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[Dunamisdeos]

I've killed them with 3 squads of military dwarves, 2 crossbows and one melee.

Set up the crossbows behind a fortification perpendicular to a one-tile wide walkway, block em with armored melee dwarves, go to town.

Also had a fat pile of dogs. 4 melee dwarves survived, crossbows didnt get touched. lost 20ish dogs.

[smeeprocket]

Hearing about the supply/demand system is exciting. I played years ago and was stoked because milking would eventually be in, and I thought that was awesome! I stopped playing for a long time and only recently picked it up again. I really love this game.

The problem with my animals coming to the refuge burrow during a civilian alert doesn't seem to be pet related, and you can pasture pets, I thought you had to if they were grazing animals. They just did it again during another siege, and I went from 200+ animals (that have been fairly worthless, tbh) to a little under 100. Some of that was due to a FB burning down the underground pasture I used for the capybaras and rabbits, though.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I think I'll train my men up further, then run the demons through a lever activated spike trap gauntlet before facing them a few at a time. Is it worth opening up Hell if I can handle these guys? I mean, the fortress is a controlled situation. Having a demon or two spawn every so often when I don't have a setup for it, assuming I can clear Hell out to begin with, sounds rough.

[i2amroy]

The only other piece of advice I'd give on the spike traps is to make sure that you have a fair amount of coverage with them since the hotter demons can wipe out nearby spike traps with the heat of their death explosions, potentially leaving you with a room full of demons and no way to kill them. Also once you have wiped out the initial wave of demons any new ones that spawn act more like extremely deadly wildlife rather then fortress killers. This means that they will be content to wander around hell and slaughter any dwarves that they see, but unless they wander up by pure chance they will feel no need to come destroy your fort and everything that you hold dear.

[jaxler]

also aren't blob demons un-killable without a cave-in

[smeeprocket]

The only other piece of advice I'd give on the spike traps is to make sure that you have a fair amount of coverage with them since the hotter demons can wipe out nearby spike traps with the heat of their death explosions, potentially leaving you with a room full of demons and no way to kill them. Also once you have wiped out the initial wave of demons any new ones that spawn act more like extremely deadly wildlife rather then fortress killers. This means that they will be content to wander around hell and slaughter any dwarves that they see, but unless they wander up by pure chance they will feel no need to come destroy your fort and everything that you hold dear.

What if I make the spikes out of copper? Will they melt?

[i2amroy]

Yeah, the hottest demons will melt through anything except for adamantine spikes.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

I'd recommend reading the entry in the wiki.  There's some useful info there after the spoiler break.

Defeating hell is really a question of how willing you are to game the system.  The simplest method I ever tested of beating hell involved an artifact hatch cover (for bait purposes), a single adamantine retracting spike trap, and two one tile drawbridges (to constrain demons to the retracting spike tile), and it worked flawlessly.  If that's too cheap for you, then just pick how cheap you're willing to go.  If you insist on melee dwarves vs demons in a single big room, all at once, then be prepared to grind the masterpiece adamantine and grind the training regimen and still lose most of your population.

[smeeprocket]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Well, I'd like to win in a less boring way, but I can see that unofficial exploits, (or at least tactics that feel like exploits,) may be my only option. I have a decent store of adamantine, but it is still limited, there is a lot more further down, but that opens up the pit to Hell. I have read that the demon fortresses lead to hell. Is there any safe way to block that off until I am ready? I have an artifact hatch cover and that is it.

Also, I am currently setting my dwarves on active/training civ mode so they train their skills. I have been getting regular goblin raids, which is weird since I killed their master, (overlord guy,) and I'm not even sure how they are organizing the raids. I suffer minimal casualties, but since I can't find a good underground grazing area, my animal population is down to almost nothing. I like to keep it around in case food stores run thin, (I have about 3k roasts atm, and birds laying eggs regularly.)

The bug where you need to remove jugs from the stockpile to extract honey from honeycombs also still seems to be in place, I thought this was fixed. It's a bit of a pain. I like to keep mead in stock.

Sorry for asking so many random questions, they have been building up for a long time. I have been progressing through trying different things. I still haven't played with pressure plates, levers, or megastructures, (I can't find a reason to build the last one.)

Is there a way to tell which ore will be available in an embark area? I'd like to try out a fortress with iron and flux stone. Making steel sounds like a lot of fun. It's pointless for me now because I have to buy all the components, and I have better materials. Two of my fortresses have produced only silver in some form, and that drives me nuts.

Also, I've read up on this, and it sounded hopeless, but do you have any advice for aquifers? The place I originally wanted to set my fortress in was haunted, for more of a challenge, but all of those areas had aquifers. I have read the wiki, but I didn't quite understand if it was even possible, or if it was just a toos up that it might be possible.

There's some cool areas with aquifers, I'd really like to try one.

[NecroRebel]

On everything except for FB's, titans, and demons this would work, but if you try to drop a bridge on one of them all it does is break the bridge.

