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[doublestrafe]

I was trying my first single-pick challenge on a terrifying glacier (OK, my second--the first ended far too quickly to count). I was doing pretty well, too--I had an airlock that got 85% of most migration waves underground safely (if covered with pungent mucus and blisters), I had completely walled off a chunk of the third cavern, the trade depot was just about as secure as it gets, and I was just getting magma forges up and going, with a population of about 45. The surface was starting to get pretty hairy, especially after the first kobold ambush, and I hadn't gotten armed yet, but they were up there and we were down here, so what did it matter?

That's when I learned that kobold zombies can pick locks.

The zombie apocalypse didn't take long. Wrestlers are not much of a match for ice wolf corpses, and while I had a few marksdwarves, they weren't much use in the vertical tunnels. Soon I found myself checking the list of citizens to find two dwarves left. One was the mayor, resting in bed. A quick check confirmed that the zombies were slowly but surely converging on his room. So much for him.

The other was Tholtig Noramurist, who was blithely constructing a rock throne as if nothing had happened.

I have a vampire!

All kinds of plans started forming in my brain. I would make a suit of armor and a hammer, then kill every zombie one at a time and drag them to the atom smasher. No, I would make cage traps and reduce their numbers until a new wave could survive. Wait, first I need to take care of all these ghosts--even a vampire can get an arm ripped off, right?

Soon, however, I realized that there was a problem. Tholtig had never attacked a dwarf in Mirroreddawns. And she was suffering from booze withdrawal. Also, one of the ghosts (of  an unslabbable caravan guard) had been haunting her, and the miasma wasn't making her particularly happy either, so some work may need to be done to keep her sane. 

Maybe, I thought, I could dig a second shelter from the surface. Zombies won't follow her, so it would be a safe bolt-hole for migrants. But migrants would starve quickly there unless I got them to a cavern--and the one exposed cavern is now home to a rather grumpy forgotten beast.

So here I sit, staring at my one, painfully slow, not-very-secretly undead dwarf. And I wonder: can this situation be saved? If anything were left alive, there might be a chance to draw the zombies into some kind of trap, but there's nothing. I'm stumped. It's your turn, guys. With the tools available, can you save Mirroreddawns?

[They Got Leader]

Is Tholtig a vampire? If so, then when the mayor dies, you will lose.

[doublestrafe]

Is Tholtig a vampire? If so, then when the mayor dies, you will lose.

Tholtig is a vampire. The mayor has long since died and now Tholtig is the mayor. I have not lost.

[They Got Leader]

Is a known vampire, but you have not lost? Really? I thought you could not have a vampire as your last remaining citizen.

They can die through combat, though they will live forever otherwise. You might seal Tholtig off and make a eternity fortress of just the one person. That might be pretty epic in it's own right.

[WanderingKid]

Bluntly: Not without more effort than it'd be worth without enjoying the epicness of it.

The problem is the undead will multiply due to goblin sieges, migrant waves, etc... much faster than you can kill off an undead, smash it, and repeat.  You need a mass grinder, and those take a reasonable amount of dorfpower to build.

As to vampires losing, I've had openly stated vampire kings.  That it's a vampire isn't a concern.  That it's going to eat your first two migrant waves is... 

To fix the ghost {k} to the ghost, and then DFHack: tweak clear-ghostly.  In challenge games the only time I'll typically use hack is to remove bugged items like that (specifically the caravan guards).  It is an alpha, after all.

[wierd]

Sounds like a well of unlife will be a great boon for you.  Multiply your vampiric workforce, and then airlock them outside. Use them to move goods in and out of the depot, clear and reset cages and traps, and other misc outdoor activities.

For the moment though, you need to purge the fortress of zombies and haunts, and replace the doors with a bridge.

[doublestrafe]

To fix the ghost {k} to the ghost, and then DFHack: tweak clear-ghostly.  In challenge games the only time I'll typically use hack is to remove bugged items like that (specifically the caravan guards).  It is an alpha, after all.

Does that work? I was scared off by the THIS IS DANGEROUS IT WILL RE-WRITE YOUR HARD DRIVE IT WILL RECALIBRATE YOUR REFRIGERATOR'S COOLNESS SETTING SO ALL YOUR ICE CREAM GOES MELTY warning.

Anyway, regarding epicness, sure a lone vampire ruling a solitary fort is kinda epic, but it's sort of the default state if you fail with a vampire. Crawling back to civilization so the vampire has something to eat, now that's epic.

So what I'm thinking now is that I need to let zombies into the trade depot so that they can eat the elves. The elves will leave behind caged animals. Caged animals can be the bait for some kind of grinder trap--I don't know what yet. Suggestions?

On preview:

Sounds like a well of unlife will be a great boon for you.  Multiply your vampiric workforce, and then airlock them outside. Use them to move goods in and out of the depot, clear and reset cages and traps, and other misc outdoor activities.

The trick is keeping anyone alive long enough to get vamp'd.

[WanderingKid]

So what I'm thinking now is that I need to let zombies into the trade depot so that they can eat the elves. The elves will leave behind caged animals. Caged animals can be the bait for some kind of grinder trap--I don't know what yet. Suggestions?

Works just fine, the tweak that is.  Just use sparingly.

Regarding the grinder?  Hold that thought please.  FurnaceClans 6 is taking ages to put together.   

[jcochran]

To fix the ghost {k} to the ghost, and then DFHack: tweak clear-ghostly.  In challenge games the only time I'll typically use hack is to remove bugged items like that (specifically the caravan guards).  It is an alpha, after all.

