Print

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

[Bakaridjan]

Ok, so it's taken me forever to capture a dragon and then once I captured it it took forever for the next goblin siege to come. But I had my dragon all set up in her little bunker to toast the first goblins that would have to go right by her and then set the whole forest on fire and burn everyone else and cut down on tree growth. I know it works because despite being trained she already blew fire on two different groups of merchants (elves and humans), still haven't figured out why that happened, but other weirdness was going on too.

So when the goblin's approached I waited for the fireworks and nothing happened. Not even when the crossbowmen shot her through the fortifications did she blow fire on them. She is now badly injured and I'm lucky she's still alive. Her spine is fractured along with most of her legs and head is bleeding. What did I do wrong?

[Daris]

The dragon attacked the merchants because there is a loyalty problem when trained or tame megabeasts encounter active military of any civilization.

It probably didn't attack the goblins because you probably had a civilian alert up.  Fortress animals obey a civilian alert, pathing toward the alert burrow and doing absolutely nothing other than that.  If the animal is unable to reach the burrow, it will just stand there, and if attacked it will not attack back.

The resolution to this is to put a door at the entrance to your alert burrow, close it when all your dwarves are safe, and then turn the alert off.  The dragon will will react appropriately to invaders.

[PatrikLundell]

If the burrows is the issue it's even simpler: include the dragon pen in the (now disjoint) burrows. If all access is blocked you don't get civilians caught with the dragon.
I'd also consider adding raising drawbridges outside of the dragon's fortifications to block her from seeing (and attacking) merchants and to protect her from bolts if things go pear shaped.

[Bakaridjan]

Thanks to you both for the pointers. It would have taken me forever to figure the burrows thing out. And yeah, I should have had some better contingency plans this time around. You know things never work like you expect them to the first time in DF.

[PatrikLundell]

In my experience things don't work out the way you expected the second time around either, or the third...
There's always something new (or old) you either didn't think of or plain didn't know.
It's satisfying the few times when things DO go according to plan, though.