Reply With QuoteOh, does Toady prefer dwarfs or dwarves? Dwarven or Dwarfen? Has he shown a preference?
I do have a corridor of traps, as well as a drawbridge beyond that. In theory my fortress is impregnable. But the reality is I want a mighty military!
Oh, does Toady prefer dwarfs or dwarves? Dwarven or Dwarfen? Has he shown a preference?
Dwarfs, always.
Dorfs!
My first military setback! An ambush, two goblin squads. I was too aggressive with my military, and I lost five dwarves, including my best melee combatant. Mostly it was because he went off alone chasing a goblin, ran into three more and got killed. Hilariously, despite being the most talented he died with not a single kill to his name.
I'm going to be more conservative with future ambushes, at least until I can get some steel equipment. I'm lacking in flux on this map (and magma, and running water) so I'm going to have to just see what I can get from the dwarven caravans. I'm really bummed about the lack of magma, I'm kind of already feeling the whole "what's the point of this fortress" thing.
I'm messing around with embarking. Is there any easy way to guarantee sites with magma, rivers, iron, etc? I've done quite a few embarks and then used one of the dfhack tools to see if I have iron around, and even if I embark somewhere with shallow metals it seems more often than not I have no iron. DF strikes me as a game that's probably pretty pointless without access to iron.
Last edited by jeffd; 09-05-2011 at 03:12 PM.
I believe iron is a deep metal, but I'm not sure. I always take the long amount of time to find a site with a brook/river, heavily forested, and both shallow and deep metals when finding a site. I haven't played in a couple months now, but in the current version there should be a magma sea deep enough on all maps.
The river should just be visible within the various grids you can move on the site finder and it'll be there on the map. Keep in mind though that if the area is cold enough, it can easily be frozen for nine months of the year. Still can be very useful as you can channel out a path to a dug cistern with no danger of dwarves drowning in the those cold months, get floodgates put in, etc. and then when summer arrives enjoy filling up a tank that will easily last all winter.
If you are playing the latest version pretty much every site has magma, its just down deep. Typically there tends to be water down deep as well.
Iron can also be found by smelting goblin weapons and armor into Iron bars (also known as goblinite).
Yeah I'm just at the point in skill / fortress development where I'd rather get my iron from actual ore in the map, rather than relying on goblin kills.
Just generate your world with the highest setting for minerals. You'll be tripping over hematite by level -6.
As for steel, it's not neccessary for goblin attacks. Iron platemail provides very good defense against iron weapons.
Check out the wiki page on Armour. Basically dwarves can wear mutiple layers of armour. They can put on a chain vest, and then a plate vest, and similarly for other body parts. Generate enough iron armor for your entire military, then dump all your leather armour and have them suit up. This is hell to micromanage but provides you with reasonably invulnerable dwarves to handle goblins.
BTW, my recommendation for 20-30% of a fort being military was too low. I just checked my current fort -- 39 of 100 dwarves are mlitary. (Another 40% are haulers, 15% are essential specialists like doctors and stonecrafters and 5% are nonessential specialists like nobles and butchers).
How do people like to build their forts at the start? Do you start with your final design in mind or do you build a temporary fort and then start your mega-fort construction?
Me, I like to dig pit-like entrances which can dive down a few levels and are flanked by murder holes to have dwarfs shoot at any descending bad guys. At the bottom it is retractable pit surface and bad stuff.
I'd usually dig a simple entrance that I'd block off later. I'd designate certain Z-levels for each purpose, i.e. general storage, workshops, residential, and build on a grid. That was enough plan for the start. When I'd got the basics up, and felt I could spare the labor, I'd work on a more serious entrance corridor. When that was done and trapped, I'd seal off the original entrance, which was generally just a simple up/down stairway down 10 levels or so.
Cool. Any prefered starting item/skill strategy, and if so, why? There is no perfect answer, of course, but I would be interested to hear what people like, and why?
I like to start the fort with a few small rooms, and later repurpose them for other uses.
I tend to hollow out about 300 squares of space (3x 10x10 rooms) on the entrance level. To start with the rooms are 1x farm, 1x piles (to move stuff from the embark wagon inside ASAP) and 1x workshops. Then I'll start digging downwards and building my more permanent locations. The top floor rooms generally become a farm, barracks and trade depot.
By late game I like to have a floor for: finished goods storage, workshops, a few for workshop input materials, misc storage (food, etc), misc services (dining hall, hospital, etc), then beds. Traditionally I'd have one central giant staircase column, usually like:
But while that looks nice it's not very optimal. My new strategy is one staircase every ten blocks (the shift-arrowkey distance) in a grid formation across the entire layout. up/down stairs would be most efficient but I use separated stairs for aesthetics.Code:uuuuu ddddd
Whatever stair layout, I put the more important stuff closer to the center. Noble rooms go on the far outer reaches while craft workshops might not even have a wall & door to the staircase.
