In something of an experiment as a precursor to my previously posted dystopian fort idea (at
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=19756), I started a fort that would never use migrants. However, rather then simply turning off migration, I've elected to wall my original 7 in and keep everyone else except caravans out, sort of maintaining two separate forts, one which is the pinnacle of dwarven civilization, and the other full of useless beggers who enjoy gathering plants and wrestling any invaders with absolutely no regard for their own safety. There's an airlock thingy for trading, and if there's something that the outside dwarves absolutely need (not something trivial like food or booze), it can always be dumped over the side of the walls.
Any hoo, in contrast to the way forts usually go, after a year and a half everything is peachy. It's really kind of nice not giving a rats ass about 80% of your forts population and not really having to pay for their idiocies. There was an incident right when the first wave of migrants came (21 idiots, 3 kids, and not a single useful profession in all of them. Boy am I glad I've already condemned these guys) where they swarmed over the walls due to an error in construction. I mass recruited them and sent them to hang out by the lava pool, but one child proved difficult to dislodge.
I was about to assign him to a starving chamber, when I started get warnings that some of the idiot's pets were dying of heat and blood loss. Apparently, the fire man in the local lava fell in love with one of their horses, but his passion proved too ardent for the beast of burden, who promptly burst into flame. Bellowing a mighty warcry and vowing never to forget poor
!!Stray Horse (Tame)!!, all 21 migrants charged the fire man. Well, not so much charged as confusedly wandered over, and not so much all 21 as whoever wasn't asleep or eating or picking his nose or being depressed about having been caught in the rain, but STILL. The fire man, who was used to his relationships turning out this way by now, threw a few fireballs their way, starting a massive forest fire that eventually burned up the food stuffs they had managed to scrounge up from the bushes and ferns of the forest (and killing most of the unharvested bushes, meaning it's gonna be a tough winter, boys!). Probably 3 died before they could even get close to the beast, and another 4 discovered the hard way that perhaps traditional choke holds and arm locks aren't sound tactics when used against a creature of elemental fire. Even after the fire man was eventually beaten to death, the raging inferno continued to claim lives, including those of another wave of migrants who showed up in the middle of the brawl (I'd love to see their faces when they saw that the fortress that they'd spent months traveling to was locked up, and everything around it was on fire). The eventual score was (not counting pets) Dwarves:19, Fire Man:1, so I guess we won.
Meanwhile, the real fortress had problems of its own! I got a message saying that a human diplomat had left unhappily. This however was a blatant lie, as he had not left and was in fact in my dinning room tearing the limbs off the poor migrant boy mentioned earlier. Fortunately, my carpenter was a skilled mediator, and managed to calm him down. Except he was actually an axedwarf and wasn't calming him down as much as he was chopping off his legs. The human was placated so hard that said legs mysteriously flew through the ceiling and appeared on the floor above. All in all it turned out well, as now I have one less child to starve.
So where do I go from here? Well, the volcano is pretty well positioned for burning the world once I get my shipment of bauxite. If the elves aren't pissed about the woods being burned, there are plenty of ways to make them angry. Same goes for the humans. I'm thinking piss off everyone, turn this fort into a siege fort, where a completely self sustained castle is surrounded at all times by various enemies, while fanatic followers come from all corners of the world to do battle and die gloriously beneath its walls, in a scorched, lava burned landscape.
Oh yeah, there's still a magma man in the lava vents going to my forges. I kind of want to capture him and put him outside to play with my migrants. Do I have to have a lava safe cage to do that? Or will wood work?
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Topic: Unionboat, the Walled-in Fortress (because migrants are stupid) (Read 1326 times)