Guys, I think I'm in trouble here, and any help or suggestions are welcome. I'll start from the beginning.
...
So between my xenophobic dwarves, disgruntled refugees, and the Mountainhomes and Human King's apparent apathy to the situation, I'm almost certainly heading for a meltdown here, and it won't be pretty. I am willing to spend a significant portion of the fortress' treasury to handle this if need be, but I'm afraid if I get rid of all of it my economy will bust when the soap exports dry up. Has anyone else been in a similar situation? As I said, I'm open to just about any suggestion at this point.
I haven't played DF in a while, but I found this post and decided to dig up the world. Luckily it was still on the external hard drive I used to store it (2TB, small I know, but it just needs to hold this world and as long as I don't set [FORGET_UNRECORDED_EVENTS] to false in the config I should be good) and gave it a go.
First off, I started importing arms from a nearby fortress. They were happy to take money for them instead of bartering, the war had hit them harder than most and they were running a serious shortage of currency, but the only weapons they could spare were low quality pieces that were rejected for one reason or another by the Royal Army and had been set aside for some nebulous special project. It must not have been that important if they were willing to part with so many of them, I guess. I had the caravans take whatever we could salvage, and it was a lot, but we still paid as much for a rusted iron spear as we did for the exceptional ones the regular military got custom made a couple years back. My own metalworking industry is rather small, the only metal my embark has is tin, but after drawing off the refugees a little bit (they were just happy to get some work) there were enough smiths to bring the better pieces up to normal quality using whatever material could be extracted by melting the lost causes.
Now, after a little bit of cajoling the nobility was mostly on board with this plan, and with the regular military's leadership drawn mostly from their ranks I could count on them as well. They realized that this would get rid of at least some of the refugees and contribute to the war effort, and some of the nobles even paid out of their own pockets to pay for the equipment and donated the services of their retainers to drill the new recruits. The commons (and more alarmingly the militia) was another story.
Some tavern owner, a Bembul Torchabbey, has been whipping up hysteria over the weapons that are appearing in the hands of "suspicious foreign elements." Despite the high tensions not too many dwarves were listening to him at first, but he attracts a few more followers whenever a fight breaks out in the upper levels, or a fortress guard gets stabbed by a thief. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that that is not a rare occurrence these days. It's hard to say how many people agree with him, but he always attracts a crowd when he goes tub-thumping in the Founders' Hall. At the same time the captain of the city militia, Feb Glazedmirrors, has been pulling farther and farther away from the regular military. Never to the degree of insubordination, but law enforcement is increasingly balanced against the refugees. His more belligerent officers have started getting up to some worrying things in the areas foreigners tend to congregate, and many of those that aren't will outright ignore anything short of murder. I've been punishing them of course, even relieving some of the militia of duty, but the damage to the peace is done and Feb is too well shielded and too well connected to get at without evidence of substantial wrongdoing.
As far as actual progress goes, getting the refugees to sign up for the "volunteer corps" is more difficult than I expected. They're plenty willing to get back at the goblins, sure, but most of them have brought their families here and don't want to leave them behind with the climate in the fortress being what it is. It's taking a lot of effort to keep them under control too, they want very badly to provide their own security in the foreign quarter, but allowing them to take up patrols there, even if I don't pull the regular fortress militia out, will only feed Bembul and Feb's narratives. Equipment and training aren't a problem, with the nobility and the fortress military so supportive of the plan, and they're shaping up to be a decent fighting force. Most of their officers are dwarves too, but they don't seem to mind and I don't see any issues arising from that even when they are eventually sent to the front lines. And that needs to happen soon, it's hard going out there and the longer these guys stay here the more problems they're going to cause.
Demand for soap has also increased. Raiding has more or less stopped, and fighting has moved into goblin territory now that the humans have mobilized their reserves, but attrition is high and a worrying number of pitched battles go to the enemy. They're burning through their medical supplies like xXPig Tail SocksXx in the magma chute. It's starting to put a bit of a strain on infrastructure, and on the surrounding forests, but once the war is over I can scale back to let things recover. It isn't a problem yet, but I don't think I can keep this up indefinitely. Overall the treasury is greatly reduced, but the amount of money flowing in has increased slightly. Inflation is under control, since the King has dictated that I can't charge more than a certain amount per bar. Below what it went for even before the war by the way, and he still ignores my requests for aid. The human king has expressed concern over the condition of his subjects, and even made some vague rumblings that aren't quite threats, but he couldn't quite bring himself to send any help either. Beardless, the both of them.
I'm starting to suspect that both monarchs want casus belli against the other and see the brewing clusterfuck here as a means of getting it. Clusterfuck is the word too, and if there isn't relief very soon something's gonna give, and it will be bloody. Don't get me wrong, this kind of thing is why I love DF, but it's hard not to get invested and I'd hate to see such an interesting fortress collapse into chaos.
((That post ended up far longer than I originally intended.))
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Topic: Playerlogs from 2050 (Read 115308 times)