After this I have transitioned just once to a further fortress, when I built a new fort a few levels above the magma sea and moved everything down there. I stopped going above ground for anything and build a new entrance zone for the fort to deal with sieges underground. You have problems with caravans not hanging around for too long once they finally get all the way down but there is the massive benefit of efficient magma-based metal production. The hardest part is wood, food and water. You basically have to terraform a level or two of caverns which is just never going to be safe with a large fort. Flying forgotten beasts will regularly decimate your army. On the plus side you can make invading goblins path through forgotten-beast infested caverns to get down to you.
EDIT: oh, my starting items never change these days:
Dwarfs:
1 broker
1 Brewer/Farmer
1 stonecrafter
1 mason
1 woodcutter/carpenter
1 doctor
Items:
7 picks
1 axe
0 anvils
As much unique food as I can afford.
If there's no trees I remove the axe and woodcutter skill and maybe other stuff to take ~50 wood for the beds + barrels/bins I'll need before first trade.
I generally don't do medical skills or supplies in the initial mix, because by the time I can afford a hospital (or need one, for that matter) I expect an immigrant with medical skills will come along.
7 picks seems excessive. Oh sure, digging and hauling are your initial major activities, but there are 3-4 other tasks that are pretty high priority, such as gathering and planting. I like to bring along lots of food and booze. That way I have a large cushion for getting farming and brewing up.
That said, I might try leaving the anvil behind and taking lots of picks some day, just to see how much it helps. Of course, you're kind of screwed if the first dwarven caravan doesn't have anvils for sale. One alternative would be to bring an anvil and enough copper ore to make 6 picks.
I don't get a metal industry up for years. Generally not until the second or third caravan. I also don't gather plants. Bring along some plump helmet spawn and live off that until caravans give you the other seeds.
My plan is typically to get the farmer and stonecrafter started ASAP and leave the rest digging continuously on my fort except for the bare essentials like beds and maybe a drawbridge if there are dangerous animals.
I always leave the anvil behind and use the extra points for one of two things:Originally Posted by Gus_Smedstad
(1) Tons and tons of drinks. This has two effects. First, it lets you avoid having a dedicated brewer too early, and focus just on farming instead. Running out of booze drags the entire operation down.
(2) A bunch of dogs. I only did this once or twice because it got a bit too slow, but it was actually rather interesting - it allowed a hugely in-depth defense because you could basically station multiple dogs at guard posts and give pretty much EVERY soldier one or two war dogs, which changes the nature of combat in interesting ways.
In my experience an anvil almost always shows up with a caravan later.
You can also bring the iron and then construct and smelt and forge your own iron anvil. It is pretty easy to do and quite cheap.
What? I thought anvils could only be forged at a forge, which requires an anvil to create. One of the ongoing jokes in the wiki was the question of where the first anvil came from, since all anvils require anvils to make.
Generally I start by hollowing out a couple of 20x20 rooms for early productoin/storage. Then I get a farm going (near irrigation source if necessary), and then I carve out a 20 man dormitory. Once this is all done my priority is to get a good smelting operation going.
Then the miners go below to carve out a great hall / permanent bedrooms. Then it's usually a more permanent workshop/storage area at which point the upper level stuff is repurposed for the military.
Somewhere high on the priority list during this process is get traps down (cages first, weapons later), establish a military (usually not feasible til the third or fourth migration wave, I find), etc.
Last edited by jeffd; 09-07-2011 at 01:09 PM.
Oh duh, I shouldn't post at 7am. I actually think I meant you could save points by bringing stuff to make steel picks and axes for your miners and woodcutters.
ProTip™: If you can, bring some bauxite. First thing to do after landing is use it all up making a set of bauxite grates and doors - where the grates are more important than the doors.
Actually the list of magma-safe materials has been greatly expanded. So unless you want bauxite for the color, there is really no special significance anymore.
So leather and bone from fire imps and dragons are now essentially fireproof? Does that mean dragon leather armor will make its wearer fireproof?
You know how DF combat works. Your armor doesn't catch fire, the ulnar nerve in your left arm does. So, no, it shouldn't help.
Bummer.
Yeah, dwarf firefighter warriors are still a pipe dream. Of course you can disable temperature and double your FPS...
My wife has volunteered to do a DF cross stitch. I have found web sites that will convert a picture to a cross stitch pattern, I just need a good scene! Any ideas????
Last edited by Marcin; 09-24-2011 at 10:16 PM.
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