Am I the only one that has no idea what tower you folks are talking about?
This one:
It's just outside the underground part of the fort.
So anyway, it just got exciting again.
A bunch of thread zombies and a troll hammerman, apparently.
There is only one solution here!
Or rather, all the levers. I
think I know which two I want. Hopefully those two are the only ones I need.
Luckily, they're not moving much yet. I'm hustling everyone into the fortress, and I've stationed our militia just behind the entrance so as to catch them if something goes wrong.
This is what faces us:
Oh, right, they're still coming.
Tired and sick, Minkot swings her pick with an energy born of bitterness. Anger at the world, anger at death and the dead that were not dead. It has been a long few years for her, separated from loved ones and witnessing death on a near-daily basis. The stench of rot fills her nostrils by day, and the screams of the dying tear through her dreams by night. This is her only relief: to be one with her tools, and to strike each blow at the earth as though it is the poisoned spring from which all her trouble flows.
As she sweeps the sand away from the base of the cliff, the silence is shattered by the sound of a horn from the watchtower. Dizzied by the sun and the noise, she staggers away from the work site and squints up the hill. Thread zombies march over the rise, dozens of them. Behind them, a skeletally thin monster covered in matted hair raises a silver maul and utters an unholy roar, a mob of gray-furred trolls grunting and barking behind him.
The horn sounds again and, blinded and vomiting, Minkot turns to claw her way towards safety. She stumbles and falls, but props herself up with her pick and shambles into a trot again. She rounds the corner of the keep, but the troll with the hammer is charging down the slopes with all the speed and ferocity of a frenzied predator. Panicked, she readies her pick and readies herself for the inevitable onslaught. She is wracked with cramps, but doubled over and on her knees she still crawls on toward safety. A bridge falls, and the troll smells the caverns and the fortress. Both home and prey. It changes targets. Minkot does not see. She finally makes it to the clear ground of the keep, and rises to her feet. She walks into the fortress, swaying and blinking at the sudden relief from the harsh light of the sun.
Elsewhere, the bridge that fell slams shut again. The opportunistic trolls that rushed forward are hurled off their feet, striking the floor with sickening cracks. The cave echoes with their howls, as the floor is spattered teal with blood. Bare bone glistens in the low light of the pit.
The other trolls run. Dwarves everywhere move to pull levers, desperately trying to seal the keep off from the rest of the fortress and keep them out. The militia ready their weapons where they wait in the main hall, knowing there will soon be bloodshed.
Screams ring out through the fortress. A troll has clawed its way through a crevice in the wall. The military elites charge. The crossbowmen remain behind to cover the entrance hall. The fate of the fortress may rest on whether the bridges are closed in time.
Okay, so there was a gap I hadn't noticed and I assumed some of the trolls were trapped. Oops. On the plus side, they're unarmed and barely armoured, so the Elite Squad should make short work of them. And a whole bunch of them got quite badly injured by the bridge.
I can't work out how to close any of the bridges except the
one that's labeled. One of the levers doesn't even seem to do anything.
This wasn't exactly what I was planning on doing today.
There are about sixty enemies, the majority trolls.