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[saintclair]

Hello everybody. First off, this is the first post I've made on these forums, and I'd like to say that Dwarf Fortress is the most heartbreakingly hard and spirit-crushing game I've ever played, and it's the best.

However, I had a fort, Trustchannel, and everything went smoothly; I irrigated a room with a murky pool to grow enough plump helmets to sustain a still making wine, I turned migrants into soldiers for a budding militia in order to fend off the inevitable first goblin siege, and I equipped them all with iron shields, armor, and weapons. When that siege came, I raised my drawbridge, trapping a few unlucky dwarves outside, and when I had my military readied behind the gate, set the squads to attack the goblins, and watched in horror as my 25 metal-armored dwarves were slaughtered by bowfire in the 10 tiles span before reaching the goblins. Two or three managed to enter into melee with goblins, and they scuffled, but ultimately my entire military faltered. Even two isolated skirmishes of two of my dwarves versus one of their goblin bowmen resulted in both of my dwarves being dismembered.

Unbeknown to me, as soon as I had lowered the drawbridge, my entire population flooded the battlefield, I presume to collect bodies, and resultingly found their own deaths.

Having read my story, my questions are as follows:

1. How can I prevent my citizens from scrambling like lemmings to their deaths outside of the fort? Do I just have to turn off the burial labor, or is there a more sophisticated and efficient system (like with burrows or something else?)

2. Why was it that with 1.5:1 odds in my favor, goblin bowmen were able to make a joke out of my military? I thought I had them training in a barracks designated earlier. I had them training with weapons, which I read on the wiki is not optimal.
2a. If sparring with their weapons is not the best choice, should I make them spar with no uniforms, or should they wear some armor, but no weapons?
2b. Is this the reason my dwarves were so coolly slaughtered by the goblins, my foolish weaponed sparring policy?

Any other general thoughts?

[Urist Mc Dwarf]

For 1, forbid on death in orders I think.

[fricy]

1. yes, burrows will help you. This is how you set up an alert: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Civilian_alert

2. Shield user/Dodging skill is usefull against ranged attacks. Have them spar with a shield equiped.

[Garath]

ranged weapons are just slightly terrifyingly powerful. Also, even when sparring for a year or more, the average dwarf will not be a weapon master by far and more importantly will not be an armor master or the like. While you hear about untrained, unarmored peasants taking apart whole sieges, that is the exception rather than the rule.

If you don't want to overuse traps, considering placing just a few of them anyway of the weaker kind just to cause some wounds. That's not too un dwarven, right? Most importantly, make sure your forcegets to the enemy with as little walking as possible. Not just because of ranged fire, also because they have a nasty habit of not staying together and getting slaughtered one by one

I relied mostly on traps for most of my defences for quite a long time. As a last note, irrigating is only needed once and only on stone floors, not on sand or clay or anything

[crossmr]

As long as they don't have an elite bowman, you can carve fortifications and have your bowmen stand beside it and fire on the enemy and soften them up before sending in your melee troops.

Burrows help, and I have a 2 tier system. Bridges as an outer defense and then a set of floodgates inside. This helps you isolate things a big a slow them down. If anyone does get across a bridge, sneaking, you can trap them. If a building destroyer gets in, you can quick build a wall while it works on the floodgate. You need to make sure you have redundant blocks and things to help control situations that might get out of hand.

[Hamsmagoo]

The best way to survive in Dwarf Fortress is to play defensively, as opposed to offensively.  Instead of having your military charge outside, towards the invaders, us the 'm' station command to have them stand and wait at the drawbridge, as a last line of defense for the goblins that bypass your traps.

[Matoro]

1. d>b>f is mass-foribding tool. Forbid corpses and items in the battlefield. No more stupid dwarves carrying corpses. Remember however reclaim those after the battle, otherwise you might have little ghost problem.

