I'm still on 40d while waiting to upgrade to a new computer and letting the bugs get shaken out, but looking forward to DF 2010.
Anyway, I just had my first elf siege. This fort has been going a long time and I thought the elves were at peace with us. Sure, their representative kept getting blown off every time he requested we limit the cutting to 100 trees a year, but heck, I thought if you kept saying no they wouldn't siege, only if you broke an agreement. Now maybe they're angry the dwarfs did some clear-cutting near the edge of the map and haven't gotten around to picking up the wood, but still, that shouldn't bother them, right? As far as I know the dwarves did nothing (special) to piss the elves off.
After a long winter and some goblin ambushes, spring finally rolled around, with no sign of the irksome diplomat or the traders--who have ocasionally brought me such useful things as animals, from which I now have a crapload of tame black bears. I figured this meant goblins had waylaid them and I could expect a siege any time. Eventually, as Granite rolled into Slate, an ambush finally showed up--of elves.
They happened to run right smack dab into the Slippery Whips, a squad of mostly legendary hammerdwarves, macedwarves, and swordsdwarves. Without any archers they were pretty easy pickings even though there had to be about 20 of them, and their leader was mounted on a horse. What was odd though was that some of them started charging over the bridge, which has a line of cage traps at the end nearest them. About half the dwarf squad was on the bridge at the time and slaughtered the invaders, but it's rather disconcerting that the elves strolled right over the cage traps without a problem--the wiki makes no mention of this (for elves). The battle was short and bloody, and ended with the Whips' vanguard pursuing a fleeing elf to the very edge of the map where they managed to eviscerate him at the last moment. One elf survived, because he was the only one who sprang a cage trap. I figure three or four made it onto the bridge, one of them being the rider.
In pointless, gratuitous retaliation, I have designated some areas inside my main defense walls for more tree-felling.
So, my first questions center around this siege: Is it normal for sieging elves (in 40d) to avoid traps? Can I expect more than the one large cluster of attackers? And how the heck did I anger them?
Beyond that though, I want to know what to do with my captive. It's awfully tempting to throw him in my arena and see if my captive goblins and turncoat dwarves will kill him before the bears do (if the bears will even attack him), but for the first elf who dared assault my dwarves and live this just isn't fitting. The dwarfy thing to do would be to stick him in some kind of enclosure where he could see trees being cut down or carpentry in action, but I'm not sure this is even possible without scaring civilians and I don't know if it would even do any good. What's a properly dwarfy way to deal with this elf? (And no, I don't have magma.)
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Topic: 40d elf siege (Read 2019 times)