this might be the last email about my current fort 'Mortalboat', as i've basically completed the things i wanted to do with it
i finished my drowning trap, and shut off the access into the fort.
image below shows ground level
along the north edge is the glass wall, and grey brick road around the outside of the map. i've enclosed the entire of ground-level in glass walls and roofed it with a glass ceiling, to securely land-grab the outdoors ground level. bottom right of the image shows some of the animals i'm farming, can't remember what those ones are, cavys or capybaras or something.
top left, where the green wall kinks downward is the bottom of the staircase which gives access from ground level outside, into the trap itself
the blue ripply strip 4 tiles wide is the small river on my map
the white walls enclose a powerstation of wooden waterwheels, each one is 3x1 tiles and there's 4 rows of 4 wheels, for 1600 power total
the brown lines are horizontal axles, which transfer power. the spiky * things they connect to are gear assemblys, used to redirect power
the green wiggly wall above the power station encloses the bottom of the pumpstack on the left, it draws water from the river. it looks like 2 pairs of green / brown barrels (green cos its made of glass, brown cos that side is covered in mud)
there's 2 greeny/goldy levers (ó) by the axles which are currently ON but that actually means no power is going into the trap's pumpstacks:
level 1 now, this is the bottom of the drowning pond
the green brick background is the glass ceiling over the whole map
the blue 7's are 7/7 deep water
the grey at the bottom is a stockpile, (with brown X's which are wooden boxes full of glass blocks, i was storing them here when constructing the trap)
the brown X at the top left, enclosed in walls, is the staircase for goblins to enter
the icons with red background are dead gobbos, the O's are dead ogresses:
level 2,
the top of the drowning pond
the pumps at the bottom are to fill the pond with water, the pumps on the right are to lift the water into the storage above the pond:
level 3, the bridge level
the green O's are single-tile walls, the vertical green stripes are 1x10 narrow bridges, linked to the brown crown (bear trap?) spiky icons above them which are pressure plates
you enter from the stairs on the top left, go over one of the pressure plates then south onto the bridge, by which time its been triggered to retract by the plate and you fall in the water.
if you make it over the bridge, the pathfinding route takes you to the bottom right, and up along the right-edge. the right edge is lined with more brown circular icons which in this case are weapon traps loaded with warhammers to make you dodge and fall in the water
the eventual pathfinding route takes you up the staircase in the top right:
level 4
top right is a coiled iron chain, next to [some bones from] a bait-animal [that got killed]
i moved the bait animal up a level, to avoid it getting splashed by water (because most animals won't fare so great if i start using magma instead)
in the middle of the picture is the bridge-floor to hold water when its up in storage, which also then would be retracted to dump the water back down:
level 5:
top of the storage cistern. the right hand pump stack terminates here, washes out past 2 double vertical bars for when i transfer water from the lower drowning pond, into the upper storage cistern, for servicing or to collect goblin items.
the lower left hand side also shows the top of the access staircase:
(above this level is just a roof to seal the top in, not shown)
its really satisfying watching the goblins sploosh into the water as they get part way across
however, there are a couple of problems with the design:
-timing
if the bridge resets and a goblin immediately runs across, they can occasionally get clear across the bridge before it retracts a second time
this is dealt with by forcing the goblins to double back after the bridges, and cross a row of 10 weapon traps also on a narrow walkway above the water.
each trap is loaded with 10 iron warhammers. the hammers hit very hard and are likely to kill outright, but their main purpose is to force dodges to make an attacker dodge off the platform into the water.
they're iron because silver isn't magma safe, and warhammers because blunt weapons are less likely to jam
i could also deal with this by doubling the length of the pond, and having a second set of bridges. 10 tiles is the longest bridge you can have but i could have 2 bridges each 1x10 and end to end, both connected to the same pressure plates
-mud
the floor of the storage cistern is a retracting bridge, so after servicing i drop the water back into the lower pond. however, because i made this bridge the same full size as the pond and the cistern there's no drainage effect, it simply dumps all the water at once.
this is nicely dramatic but unfortunately it splashes water over the pressure plates and the weapon traps.
this means that mud accumulates, (its also why various tiles in the trap are brown instead of green) and has clogged the mechanisms so the trap is currently out of commission
this could be solved by cleaning it, or by making the floor of the cistern out of real floor tiles with a smaller aperture dump-gate so water doesn't touch the mechanisms.