2. So you made a charge into bolt-rain. There's nothing wrong in your military, it's in your strategy. Charging towards shooting enemies is basically suicide.
2a. I spar my dwarves always in their full soldier equipment, armor and weapons. And it works.
2b. Tactics is the problem, not the equipment. Build some kind of airlock system or just station your army in narrow corridor or something like that. At the gate. Make enemies charge towards you by opening the bridge and moving your military to the bridge. Also, mixed weapons are good - make sure that you have also marksdwarves, not just meleedwarves.

[vanatteveldt]

For 1, I would always use the burrows + alert system. Designate a burrow to cover the "safe" part of your fortress, call it "inside" or something, and then in the military screen create a new alert, set it to include the "inside" burrow, and activate it when a siege or something happens. It takes a bit of time to set up, but for each siege or attack it is a one-action click to get all your citizens to safety. If they are still outside they will also run to the gate as soon as you set the burrow. Since sieges usually walk quite slow, they often have time enough to get to safety.

For 2, attacking bowmen with melee troops is suicide (maybe unless they are very well trained and equipped). See Shakespeare's henry V . You have roughly three options:

0: Traps, especially cage traps. Cage traps are so overpowered they're not even funny anymore. Some people avoid all traps because of this, I use cage traps in moderation because it's fun to have some captives.
1: Get ranged troops yourself, and use fortifications to make sure you can shoot them and they can't shoot back.
2: Ambush the siege by drawing them into a place where your troops can get there without having to walk 10 paces through enemy fire. E.g construct something like this:

Code: [Select]


          ##########################
<outisde> G                        G  <inner fortress
          ####GGGGGGGG##############
           <melee troops>

#=Wall
G=any kind of controllable gate, presumably a raising bridge

Open both gates. The archers see the path to your fortress (or to a bait kitty) and will path there. Make sure there is no direct line of sight, e.g. have a ramp or bend after the second gate. Once the first archers passed the gate separating it from your melee troops, close both gates. The archers are now stuck. Make sure your melee troops stand next to the gate, open the gate, and slaughter the archers.

(of course, once you have the archers trapped, there are lots of ways to send them on, including atom smashing, cave-ins, drowning, etc. But your dwarfs take joy in slaughter and it is good XP, so just let them have their fun .

The nice thing is that you can construct something like this while the archers are waiting outside (assuming you've left some horizontal space between your main gate and the fortress. If space is tight, you can always take it down a z-level and use the space there...)

[firefly68]

In relation to burrows, if you're using dfhack then you can use the burrow command to set particular types of tile within a burrow. So, if you create a burrow for your civilians and use the command to add, for example, all subterranean tiles to the burrow which can save a lot of time.

[Trif]

2. Why was it that with 1.5:1 odds in my favor, goblin bowmen were able to make a joke out of my military? I thought I had them training in a barracks designated earlier. I had them training with weapons, which I read on the wiki is not optimal.
2a. If sparring with their weapons is not the best choice, should I make them spar with no uniforms, or should they wear some armor, but no weapons?
2b. Is this the reason my dwarves were so coolly slaughtered by the goblins, my foolish weaponed sparring policy?

I think you misunderstood the wiki on the "training without weapons" point. If you want your dwarfs to fight with weapons, they have to train with weapons. The wiki might advise against using different types of weapons in one squad. If you put an axedwarf and a hammerdwarf in a squad, the hammerdwarf will make combat demonstrations on how to use a hammer, which is useless for an axe fighter. Separate squads for separate weapon users is the most effective way.

[Larix]

I can't confirm that - in my experience, an axedwarf will only start axe demonstrations if there's at least one other axedwarf in the squad. I have a long-suffering three-dwarf squad with an axedwarf teacher and hammerdwarf and speardwarf pupils, and none of them has any experience in the other weapons, not even 'dabbling'.

If you train them in small squads or at least with train (two minimum) orders, unwanted crosstraining of weapon skills shouldn't happen.

But as far as training is concerned, it definitely should take place with weapons. Otherwise, dwarfs will wrestle, and sparring wrestlers can apparently throw each other, with a large potential for serious damage including instant death.

[Garath]

yup. Whatever you do, even for raw recruits, always give them a helmet