Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[LumberingOaf]

Alright, so I kind of asked for this one. There's no less than five necromancer settlements nearby. I pretty much picked this site for the specific purpose of entertaining some undead guests. I am nevertheless somewhat disappointed by their sense of timing. I hadn't even sent the invitations! Such rudeness really cannot be tolerated, what would the neighbours think? I can't have zombies wandering around at all hours disturbing the traders. There is a time and a place for such shenanigans, and though the place is most certainly here, the time is not now.

I'm a little stuck though, and therein lies the problem. Normally I'd just seal the entrance against all comers and knuckle down for the long haul - it's not like I'm short on supplies - but the aforementioned traders are locked in here with me. I'm rather keen to keep my fellow dwarves alive, but I can't let them out. There's more than fifty zombies out there along with three necromancers to keep them coming. Those are not dwarf-friendly odds. My current military consists of somewhere in the region of approximately zero dwarves, and I do not have time to train and equip soldiers before the caravan will fall to insanity. My depot is secure if it comes to it, but I'd rather avoid such losses.

Clearly, if the merchants are to be saved, I shall have to get creative. My caverns are.....strange, with significantly more vertical space than lateral, so digging a subterranean exit is going to be time consuming if it's even viable at all, and I have no great wish to exploit my entrance bridge as a weapon (though should no other options present themselves, I shall have to rig something of that description together).

And so I bring this conundrum to the forums. What ingenious methods can you devise for me to rain lasting destruction upon the undead without exposing my dwarves to undue harm? My main concern is the necromancers. I am confident that if I can remove them from the equation, the caravan will be able to cut itself a path to freedom.

tl;dr Zombies and necromancers, no existing military, time is of the essence. Ideas?

[Iosyn]

Zombies or safe traders, pick one.

If you lined your entrance with bridges you could fling everything into a pit or just grind them into a fine paste, but I assume you no longer have access to the entrance tunnel due to said zombies. If time is off the essence I'd just dig a path on the same Z-level to the nearest map edge and then stick a raising bridge on it. If you run the caravan exit through the cavern layer it's usually a longer walk-- and you never know, something fun might show up and horribly mutilate them.

[Loud Whispers]

Stone traps and sharp pointy things. Probably easier to just dig the cavern way out though

Necromancer sieges are one of those pesky things where if you haven't prepared for them there's not much you can do to fix them :/
Not as polite as goblins, no.

[LumberingOaf]

Zombies or safe traders, pick one.

If you lined your entrance with bridges you could fling everything into a pit or just grind them into a fine paste, but I assume you no longer have access to the entrance tunnel due to said zombies. If time is off the essence I'd just dig a path on the same Z-level to the nearest map edge and then stick a raising bridge on it. If you run the caravan exit through the cavern layer it's usually a longer walk-- and you never know, something fun might show up and horribly mutilate them.

The entrance tunnel itself has easy access as I had the foresight to make it seal at both ends (this is also the reason that my merchants cannot harm my fort if they berserk). My only real option for trapping the tunnel, however, is to line one entire wall with a large bridge as the cliff ends abruptly on either side. This is one solution I had already considered, but I'll have a hard time baiting the corridor without allowing a path that goes at least as far as the depot, and the soldiers within would probably suicide rush under the bridge as it lowers. Regarding what you say about digging an exit, I was under the impression that the edges of the map cannot be dug just as they cannot be walled off, forcing an open cavern edge as the only viable subterranean exit strategy. Was I misinformed?

Stone traps and sharp pointy things.

While I had the foresight to include seals at both ends of the entrance passage, I have no way to prevent the necromancers immediately raising any corpses that die to traps within. That said, I am currently experimenting with allowing a few zombies at a time into the tunnel, sealing them in with the caravan, removing the corpses and repeating.

Edit: Some difficulty with this tactic. Outpost liaison shows depressing lack of concern for personal safety re: trying to leave mid siege.

