People talk a lot of crap about the feedback learning model. A lot of that's justified, I'll admit, but it generates so many great moments that I could never go back to DF pre v1.4.
Let me show you what I mean.
It was my fortress' twenty-third year, and things were going well. Population had more-or-less stabilized at 1200 dwarves, caravans and patrols were up, all that good stuff. The fort was based in a gigantic limestone seam in a largeish mountain. I had plenty left over even after setting up the spare housing and panic room, so I carved out the level below the panic room and took another run at my Supercollider concept (basically it's girlinhat's Firehose design, except the limestone's porosity was supposed to bleed off enough energy to stabilize the feedback loop, so that you can fire kinetic bullets instead of bursts of superheated gas. If it worked it'd be DF's first workable ICBM, but it doesn't quite for reasons too complicated to explain here).
So: plenty of dwarves, immediate landscape subjugated, proto-superweapon in the basement busily building up air pressure and thus heat. So far so good. Then the Hatfields immigrated.
The Hatfields had a long, long, long history with the McCoys. If I'm reading the logs right, about 500 years earlier a branch of the Hatfields belief-cascaded into a gestalt demigod, which couldn't sustain itself because it'd turned all its proto-worshippers into a single semidivine being. It went demonic and sacrified a bunch of nearby McCoys, but ultimately fell apart anyway when it ran out of food. I think. But whatever, their host culture scored crazy-high in Retribution, Ferocity, and Oral Tradition, so once it was on it was going to stay on forever.
I should note that I'm reconstructing the early bits from the logs - I didn't notice the Hatfields right away. The McCoys had established themselves five years previous; collectively they had "warm" or "intimate" relationships with 4/5ths of my dwarves. So the Hatfields didn't quite dare force a confrontation, and the McCoys valued their relationship with the Watch Captain too much to do anything overt. There was a rash of mysterious unsolved crimes around then, but I didn't put it together until after the fact.
Things didn't get really out of hand until someone looted the treasury. My guardsmen never caught the parties responsible, but it had to be one of those two families; they each accused each other of gigantic thefts, more or less simultaneously (incidentally, this would be a case where complaint about the learning model is totally deserved. The treasury disappeared, and then the Hatfields reported a treasury-sized theft? DO THE FREAKING MATH, GENIUSES!)
With the economy broken open, it was suddenly feasible to hire my old adventurers as assassins. I took that as a good sign: the extra money would leave the economy, the feuding parties would kill each other off, and I'd be able to go back to fiddling with my Supercollider. There was indeed plenty of assassination, but one of the victims was the Mayor, who'd somehow managed to remain on friendly terms with both parties. In the emergency election, the dwarves overwhelmingly elected Boss McCoy - according to the logs, over half the voters cited "ending this long-running feud" as their primary concern. Ominous.
Anyway, Boss McCoy's first official act was to claim the Hatfield residences for some nebulous "special project". His second act was to ban the manufacture and export of gold items, which by a crazy coincidence was their primary source of income. The writing was on the wall for Boss Hatfield, and he was pissed; I don't think I've ever seen that deep a red in the mood window. I was all set to watch the briefest, most one-sided civil war in the history of DF, but instead he did these things:
1. He persuaded the old mayor's son, who still had a foot in both camps, to throw a party for Boss McCoy and his supporters in the panic room. That wasn't hard to do; I'd seeded it with lots of artwork to take the edge off.
2. He organized another, much smaller party for his family and friends. He sited it in the gem stockpile above my sweatshop (don't judge). None of the invitees really liked the location - there was nothing there - but their Envy and Tribalism were tweaked enough by the other, bigger party downstairs that they mostly went along.
3. Having successfully incapacitated the entire fortress with parties, he stole a pickaxe from the McCoys and assigned himself the mining labor. No one spotted him; I only know about it because I was following him in omniscient mode, in close to real time.
4. He left the fort and climbed down the mountainside.
5. He dug his way into the Supercollider.
The Supercollider had been charging for eight months at that point; an ordinary Firehose left unfired for that long would have exploded already. Boss Hatfield didn't even have to pierce all the way through the mountain wall; as soon as his tunnel was long enough to create a fracture point, the whole mountainside blew outward, killing Boss Hatfield instantly and turning the floor of the panic room into a mass of limestone shrapnel. Then the overpressure wave spread through the rest of the fortress, breaking almost everything and killing almost everybody...except for the partiers in the gem stockpile, who were as far away from the ignition point as it was possible to be. I got the "blood flows in your tunnels!" popup, but it disappeared almost immediately, and while the histories do list it as a civil war, they report that it ended a few seconds before it began.
So what the hell happened there? The "persuade people to party in dangerous locations" trick is old, of course, but how could the planning engine possibly have known that weakening one of those walls would turn that sealed cavern into a giant bomb? Was he trying to trigger a cave-in, maybe?
I love this game.
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Topic: Playerlogs from 2050 (Read 115268 times)