Print

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

[JTTCOTE]

Noob question, sorry.
I have a map where I have found nothing but sphalerite(zinc), native silver and a tiny bit of casseritite. The first goblin siege will be coming up soon so I need to make my defensive traps.
Without iron I can't make traps worth anything. Yes, I got as much as I could off the caravan but thats not much. I have queued up loads of silver warhammers, but what should I make in the way of traps?
Is it even worth making traps, or should I lock the doors, wall up the entrance and wait till they get bored and leave while I dig for iron?

[Flare]

Silver spike balls. That is all.

Or bridge traps, those are always good. Splatty!

Dodge traps Skewer them!

Or you could just hole up.

I've used wooden traps before on tougher entities than goblins. I embarked onto a map where there wasn't any iron or bronze bearing material with the defence mod installed. All it take is a quantity.

[JTTCOTE]

Thanks.
I was thinking as a long term defense measure to make a moat and have upright spike traps around the edge. Do goblins/other siegers circle around a moat if they can't reach you and stay there so I can ram spikes into them, or do they just sort of idle anywhere?
CHARCOAL MAKING IS SO ANNOYING
sorry, it had to be said.

[UltraValican]

Thanks.
I was thinking as a long term defense measure to make a moat and have upright spike traps around the edge. Do goblins/other siegers circle around a moat if they can't reach you and stay there so I can ram spikes into them, or do they just sort of idle anywhere?
CHARCOAL MAKING IS SO ANNOYING
sorry, it had to be said.

If they can't bath to a dorf, the ai will throw a hissy and sit at the edge.

[Zaroua]

Glass spiked balls work fairly well with a decent mechanism and high number, even if you use completely unskilled glassmakers. Which is part of the reason I always bring a fair amount of sand bags on embark. If I get no military metals on my embark, I can defend myself with glass stuff (and I get a ton of cheap bags!).

[Nan]

Spikes are actually very good. They are MUCH sharper than spears, and even if made out of inferior materials like wood, can punch through copper helmets no problem. I'm not sure whether wood or silver is better (worser) for spikes, both seem to make equally bad spears (from testing elf spears), but spikes of either will probably work - but wood would definitely be better off turned directly into wooden spikes than charcoal for silver spikes, no contest there at all.

If you don't mind being cheesy you can build a dodge trap. Just channel out at least 2z on either side of a walkway covered in weapon traps. Enemies will dodge the weapon traps and fall in the pit.

Another weapon choice is crossbow dwarves armed with bone or wood bolts. Just make full squads of 10 dwarves, and to train up skill, rather than bothering with archery ranges, barracks or training - have them shoot wild life.

[Tirion]

If you feel cheap, you can spam a long hallway with cagetraps and capture entire sieges. Disarming these will give you copper, iron and silver (and maybe bronze) weapons and armor you can use, or melt down for metal.

[orius]

Yeah, I'd say use cages.  You can at least make those out of zinc. At least it should tide you over until you can start harvesting goblinite.

[peskyninja]

Bridges! Or

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

~~ ~~

[Lagslayer]

Be a man and meet those gobbos head-on. Blunt weapons and whatever armor you can scrounge up at first will do if you have a danger room. You can upgrade as you get better stuff.

Or zerg rush their asses. Equipping all your civilians with wood crossbows and churning out tons of silver bolts should be comical. They won't intentionally get close when they are off duty, but if they are far enough away, they will shoot at the enemy.

[Babylon]

Noob question, sorry.
I have a map where I have found nothing but sphalerite(zinc), native silver and a tiny bit of casseritite. The first goblin siege will be coming up soon so I need to make my defensive traps.
Without iron I can't make traps worth anything. Yes, I got as much as I could off the caravan but thats not much. I have queued up loads of silver warhammers, but what should I make in the way of traps?
Is it even worth making traps, or should I lock the doors, wall up the entrance and wait till they get bored and leave while I dig for iron?

cage traps work really well on goblins, although I know some people don't like to use them.  If you want to limit use you could always use them to take out the first few ambushes or a siege and then use goblinite to get iron and deconstruct them.