Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[paladin225]

It's been a while since I've played dwarf fortress and I just wanted a reminder on some things.

The DF wiki has been very helpful and I've been using that to answer the majority of my questions.

I'm playing with an older version of DF, not the 2014 one, if that makes any difference. My version is probably 2012 or 2013.

I would like to know what exactly starts triggering sieges and ambushes. Is time a factor at all?  The wiki says population number is a factor for sieges and I think it said that I won't be sieged until I have around 80 dwarves. The wiki also said that megabeats won't have a chance of appearing until I've reached 100k in created wealth. 

However, ambushes can happen anytime and are purely dependent on created wealth?  How much created wealth triggers them?

How long do sieges and ambushes last if you try to wait them out?

My embark ended up having native gold just about everywhere... even on ground level. Gold nuggets litter the floor everywhere. So I started making lots of gold stuff without thinking... and now I'm concerned. I have 86k in created wealth and only at the start of my second year. Only 24 dwarves so far though I'm sure the next couple migration waves will bring in a lot more.  I have seen a few thieves.  I have guard animals set up to catch them.

My embark was a wilderness area. Not untamed wilds or anything worse.  I forgot to check my neighbors, so I don't know if goblins are nearby.

My problem is I only have four cage traps and a single drawbridge that's not finished yet. lol   I have not found iron yet (gold is the only metal I've found) so I can't really make weapons or armor. No hospital or well access yet... and the only good thing about my military is a couple master hunter/marksdwarves. 

Any tips on what I should do immediately to try to prevent the disaster this is leading to?  I assume I should stop all gold production, find iron and focus on nothing but traps and building my defense at this point.  I'm sure even if I did that though, producing the mechanisms for traps alone will eventually push me over 100k created wealth.

Advice and answers to my questions would be appreciated. Thanks! 

[dwarf_reform]

I'd personally seal the fort til it was menacing with traps, but I'm a military-less cave adapted coward

[§k]

Ambushers will come sooner or later, as your wealth is accumulating fast anyway, especially when you begin to make mechanism and trap component. Siege will come when your population hits 80.

Besides sealed fort or a good military, there's an alternative. You may try to wall the map edge and split the edge into sections with multiple bridges. It doesn't take much time as you may think. I started doing this with 6 dabbling masons right on embark, and finished before dwarven caravan arrived.

[LordUbik]

Well, first of all, are you sure you have iron?

Second, cage traps are the ultimate overkill, those simple wooden cage can stop pretty much anything, unless it has the trapavoid ability. So putting some row of them in your entrance can be quite deadly for the first ambushes that you can get.
Drawbridges are the non-plus-ultra for home protection and can be built pretty quickly.

I suggest you to stop gold production and focus more on defence, unless you want your !! FUN!! faster than usual.

[paladin225]

Yeah, I've thought about building more cage traps. Since weapon traps need lots of weapons that will quickly increase my created wealth even further.  I already got a second useless artifact made that bumped me up to 90k created wealth now.

However, cage traps will block caravans, right?  I have a single 4 or 5-wide tunnel going into a mountain where my fort is. Going for an airlock design with the trade depot in the entrance tunnel. Sadly, it doesn't leave much room for traps without blocking the caravan. 

There is un-mined space on each side of the tunnel where I could carve fortifications for archers or siege engines to shoot into the tunnel if any enemies get that far.  But I'm not sure how effective that would be... the DF wiki seems to give the impression that siege engines aren't really worth the effort for what you get out of them and I don't really want to waste wood on ammunition for them.  I am getting a lot of trained marksdwarves from immigration though... so I might just make some fortifications for them.

Also thinking of making an underground trap corridor that opens up near my entrance and put a bait animal at the end of it or something.

I'm not sure if I have iron but my embark had shallow metals and deep metals so I'm really hoping I'll find it soon.

I'm also wondering how I should go about defending my outdoor pasture animals?   Is building a wall around them the best way? I know some sieges will have flyers that can fly over the wall though.  So, I guess I would need to build a roof over the pasture animals too?  Will that kill their grass? lol... it's been a long time since I played and I really don't remember all this stuff.

[wuphonsreach]

Constructed walls / floors do not block sunlight from reaching the pasture grass - it will continue to grow (also holds true for surface farms).

All traps block caravans, but as long as you leave a 3-wide path, it will work.  To get more effectiveness out of a 5-wide corridor, you could put traps 2-wide on the left side at the start, leave a 5-tile gap, then put traps 2-wide on the right side deeper in.

The important bit with caravan wagons is that any 90 degree turns need to be about 4x4 tiles or 5x5 tiles wide so that they can turn properly.  A 3-tile wide corridor with a 90 degree bend tends to cause problems.  Straight corridors or ramps / bridges can be 3-tiles wide without issues.

[PatrikLundell]

There is a wiki description of how to make a caravan friendly trapped path, and it's worked for me (contradicting wuphonsreach's conclusion):

  XXXXXXX
  XXXXXXX
  XXXXXXX         DDDDD
XXXXTXXXTXXXXDDDDD
XXXXTXXXTXXXXDDDDD
XXXXTXXXTXXXXDDDDD
         XXXXXXX  DDDDD
         XXXXXXX
         XXXXXXX

Note that I'm using the current version, though. If your area is generally safe, you might want to put the depot off to the side of your fortress with a drawbridge to close off the path to it, basically betting on there being no trouble most of the time, and sacrificing the caravan if need be.
I'm currently redesigning to give the caravans a separate entrance to the depot, one that I'm going to keep closed with a magmasafe drawbridge unless a caravan is in- or out-bound. That way I can trap my main entrance to hell and back without impeding caravans, and you can trap the path from the fortress to the depot, of course.
I'm also walling off and decking over first my outdoor farming area (done), and then my pasture (working on it), but that takes some more time which I guess you don't have. I would guess the first siege usually would not contain flyers, so a wall at least 2 z-levels high (I think climbing one tile is no problem) with no trees to provide a path over ought to be sufficient to keep the first wave off your cattle (Warning! this is a guess, not knowledge). As been noted elsewhere, one time sunshine, always sunshine, so decking over is safe from that perspective (but hostiles get more dwarves to catch outside while they're working on it). I'm still waiting for my first siege, but my current guess is that it will happen during the winter, since that is the goblin season. The decking project is on a tight schedule...

