Building my latest fortress in a new spot after tiring of volcanoes. It's quite an idyllic location, being at the beginning/end of a brook (which apparently means the brook itself never freezes, even though other water sources do). It's relatively flat, and has some seriously heavy tree and plant life (and some incredibly vicious pandas!). Plenty of soil/clay/sand, just about every rock imaginable, and oodles of iron and flux. I have a single entrance fort with separate stairs down to the 3rd cavern, appropriately trapped and hatched. There be magma pools down there, so I've carved out some space to give me a neat little magma industry. The layout after building some walls makes it almost indistinguishable from a carved out room, excepting the magma in the middle o'course. Things are so good that I've only just needed to consider expanding the main fort to another z-level.
Anyhoo, this all took time and effort, so I probably wasn't as prepared as usual for the first !!Vile Force!! (oddly, no ambushes beforehand, just a couple of snatchers). I did, however, have my combination moat and reservoir (separated via floodgates to avoid pollution) ready, along with emergency escape hatch for dorfs that insist on falling in, and absurdly long drawbridge for emergency atom smashing. And my relatively inexperienced/untrained militia, using the recommended two-dwarf-to-a-squad combo that I only recently learnt about here.
The ridiculously-huge-goblin-squad, led by a goblin pikeman but otherwise comprised of god-damn-bowgoblins, made a rapid beeline for my fort. I stationed the militia just behind the drawbridge, and sent the command out to pull the lever. At which point one of my militia decided to stand on the very edge of the bridge and fight off the goblins that I was hoping to inconvenience.
So not a single goblin made it onto the bridge, and my dorf was surprisingly healthy for the minigun-based-arrow attacks the goblins seemed to be firing. And then the bridge raised.
Up-up-up, went Urist. You could almost see the goblin's necks craning to watch his ascent.
Then Urist hit the farthest extent of his parabola, and down-down-down went Urist, as insisted upon by what passes for gravity around these parts. Four of my militia stood in a straight line back behind the raised drawbridge, and I like to imagine that they held up score cards for his incredible dive. It was quite well executed, so I imagine the scores were 9-9-7-9 (Spanky McHardass is always a fickle judge).
Incredibly, Urist McRecruit was straight back on his feet and fighting the goblins as if nothing had ever happened. It transpires, however, that while Urist was tough enough to withstand ye-olde-dorf-diving-board-of-doom, he wasn't well suited to point-blank shots from ye-olde-arrow-firing-minigun. The incredible bouncing Urist was struck down rapidly.
In the meantime, however, Urist's amazing double half-pike with a twist had led the goblins very near to our pasture, and they wasted no time in chasing our animals down for wanton slaughter. It was here that we had good reason to thank Urist for his incredibly inappropriate diving demonstration, for the goblins exhausted their supply of arrows in no time on a surprisingly low number of animals. And then our hammer-, axe-, spear-, sword-, and mace-dwarves came out to play.
One casualty total. Cause of death recorded as "Being awesome".
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Topic: Urist McRecruit cancels striking a menacing pose: time for diving demonstration (Read 1132 times)