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[Mohawk_Bravo]

Okay, so first of all, I've had a vampire terrorizing my fortress. At first, the vampire was rather dastardly, only targetting my military and never getting caught. Now, the little devil seems to be targetting... well... everyone. Anyway, I figure I'm on his trail now. I'm building a dungeon room in my graveyard. But it got me thinking. I'd heard before that you can spread vampirism through vampire bloodied water. Assuming this is true, I want to vampirize my hammer lords to create super soldiers. So, I have a couple question;
- Is there any benefit to this? Are vampires harder to kill?
- How should I go about creating a trap that will drain the vampire into somewhere convenient?
- Any special considerations to caring for a vampire pack?
- Would it be better to vampirize a useless peasant and send him out during a siege as some sort of bio/terror tactic?
- On a completely unrelated note, can a switch be motorized with a power source? Would it then flip and run whatever it was hooked to?
Any other tips, advice, or comments would be helpful.

[weenog]

I've done this before, it's a crock of shit.  You will lose containment and have them terrorizing the other members of your fortress, and/or wind up with dwarfs you didn't want vamped out becoming vampires, count on it.  Also, vampires make terrible soldiers. They're not especially powerful, but they are still alcohol-dependent, despite no longer being able to drink alcohol. Long-term sobriety makes them incredibly slow, which makes them essentially useless as a response team.  You could use them as standing guards, but if they're guarding anything worth attacking, you will definitely wind up with them eating your other dwarfs.

[Mohawk_Bravo]

Hmmm... everyone else have the same experience?

Well, any other ideas to play with my prisoner? He did eat a rather bipolar dorf (who hated crowds, was outgoing, was easily engraged, and was calm under pressure all at once) commander, so I do want to have some fun with him.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Vampires can be made fast, despite alchohol loss. Well, first of all, alchohol loss is preventable if you feed them peasants. Second of all, even if you don't feed them peasant, you can build a danger room. The mechanics of the danger room will prevent skill decay and keep them sharp. You can switch it on once a year, for a week and it will do the necessary work.

[Magistrum]

it's simple, he'll live forever, assing him to military create a room outside the fortress, station him there with armor and weapon and lock him inside, when the next siege arrive, lock the fort and open his room, he might kill 1-3 of them. Vampires are normal, they just gain some atributes
when vampirize.do this with every vampire you get, once I amassed 6 vampires before a siege (I don't know if it's luck or not) and they take care of
most of them, the goblins that didn't died started to run and my vampires take out the ones wich had loss an leg or something.

[Di]

Burrows restrict their feeding targets. So isolating them won't be much of a problem.
Their combat suitability is questionable though. I've once had vamp mayor to fight a lone troll, mayo got his leg broken and troll ran off because of mass goblin massacre deeper in fortress. And here comes the problem: vamp with a broken leg can't move and can't rest injury because of his no_sleep and nostun. So he would just stay on the same place with numerous hysterical children running up to him for consolation, beating him as hard as child can and running off barely happier than they were.
When another siege came, he was annihilated by ice along with them because he was stranded in water trap chamber in freezing biome.

[NightmareBros]

I wonder if we'll ever get a feature where vampires can feed on other beings to get rid of/compensate for their alchohol negative traits?

I mean if you could stop them from being really slow for a while by feeding them elf merchants, goblins or kobolds they'd become really something

of cource a weakness in that would be if they happen to drink forgotten beast blood, they'll contract the blood syndrome (if the FB has one) so they'll probably burn to death from having boiling blood or melt from the inside

[racnor]

Was that vamp stuck in a bed? That's a known glitch with vampires with broken bones. It's fixable.

I think the main qualification for being vamp'ed is unconsciousness, and I believe that people have fed them animals, so you might be able to make an elfeater vampire. !!SCIENCE!! is needed.

[Ringsea]

It'd be good to see vamps drink the blood barrels other caravans bring, for one thing.

But yeah, vampires as soilders are not really worth it. It might be worth trapping one as an eternal book-keeper/life insurance is the fort falls, but as soilders, they really don't do much. Werewolves are better, as they heal and stuff, but they can still end up killing each other and they can't use weapons and armor. (?)

[Magistrum]

Di, actually it's just a way of dispose the extra vampires, and ringsea, no, were-creatures can't use neither armor nor weapons cause they get too big for them, also even if there's an bigger armor or weapon, they won't try to use them.

[saurio]

I don't know if it's a bug but I once had 2 vampires isolated, made into a 2-man squad and set to train... and they just refused to train. Their status said something like 'resting', indefinitely.

Don't know if this applies to all military vampires or only the ones I had, but in any case it seems military vampires are equal or worse than regular dwarves.

[weenog]

Vampires can be made fast, despite alchohol loss. Well, first of all, alchohol loss is preventable if you feed them peasants.

No it isn't. Dwarf blood is not alcohol and does not transmit alcohol to the drinker. Even modding dwarfs to literally have booze for blood have not worked, it's still blood and still doesn't cure sobriety.

Second of all, even if you don't feed them peasant, you can build a danger room. The mechanics of the danger room will prevent skill decay and keep them sharp. You can switch it on once a year, for a week and it will do the necessary work.

This is pointless. Any dwarf can become a super soldier with a danger room, and a vampire will take forever to get OUT of a danger room and go fight for real, because he's super-slow due to sobriety you still haven't fixed.  You could put the danger room out where the fighting is but at that point the only reason you're not using real spears in your upright spear trap is you're pretending you have working super soldiers when you don't

[Gukag]

Would a simple workaround be to remove vampire dwarfs's no-drink tag? Of course it does get rid of one of the major advantages of vampirism in the first place :/.
I suppose in conjunction with a trapped necromancer vampire soldiers could be more usefull than regular dwarves, as a part of whatever undead horde you care to reanimate. I guess spears or crossbows could be a good support weapon? Whips of course go without saying if you can manage to loot some silver ones.

[Sutremaine]

You can water a dwarf for eternity with a single tile of water, so long as it doesn't have a well over it. You can also feed a dwarf for an eternity if you have a farm plot with berries or plump helmets, plus a stockpile for those plants. Just be careful that you don't reach the 200-seed limit with all the existing seeds being unavailable to the farm plot.

You can't remove a vampire's no-drink tag directly so long as the vampires you're using are the pregenerated ones, but you can make a syndrome that removes the tag. Removing the alcohol dependency would be better, but that's not an option.

[BodyGripper]

Vampire squads are cool as hell, regardless of effectiveness.  I had a small iron chamber for them to train in that was meant to be locked at all times, but I spent a year remodeling it and had to let them roam free.  I don't know how fast they moved, since I pause frequently and everyone seems slow.

When the end came, the militia captain Onget was a master swordsdwarf and had killed a dragon.  After a bloody siege in which he earned a title, I decided that as a twist he should do jail time for his murders.  Unfortunately there was another siege about a month later, and he was shot by marksgoblins.