Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Often: The fortress isn't meant to protect them. It's meant to entertain me.

On Occassion: We all need a bit of dark laughter now and then.

When necessary: As a means to an end, I'll kill a dwarf to save a dozen.

Never: The world is dangerous enough.

[Veylon]

I try to be nice. I even built an above-ground town with individual houses for the dwarves to live in and then built a keep for civilians to hole up in when invaders came to town so that nobody would get slaughtered in the streets. I've tended to have an emphasis on drowning traps and such to keep my dwarves out of harm's way. I've never really gone the full-on malevolent route.

[LoneChipmunk]

I tend to do what I can to take care of my dwarves. While there is the occasional bout of "You stupid dorf" (followed by a drop of pop count), most of my dwarves remain well fed and with a supply of booze. In my current fort, I am currently trying to fix the lack of bedrooms issues

[Naryar]

I am pretty damned protective of my original seven, and the other useful dwarves. Especially the metalworkers and the soldiers.

I try to keep my standards of living good, or at least decent. I also take measures so my dwarves have good variety in food and drink. Always set up a dining room, rooms for most of the dwarves and beds for all.

However, pragmatism always comes first in times of trouble. Remember what Machiavelli said "So long as he is able, a prince should follow the path of good, but if necessary he should be able to follow the path of evil".

Also, non-useful nobles... elves... goblins... What ? You think they are worthy of anything but scorn ? Kill them all swiftly and place their remains on a temple to the Blood God.

Or magma, your choice.

[SkyRender]

 I treat my Dwarves exceptionally well.  Everyone gets a smoothed 3x3 room with bed, cabinet, and coffer.  The main dining hall is legendary.  Meals are always made by expert cooks, and drinks brewed by master draftsdwarves.  The military is kept on a fair schedule, and married women are never drafted (married men rarely are, but moreso nowadays since families tend to move to forts now instead of single individuals).  Everyone has a task to take care of most of the time, and I never get particularly frustrated when a given Dwarf goes on break because every job has redundant backup hands available to take over for them.  I also give them a very rich Mountainhome to live in: wealth tends to accrue to the point that I've broken 10mil Dorfbux within 5 years.  It's little wonder that I tend to hit the population cap so fast with conditions that pleasant...

[misko27]

I treat my dwarves as citizens of a dictatorship: It's good if they do well, but it sucks for them if it doesn't. Dwarves are treated decently, but they are not coddled. If sacrifices are unavoidable, then they sure will be made. I don't like losing dwarves, I prefer to keep them all working happily, but bad things may happen to one or two dwarves that are simply unavoidable.

If a dwarf gets murdered by another dwarf for a mood, who am I to judge? And if a different dwarf feels the need to throw a fit, he may get slapped with a murder conviction, whatcha gonna do? And perhaps a few cheesemakers need to play the role of redshirt army till we have a effective fighting force, no tragedy. Basically acting in their interests, but not their individual interests. Morality doesn't come into play; if it happens, it's coincidental at best.

I treat my Dwarves exceptionally well.  Everyone gets a smoothed 3x3 room with bed, cabinet, and coffer.  The main dining hall is legendary.  Meals are always made by expert cooks, and drinks brewed by master draftsdwarves.  The military is kept on a fair schedule, and married women are never drafted (married men rarely are, but moreso nowadays since families tend to move to forts now instead of single individuals).  Everyone has a task to take care of most of the time, and I never get particularly frustrated when a given Dwarf goes on break because every job has redundant backup hands available to take over for them.  I also give them a very rich Mountainhome to live in: wealth tends to accrue to the point that I've broken 10mil Dorfbux within 5 years.  It's little wonder that I tend to hit the population cap so fast with conditions that pleasant...

Nothing against your fort, but money is more easily made by working everyone hard, and population is solely determined by money. Dwarves are greedy little things.

[SkyRender]

Nothing against your fort, but money is more easily made by working everyone hard, and population is solely determined by money. Dwarves are greedy little things.

Oh I know it.  If I had all of my currently idle Dwarves producing top-value goods, my fort's wealth would blast well over 100 million in no time.  Large, steel serrated discs are so very over-valued, and it takes almost no time at all to get a legendary weaponsmith out of forging them.

[Bludulukus]

On my current 35 year fort I took a benevolent approach with the first migrants, giving them luxurious apartments and grand tombs. Housing has become progressively smaller and more spartan for the 2nd generation of fortress born dwarves. But I still try to take care of all dwarves and minimize casualties in all situations.

[Kydrasz]

Personally I'm only nice to the first couple of waves. The first five or so gets grand living spaces and lots of safety and protection in the inner fortress, the next couple of waves gets the above ground homes. Then after that pretty much everyone is a viable meatshield. I just don't really see the point in having a bunch of Dwarves just sitting in the meeting hall, leaving to plant/collect crops every so often, I'd rather have them in the military fighting for the fortress. Since they don't get much social time, no one really cares they die.

