I lost another fortress today, for about the 10th time that I've lost a fortress. With every new version of DF comes more painful lessons. I have this desire to defend my fort with troops rather than traps, which tends to make things maybe a bit too challenging. Anyway, the fortress I lost today was absolutely beautiful. It just wasn't... functional.
It all started with a temporary soil fort while I dug through the aquafer, then I switched to the main fort with a series of ramps going underground down to a giant subterrainian fortified entryway with focused ballistae and places for my marksdwarves to rain death upon the enemy. It was really sharp! I had considered everything on the other side of this chokepoint to be the interior of my fortress, and the approaching ramp to be outside of the fort. That's how it was in my mind(see where this is going?) I fought off a few ambushes and was already seeing the weaknesses of my design. Then about 6 goblin bowman came.
They slaughtered a helpless elven caravan, and nearly all my dwarves loudly exclaimed "FREE STUFF" and they all went charging up the ramp. Ooh, that's bad, so I told them all to stay inside which they did... The goblin bowmen stayed in a tight group and slowly advanced down the ramp, steamrolling everything in their path, while my well trained ballista operators and marksmen sat useless as this super deadly 'kill zone' I had planned for the goblins, was actually full of about 50 miserable,panicking or beserk civilian dwarves.
Nobody would do any work after this day, so we buried our dead in the most magnificent and vast dwarven cemetary the world had seen, which we had designed for future generations of dwarves, never imagining it would be filled in a day, and we left...
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Topic: How not to defend (Read 536 times)