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[infinityc0mplex]

I haven't played DF for very long but I've seen the most bizarre things can happen at a moment's notice. And while they can be bad, they can also be good. Then there are things so lucky you are dumbstruck that things turned out that way.

Just yesterday, I had a fort get besieged. At the time it was completely unarmed (due to not mining any metals usable for weapons or armor) and about a third of our population was composed of children (because migrant waves suck). I knew there was no way my dwarfs could fight off that siege, but as I was waiting to die I got a new alert on my screen. Zombies. Freaking zombies, started to flood into the map right where the invaders were at, forcing them to duke things out. And after the invaders won out against the dead, they practically lost interest in the siege and eventually went home without so much as getting within weapon's reach of my fort.

Then today (different fort, the last one didn't survive the second siege), my dwarfs were in an almost identical situation. Except we were even worse off because we missed the last trade caravan and were even less equipped than the previous fort was. Except this time, the invaders were distracted by the new trade caravan, coming in for the season. The invaders attacked and killed several of the traders but the traders' guards killed all of the invaders. The kicker though is that one of the trader's wagons was destroyed and the traders ran off after the battle, leaving behind a ton of supplies, weapons and armor from each side of the battle for my dwarves to pick for themselves.

Both times I thought I was screwed and both times I came out on top. I'm wondering what kind of baffling luck other people had in this game.

[zubb2]

I've tried to drop a vampire on a spike at least 5 times and he has missed each time.

I'd call "smiley" the vampire pretty lucky.

[Drazinononda]

My current fort got ambushed by five squads of goblins while I had no traps, the drawbridge still unlinked and my entire military consisting of three shoddily-clad, poorly trained soldiers. A caravan showed up in the middle of it and ended up being completely wiped out, but turned the tide enough to drive off the goblins.

Before the ambush I had 54 dwarves in the fort. I lost 28 in the fighting, and another 24 to subsequent tantrums and insanity. Two dwarves left, and one of them was bedridden in the hospital with one leg missing and the other smashed all to hell.

The other dwarf, though, was largely unperturbed by the entire ordeal. He apparently had little to no family or friends in the fort, as his bad thoughts were along the lines of "disgusted by miasma" and such things marginally related to the aftermath of everyone being dead. I turned off all labors then enabled all the medical ones and he patched up the other survivor; then I turned on masonry and set him to building coffins -- I think he was a ranger before that, can't recall. The "satisfied at work" and "had a decent drink" thoughts apparently offset the "witnessed death" and such enough to keep him happy, and he ran the fort by himself until migrants showed up 'despite the danger' the next season.

So, yeah, thank Armok for unsocial dwarves.

[Scootagoose]

A cave crocodile was fighting about five of my wrestlers, three died, one left with a missing limb and the other beat the croc to death with his bare hands after the croc gave into the pain from being shot in the head with a bolt.

[Deus Asmoth]

I was in the middle of a necromancer siege, which would have been enough to kill me if I hadn't had walls up by that point, so I had enough time to prepare an attempt of a thirty-dwarf kamikaze attack at the necromancer who was ruining everything. Except just before I lowered the bridges, a giant shows up out of nowhere, kills half the zombies and then breaks pretty much everything in the necromancer's body. The kamikaze mission became a rescue attempt when he got surrounded by the remaining zombies, but he died of his various wounds before they reached him. They did get rid of the rest of the zombies at least.

[NESgamer190]

A couple good lucky events:
1:  A few unfortunate dwarves wound up being sealed in by a cave blob, and they freaking killed it!  Huzzah for the dwarves.
2:  A small siege of zombies tried to take on the fortress, and the glass disks stopped a great amount of the zombies, making the siege end with relative ease.
A bad thing or two came out though:
1:  A Dimetrodon came at another fortress, and proceeded to deadly dust everyone.
2:  In yet another fort, I got reamed by skeleton yaks in a glacier area.  (Ah yes...  Reminds me of the second time I embarked on an evil biome.)
And the wierd:
1:  A goblin who got tossed into a spike pit managed to survive ten wooden spikes and about 20 Z-levels of falling and lived through it.  Summarily though, the goblins died to some more traps.

