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[Eidre]

Bottom Line Up Front: what is the best way to weaponize magma mist?

OK, now for the details...
Just started a new embark on a volcano (love me some easy magma forges).  I deliberately picked the embark despite being almost completely surrounded by goblin settlements (not sure if this makes it more likely for ambushes to show up early?).

Now that I've dropped in, I see that I have more of a challenge than I thought:

Assets:
- Volcano
- Native Gold
- Native Silver
- Galena
- Clay
- Lots of soil
- "Woodland", so some trees
- Aquifer (so findable infinite water supply)
- Plenty of magma-safe rocks
- Good supply of gems

Liabilities:
- Hot temperatures = no surface water (ponds, fishing, etc)
- No iron, copper, or flux stone = no weapons grade metals = no melee weapons, metal armor, or metal trap components
- No sand = no glass = no easy magma-safe trap components (corkscrews, pipes, etc) = no good way to pump magma

This leads me to the following hypotheticals on early defense:
- Marksdwarves (wood crossbows, wood/bone/silver? bolts and shields) protected by fortifications
Available quickly, but unlikely to be good enough early in the embark to protect against an ambush.

- Weaponized magma (immersion pits with retractable bridges)
Usable, but dependent on fine timing with levers, locking doors, and will destroy all of the non-ferrous goblinite (copper, silver, bronze, etc); and without the ability to pump the magma it away, it will require waiting until natural drainage or evaporation gets rid of the magma before the goblinite can be extracted.

- Weaponized magma mist (dropped rocks into convenient magma pools?  overhead magma reservoir with triggerable murder holes?)
If done correctly, will set goblins on fire, which will kill them without doing damage to their fire-safe (instead of magma safe) metal stuff, and it will require much less magma, leading to a quicker clean-up afterwards.

- Goblin launcher (drawbridge launches enemies into the volcano, walls, or other objects)
NOTE: I refuse to use bridge atom smashers as defensive devices; I consider this an exploit.  Likewise with cage traps.  I don't have objections to using a drawbridge to lob enemies into solid objects (or lob solid objects into enemies).

- Siege Weapons
Catapults are inaccurate, don't do reliable damage, and since they're manned by civilians and therefore require a complicated set-up to keep them from running away when the goblins show up.  Ballistae aren't much use without weapon-metal arrow-heads.

- Buying iron/steel weapons and armor
Gold and magma forges will allow for quick generation of high-value gold crafts, which will allow purchase of iron and steel weapons right away.  However, I won't get a say in what gets brought until year 2 autumn (earliest), and what they bring is irregular and may not correspond to the exact need (or be horribly overpriced; needed -iron mail- and all they brought was *<<=iron mail>>* for three times the price due to the nice pictures of purring maggots in prase).  Buying raw materials (iron, steel, wood, coal, flux) take a very long time to accumulate enough to outfit a credible defense.

So of the options available, I'm tending towards the "magma mist" option; it seems to be pretty quick, have the highest potential gain, and has the virtue of being something I haven't tried before. 

Does the community at large have any suggestions on the best way to weaponize this valuable resource?

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

Silver hammers and maces?

[Larix]

I've never played with magma mist. Other options:

- weaponised minecarts
extremely efficient, all you need are a few rollers to bounce them back and forth across the entrance corridor. A cart with five native gold boulders weighs ~10 tons and (slowly) flattens everything that tries to cross. If you want to use launched projectiles and/or goblins, you should use minecarts for that purpose anyway; bridges don't launch, they just toss stuff around completely randomly.

- buy any old weaponable-material items, melt them down; base-quality anvils and instruments give one bar each and don't cost much. With a volcano on the site, melting shouldn't consume anything valuable. Copper and tin cages, after melting to bars, can be combined to bronze, which is a decent weapon material; you can just order tons of cheap tame animals, each brought by dwarfs is in a base-quality cage, made randomly of copper, tin, zinc, nickel or lead.

- use silver for blunt weapons. While not good for cutting weapons, silver war hammers, maces and giant spiked balls should do alright.

- obsidian short swords; they're actually useful again, and you should be able to find or cast obsidian on a volcano site.

[Eidre]

Silver hammers and maces?

Considered, should have mentioned.  I think the rate of casualties for dwarves with hand weapons and shields but no metal armor would be appallingly high, leading to massive unhappiness, health-care system collapse, and depopulation.  Which would be fun, definitely, but not quite what I'm looking for this game.

[Crashmaster]

Here's a thread with two versions of a minecart system magma mist generator, a powered and an impulse ramp exploit version;

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=115875.0

Hot stuff!

[Badger Storm]

I second the melting of trader goods.  It won't be much a first, but if you're smart about ordering from the liaison, within 3-5 years you might have more iron than you know what to do with.  Anvils are a good thing to melt down, but make sure your forge is built first so you don't accidentally your embark anvil.  Bronze crafts are half the price of iron ones while giving around the same amount of metal, and bismuth bronze is only a little more.

Most of the time you can request metals and their ores from the liaison too, though they'll be expensive.

Blind dwarves are actually supposed to be better siege operators because they can't see goblins, so they won't run from them.  Of course, this is not the case in real life...

[Eidre]

I've never played with magma mist. Other options:

- weaponised minecarts
extremely efficient, all you need are a few rollers to bounce them back and forth across the entrance corridor. A cart with five native gold boulders weighs ~10 tons and (slowly) flattens everything that tries to cross. If you want to use launched projectiles and/or goblins, you should use minecarts for that purpose anyway; bridges don't launch, they just toss stuff around completely randomly.

