Print

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

[vanatteveldt]

Hey all,

Just played my first somewhat succesful fortress. Got initial stuff setup but failed to get farming working properly (cook cooked all my seeds) causing my still to stop working and the dwarfs to go outside to drink...

I thought I had a nice defensive setup: Had a river with a steep mountain on the east, and another river on that mountain falling down in a waterfall. So what I did is dug the whole fortress in the mountain with a drawbridge one level above the river gorge, and a entryway with traps behind it. Then, made a channel for the higher river to flood the entryway if needed.

However, what happened is that a lot of my dwarfs were actually outside at the time of the first ambush and most others ran outside to see their first (and last) goblin, and running in circles until dying. Found out at some point how to make a burrow and order everyone inside, but was left with 10 dwarfs out of 60 or so...

So, my lessons were:
1) make sure most dwarfs have no business going outside by providing enough booze and a well if needed
2) immediately order everyone inside.

My question is: what is the normal "invasion checklist"? Do you close the gates after everyone is inside, or is the poor fisherdwarf caught on the wrong side considered collateral damage?

Another question: I made a civilian alert to get them into the burrow, but couldn't find a way of disabling the alert without deleting it. Did I miss an option?

[thiosk]

Because farming and trading can easily supply the whole fort with plenty of supplies, I turn off fishing and hunting entirely.

I use what amounts to an airlock.  Gate open to the trade depot, second gate closed to the fort.  Caravan comes in, I close the outer and open inner gates.

You have a slight misunderstanding of how alerts work, I think.
Create alert, highlight it, then click right to select the burrow.  Then, you click left and turn on the alert.

[AutomataKittay]

1: make sure meeting zone is inside, or within walls
2: PULL THE LEVER, anyone stuck outsides are corpses anyway once the bridge shuts the entryway ( I don't uses hunters or fishers, and rarely have woodcutters working )

Occasionally 3: Let's drop a turkey to bait them into traps

[vanatteveldt]

Hmm, I guess worker management is what I need to learn. I'll have a look at the alerts, I agree that I possible misunderstand them :-). I think in the end the people went to the burrow because I assigned the remainders to it.

With an airlock, do you mean that the fortress is generally totally closed off from outside? How do you get wood?

If you have an underground river or a chasm-river, can you use that to fish? How much access does a fisher need?

(and how do you 'drop' stuff? I've wanted to use rivers etc as refuse disposal, but no idea how to do it..)

[AutomataKittay]

Hmm, I guess worker management is what I need to learn. I'll have a look at the alerts, I agree that I possible misunderstand them :-). I think in the end the people went to the burrow because I assigned the remainders to it.

With an airlock, do you mean that the fortress is generally totally closed off from outside? How do you get wood?

If you have an underground river or a chasm-river, can you use that to fish? How much access does a fisher need?

(and how do you 'drop' stuff? I've wanted to use rivers etc as refuse disposal, but no idea how to do it..)

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Zone This will help with dropping stuff. Also don't use rivers, unless it's for rotting stuffs, and you'll always forget to deactive it to clean up

And I don't really use much wood so a clear cutting the first few times before ambushes or sieges comes covers me for loooong time. It helps I don't use much metal either, no need to burn wood. I rarely bothers to set up tree farms, but it's easy if you have water source and spare space to pump water into.

I don't know about underground fishing since I always deactivates it ( They're not bright enough to not get killed, yep )

[thiosk]

Game start, I get wood all the time.  I tend to wall off a fairly large area outside my fort entrance, so I get wood there.  Not much, but it gets me through.  Trading with folks is where my wood really gets good.  The elves give me wood.  Big time.  Actually, so do the humies.  Dwarves generally only give me wood if I ask them to.  But as long as I am trading and not wasting my wood, I get enough wood to get me through the whole game without much effort.

If you don't have coke, it can be really hard to keep wood for long, under any circumstances.  So if you can't get coke, you gotta go deep.

[Damiac]

Elves give you wood? It's hard to keep wood without coke?

I laughed pretty good at this.  I hope I'm not the only one.

[vanatteveldt]

Care to enlighten the newb here?

It makes sense to me that if you don't have any coal you need a lot of wood to get any sort of metal industry going?

And it does seem that all the elves want to do is sell wood?

[AutomataKittay]

Care to enlighten the newb here?

It makes sense to me that if you don't have any coal you need a lot of wood to get any sort of metal industry going?

And it does seem that all the elves want to do is sell wood?

