Since I am a bit stuck with my fort, thought I'd post an AAR of my first fort for my first post!
Hello DF community, nice to meet you
I am a complete newb and I did do a few hours of watching videos and reading Wiki before embarking.
So far I have had probs about 60-80 hours of enjoyment out of this fort, which is amazing value!
I hope this AAR may be a bit entertaining and maybe motivate someone to play(again)!
Before you read any further, if this really turns you off; I did savescum 3 times because I wanted to apply lessons learnt to my current fort instead of starting over:
1. Learnt that when killing a legendary beast, one wants their Dwarven Warriors to arrive at the fight as a squad, and not one by one; so how to use a staging area
2. Learnt that Marksdwarves will happily jump out of the fort to engage a besieging force in glorious hand to hand combat; learnt to build an overhang on my battlements
3. Had a civil war in my fort that wiped out half the fort. I was happy to keep playing, but while burying the dead the filthy goblin spies in my Tavern had alerted their brethren that I was vulnerable and a Max. sized army showed up. I could have defeated it but I did not realize that to use my Macelords in an outnumbered scenario effectively, I would want to fight in a corridor. As my militia commander died with 12 dead goblins at his feet, I decided to 'reload'. I had no clue what caused the civil war, but I decided to prioritize putting up a Justice system and that did the trick somehow.
I am currently stuck/unmotivated due to:
- My stockpiles are a mess and tons of stuff is stuck in bins, especially in my metal workshop
- My manager has so many jobs to organize that some seem to be stuck in limbo. (I love the ingame manager system tho; I decided to use DFhack as little as possible when I started the fort)
- I am sure that the above is significantly contributing to FPS drop on my i7, 24GB RAM system.
What have i enjoyed the most?: Definitely seeing the complicated wound and medical system at work. I couldn't stop laughing when I had my first soldier going into combat with his silver crutch.
Naming all my dwarves after friends, colleagues and historical figures/celebs helps with this
Anyway, without further ado, what the fort of a newbie looks like:
1. The entrance to my empire. Walled off with a northern and southern bridge.
2. My battlements. Note that all fortifications are roofed with an overhang to prevent Marksdwarves jumping out. The marksdwarf you see is on patrolling duty. It took me hours to figure out the military screen, but after I got it it was quite nice and intuitive to use.
3. Kitchen and Farming Level, with indoor and outdoor farm.
4. Indoor Pasture and my Well. I setup the indoor farm after those goblin bastards went straight for all my livestock during the first siege
I designed the well after realizing I embarked in a cold zone with the river running only 2 months of the year when my first casualty had to go to hospital. Imagine my amusement when I discovered that I had designed it in such a way that my aqueduct would take 15 years to fill the well. After adding a 2nd aqueduct with better flow, it took only 2 years -.-
Here the original aqueduct with waterflow that was way too slow (due to the diagonal flow and the fact I didn't clear out the rocks before opening the flood gates.
5. My main dining hall, baracks, hospital (top left) and living area. I assigned the dining hall to my queen when she inherited the position as I cba building a royal dining hall from scratch.
6. My main hoard. Note the encircled stockpiles in an attempt to unbreak stockpiles/bins
7. My tavern. Currently constructing an arena where long term residents that apply for citizenship will have to prove their worth in mortal combat. On the left the levers that will open the cages of the opponents my aspirant citizens will have to overcome.
8. The metal workshop. The adamantine workshop on the left is running smoothly. But the stockpiles/workshops on the right are pretty broken.
Even though I am on an embark without ore and all my bars come from trade/smelting... I obviously need to work on a stockpile<->workshop design that works better
9. I found a large deposit of adamantine in the caverns. Unfortunately a really powerful forgotten beast was running amok killing almost ALL the cavern monsters. I had to wait before accessing the adamantine until my soldiers were strong enough to deal with him. In the mean time, I kept the beast busy by locking in a vampire in the caverns that ran for his life for over a year
After dealing with the beast I used burrows to setup a Civilian alert to keep the dworfs from running around the cavern gathering crap, and only be active in burrows defended by the military.
10. I currently have a large military, with original 7 squads filled with legendary dwarves, 2 marksdwarf squads, a 'Gestapo squad' with weak old ladies toting mussel shell gauntlets and cave dragon bone greaves
and a new squad led by my champion to train all my civvies to lvl5 fighters. After each squad of civvies is done, I deactivate the squad and create a new training squad. The deactivated squad goes on civilian alert hoping they will defend themselves with weapons when confronted with wild life
(don't know if this works) After this is done I hope my 'armed citizenry'can roam the caverns without having to rely on defended burrows and that way stop the job cancellation spam
Like a lot of players, I suffer from dworfs not picking up equipment. They way I resolve it is by assigning those soldiers to different squads, which seems to entice them to drop all their gear and go pickup shiny new stuff.
11. This is the uniform I use for my civvies and all the soldiers that come in through the tavern. I find that it ensures tavern guests keep the equipment they come with and enables my armed civilians to grab any crappy gear they can find.
12. Finally, my death list. The dwarves that didn't deserve a special mention either died killing goblins or got stuck in trees. Oh, 1 mom and her baby fell into the river the day it froze over. They were found in summer encased in ice
. Note I lost my hunter on day 1 to a badger!
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Topic: My first fort (43.05) - Dispatch from a wee noober (Read 475 times)