of the fire came within visual range. It was a brush titan named Lafo. It was a strange beast composed of flame, with a shell and a stinger and not much else identifiable in its infernal structure.

After some thought I weighed the risks and decided to allow Lafo into our gatehouse. I had our military forces wait below, just inside the entrance to Upper Battlefailed, to kill it once it had done the hoped-for work. The roaring knot of flame saw our home and its open gate and made a beeline for it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm told the radiant heat was painful all the way up in the Sprinkler Head, where the lookouts remained in vigil, and the interior of the gatehouse turned into a veritable oven as it passed. The many layers of blood that coated everything in a thick patina shriveled and scorched, peeling off in flakes to rain down on Lafo like some sort of gory snow. The poisons layered in with the blood was also cooked into inert ash. The gatehouse was clean.

When Lafo entered Upper Battlefailed the fight was brief and victorious. Lafo only managed to emit a single scorching burst of flame before being torn apart with our bolts and steel. It turns out that flame is not a very sturdy structural material. Alas, our strangely popular Mayor Fikod was one of two warriors who were caught in the burst of flame and perished of blood loss from his burns before he could be taken to the hospital. We'll miss you, Mayor Fikod, and your ridiculous mandates for native silver items that I have long ignored. May you be united with the stuff in death. An election was immediately held and he was replaced by Kel Kubuklalar, who likes iron and green glass. I'm sure we'll get on wonderfully.

With the gatehouse clean it seems that the only remaining reservoirs of poison in Battlefailed are the Stairway of Death (which has been sealed by a locked hatch for some time now) and our own clothing. This was confirmed by a joyous event shortly after Lafo's visit; a kobold thief was caught inside Upper Battlefailed. The shoeless creature fled upon discovery and when last observed seemed to still be completely healthy.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I have unleased probe cats to confirm the situation. The few remaining stray spots of contaminant inside Battlefailed will be cleaned by constructing and removing grates over them. Here's an example of one that a cat found, possibly left by Buqui's corpse:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That excitement aside, the year was one of solid labor. One year, just a single year of work. I set that as our goal arbitrarily since otherwise there'd be too much temptation to relax and plant the seeds of Kedkol's predicted doom. A steady stream of sand bags flowed down from the surface, where a collection area had been designated in one of the unused side-caves of Upper Battlefailed. Finished pump components flowed up, stockpiled in the old dining hall. The old power output gear for the water reactors was removed and the hole sealed over, and a new main power shaft was dug and installed leading in the opposite direction to the west. Since the reactors were destined to be flooded again once the rubble was cleared I took extra care to ensure that no water could follow the shaft all the way to the magma pumps, to spill in and clog the mechanisms; I had the drive shaft rise up a level when it had to make a bend anyway, and in addition I added an overflow drain to the cavern outside that would intercept any pressure-driven water that made it over the rise just in case something unexpected occurred.

FAILCANNON received some more renovations. The archery range was moved down into Upper Battlefailed and the structure's "barrel" was simplified to allow a small room for ammunition to be maintained. A new archer post was established one level above the Sprinkler Head, carving arrow slits directly into the giant bone skull. A system of nickel drawbridges was built inside FAILCANNON's barrel to allow leftover fluids to be quickly and completely cleared between firings, and a set of gabbro doors was installed at the tip of FAILCANNON to allow the fluid pressure inside the cannon to build up before being unleashed.

The nickel purge system is very important to the new design. You see, the original FAILCANNON, as it was when we arrived here, had two windmill-driven pump stacks that drew seawater up from the surface of the ocean. I presume there were two merely to increase the water flow rate. Since the magma was ultimately going to be delivered from the deeps by just a single pump stack, only one magma pump stack would be needed within FAILCANNON itself. The other pump stack was still rebuilt, however. I had it extended downward by an additional level to tap into the ocean a full level below the surface. This gives this single pump stack access to fully pressurized ocean water and should allow a far greater sustained water flow rate than the old dual stack unpressurized-source design.