[Xob Ludosmbax]

I'm currently on year 7 in a reanimating evil biome, with 4 undead sieges, 3 goblin sieges converted to zombies, and a number of waves of immigrants converted to zombies.  Somehow, the caravan guards manage to get the caravan safely to the depot, but they immediately leave due to a casualty or two.  I peaked at just under 400 zombies. 

I started carving them down, and I'm down to 350.  I let a few in at a time, mow them down, and dump them in magma.  My original intent was to have no moat, but the troll zombies destroyed the hatches that were acting as a bridge, and now the zombies are locked outside.  I'm letting them in through the back door attached to a lever. 

[Loud Whispers]

The easiest way to kill necro sieges is to just separate the hordes, and if possible take out the necros with crossbows or more... Ingenuitive measures. Zombies are immune to magma, necromancers are not.

[Iosyn]

Can't you carve stairways or ramps on the map edge, then a lever-linked support to cave it in?
My knowledge of some DF game mechanics is quite <rusty>.

You'd need to roof it over, though.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Kill the necromancer first. The zombies are flimsy once they stop being infinitely resurrected.

[LumberingOaf]

Kill the necromancer first. The zombies are flimsy once they stop being infinitely resurrected.

I am aware of this. I am also aware that I have no combat-ready dwarves that I can directly control, before you even take dwarven artificial "intelligence" into account.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Hm....

Well, as necro would have put it, MAGMAAAAAAA!!!

[Di]

Do you have a few blind masons by chance? Bridge touching the edge of the map above the ground would be enough for traders to commence warp-jump.
When I was playing with necros, I had highly trained warriors jump  out of freshly dug tunnels right next to necromancers. But that's definitely not your case.
My advice would be to go for the cavern edge, you can't dig border tiles. And remember, you can't slab merchants.

[ledgekindred]

Tunnel a path for the merchants that leads directly under the necromancers.  Either cavein underneath the necros to kill them, or open up a path for the merchant guards to slaughter the necros.  It's questionable how long you have before your merchants go completely bonkers though, if you'll be able to pull this off in time.

The zombies are indeed weaksauce once they stop getting reanimated.

(Or you could hope you get lucky, like I did in a similar situation, and have a megabeast - a minotaur in my case - show up just in time to slaughter everything and then get caught in a cage trap.)

[Quietust]

Hm....

Well, as necro would have put it, MAGMAAAAAAA!!!

Either you're joking, you're deliberately providing malicious advice, or you don't know what you're talking about - magma will not harm zombies.

[Friendstrange]

In case this happens to someone in an evil biome:

1. Create hallways filled to the brim with metallic large serrated discs. Path zombies through it untill all that is left moving are hands and heads.
2. Path hands and heads into safe non-reanimation zone.
          2.1 If no safe zone is available use a retractable bridge to make them fall into a magma reservoire with fortifications looking donw into it.
3. Marksdwarfs.
4. Dump hands and heads into magma pool/reservoire.

Sure magma cant kill a zombie. But if the zombie gets killed while inside the magma, the remains should melt away given enough time. And if the remains reanimate, killing it again and again until it melts should work. In theory you could automate this utilizing magma-resistant weapon traps inside the lava.

[Iosyn]

oh well. I would have sworn you could channel/ramp/stairway a map-edge tile though
 wonder where the hell I got that idea from.

If you're planning to do any make-or-break construction I'd advise having some rock blocks stockpiled very near to the actual construction; you can cut construction time on bridges considerably by using blocks instead of raw stone, but I suppose you could just drill a wagon tunnel somewhere else, build a bridge first and then open some ramps to the surface to let the traders out, before immediately slamming the bridge lever.

As for the undermining necromancers, I think that would be pretty damn hard without having it set up beforehand, without exposing your precious miners to evil hair and suchlike. I'd probably dig something out so I could bait them with an animal first and draw them to the other side of wherever.