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Author Topic: Siege question?  (Read 393 times)

UBCS Recruit Muffin

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Siege question?
« on: February 08, 2014, 04:10:51 pm »

So I've just "Won" my first siege, all of the goblins were killed, but a large amount of my soldiers died, immediately having a bunch of my Dwarves enter Tantrum spirals. To be fair, I had recruited a large amount of peasants who were born in the fort. Anyways, how do I stop the tantrums, but also be able to defend my fort?
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Zammer990

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Re: Siege question?
« Reply #1 on: February 08, 2014, 04:22:57 pm »

engrave everything
give remaining people fancy bedrooms
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If your animals aren't expendable, you could always station a dwarf or two out there?

Larix

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Re: Siege question?
« Reply #2 on: February 08, 2014, 05:34:25 pm »

If at all possible, lock yourself in for the time being. You don't want another goblin ambush to run roughshod over your attempts to get back in control.

Go through the workshops and suspend/cancel most jobs (you might also want to go into the manager screen if you have non-essential jobs lined up there and stop them) and only re-enable them by priority: coffin-making, coffin-filling, slab-making, slab-engraving and slab-placing are usually vital. Most anything else can be cancelled in a crisis (letting corpses lie and rot makes the crisis worse, that's why burial is an exception):
food and drink? - you have less mouths to feed now, so it'll take proportionately fewer hands if you can't simply fall back on reserves
clothes? - hey, a great many socks have been vacated recently!
trade goods/soldier gear? - once again, equipment has been freed from use and goblin trash can double as trader bait in a pinch
carrying on with building/mining projects? - you have fewer and less reliable workers currently. You won't lose much progress right now, not even mentioning the potential of tantrums and berserking interrupting operations, destroying or mass-suspending constructions and hurting your remaining workforce even more.

basically, try to get as many dwarfs idle as possible, so they can hang around in nice personal rooms (see previous post re: nice rooms for everyone) or legendary meeting halls and admire furniture/talk with remaining relatives/friends. The latter is not without risk - tantrums breaking out in the meeting hall can make matters worse, not even speaking of dwarfs going berserk. But the possible density of good thoughts still makes it an acceptable risk in many cases.

Make double sure your mayor/expedition leader is always available for meetings - disable all their labours. A decent mayor can save a dwarf or several from insanity by holding meetings, but must be absolutely free of any other duties: Nobles are bugged - leaders treat meetings as idle time and abort them if anything even vaguely resembling a job pops up anywhere in the fort; you often need to lock a mayor in with the unhappy citizens so the mayor does their job instead of "store owned item" - i.e. shift a worn sock from the office to the cabinet in their bedroom.

Make sure your medical staff is available - relieve them from labours as well. If dwarfs get hurt, this again doesn't help their happiness and if treatment keeps failing to start thanks to unavailable doctors or doctors tantrumming all over the place themselves, patients can become impatient and tantrum/berserk.

Keep capable military active and in readiness. You could even shift their barracks to the meeting hall. Stationing your war animals in the meeting hall is definitely a good idea.

Cut down on hauling. It wastes labour like crazy and doesn't even give "satisfied at work" happiness. In a pinch, just area-forbid the remains of the battle other than dwarf corpses. Corpses and body parts in much-travelled areas should still be hauled away promptly - miasma doesn't help happiness, in spite of its pretty purple colour.

Basically, "survive the tantrums" is the main objective of your fort. Everything else takes a back seat.
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SixOfSpades

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Re: Siege question?
« Reply #3 on: February 08, 2014, 11:23:03 pm »

Good points, just thought I'd add a note to bespangle the crap out of the meeting hall: If you have any artifact furniture just sitting around, or placed somewhere not really necessary (like in a recently-deceased dwarf's bedroom, or the office of some noble who could reasonably do without it), it's best to relocate as much of it as possible to get the maximum visibility. At least for the time being. Artifact weaponry? Embed it in a weapon trap, right in the middle of the meeting area. (Yeah, that's not suspicious at all.)
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Dwarf Fortress -- kind of like Minecraft, but for people who hate themselves.