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[Eidre]

Well, after somewhat less than a year (real time) of playing DF, I've finally seen my first loyalty cascade. 

In a mature fort, in the middle of relocating the entire mountainhome from the top 15 z-levels down to just above the magma sea (only source of magma found at this embark), with a population of ~215 (with all of the adults in the militia and fully armed and armored with steel), I mustered the entire militia and sent them out to save a dwarven merchant caravan from an ambush.

And with a single misplaced keystroke (on the "kill from list" menu), I ordered my whole militia to slaughter five goblins and one innocent merchant.  Meanwhile, confident of my victory, I went back to following my miners around digging out what was going to be my lower level guard-room / barracks.

After watching the red "C" pop up a few times I decided to ignore it...then realized on a check through the "U" menu that there weren't any goblins left and my dwarves were still popping up fighting notifications.  A quick jump back to the surface revealed it already littered with bodies.

At this point, I wasn't even sure who was in what faction so I just let the whole thing play out...wow...dwarves slaughtering dwarves, children punching in each other's skull, a marksdwarf obliterating traitorous swine (literally; he decided my huge herd of pigs was in the wrong faction and went about patiently exterminating all of them).

The final act of civil war was my manager, broken and crippled, leaning against the inside of the fortress's curtain wall, being calmly shot to death by the mayor.

Now, I am left with the mayor, two planters, and a miller, all (fortunately) excellent fighters armed and armored in steel, trying to clean up the remains of more than 200 brutally murdered dwarves while avoiding getting beaten to death by violent ghosts and the seasonal goblin and kobold attacks (fortunately, the outer trap corridors are still functional, although that is likely to end after the next siege since I don't have enough dwarves to unjam them between attacks).

The latest siege has just showed up.  Time to muster the troops!  My only hope at this point is for immigrants to show up before a really nasty forgotten beast, titan, or flying megabeast shows up.  I'm pretty sure having 99% of my population murdered in the last year is a pretty solid deterrent against immigration, despite the fortress's wealth...

[Eidre]

Now down to two dwarves...and a another siege just showed up.

[Casei]

So much !!FUN!!.

I had my first loyalty cascade recently, too, and with similar circumstances. From 225 dwarves down to 11. A migrant wave saved my bacon.

[Eidre]

I'm thinking that having been mountainhome, not trading in three years (disassembled my trade depot because I was completely self-sufficient), or being a ghost haunted, blood-caked abattoir might be deterring any from showing up.  I haven't even gotten any "you didn't attract any migrants" messages.

Siege passed uneventfully (traps saved my bacon again), as well as a skinless bear with antennae and toxic spittle.  Starting to produce rock coffins to inter the dead, hopefully before the angry ghosts (up to 5 now) batter my survivors to death.

[Victor6]

Slabs might be better than coffins in this case because you can target specific ghosts, although they do take an additional manufacturing step to complete.

The main thing is to seal your dwarves in while you work, since exterior threats are the biggest potential problem. The upside of mass population drops is that you always have tons of food \ booze \ clothes lying around.)

[Eidre]

Well, my trapped passages have taken out two sieges now, but I finally discovered the root of my problem...a small immigration wave of 5 showed up "despite the danger" and I thought I was out of the woods, until I mustered the military (to get the new recruits to put on their gently used armor and weapons)...and my mayor, one of the two survivors, whipped out his steel warhammer and slaughtered them one by one.  He (apparently the last member of the "renegade" faction) is now the only survivor of the fort and is busy with "Individual combat drill" instead of burying bodies (apparently he considers them enemies).

I'm now curious how long this "fort of one" can hold out, so I'm going to let it go until he gets taken out.  It won't be hunger or thirst (I have 2,700+ rations of booze and 23,000! rations of food), so I'm thinking vengeful ghosts is the most likely.  I've just enabled all the non-uniform-granting labors on him to see what he considers the highest priority...

[McDonald]

Wow, I might start playing DF again to do this.

[Quietust]

Reading this has made me consider writing a tweak for the next version of DFHack which will automatically exclude such friendly units from kill orders. Because really, the civil war bug isn't something any rational player actually wants to inflict on their fortress - if you want to deliberately destroy your fortress, there are plenty of "normal" ways to do it (ordering all of your soldiers to strip naked and then run headlong into a siege, flooding your fortress with water or magma, releasing a trapped megabeast, or trying to take on HFS).

Also, DFHack already includes a "fix/loyaltycascade" script which will restore your citizens' loyalties toward one another.

[Sadrice]

I don't know, running a hermit fortress using the method you described in that thread (allow caravan to report full pop cap, not permitting any further caravans to leave alive) using a renegade dwarf as your hermit might be interesting.


If the hermit achieves his solitude in a sufficiently violent fashion and attains legendary combat skills, like Eidre's mayor, he ought to handle the dwarven caravans by himself.

[Loud Whispers]

Reading this has made me consider writing a tweak for the next version of DFHack which will automatically exclude such friendly units from kill orders. Because really, the civil war bug isn't something any rational player actually wants to inflict on their fortress - if you want to deliberately destroy your fortress, there are plenty of "normal" ways to do it (ordering all of your soldiers to strip naked and then run headlong into a siege, flooding your fortress with water or magma, releasing a trapped megabeast, or trying to take on HFS).

Sometimes you want to see your Fort's best warriors square off against one another without having to cheat by changing the game to arena mode without hacks.