So what I'm thinking now is that I need to let zombies into the trade depot so that they can eat the elves. The elves will leave behind caged animals. Caged animals can be the bait for some kind of grinder trap--I don't know what yet. Suggestions?

Well, since they're zombies, use the universal dwarvish solution. Wash 'em with magma. Have a trap baited with your animals (thinking retracting spike trap made of magma safe materials) then have the area submerged in magma. Since the zombies won't path through magma, have the trap arranged on 2 z levels. The lower level is the magma covered spike traps. On the upper level put in a retracting bridge to dump 'em in the drink. Thinking perhaps a corridor that's 2 tiles long (covered with 2 1x10 retracting bridge) both controlled by a pressure plate just in front of the 1st bridge and your bait animal at the other end. To deal with pesky TRAPAVOID undead kobolds, have a secondary trigger in the form of a lever you can flip. But if the kobold happens to be in the company of another non-TRAPAVOID zombie, the problem will be taken care of when the kobold's companion triggers the pressure plate dumping both of 'em into the drink.
 

[wierd]

Zombies can usually just be atom smashed into oblivion without being killed first, unless the are enormous zombies. (Zombie megabeasts, elephants, and pals)

As such, given that we have just the one vampire dwarf to work with, i'd do something like this:



It's basically a corridor, with raising bridges inside.  Arrows indicate direction they drop.
The corridor needs to be short enough that the zombies see the delicious animals inside, but long enough that they can't make it to them before the 2 endstop bridges raise. This traps them in the zombie compactor. The second set of bridges comes down, quantum deconstructifes the zombies, raises back up, then the end caps open again to accept more zombies.

This kind of setup can be quite fast to build, and needs far fewer mechanisms than the equivalent area of floor tiles covered in weapon traps.

An even more interesting alternative, if you feel ambitious, is to use a loaded minecart full of metal bars to sweep the hallway.

           O===============O
           |   O===========O    |
           |    |                            |     |
______|   |                            |     |________   To tasty animals
______    |                            |     ________
           |   |                             |    |
           |   |                             |    |
           |   O===========O   |
           O===============O

                <--- Direction minecart travels

It's just a closed loop track with an empty space in the middle that you put a power distribution center in, and a windmill on top of.  This allows powered rollers on the straight aways, and is on/offable by putting a raising bridge just behind one of the rollers. (This keeps the cart from going forward, but also keeps it primed to fire when ready.) It should be possible to have several carts on the same track this way, to maximize carnage.

Doesn't matter what direction the zombies go down the hallway, the minecart will gibletize them.

The bridge method completely removes the corpses though, and as such is much more useful.

In both cases, the idea is to use as few mechanisms and constructed parts as is possible. The atomsmash hallway isn't very original, but should be very effective at completely removing zombies.

[doublestrafe]

The atomic hallway is probably more feasible and easier to implement than the magma dump, for the simple reason that the magma about 80z down. I would not like to build a pump stack or a minecart system with one sober dwarf.

The drawback, of course, is that the hallway is manually operated by one sober dwarf. I might see about making it a somewhat longer hallway, with a one-way trapdoor failsafe at the end, in case of dereliction of duty, and maybe lock Tholtig in the operating room. The zombies--at least the non-animal ones--seem to be good at detecting life from quite a long way away. The ice wolf corpses and such seem to lose interest once you're out of sight.

Addendum: Things just got a bit more complicated. Now there's a giant beakless turkey zombie with a poison sting in the mix--no idea when he got there, or when he got dead. Pity, I would have liked to watch. Still, something to be careful not to close a bridge on.

[UnlawfullyDeranged]

Could you build a long disposable 1x1 hallway filled with raising 1x1 bridges? Once Mr. Beakless goes down the hallway with undead company, you raise the bridges and everything is crushed except Beakless, who is trapped in a 1x1 area between two 1x1 raised bridges. Then deconstruct all of the other bridges and mine around the trapped Beakless.

[kero42]

Is a known vampire, but you have not lost? Really? I thought you could not have a vampire as your last remaining citizen.

They can die through combat, though they will live forever otherwise. You might seal Tholtig off and make a eternity fortress of just the one person. That might be pretty epic in it's own right.

I'm pretty sure a vampire can be your last citizen, at least from what I've read on these forums and on the wiki. I don't know if being discovered counts for anything. I think Were Creatures are a different story, as when they change they temporarily stop being civ members, so the fort will crumble if they are all you have left when they reach their time of the month. As most of my assumptions about vampires and were creatures are based on second hand information, I would appreciate it if people who know better were to correct me.

More on topic, good luck keeping Tholtig alive and sane long enough for migrants to arrive, sounds like you have a lot of work on your hands.

[doublestrafe]

Could you build a long disposable 1x1 hallway filled with raising 1x1 bridges? Once Mr. Beakless goes down the hallway with undead company, you raise the bridges and everything is crushed except Beakless, who is trapped in a 1x1 area between two 1x1 raised bridges. Then deconstruct all of the other bridges and mine around the trapped Beakless.

Under normal circumstances, sure.

With a sober vampire? Forget it! It took a FULL SEASON to attach ONE MECHANISM to a bridge! And that's without hooking up the lever, even. When they say sober dwarves work slow, they mean it!

[snjwffl]

Is a known vampire, but you have not lost? Really? I thought you could not have a vampire as your last remaining citizen.

I can confirm that you can have a vampire as your last citizen.  In fact, on more than one occasion this is how I've discovered that I had one: having fallen to a necromancer siege, my remaining handful of citizens merrily continued their lives as if those undead weren't there. (Sadly, vampires will never attack undead, so I had no way of pushing the siegers back)