Bay 12 Games Forum

Six years ago we struck the earth, here in the Jungle just by sea.  And now our grand projects are at last complete.
Not the fortress, although there is a fortress it's nothing to speak of, it's just like any other you might find throughout our kingdom, the Lustrous Spear, although we have deliberately come quite far from the reach of King Zasit.

Since a time before time it has been said amongst the wisest dwarves that water is a curse from the gods, only there to drown us and burn our throats when booze cannot be had.
Therefore the ocean is truly a cursed place, water as far as the eye can see and a sickening open horizon that causes the plump helmet roast to rise from the stomach of even the best adapted dwarf.  Nonetheless, dwarves are not known to shy away from cursed places, and so, our ambitions coming here were:

One: Construct a drydock in which we could construct a seaworthy vessel before the dread salt-water surrounded it
Two: Construct such a ship
Three: Set sail and raid every town near the sea from the mired tundra in the south, to the Entrancing forest in the north for loot and glory, striking fear in all in our path


And we have almost completed steps one and two already:
Above is pictured the main deck of our ship, sitting in drydock, very nearly complete.  As you can see we are still in the process of removing the scaffoldings that were necessary for construction, in the south is the enormous marble floodgate that will allow the water in.  This ship will be well armed, with the finest in dwarven technology, the mighty ballista, ready to fire on enemies in any direction.  Also on this deck you can see the galley, the only stone part of the ship, including metal forges.  The aftercastle in the north houses a fully functional hospital and library on this level.
Going up first:
The three masts visible here go up several levels and include a fighting top (for shooting down with crossbows on any boarders) and a crow's nest.  In the south there's an archery range, as I'm sure crossbows will be very important in our travels.
You might also notice the lack of a figurehead, but we'll get to that later!
Moving back down:
The wisest of dwarven scholars claim that coating the exterior of a ship in copper will prevent the decay of the wood within, and that the ship can indeed still float if constructed so.  Putting our faith in dwarven scholarship we have constructed all exterior walls below deck out of copper (interior walls and floors are all wood still though)
We have also installed many gem windows through which we might peer out and glimpse the horrors that lie in the deep.  On this level from north to south we have some workshops, a taven/dining room and food storage, more workshops, barracks, weapon/armor storage and a temple complex.
In the top right is a well that leads down to our water storage, pump on this deck for purification, some excess bedrooms and a dormitory if necessary, some rooms for pastures (I had plans for pigs but my boar was killed by some pestilential undead Invaders, but I'll get more suitable animals if I can).
Down here is most of our other storage, some chains for criminals, and in the north water tanks for saltwater to be purified to drinking water.  (also a bonus ghost making an appearance)

So now you've seen her surely you agree she's the finest dwarven sailing ship you've ever seen?
What's that?  You haven't seen any others?  Well what about Bellsmaw?  Although they do say that's only a legend.

In any case, if you agree she's a fine ship I'm sure you'll agree she needs a fine name, and I'm open to suggestions, and also what to mount as a figurehead, (we have access to gold, silver, copper and brass for a statue) we have mounted a gold statue of a pond grabber on the crow's nest to give the proper idea of what's about to happen to anyone who spots this ship.

More than a figurehead and a name though, we need a crew!  Sign up here if you want to join us on our adventures, with a name, profession, and an indication if you would like to participate in raids or not (which will increase chance of death!), although all hands will be expected to defend the ship in the case of boarders.



 

so I don't know if anyone remembers these threads
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=133733.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=139844.0
basically the idea was to have a cutthroat power struggle forum game going alongside a succession fort, but as you can see they plainly sputtered and died, sadly  .
I have been wondering why and my conclusions are thus:
1. It is way too complicated to keep track of every dwarf's possesions and specific house designs etc they want, so i'm never trying that again.
2. It didn't work with few people/ not many people stayed interested so it ended up being just a succesion fort with like 2 people watching.
3. The game we had in place was perhaps a bit too friendly and didn't promote people vying for power over each other and they more just ended up cooperating.

So in the same spirit, but perhaps a bit meaner, and certainly I hope improved, I have drafted a new set of rules, and resolved that we need 1 overseer/GM rather than trying to pass it around as well.
The rules are as follows:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O57rVnJVST6OliDXYdMIXCSQsNZcIFRAkSYc-gZBDoI/pub

I plan to, sometime soon, start a new game of this with me as overseer, first I want to gauge interest and also let people have a look at the rules first
please let me know what you think of the concept and also the specifics, I want to know if theres parts of it that just don't sound fun (or the whole thing if you like)
and also look for any possible exploits to just break the game because i'd rather eliminate those before I start.

because I think I have a pretty good one:
I'm just chilling in fortress mode when I see
I think, hmm ok what could that have been?  so I zoom to the location
nothing untoward seems to be going on.. so I check the combat logs:
turns out he was being chased by a badger, and smartly (strange for a dwarf) ran towards the traps, only to have the badger explode into pieces and kill him.  How come this never happens when a goblin gets sliced up next to his buddies?

Hi guys, I just wanted to post this idea and see what kind of interest there was before putting the save and more detail up;
a while back I had a fort make a legendary candy battleaxe, worth 1.5 mil, needless to say I was very proud.
The dwarf it was assigned to didn't get much action for a while, eventually a forgotten beast emerged from the depths, can't remember a thing about it, I'll look it up if I expand this post, naturally i sent the axewielder down to fight it,
both the forgotten beast and the axedwarf (due to simultaneous drowning and strangulation once the beast's lungs were already hacked apart) died, and the axe fell into the water. attemps were immediately started to retreive it but the circus was unfortunately breached at that time, and the fort fell.
now; my idea, I post the save up and people race to retrieve the axe by the earliest in game date in adventure mode!
I realise the axe isnt particularly special, but it seems like a fun thing to try and do as the axe is very dear to most dwarves apparently as it appears in 90% of engravings, across multiple civilizations, and also the fort is swarming with clowns so it seems particularly challenging.
so, sound like a good idea?

I was thinking, if a dwarf spent 2 years of his life beating up unarmed goblins in the prison, that wouldn't necessarily make him adept at fighting a cave crocodile, or at the least, he would be more effective at fighting goblins, so what if you had skills that increased the more you fought a specific creature, like "Novice Goblin-slayer" for example, making the dwarf more effective at fighting goblins but nothing else.
I think these skills should only have a minor effect compared to the non specific combat skills (except maybe a larger effect on morale when/if that gets implemented further)
also i'm not sure how to have this shown in the skills list without cluttering it up too much (maybe a have a seperate category to toggle other can combat misc and labor?)
what do people think?