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Author Topic: Making hostile dwarves (enemy dwarf necromancers, undead dwarves) handle-able  (Read 1047 times)

Catsup

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Dwarves in cages, enemy or not, cannot be assigned to be pitted, penned, chained or otherwise removed from the cage without building the cage first and unassigning them or linking a lever to the cage and pulling it.

is there a way to mod the game so dwarves can be handled like any other creature in a cage? i tried adding "Pet_exotic" to dwarves, but that just made children tameable. Dwarves still could not handle any of the many undead dwarves captured from the necromancer siege.

Deon

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The answer is magma.
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✫ DF Wanderer ✫ - the adventure mode crafting and tweaks
✫ Cartographer's Lounge ✫ - a custom worldgen repository

Catsup

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its the late-first year and im on a wood-scarce biome, and barely breached the caverns and didnt even have enough cages for traps so i just walled them off. Used most of the cages for a quick trap-maze i built when the necromancer siege arrived in the fall (they had way more than i expected for first year).

so i cant afford to just dump all the cages in magma, half of them are glass too, so magma wouldnt even work on them.

smakemupagus

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it's like that old parable,
"when life gives you caged zombie lemons, make a really nice zoo"

Catsup

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i already have a zombie zoo for all the zombies i can assign to built cages, since i dont yet have a way to dispose of corpses atm (corpses are dumped in a pit full of cage traps).

Dwarven zombies cannot be assigned to cages, or be pitted, so they cant be moved to the zoo.

Wannabehero

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  • Dig a pit next to where you build the cage.
  • Build a floor above a support on the opposite side of the cage.
  • Link the cage and the support to separate levers
  • Pull the levers in sequence.
  • The enemy will either be crushed by the floor or knocked into the pit by the dust cloud.

Graphic:
Code: [Select]
Top View                    Side View

                              ████████
█████████                   ███ --- ██
█| |©---D                   █  © I D
█████████                   █  ███████
                            ████

| | =  pit
█   =  wall
©   =  cage
-   =  constructed floor above a support
D   =  door
I   =  support


Alternatively, you can do the same thing with drawbridges (in fact, it is much more reliable with drawbridges).  In the above graphic, replace the floor with a drawbridge (and no support, obviously) that raises towards the pit.  The door prevents the released entity from leaving the room, and when you pull the lever the drawbridge will fling them towards the pit.  You can also just flip the drawbridge direction around to squash them.  That's my preferred method of dealing with caged undead.

Whatever you do, enjoy yerself
« Last Edit: April 09, 2013, 05:05:30 pm by Wannabehero »
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Catsup

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should be noted that im not dealing with 1 undead dwarf here, im dealing with at least 20-30, and i'm expecting there to be a lot more undead dwarves sent in sieges in the future. Its simply not efficient or practical to build and link cages for several dozens of undead dwarves every time a necromancer sieges you.

 I consider it the game broken in that it doesnt allow dwarf undead to be pitted and moved out of cages like other types of undead and thus i want to mod it. Thanks for the replies guys, but please no more crazy ideas that are more complex than atom-smashing all dwarf-zombie cages (which i cant do, since its very hard to make cages this early in a terrifying wood-scarce biome).

Tirion

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Maybe if you make dwarves impossible to be raised as undead. [ITEMCORPSE:xxxx] like with bronze colossi might be your friend. Won't help against necromancers, husks and assimilated dwarves leading goblin squads, but those aren't that numerous.
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"Fools dig for water, corpses, or gold. The earth's real treasure is far deeper."

Catsup

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Maybe if you make dwarves impossible to be raised as undead. [ITEMCORPSE:xxxx] like with bronze colossi might be your friend. Won't help against necromancers, husks and assimilated dwarves leading goblin squads, but those aren't that numerous.
i suppose this could work, but i would need to regenerate a new world where dwarves could not be raised as dead by adding the not raiseable as undead token to them so necromancers cannot raise them in world-gen.

this presents some problems though, because atm i have it so dwarves have the same starting biome as all other races, and they tend to be quite numerous during world gen. And i would need to find a way to limit their population (like by changing their starting biome back to mountains, but my worlds tend to be huge islands of prairies and desert) without causing too much rejections due to un-playable civ. My aim in world gen is to generate as many towers as possible, making dwarves impossible to be raised as undead makes this harder for necromancers to get their armies up and running.

I also dont want to restart because this fort shows promise and is one of the few embark attempts to survive a terrifying embark's first year (with necromancers trying to kill you the first summer and fall).

