Well shit. My fort finally fell.... sort of.
I was having a pretty decent set-up going on. I was sitting on more silver than I could dream of and I think I created a new holiday because most ponies would go to sleep and then wake up to find five new silver armor racks cluttering up their room, and a tin coffer just to add some flavor. In all, happiness was rather high, even though I was going through a starvation epidemic... even though I had stockpiles of prepared brahmin gullet stinking up the place.
Turns out that if you go into a bed in a designated hospital with three ponies dedicated to healthcare-related tasks, you might as well start opening some important blood vessels, because my ponies avoided feeding any patients like they had the plague, even though his only injury was a broken leg. So all of my patients starved to death, except for a pony named Beard, he passed out just outside the main courtyard and was pecked to death by some buzzards.
After about a month of fairly calm, but still pretty damn shaky, problems, I get the wave of thieves. After killing off five petty crooks, three snatchers jump out of nowhere and smash two of my turrets and decommission my militia commander. I kill them off, only to be greeted by a wave of both thieves AND snatchers, then out of nowhere:
An ambush! Curse them!
I gear up my troops to fight them. A couple spear ponies, nothing too bad.
An ambush! Curse them!
Maceponies. Shit. I'm fazed, but I keep cool and split my forces. A fairly decent battle rages on on two fronts, a few soldiers are lost, but I'm still-
An ambush! Curse them!
Are you kidding me! I was doing fine against the spears, so I send them to deal with... Gunners... fuck everything. Thankfully, I draft a nearby miner with no experience whatsoever and he gets into a martial stance and cracks half of those fuckers down, only to be stung by a stray black radscorpion.
After a brutal three-front war (and I wasn't as lucky this time, two groups bunched into a death ball and smashed right through just about anything, eventually colliding with my turret wall, and eventually pulling back for round two) I managed to beat the fuckers back and gazed on as my group of inexperienced conscripts make the final raider choke on his friend's broken teeth as an 8 year old filly "lodges firmly into the wound" an iron sledgehammer.
So, it seemed pretty bad in all. We were fairly beaten, down to 17 of my original 40, but we kept on. I think this would be a good less-
An ambush! Curse them!
.......I give up! I conscript every pony I got to take on swordsponies with full shields/armor/weapondry and I watch as the last of the tiles that weren't red, white or green with blood, icor or vomit turn not-not red, white or green.
In the end, I had nine ponies walk away from that bloody battle. Right now, I have five as I type this: two foals, a heavily injured slave, a melancholy-stricken engraver, and the Hero of Breachtower, Morning Riverruler Angeltwist Wavy (he put a ring on it... many times), who bascially was the only person to fight in the last ambush, everyone else was too injured to walk (gotta love martial trances). I don't think I'll abandon quite yet. I'm banking on the fact that some migrants are well overdue, but I have a smidgen of hope.
Just thought I'd let you guys know of this interesting tale. Time to see what a 36 year old war hero, who lost all of his bloodline in under a year, can really do with a fortress infested with ghosts, vermin, and lots of vomit. So much vomit!