the dwarfyist solution though would be to use magma instead of water - the trap was built with magma in mind, and water was just used for the testing phase.
unfortunately, any construction or modification projects are basically not possible any more without going back to an older save, because i recruited ALL my adult dwarves to the military. the only adult to escape the draft was my chief medical dwarf and he is pretty useless most of the time
I've now got ~125 crossbow dwarves, at mediocre levels of skill. it takes so long to level up firing at archery targets, even though between them they've used maybe 30000 bolts in training.
i've got ~55 axe dwarves and ~50 hammer dwarves
the repeating wooden spear traps in the danger room train melee guys very fast.... i mean yes they did fatally impale 4-5 unfortunate guys at the start of this fitness program, but the survivors are now all super-legendary.
(level 15 in a skill is legendary, level 20 is legendary +5 and the highest that matters in game. but the game keeps tracking xp gains even after that, one of my original military guys is an axelord who is Fighter level legendary +317... he's been danger rooming for 15+ years)
before the melee dwarves got drafted, i had all the crossbow ones training for a couple years while the melee candidates were digging in the depths.
they made a battle arena, which is a 17x17 square room with a single down-stair in the middle
around the edges is fortifications carved into the rock that archers can shoot through but creatures can't pass through
behind each wall of fortification is a set of chambers for archer dwarves
access to the fort is in the top left, behind a set of bridges and doors:
i'd removed the ceiling from this chamber so on the level above was another set of fortifications and rooms, for a second tier of archery:
down the down-stair, was a passage to hell. but not a simple one
(via the blue 'v' down-arrow ramps, this digs into an adamantine spire)
i'd made a single-tile zigzag route to follow that hopefully should slow down a rush slightly, maybe into a manageable trickle.
also along the passages was 12 side-chambers, each with a bait-table and a lockable gate, to try and lure demons and trap them separately, to split them up.
shown here, in the middle of the image by the table passages, is 2 red demons and 2 brown ones:
so all of these preparations were finally complete, everyone in position, civilian alert in place to keep children in the upper fort, (although every baby available was being carried by its foolish archer mother)
i breach hell with great trepidation, and nothing much happens. a few minutes later a couple of soot demons and flame monsters find their way up into the passages beneath the battle arena level, they dither around looking at the table side passages and generally not doing anything
hmm
it seems the demon pathfinding is very crude
so i shut off some of the bridges down on that level to reduce their options. they manage to overcome their confusion at the sight of tables and make their way into the zigzag bit, and then towards the upstair into battle arena
as they round the final twist in the passage, a couple of dwarves on the level above detect them, and leap down the stairs into battle.
brave, noble, retard dwarves.
once a military dwarf has charged an enemy, there's no orders you can issue to call them back. so then its 1-2 dwarves in a narrow passageway, with no archer-support, against 2-3 demons.
fortunately they butchered the demons. i checked previously and the demons i have are composed of really flimsy materials. soot haunts, blizzard steam and flame monsters, giant mosquito demons, flame-scorpions
after that i pulled all the melee guys out of the arena, and just relied on the archers behind their fortifications for the next demons that arose. it was 2 flame monsters, and they got hit by 2 bolts each before exploding into flame and vanishing. i didn't even get a chance to screenshot it, i wanted to see a serious flurry of bolts in midflight
so far, the demons have been weaker than goblins and a big disappointment
(I just remembered after writing all of this, that i'd forgotten to deactivate the speed cheat and my dwarves still have superfast attack and move speed)
however, i did see a forgotten beast wander into hell a while ago and get hit by a group of demons, some of them spew webs and immobilised it, others spit fire and burnt it, between them they destroyed it
most recently, there was half a dozen various demons in the passages under the arena, and i sent in my best axe squad to clear them out so i could simplify the passages to avoid confusing their pathfinding, and also to breach the second spire, which seemed to have more demons collected in it
but the axe guys got webbed and set on fire
so i had to send an archer squad in behind them, only 2 of them were able to get round the corner enough to be able to fire, but they killed the demons and my axe guys seemed unscathed (masterwork steel armor yay)
currently, i've issued orders to dig out some of the passages but the only guy who can do so is the chief medical dwarf and he's asleep, the lemon
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Topic: Mortalboat - Dwarves Ahoy (Read 4466 times)