[wuphonsreach]

U-Bends like you show do work.

Code: [Select]

   XXXXXXXXXX
   XXXXXXXXXX
   XXXXXXXXXX      DDDDD
XXXXXX    XXX XXXXXDDDDD
XXXXXX    XXX XXXXXDDDDD
XXXXXX    XXX XXXXXDDDDD
          XXXXXXX  DDDDD
          XXXXXXX
          XXXXXXX
If you change those traps to thicker walls, you'll be more likely to see problems with wagons getting stuck on the corners.  Especially for that left-hand u-bend which is a bit wider in my example.  Wagons + draft animals have a 3x4 footprint and seem to have trouble in enclosed spaces.

I have had forts (in 34.x) with a 3-tile wide corridor with long straightaways and a few 90-degree bends, had caravan wagons get caught on the corners more then once.  So now I suggest having a 3x4 up to 5x5 open area at the corners to give a bit of turning room.

In most of my current designs, the outer gate will be 3-wide, but I'll switch to 5-wide corridors / ramps / landings once I get deeper in.  In general that means:

- 3-wide raising drawbridge over a 2-3 tile wide dry moat (also used for foot traffic)
- 3-wide entrance, about 3 tiles deep (gives room to have 2 doors to the side leading to stairs for the foot traffic), also leaves spots for chained dogs to detect intruders
- immediate dive into the earth via a 3-wide ramp, down to the first stone layer (2-4 z levels down)
- a short section of 3-wide corridor
- widening to 5-wide corridor after that point
- 90 degree turn towards the side with the stairway
- a 5x9 area for the initial depot, linked to the foot traffic stairway

I leave room there to run a 5-wide corridor away from that location so that I can ramp down to get closer to the magma.  My trade depot eventually ends up halfway (in z-levels) between the surface and the magma forges via a winding set of ramps.  Or it at least ends up 10-20Z deeper then the "just under the surface" depot that I start with in the first year.

[paladin225]

I would guess the first siege usually would not contain flyers, so a wall at least 2 z-levels high (I think climbing one tile is no problem) with no trees to provide a path over ought to be sufficient to keep the first wave off your cattle (Warning! this is a guess, not knowledge).

So... I need to build a wall on top of my wall? Is climbing something the new version of DF implements? I'm not using the new version so maybe I don't need to worry about that.

It's good to hear that I can build a fort over my pastures without hurting the grass. I think eventually I'll put a second floor over the pastures and fill it with marksdwarves.

I've started construction on walls around my pastures but with a bunch of unskilled masons its not going fast. I  got my drawbridges finished though... just as I hit 100k created wealth in the second year.  49 dwarves now.

So far, I've dug down deep enough to hit the first cavern and I'm still not finding any metals I can use for weapons, just gold lol... gold everywhere and nothing else.  This is starting to seem like a much tougher embark location than I thought it would be.

Anyway, thanks for the help everyone! If you have any more advice please feel free to post it.

[PatrikLundell]

The method I used to build a second wall tier was to build a ramp at one end (to tear down later). However, for some unknown reason they've refused to build one second level tile in the middle of my wall...
I'm using wood to build my walls, since I've got huge amounts of timber, and that's a lot faster than using masons. A method to speed up stone based wall building is to set up a stone stockpile close to the wall to be, set a bunch of haulers to haul stone, and only create wall segments with stone that's in the stockpile (thus, specifying the wall segments piecemeal, rather than all at once). Another potential method could be a strip mine close to your building site, where miners build a pit (with a ramp up), with the single objective to produce stone for your masons.

The wiki warns that a single level deep dry moat only slows goblins down marginally, so I assume the same goes for a single level wall. Also, In my overdecking work I've used natual terrain for parts of the sides, and I've decked over all the slope tiles (with the objective to stop my cattle from straying), and only have sheer single tile walls (until I can cover everytihng), and my dwarves, and even caravans, have no trouble getting up or down there. I don't think I've seen them climb my wall, though.

[slothen]

dodgeme traps are pretty awesome.  Gotta be careful with cages though.  I've often had squads sit around the cages and not move for 2-3 seasons.  So I tend to put the weapon traps as the first thing the invaders hit.  Then you either get marksdwarves to shoot at them from a fortification as they flee and/or send the melee squad to finish the wounded and chase down stragglers.

[Spectre Incarnate]

So... I need to build a wall on top of my wall? Is climbing something the new version of DF implements? I'm not using the new version so maybe I don't need to worry about that.

Yes, two levels of wall is needed against climbers in the new 40.xx  But, you will be fine with one level of wall if using version 34.xx and older. Although, it might be good to practice for later.. hehe.

[wuphonsreach]

dodgeme traps are pretty awesome.  Gotta be careful with cages though.  I've often had squads sit around the cages and not move for 2-3 seasons.  So I tend to put the weapon traps as the first thing the invaders hit.  Then you either get marksdwarves to shoot at them from a fortification as they flee and/or send the melee squad to finish the wounded and chase down stragglers.

If their leader gets trapped, squads will stay near the leader... who is not dead.