I didnt come close to finishing the challenge. Too many years went by with no spawns. Still 19 FB/Titans down is a lot more than I would usually kill, and I learned a lot while playing. Still had a lot of fun playing it. Spoilers for anyone thats still working on it at this point (I cant post spoilers within spoilers for the pictures, so please stop reading if youre still working on this
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Fort Scalyroof 22 dwarves with no reinforcements, so I had to divvy up jobs early to give people the chance to specialize to do better at what we needed to survive at the start. The easiest one was reserving the men for my military (one I got smithing up and running of course), while giving all the actual work to the ladies. Men would be on hauling duty until we got the tree farm up and running.
I decided to take a risk (that backfired the first time I tried it naturally and forced a restart): that my first artifact demand wouldnt involve wood. I had my one miner immediately dig out the central staircase until I hit the first cavern to release the spores, then dug out a small area that I was going to place my farms out. The moss grew just quickly enough to keep all of the grazing animals alive while I worked on the second part of my plan. I then burned the 3 pieces of wood I had into charcoal. One piece to smelt a magnetite ore (creating 4 bars), then the last 2 pieces for 2 iron picks. With 3 miners, I was able to expand my tree farming area quickly enough that I could get a tree or two fully grown before the 2nd artifact was due for creation. I was able to carve out almost 2 full levels for just tree farming while creating the rest of my needed rooms in the fort.
When I started having trees growing to the point where I could start burning charcoal, I had everyone in the fort craft 1 set of iron bolts and 1 iron helm/shield/gauntlet. This maximized the chance of getting an artifact weapon or armor piece. Whenever I had someone claim a forge, I forbade all iron and pig iron bars to guarantee the artifact would be steel (or so I thought. I had two separate occasions where they demanded iron bars. I never knew they could require specific metals). I got a couple steel mail shirts, a steel spear, and a steel mace during my tenure, not too bad at all.
Once I had enough steel armor and weapons for a couple small squads, I breached all three cavern levels and explored fully. This was a mistake on my part actually. I should have breached the first level only and farmed up ~20-30 spider silk first, then opened the last two levels. This didnt bite me in the ass, but it could have.
After a few years of hiding behind the walls of the fortress waiting for beasts to spawn, I got bored and decided on something that worked almost perfectly.
The Hall of Blood (needs a new name, but this is all I came up with so far). A three pronged path of retractable bridges leading to a room layout above for my military dwarves. I had the squads on training 12 months a year. 2 squads of 6 dwarves, 4 minimum for training every month. They would train in that room and whenever a creature from the depths came up to try and escape, they would be murdered immediately and then everyone would go back to training. No one even got mad at the long guard duty because of all the slaughter in the room.
I plan on using this layout in my forts from now on, with a few changes. The third path was initially designed to have war cave dragons/jabberers in them, but I now know it should be a path to the surface that bypasses my squad room for the truly dangerous FBs that you dont want to fight up close. This path should lead to a shooting gallery type of area on the surface for the dust/poison blood style FBs.
Ideally you would also have a well near the squad room so the off duty dwarves would have someplace close to wash themselves at, rather than making the trip back to the main fortress.
You also need to put a floor in the 3x3 squad room. You can deconstruct and rebuild to get rid of the massive pools of blood that end up accumulating. I've rebuilt the floor 3 times now, which I think my guys appreciate.
I had some named weapons for the first time in my short DF career, which was neat. All of them iron crossbows, but its still pretty awesome.
I used Animal Training for the first time too, which was pretty neat. I have plenty of falcons to rid my fort of vermin, as well as 1 war Jabberer. Jabberers and Dragons dont bolt for freedom the way most other monsters do, so you would have to build a trap to lure them in. My attempt at this failed, since they really have to come within line of sight of the bait, which they almost never did. They can exit the map on any of the cave levels or the main one, so you do have a shot at getting them in the cage hallway.
The jabberer sadly gave his life in the last FB encounter (a clear glass monster with deadly dust, by far the most dangerous thing I've fought).
While browsing my starting 22, I noticed that one of them actually had a red trait. I was surprised at first, but then I read her full bio and started laughing. If I had 11 children in 14 years, I'd have poor focus too. She is the biggest asset and biggest threat to my fortress actually. We have no way of getting rid of old clothing by selling them off to merchants. Eventually there will be a bunch of destroyed masterwork clothes in the fort. Combined with the fact that shes surrounded by easily killable children, well, that can get nasty if shes ever upset.
All in all, I had a lot of fun with this fort. It might have worked better as something like: Most FB/Titan kills in 15 years or something like that, but its all good. I've attached my save here (
http://www.sendspace.com/file/47jq8i) if anyone is curious about anything and wants to peruse it. A fun challenge that taught me quite a bit
Also, what was up with the killing of the desert scorpion in the year 76? Half the engravings and artifacts reference it. Its like the only memorable thing that happened in the whole dwarven civ over 1500 years before our fort was founded.
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Topic: Titan Extermination Military Challenge (Read 7702 times)