It's not limited to those creatures, actually. Whether a bridge can raise, lower, retract, or extend when a creature is on top of it depends on the size of that creature. If any single creature on a bridge's area is over a particular limit (IIRC 1.2 million), the bridge will not operate. FBs, titans, and demons all happen to be well above this limit, but they aren't the only things that are.

[i2amroy]

On everything except for FB's, titans, and demons this would work, but if you try to drop a bridge on one of them all it does is break the bridge.

It's not limited to those creatures, actually. Whether a bridge can raise, lower, retract, or extend when a creature is on top of it depends on the size of that creature. If any single creature on a bridge's area is over a particular limit (IIRC 1.2 million), the bridge will not operate. FBs, titans, and demons all happen to be well above this limit, but they aren't the only things that are.

Guess you are right, though I would like to point out that if you are attempting to lower the bridge onto such a creature, the bridge will not only refuse to move downwards, but will actually break, potentially letting !!FUN!! into your fortress.

An artifact hatch cover might work since the demons will all path to it and then spend the rest of eternity attempting to destroy it. Note that if you block off the path with a wall it will keep the demons out as well, but it will cause massive FPS play due to a bug that makes them attempt to path into your fortress on every single 'tick' of the game.

DF Hack has a rather useful prospect tool that can tell you what is at a site once you embark at it. My advice would be to pick a place with both deep and shallow metals (edges of mountains work great) and then use DF Hack to tell you what minerals are present. Then if it doesn't have what's required for steel simply abandon and re-embark elsewhere.

For breaching through aquifers the best method that I've seen is this method, which only requires 1 dwarf powered pump (that's a total of two wood and 1 stone, very easy and cheap to embark with) to go down through as many layers of aquifer as you want.

[NecroRebel]

Note that if you block off the path with a wall it will keep the demons out as well, but it will cause massive FPS play due to a bug that makes them attempt to path into your fortress on every single 'tick' of the game.

This is also a myth, actually. The FPS drop from demons is due to their BUILDINGDESTROYER tag, probably due to them attempting to path to every accessible destructible building in the fort every tick and then attempting to walk each of those simultaneously, but if you close off all the paths, they'll eventually find blockage in and cancel all of those paths, causing FPS to return to at least close to normal. If you remove their BUILDINGDESTROYER tag before breaching the depths they'll cause no more FPS drop than any other large group of creatures.

[i2amroy]

My statement still stands true however, in that walling off does cause massive FPS drop, by pathing every tick for a while. And true, you can remove the [BUILDINGDESTROYER:X] tag, however in order to do so you need to first set up your saves to be uncompressed, and then go into every single world that you have created and edit the world.dat file by hand (or with a hex editor I guess) to remove those tokens from every single randomly generated demon. All in all it is a bit of a complicated process that I personally view to be beyond the reach of the average newcomer to DF.

[smeeprocket]

All this complex talk aside, would glass spikes get annihilated by explosive mobs? (I know it is magma safe.) I don't have sand in my area, but I buy bags of it constantly. I was using it to make 1 step process trap components, and I could just switch over to only spikes, instead of discs and spiked balls.

Also, the wiki on traps nor the weapon section doesn't break down how good glass is for trap components over or below various metals and wood.

I guess I should buy some obsidian stone, as well. Just in case.

Edit: Also, if the hallway they walk down is made of non-magma safe stone, will that melt on explosions?

[i2amroy]

As stated before pretty much everything except for adamantine is wiped out by fiery death explosions. It will only wipe out a small area though, (and potentially might wipe out some nearby demons as well!) which is why the best way to handle it is to simply coat an entire hallway with spikes, something that cheaper components (such as glass) work well on. The only problem you are going to run into with glass is if you get a harder material demon (such as one made of rock) then they will pretty much ignore the glass as it bounces off of them.

As for hallways, constructed walls/floors are completely immune to temperature regardless of their materials. You could build constructed walls or floors out of wood and they will resist any type of fire that you throw at them.

Glass tends to rate below most metals but above wood for trap components. It tends to work especially well in the disc variety, as it will slice right through unarmored areas and give limb severings even if it still bounces off of more armored ones.

[i2amroy]

As stated before pretty much everything except for adamantine is wiped out by fiery death explosions. It will only wipe out a small area though, (and potentially might wipe out some nearby demons as well!) which is why the best way to handle it is to simply coat an entire hallway with spikes, something that cheaper components (such as glass) work well on. The only problem you are going to run into with glass is if you get a harder material demon (such as one made of rock) then they will pretty much ignore the glass as it bounces off of them.

As for hallways, constructed walls/floors are completely immune to temperature regardless of their materials. You could build constructed walls or floors out of wood and they will resist any type of fire that you throw at them.

Glass tends to rate below most metals but above wood for trap components. It tends to work especially well in the disc variety, as it will slice right through unarmored areas and give limb severings even if it still bounces off of more armored ones.