[Chaz GELF]

I haven't had many lucky moments yet, but I had a minor lucky moment just now when I found myself struggling to deal with a secretive weaponsmith. How he managed to keep his sanity for as long as he did until I set up four or five workshops and got him the leather and cloth he needed is a mystery, but I'm just glad I avoided a potential tantrum spiral.

[MythagoWoods]

A few of my luckiest moments include my last fort, prior to succumbing to FPS death from getting sieged by almost 100 goblins/trolls+mounts, was the sheer success of my checkerboard traps.  basically... I build on long, winding 3x3 corridor leading to my fort and place traps in a checkerboard fashion because while being very inefficient... it's positively hilarious.  For the first 2-3 sieges almost all the combat logs consisted of little more then dozens upon dozens of Goblins getting torn to shreds by iron discs, silver balls, random weapons I didn't feel like melting, and stone traps I put in just because.  Favorite one was a 50 goblin siege where the lead Goblin ran first, got eviserated by the first disc trap, and the siege broke and everyone else fled.  It was lucky because most of my military was recovering from a Forgotten Beast fight that left most of them wounded due to symptoms.

Another lucky moment that was quite amusing was in said previous fort I was digging down to find the caverns, my miner began to dig a downward staircase... and fell 10 Z levels into the cavern, landed in water, broke a leg, fumbled out of the water, gored a Giant Olm and 6 Crundles in the face with his pickaxe, and casually limped to a spot I told him to dig to start his march back up to my fort, and proceeded to gore every hostile wildlife that came close that dared to interrupt his trek back to comfort.  He then got eaten by a Giant Cave Spider.

[wagawaga]

I was just setting up my fortress on a cold biome, when I suddenly realized all of my dwarves were thirsty because I had accidentally brought NO booze, only some meat to eat and a handful of seeds. And the brook was frozen for most summer too.
I spent great part of the first year scavenging food and in general struggling to get anything going with the constant menace of dehydration.
The caravan eventually arrived and brought great relief with booze, then as soon as they left the map I was notified in quick succession that three kobold thieves had stolen from under my nose the same stone mugs I traded for the booze.
But that wasn't the problem.

I can barely read the last theft announcement that a berserking werebear(!) appears on the map.
I'm already preparing for a suicide charge as my fort was a hole in the ground with most supplies still on the wagon, and watched the werebear tear its way through the map, chasing and ripping apart several small animals, and ironically enough a kobold thief.

He was three tiles away from my only two armed dwarves (miner & woodcutter, and with copper, no better) when he turned back into a human child, running off the map faster than he got in.

[Shash The Stampede]

In a previous fort I had a militia commander that rushed outside while I was trying to lure a white tigerman(Masterwork) siege in. She met the siege on the outer drawbridge, killing four of them before the combat report became a sea of red. Figuring that it was time to cut my losses before my untrained militia was slaughtered I decided to close the bridge. What I didn't realize was that she'd broken the siege before collapsing. As the tigermen fled, my militia commander took a drawbridge ride back over the walls, landing unconscious and covered in blood a square away from a stagnant pool. I figured she was done for when I checked how badly she was wounded but she fully recovered eventually. The brain damage she suffered as a result of the whole mess didn't seem to slow her down at all.

[JimDale]

Lucky:
Getting a five giant lions via cage traps placed randomly throughout the map.
Turned out that I got two breeding pairs out of the five, and within a few years military conscription was a thing of the past. Instead, giant, blood-thirsty, war-bred and danger-room trained lions ripped sieges apart.

Not so lucky:
Turned out a few dwarves adopted a couple of the lions. Some of those lions died in battle, and apparently the bad thoughts from losing a pet were enough to trigger them to go berserk. Sadly, said giant lions weren't present deep enough in the fort for them to actually help with the matter. Ended up losing half of my fort, mostly on the bedroom and office levels.