FAILCANNON will be able to shoot both hot and cold running fail. An important note to all future operators; make very sure to purge the barrel of one substance before switching to the other. A messy and damaging obsidian jam will occur otherwise.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The garbage chute was quickly converted into a fully-equipped magma pump stack. I broke with the design philosophy that the other pump stacks of Old Battlefailed had used by not relying on direct contact from one pump to the next to transmit power. Instead I had each pump fully supported by an intact floor and installed a 110-level-tall gear shaft beside the pump stack to transmit and distribute power among the pumps. This required 156 additional mechanisms and 111 additional axle segments, and increased the power requirement per level from 10 Urists to 18.5 Urists. The tradeoff for this additional complexity is a far more robust system. I had seen firsthand the fragility of the more efficient pump-supported pump stack several years earlier when Aci had smashed a pump at the bottom of the old stack that had used to run next to the Staircase of Death in the first cavern level. With that one pump destroyed the entire stack collapsed. Furthermore, such a stack can only be constructed one pump at a time starting from the bottom and working up. And there would be no way to replace the components of a single pump should it happen to be accidentally constructed of non-magma-safe materials. We had sufficient power resources, and mechanisms required only stone that we had in great abundance so I saw no real downside here.

The only thing we lacked was wood. The additional axles would need a lot of it and we were about 30 logs short. I wasn't concerned. Last time the dwarven caravan had come they'd brought more logs than that, and I had told the trade representative from Mountainhome that we would pay a premium for more. I was sure that come Autumn we would be adequately supplied and the final touches could be put on it all. Autumn was eagerly awaited. We finished everything else ahead of schedule, leaving me time to work on a new control room to house the levers for all of the complex mechanism Battlefailed had sprouted. Finally the caravan came and I rushed down with our broker to see what bounty they'd brought.

Eight logs. Eight measly logs. "We said we'd pay a premium for wood," I told the caravan leader. "You brought me barrels of eel blood. When have we ever purchased eel blood? Twelve anvils. Anvils are not consumable, you realize. We have plenty of anvils. I've had half our anvil supply melted down recently for being a waste of metal and space. If I needed more anvils I could have fifty forged by the end of the month, each one worth more than your entire load of useless scrap! Why did you only bring me eight logs of wood? I would have paid you a thousand dwarfbucks apiece. Ten thousand. As many silk socks as your mules could carry!"

"Would you like some fine prepared sea serpent brain?" The caravan leader asked me instead of answering. "It has excellent value for its weight. Or how about some leather? Fine tanned skins from creatures all across the land. Also excellent value for its weight."

I have to admit, something inside me snapped. I left our broker to deal with these idiots however he liked and stormed down to the armor stockpile in Lower Battlefailed. I already wore steel high boots, a protection against poisonous floors should I step outside of the safe zone, and the ringing of metal on stone must have borne the note of my furious resolve as many of my fellow dwarves stopped what they were doing to watch. "Kikrost, what're you doing?" One asked.

I reached the bins that contained my goal and, as I began suiting up in full steel plate and chain I bellowed "Coastal Ships, Occult Wheels, Glowing Roads, to me!" These were our archers and our best melee fighters, essentially the whole professional military force of Battlefailed. "They mock us with their useless trade goods! The year is nearly up, the project will be complete on schedule. If all we need is wood I shall HEW THE WOOD FROM FLESH AND BONE! TEKKUD!" I saw our chief miner passing and raised a masterwork axe high to beckon him. "I'll need your pick too! With me!"

The growing troop of dwarves marched with me down the hall to my managerial office where the maps of Battlefailed were spread over every surface. "We need wood," I repeated once everyone was assembled. "And we have wood. Nigh on a hundred fungal trees, perhaps more, grow in the second cavern layer. They are guarded by three Forgotten Beasts, all of them ground-bound but one composed of flame and thus immune to Battlefailed's poisons. We have relied on those poisons for too long. We've forgotten what Dwarven steel can accomplish. We're going to take that cavern layer, TODAY."