[scionkirk]

I think most people's goal is to get to that point where everyone has huge gold plated bedrooms with gold furniture and feasting on lavish meals using gold tables and chairs and wear silk clothes with forgotten beast silk socks that menace with gold spikes engraved with the image of gold statues (replace with adamantine for late late games) (In fact, I have a game where I outfitted 4 squads with adamantine armor now I'm working on clothing people in adamantine).  But yeah, its when things go horribly wrong that people decide to take a break and check out the forums.

Anyhoo, you'll find that happy dwarves will work harder on your insane megaproject schemes.

[itg]

I'm always give my dwarves luxury bedrooms and decadent meals, and I rarely go out of my way to harm them, but my builders and miners have a horrendous safety record. My current fort has lost well over 50 dwarves to various projects, mostly (but not entirely) due to carelessness/imperfect micromangent rather than intentional sacrifice.

[Sirbug]

As for general, I try to use everything I can to make dwarves feel better as well as produce countless riches in process.

Though I do refuse to wall off caverns, use drawbridge to seal away sieges and place cage traps, because I consider this to be exploits.

[Rhaken]

I'm a very nice guy to my dwarves, to a fault. Most of them get decent rooms (sooner or later), masterwork clothes, beautiful dining halls with wall-to-wall engravings, varied booze, and food so valuable it could buy out caravans (quarry bush leaves must be fucking delicious).

On the other hand, I like to put my military through hell. In my favorite fort, I built their barracks as a massive training complex in the middle of the mountain - then chopped the mountain's peak clean off. The army would train for 12 months of the year, with an annual blizzard season lasting 8 months. After a couple years of service, none of them particularly cared about anything anymore.

I like to see this as being a merciful overseer. This way, should tragedy strike, the military will be able to maintain calm and deal with it, be it massive sieges, tantrummers or what have you.

As for dwarven !!justice!!, only murderers get punished - unless I'm feeling evil. In which case, I assign a local wimp to captain of the guard but build no prisons. It's goddamned hilarious to watch a single, weakling dwarf roam the halls, ambushing "criminals" and wailing on them inneffectually. This includes beating the crap out of a chief medical dwarf who was busy napping.

[hiroshi42]

I generally only play with a migrant cap of 50 and try to let nature take its course after that so I generally value all of my dwarves.  I found that when I have a fort with 200 odd adults running about I couldn't care less about individual safety since there was always someone to take the place of dwarf # 024.  Even if half the population dies, goes insane or gets stuck down a well you've still got another 100 to do their work. (Not saying there is anything wrong with that, it's kinda fun in its own way)
I try to have a variety of food on hand and have become a little obsessive about having a stockpile of every booze that I can beg borrow or steal.  The dining room is well furnished and usually includes a menagerie (usually of POWs).
I also try to kit everyone out in basic armor.  This started out as a way to avoid having to make clothing but has since become something more.  Everyone above the age of reason in my forts is in the militia.  This drastically cuts down on the number of injuries or fatalities and the speed hit is lessened by intensive dodge-stick or dodge-ball practice every year or so.
Hells, about the only 'unkind' thing I do to my dwarves is not having individual bedrooms.  I dislike their tendency to create clutter.

Non dwarves on the other hand... if they are useful I might wait a while before I start dumping magma on the traders, but then again I might not.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I am a kind and caring overlord.

Mirrorcalm is a good and happy place.

The dwarves are all finely clothed and fed. They live in safety, protected by magma mines, an ace military and even certain doom, since their overlords have overcome death itself.

Business district and mayor's home:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Clean happy dwarves, bustling about. Note the dead demon lying by the entrace memorialized by a proximate headstone. We are nothing if not good neighbors.

Necromancer laboratory:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

even now our wise and elder scholars are busy studying the mighty Hydra. Here's hoping they catch a male this year!

You can also spot the "Hive": the home of almost all the dwarves of Mirrorcalm. Can you spot the little hive right next to the big one? That's used for beekeeping and was built by the original necromancers themselves! Talk about symbolism!

So ignore burial-centric propaganda!

Mirrorcalm is the very image of dwarven paradise!

And remember: never go into the old burial ground!

[TheDarkStar]

What's this "moral" thing you talk about? My dwarves are strictly valued based on how useful they are. Useful dwarves get to be kept away from other dwarves so that they don't socialize, and useless ones volunteer themselves for things like cavern exploration or breaching magma. They also form the suicide squads. Although the map may be covered in the blood of my dwarves, I still minimize losses and make sure to have a military on hand to kill anyone who goes insane. Once there are overpopulation issues, I go burrow the extra cheesemakes under bridges to ease the problems. Military dwarves usually have all their gear, but I make sure to always have a thriving coffin industry. To avoid things like vampires killing the remaining useful workers, I almost always make a large dormitory or two. The meeting hall is usually nice, with engravings everywhere, and the food is decent (but I make good food during crises), but that is just to keep the dwarves happy enough to work more. When a siege or something else like that happens, I don't care about the dwarves stuck outside, since they are probably the ones with nothing better to do than haul wood in, and I have about 75 other dwarves to replace dead dwarves 1-25.

On a completely unrelated note, the half-life of a dwarf in my forts is about a year.