Most importantly, making dwarves non-undead candidates defeats the purpose of a terrifying embark, where the dead-island theme is the main attraction; my dwarves will not rise as undead and cause fun when they die any more.

for the problem of world rejection due to lack of dwarves, i've found that dwarves require neutral mountains in vanilla, never evil or even good mountains, there is no ANY_MOUNTAIN token for starting biome, any ideas on limiting the number of dwarven civs so there is more tower fodder for necromancers, but not so much that there is world rejections? neutral mountains are a extreme rarity with my current setting as mountains tend to be medium to large biomes, and most of those tend to be evil.

Trapezohedron

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Maybe if you make dwarves impossible to be raised as undead. [ITEMCORPSE:xxxx] like with bronze colossi might be your friend. Won't help against necromancers, husks and assimilated dwarves leading goblin squads, but those aren't that numerous.
i suppose this could work, but i would need to regenerate a new world where dwarves could not be raised as dead by adding the not raiseable as undead token to them so necromancers cannot raise them in world-gen.

this presents some problems though, because atm i have it so dwarves have the same starting biome as all other races, and they tend to be quite numerous during world gen. And i would need to find a way to limit their population (like by changing their starting biome back to mountains, but my worlds tend to be huge islands of prairies and desert) without causing too much rejections due to un-playable civ. My aim in world gen is to generate as many towers as possible, making dwarves impossible to be raised as undead makes this harder for necromancers to get their armies up and running.

I also dont want to restart because this fort shows promise and is one of the few embark attempts to survive a terrifying embark's first year (with necromancers trying to kill you the first summer and fall).

Most importantly, making dwarves non-undead candidates defeats the purpose of a terrifying embark, where the dead-island theme is the main attraction; my dwarves will not rise as undead and cause fun when they die any more.

for the problem of world rejection due to lack of dwarves, i've found that dwarves require neutral mountains in vanilla, never evil or even good mountains, there is no ANY_MOUNTAIN token for starting biome, any ideas on limiting the number of dwarven civs so there is more tower fodder for necromancers, but not so much that there is world rejections? neutral mountains are a extreme rarity with my current setting as mountains tend to be medium to large biomes, and most of those tend to be evil.

Actually, if you don't want your necromancers to raise your corpses just yet, just add [NOT_LIVING] to the DWARF definition in creature_standard. Remember to remove it once you're done, because your dwarves are now undead. :P You don't have to regen a new world for this.
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Catsup

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Actually, if you don't want your necromancers to raise your corpses just yet, just add [NOT_LIVING] to the DWARF definition in creature_standard. Remember to remove it once you're done, because your dwarves are now undead. :P You don't have to regen a new world for this.

no, what i mean is, necromancers require 50 undead minions to make a tower in world generation, and the types of undead they send in attack waves are generated in proportion to these 50. These is no way to change the default undead sends by necromancers without regenerating a new world and making dwarves non-raiseable in world gen.

Wannabehero

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Given your stipulations, you may just need to bite the bullet and deal with your caged undead manually.

You don't need to atomsmash the cages, just invest the time to build and link the cages to an atomsmashing chamber that the undead will path into before being crushed to oblivion.

Essentially, the answer to the OP question of being able to handle undead (dwarves) like animals is that it is unmoddable into a current genned world.  You can mod the currently running game to replace the expended cages however... (if you decide to atomsmash the cages)
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Catsup

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so there is no way to make caged undead dwarves handle-able? (oddly, no ones given me an answer on this yet...) from my experience with necromancer sieges, the undead come in 1 to 2 hundred later on, i dont think i'd have enough man-power to build and link all those cages every season after a siege; though i can already think of a set-up of how it would work: use only magma-safe cages, link with only magma-safe mechanisms, open cages and kill undead with marksdwarves, magma burns the dead corpses, drain out magma and collect cages/mechanisms.

Trapezohedron

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so there is no way to make caged undead dwarves handle-able? (oddly, no ones given me an answer on this yet...) from my experience with necromancer sieges, the undead come in 1 to 2 hundred later on, i dont think i'd have enough man-power to build and link all those cages every season after a siege; though i can already think of a set-up of how it would work: use only magma-safe cages, link with only magma-safe mechanisms, open cages and kill undead with marksdwarves, magma burns the dead corpses, drain out magma and collect cages/mechanisms.

Reread the OP, no there isn't. Barring a lever-connected cage and releasing them into an arena/magma pit, there's no way to make the cage inhabitants unassign from their cages.

Remember to construct the cage first before submerging in lava.
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Catsup

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may i ask the technical details of why its impossible? the dwarf entries in the raws dont appear that much different than humans, elves, and goblins, so is the distinction of a player controlled race defined elsewhere? if so, how can i make changes to that?