There was a murmur through the room. My fierce speech had clearly caught the hearts of many, warriors who had never done more than spar were nodding hungrily at the thought of facing even such fearsome foes. But Stukos had seen more battles than any, he bore real scars and he had the real experience necessary for proper caution. "You've never been one to jump into something risky on impulse, Kikrost," he spoke up with a quiet but firm tone. "Tell me you haven't simply become enraged."

I smiled grimly. "Of course I have a plan. The only thing mightier than Dwarven steel is Dwarven engineering. Delving deep, striking the stone. Here's what we're going to do."

It all came to me quite quickly, but perhaps because I had subconsciously already been planning this for a long time and had only needed this final push to make me realize it. The plan was foolproof and also had provision to account for the cases in which it failed anyway. The spiral ramp passed quite near a wall of the second cavern layer, and passing through that narrow wall was a tall vertical shaft that had been dug for some unknown purpose long ago by Old Battlefailed. I would have Tekkud's miners dig a passage to this shaft, and then we'd place stone grates over it to allow access to the far side. Miners would then penetrate the wall into the second cavern layer, and all of our forces would retreat up the spiral ramp just around the corner out of sight.

Forgotten Beasts seem to instinctively know when a path opens to Dwarven prey and unerringly follow it. They also destroy whatever works of Dwarven construction that they encounter. The Beasts would come, and then as they reached the grate-covered shaft they'd do one of three things. One, they would destroy the grate before crossing over it. That would strand them on the far side of the pit and allow our archers to kill them in safety. Two, they would destroy the grate while crossing it. Perhaps the ideal case, this would result in the Beast falling seventeen floors to smash to death in a low-traffic hallway outside the old nobles' quarters (why the Old Battlefaileders dug this shaft I will never know). None of the beasts have poisonous blood so no dangerous contamination should occur. Three, the Beast destroys the grate after crossing. Less optimal, but it will cut off any reinforcements from additional Beasts and allow our warriors to charge around the corner and swarm it all on one.

The passage was carved and low-quality grates were laid. The cavern layer was breached. The first Beast roared in, smashed the grate the moment it saw it, and then stood in befuddlement at the far side of the pit trying to figure out a way to get to us while the marksdwarves rained death upon it. The grate was replaced and the second Beast repeated the pattern. Then the third. Then the cavern was ours.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Beasts were hauled off to the butchery, adding our first non-poisoned Forgotten Beast meat to the larder, and our warriors wandered off to resume sparring with both relief and disappointment. A great wave of woodcutters went forth and we had our wood. Later, I had a drawbridge installed beyond the grates; in the event of future Beasts that were not so easy to deal with the cavern could be sealed once more. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that.

As winter came upon us there was only one remaining task; refilling and restarting the refurbished water reactors. Unfortunately the only water source for this task was the stack of thirteen manually-powered water pumps drawing water up from a small channel in the third cavern layer. I had not appreciated just how slow a trickle this would produce. By the end of the year only a handful of reactor chambers had sufficient water in them to operate. But it was enough to prove the concept. The internal resistance of the decoupled reactor complex alone is just over 600 Urists, so four reactor chambers would produce enough power to get the entire system running at an idle. I sent four dwarves in to manually prime the pumps of these chambers and sure enough, they started the whole system going. We didn't quite hit our target of a fully operational FAILCANNON in just one year, but it seemed inevitable now. Everything was working. We just needed to wait for the trickle of cavern water to finish reaching the rest of the reactor chambers.
« Last Edit: February 14, 2011, 05:07:36 pm by Bryan Derksen »
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Oglokoog

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Re: Reclaiming Battlefailed
« Reply #59 on: February 14, 2011, 03:13:03 pm »

I think you should consider replacing _these_ with these or possibly these. Just a suggestion.

Other than that... dude, you're awesome. This just keeps getting better.
Also, out of curiosity, what FPS are you running the fort at? Either you're really really patient or your computer is incredibly powerful :D
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So we got monsters above, monsters below, dwarves in the middle and a party in the dining hall. Sounds good to me.
If all else fails, remember one thing:  kittens are delicious, nutritious little goblin-baiters, cavern explorers, and ambush-finders.
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