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[Noobazzah]

I just started an above ground fort, a small farming hamlet. Recently the villagers have been quite busy whacking all sorts of monkeys that rush staright into my village without a warning. Mainly it's been gray legurs (or what was it?) but now a band of rhesus macaques showed up. The farmers have already picked up their tools (axes and picks) and are ready to face the coming onslaught. Are rhesus macaques as badass as I once heard? Should the peasants hide in their wooden huts instead?

[GreatWyrmGold]

Nah. Your people have superior weapons and armor, and those macaques shouldn't be stealing dwarves' stuff if they don't want us to drown them in magma.

[Bigheaded]

Cage traps work pretty well in catching frequent raids. place them around the entrances, make sure the dwarf caravan can still get in (cage traps will block caravan movement)
Can also chuck loads of them all over the map, this catches an impressive amount of wildlife and snatchers/thieves. I had about ~70 of them in one fort and i actually captured 100% of 2 ambushes of goblins and ~50% of another, the bowman were the only remaining untrapped units which i went over and killed.

Try and make sure all items you want to keep are inside your fort, that your fort has one entrance and that entrance has defenses. Seems pretty obvious, but really, it fixes everything.

As an example, i have a wall around my one and only entrance/exit, the lower area of traps picks up anything from the lower end of the map, anything from the left or top left is captured by the ones near the top of the wall, there's a gap where i need to add some more traps to the top right, but my map is FILLED with traps so i don't "really" need em, though they have caught a few which managed to get through. I've yet to find a thief get into the middle of my fort since the traps were added.



don't ask about all the animals.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Alright, I won't ask.
Why is your meeting area aboveground?

[Sutremaine]

To prevent cave adaptation and feed grazers?

[Bigheaded]

To prevent cave adaptation and feed grazers?

wrong.

Alright, I won't ask.
Why is your meeting area aboveground?

It isnt. Some animals are free to wander, the peahens actually live up there cos i know where they are then. The other animals there are grazers. The meeting area is downstairs, with surprisingly few animals in. Notice there are NO DWARVES in the area of mass animals/stuff. Carpenters/wood using craftdwarfs are outside, as near as possible to my wood supply. I agree, kind of a weird layout but it's really easy to use as you can literally immediately build a carpenter/craftdwarf at embark and still use them later on.

All animals are generally chasing my animal trainers (one guy has 20 emu chicks chasing after him, which is why my fortress is surrounded by emu chicks).

I decided to build a farm, here's my unit screen, bare in mind i'm curbing back on some of the eggs now.




To put the thread back on track, notice all the thieves in my cages, counted 10 of them (red dots). So cage traps are a pretty good way of catching thieves, need quite a lot against the hordes of animal thieves though, as they can come in larger packs, still, you can see the ambush i caught too!

[Noobazzah]

Yeah, my "normal" forts always end up lined with devious traps, as well as some more complicate designs to catch, burn and drown any neighbors. This fort is quite different, I only allow myself to dig 1 z-level down at max, preferrably just for basements. The village itself is pretty unprotected, while the hamlet's "lord" resides in his stone fortress, guarded by regular soldiers. I can't get any stone by mining, since it's a flat map, and purposely used all my embark stone fort the castle. I can tell you that sieges are very interesting indeed.

[Noobazzah]

(Yay double post!) The macaques were defeated, two killed by the village's hero and one killed by A TURKEY HEN. The rest scattered around, and now the dwarves are chasing them. And yes, A TURKEY killed one of the macaques by ripping it's throat apart. It didn't get a name for it though, which is too bad.

[GreatWyrmGold]

The turkey will need to kill someone important, or a lot of unimportant people, to get a name or title. Or kill one of your dwarves.

[Noobazzah]

Operation Turkey Must Get Name Now:
Phase 1: build a 1x1 box.
Phase 2: lock the village's only child in along with the epic turkey.
Phase 3: wait for minutes.
Phase 4: Profithailed, a turkey hen.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Warning: May cause turkey to violently attack anyone it encounters.

[Noobazzah]

Having a ass-kicking named turkey is worth it .

[Oaktree]

The monkey raids in my current fort were giant gray langurs.  A bit large to expect standard civilians to simply drive off.  Luckily I had predicted wildlife issues and had spent embark points for a copper mailshirt and copper leggings along with copper gauntlets and low boots.  So I put my woodcutter in a squad by himself (Level 2 axe dwarf), armored him up and let him loose.  He kept things fairly safe while I got the wagon unloaded, ditched a perimeter with the miners, and got some initial underground storage going. 

Having one bridge spot over the ditch made things more defendable and I got traps in the area fairly quickly as well.  The axe dwarf was supplemented by a migrant who was Level 6 with a sword; and I patched him together some armor as well.  He was actually the more effective fighter against the langurs until one grabbed him and shook him around heavily, causing leg nerve damage and crippling him.  (He is now one of my more effective combat teachers with the reserve militia units - and a legendary crutchwalker.)

A little later the entrance had cage traps on the inside and some weapon traps on the approach path to deter them.  Every so often one or two would get in (leaving 6-7 comrades in cages or dying in traps) to be chased by whatever militia I had on alert.  Soon afterwards the traps became enough to handle their normal groups of 8-9 and they just became an annoyance to lone dwarves beyond the perimeter.  Between these attacks and the tamed group that built up and bred the fortress has a pretty consistent meat supply.  (Plus one was pitted for the tame GCS to shoot webbing at for the silk farm.)