They barely sells me any, though they offers a LOT of rope reed cloths. Pretty nice, though, since I can actually sell them cloth stuffs, and not woods

Also magma are easy to get to, if a bit deep to dig for, usually. I don't really dig too deep too fast so it can take years ( or a couple decades in a couple fortresses )

[muzzz]

I usually let melee invaders come to within 20-30 tiles before closing an undefended entrance. At that point, any dwarf still heading there is going to get scared away (and killed) anyway. For ranged critters I usually try to close the gates just before they get into range.

Airlocks are great. Once you get settled, they're also a cheap and effective way to start collecting some goblinite.

[kuki]

Care to enlighten the newb here?

No no, you're not being a newb, he's just making jokes about cocaine and boners.

I use the "airlock" design for rescuing hunters/fishers (which I do use... silly me). I add all my civillians who are already inside to the inside-fort burrow to keep them there, and immediately shut the inner gates. I call all the stragglers to the courtyard burrows, and shut the gates shortly before the goblins arrive, hopefully giving my hunters and fishers time to get across the bridge. If not, at least they got a run at surviving, without me having to leave my actual front door open. If they make it they can be airlocked into the fort once the outer gates are shut.

[Big Bear]

Game start, I get wood all the time. 

That's an interesting image:

DF:           ".... Strike the earth!"
Thiosk:     !! BOOOOIIING !!

 

Anyway, now that I got that out of the way, I usually set up a defensive moat and wall (with drawbridges on each) as soon as possible, covering a really large area around my fortress entrance. Then I designate my fishing zones, etc., inside those walls. If you set up your zones and walls well, there won't be much need for dwarves to be outside your defended area in the first place. The only problem I have is hunters running off to kill some poor dingo at the very edge of the map. It helps to assign a few war dogs to your hunters, to hold off the goblins if they attack.

[Shoruke]

I use a three-tiered defense system. I have a bridge over an open space that opens towards my fort, so even a combination of building destroyers and flyers can't get past it once its closed.

Since the gate is usually open, the fast (i.e. non-wagon) path through to the depot has some 300 traps in it, some of which are pillars supporting disconnected landmass (for reckless building destroyers). I'm saving the caged prisoners for a battle royale.

After that, there are Dwarves. Lots of angry, drunk midgets with all manner of sharp, hard things for Elves. The Dwarves also have a fortification'd lookout over the trapped path, for anything that isn't a ridiculously overpowered marksman but is immune to cage traps.


My favorite fight with my current fort had two squads of Goblins get inside the gate, where their leaders were caught in cage traps, while their underlings mingled around them. So I closed the gate (locking the third Goblin squad outside) and had the Marksdwarves get some practice. 'Twas good practice, and I have some 20 more prisoners for it.

[vanatteveldt]

No no, you're not being a newb, he's just making jokes about cocaine and boners.

:-$. So, more light enlighten the non-native speaker. I usually catch the innuendo's, but I guess I was stuck in my dorf mind (where fertilization doesn't seem to require an awful lot of physicality...

Thanks for the tips on the air lock. I guess it's even more fun with some fortification and marksmen if I managed to lock 'em inside.

If I understand AI behaviour, if I build a large "DMZ" between two gates, and leave them both open, the goblins will attempt to enter the fortress; then, when they are in the DMZ, I close both gates and kill them any method of my choosing (marksmen, flooding, magma, etc). Is that correct?

About fencing off an area using moats etc, does it make sense if you have a hilltop to just remove all ramps and consider the hilltop your "safe zone"?

[kuki]

if I build a large "DMZ" between two gates, and leave them both open, the goblins will attempt to enter the fortress; then, when they are in the DMZ, I close both gates and kill them any method of my choosing (marksmen, flooding, magma, etc). Is that correct?

If you're confident that you can get those two levers pulled at just the right moment, yes. I'd recommend adding a dwarf or two to a burrows that only covers the lever room, shortly before pulling this trick.

About fencing off an area using moats etc, does it make sense if you have a hilltop to just remove all ramps and consider the hilltop your "safe zone"?

You can still get shot at from a lower Z level. However, if you put walls up around the edge of your hilltop, you will be safer than if you had a wall-fortified entrance at the base of a mountain, as nothing can climb up above you and shoot down into your walled courtyard [edit: and certain creatures won't be able to step down into your courtyard from the Z-level above]. You don't need to dig out the ramps if you build walls, obviously.