http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=787#c26957So, I got into an unwinnable fight with an invincible strand of hair. As interesting as that bug is on its own, and as fervently as I hope it gets fixed, I still learned a few surprising things during that battle. I'll try to summarize them here, before I forget them.
1) Animal hair has parts. Not visible until it has been reanimated as an undead hair-thing, but they're apparently there. You can chop (or in my case, punch) an animated hair-thing into smaller and smaller pieces. This is
a very bad thing because of the bug.
2) Not all civilians are cowards. My (admittedly green and untrained) melee dwarves all ran screaming like bitches. But about 5 civilians
charged into the fray and did not let up. One of those civilians was a child. These civilians were relentless. They never, ever stopped attacking it. They had bad thoughts about being attacked by the undead, but they were utterly single-minded. Which leads to the next lesson....
3) An enraged dwarf will continue fighting until he literally dies of dehydration. At least, I assume it was rage driving these civilians to continue attacking this completely harmless hair-thing. They ignored their own hunger, thirst, tiredness, and unhappiness. At any time, they could have walked calmly back into the fortress and got a drink. Once they were far enough down the stairwell, they would have lost line of sight, but they didn't do this.
4) This may not be a general rule, but at least in this particular example, all reactions were strictly "fight or flight". Every dwarf either ran away screaming in terror, or charged in for a battle to the death. Nobody -- not one single dwarf -- calmly assessed the situation, realized that 5 guys were already beating on this thing, and decided "Eh, they got it covered. I'm'a go back to the workshop now." Even more to the point, none of the dwarves who were fleeing were capable of rational decision-making. This is nothing new, of course, but you'd think that
just once in a while they would manage to flee
into the fortress (more to the point,
down the stairs), instead of away across the surface Z-level, and then up into the trees, and ultimately, crashing back down to the ground.
As a feature request, I wish Toady would make frightened dwarves try to go
down instead of
up. If their current tree-climbing instinct were replaced with a burrow-diving instinct, it would make a whole lot more sense,
and it would keep them alive longer.