I've heard about tantrum spirals before, but never confronted it during my 1.5-year gaming experience. I always run small forts of 25-40 dwarves and most of them are unique specialists. If I fail to protect myself from gobbo ambush that ends up in loosing a significant amount of worker dwarves, I always get bored and abandon/nuke with hfs my fortress.
Last time I decided to make an abovegrund fort with pop of 120-150 dorfs, that will withstand any difficulties. But having lack of space and work it ended up with overcrowded meeting hall and everybody making friends. I knew that it may lead to tantrum spiral, but believed that "talked with a friend recently" can save the situation.
Having a pop of ~55 beards, I trained 5-6 mace/hammerdorfs, 8-10 speardorfs, 10 crossbowdwarves and some random junk like daggerdorfs and lashers (with daggers, flails and whips from deceased thieves/ambushes). I should note that we were lack of metals, particulary armor. I only made some wooden shields and bought 2-3 breastplates and mail shirts.
I also had some dwarves for doc training. They were launched with a bridge and delivered to the hospital so my doc can get a little skill. One of cannon fodder dorfs died upon impact and his friends tantrumed a bit. Especially those who have been put to hospital (they were forced to patrol the bridge!). But they camed down soon.
I saw a bunch of ravens and decided that we need some meat. I lead rangers out and let them shoot some. While they were shooting birds, my woodcutter has run into ambush! I ordered everybody to move to help. Lucky he is, rangers were close. 2 gobbos were crippled, but other 3 charged to my rangers and killed 2 of them. Another 2 were wounded, but spear/hammerdwarves came to help and made a quick work of remaining gobbos.
We still were far from tantrum spiral, but 2-3 dwarves tantrumed and one resting cannon fodder dorf went berserk, killing another cannon fodder one. Not a big loss.
I made a shaft to the caverns (I thought it will release some fun, but none of these crundles were about to go to the surface). One troglodite came, but was smashed by my hammer squad.
Another 2-3 gobbo abushes showed up during next year, but was shooted from walls, run into cage traps or killed in melee with minor losses (0-1 dorfs). But during the last ambush I thought that it is unfair to kill gobbos from walls and lead all my forces outside. They charged at the gobbos and quickly revealed another 2 squads. That was not fun because all of my rangers were unhappy because of keas (long patrol on my booze stockpile - damn bird you won't get it!). I lost about 5-6 dwarves and that lead my fort to the spiral of blood.
It started with 5-6 tantruming dwarves, mainly rangers. One of them continued to punch my craftsdwarf (he made that bone bolts!). Another one deconstructed a workshop and bridge. But then another resting cannon fodder dorf went berserk! He was killed wery fast because all military was inactive to stay in the meeting hall and get happy thoughts from chatting. This death made a bit more tantruming dwarves.
I thought a bit about trying to recover, but there is nothing I could do. Abovegroung fort was not build completely, it was like a open field inside the walls (with a tower for hospital, dining room and bedroom). No way to separate dorfs, many of them tantruming (leading to inability to build something fast). An I decided to watch.
Some of my dorfs were stricken by melancholy, 2 or 3 went berserk (and was killed soon), but things got worse: my melee military started to tantrum. Flying longland grass was not a kind of danger, but everything has changed when my macedorf military commander went berserk! He was the dwarf with strong weapon skill and had the best equipment in the fort. He was the gobbo threat, killed most of the ambushers.
He quickly processed 9 dwarves and being killed by.. WTF??? Miner, stricken by melancholy, drived his pick into macedorf's head! I decided that we should make a squad of remaining dwarves (there was 9 of them), but only one was in the mood to follow my orders. For the fun, I've opened doors letting 2 goblins from ambush in. But they also were killed by the said miner.
Soon almost every dwarf died from thirst or berserk fists, I ended up in 1 sane and quite happy dorf. And fortress of blood and death.
That was Christmas time and I decided not to spent my time on this fort anymore and abandoned. That may be the interesting challenge to recover from it with 1 dorf, but i thought it is just a boring work of hauling corpses and clothes.
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Topic: My first tantrum spiral (Read 724 times)