- buy any old weaponable-material items, melt them down; base-quality anvils and instruments give one bar each and don't cost much. With a volcano on the site, melting shouldn't consume anything valuable. Copper and tin cages, after melting to bars, can be combined to bronze, which is a decent weapon material; you can just order tons of cheap tame animals, each brought by dwarfs is in a base-quality cage, made randomly of copper, tin, zinc, nickel or lead.

- use silver for blunt weapons. While not good for cutting weapons, silver war hammers, maces and giant spiked balls should do alright.

- obsidian short swords; they're actually useful again, and you should be able to find or cast obsidian on a volcano site.

In kind:
- Minecarts: in the couple years I've been playing DF, I have been shying away from minecarts; I just don't have it internalized how to make them work properly (which is why I didn't even think about this as an option).  This might be a good reason to figure it out.  I suspect I'll have to find the aquifer and make myself an artificial river as a power source for the rollers, though.

- Buying and melting random junk; definitely an option, although it runs into the same problem as anything else from the merchants; I'd be making a high $ value of stuff to sell for a small amount of meltable stuff, meaning the goblins come sooner and in greater numbers (I think that's how it works?).

- Silver spiked balls...didn't know this was possible, I thought all trap weapons were restricted to armor-metals and glass.

- Obsidian swords...again, didn't consider; mass casting of obsidian (for manufacturing or for defensive purposes) is not something I've tried, so again, a good opportunity to try something new.

Thanks for the all of the ideas.  This game, as dysfunctional as it's likely to be, should be a good opportunity to experiment with some things that I've been reluctant to do before.

[Skullsploder]

I was in a similar boat to yourself prior to piercing the aquifer (4 years after embark), facing undead. My strategy was simple: buy all animals from the caravans, slaughter them all. Buy and order bulk leather. Clearcut the forest seasonally. Have an assembly line of leather armour and high boots alongside bone greaves, helms, and gauntlets. Have a crossbow (wood or imported copper), a wooden shield, and a leather quiver for every dwarf. This, naturally, is preparation for drafting every dwarf into the military.

Any enemy that gets near a clump of civilians will be overwhelmed with bolts, all the discarded clothing counts as imports and thus doesn't count towards exported wealth when traded, and you can simply throw everyone at every threat. This would work well in combination with the obsidian short swords idea, and even better with silver bolts and hammers.

Additionally, magma misters can be super simple. Have a quantum minecart stockpile on z2, dumping refuse into a hole. Beneath that hole on z1, you have a magmaproof hatch or retracting bridge. Then on z0 the shaft comes through the middle of the goblin room. Below that on z-1 is any amount of magma, so long as there's a hole in the floor under the shaft. Pull the lever attached to the bridge/hhatch when you want the Goblins to become !!Goblins!!

[Centigrade]

Without access to sand or magma-safe metal, I do not see how you could get a controllable magma-based weapon up and running before the first caravan presents you the opportunity to purchase iron or steel. With that said, this is what I would do:

Carpenter --> Spiked Ball/R
Mechanic --> Mechanisms/R

Mechanisms and Spiked Balls are the highest-value items you can make from stone and wood, with respective base values of 30 and 126. As soon as you can, which could conceivably be the very first thing you do when you unpause, make a Carpenter's Workshop and a Mechanic's Workshop and set those jobs to repeat. Low-quality specimens become trader fodder, and even if you start out with dabbling dwarves you will have more than enough value generated by the first caravan to buy it out. If you have your heart set on getting weapons-grade metals, then from the first caravan and every subsequent caravan request at highest priority all of the weapons-grade metal bars, their ores, and any other low-weight things you might need or want; e.g., gems, seeds. If budget is a concern for some reason, then check the Melt Item page on the Wiki for a list of the best things to use for recovering metals; and, if you are feeling especially gamey then feel free to turn 1 bar of steel into infinite steel through repetition.

For a quick defense design to get you through the first few years without metal, all you need to do is make a long trap corridor behind your trade depot which is 5 (or more) tiles wide and which is covered in weapon traps along 80% (or more) of its surface. Enemies will not march through a completely trap-obstructed hallway under most conditions; i.e., if your 5-wide corridor has a 5-wide layer of traps then they will just stand there in a group outside of it once they spot the traps, but they will merrily parade through it so long as there is an unobstructed path. And due to the variations in A* path finding most or all of a squad of goblins will run into the traps they "know" are there, because A* hates having units march in a single file line.

Any goblin, giant, ogre, cyclops, minotaur, or anything else you are likely to face in the first few years, will be incapacitated or outright killed by a weapon trap filled with spiked wooden balls, owing mostly to the fact that each ball gets three attacks per target—and you can easily have dozens of such tiles within the first year, each with 30 chances to roll a collapsed lung or pulped skull. Anything else you choose to do for defense, whether it be a functioning military or additional weapon traps made of metals or a magma-based weapon of some kind, is entirely superfluous until you start dealing with procedurally-generated monsters made of gems, metal, and stone.

And if all else fails, then a simple drowning trap made of bridges is an easy addition or alternative to the aforementioned trap corridor which will at the very least isolate a threat it is incapable of killing.

[Eidre]

Again, I appreciate all of the input.  There are enough ideas to try that I will be leaving enough space on the entry level to have multiple death corridors (gold minecarts, death by casting, magma mist, traps), and choose between them when an enemy approaches.

After re-reading the magma mist article, I was chagrined to find out that you can't make magma mist by dropping magma; you have to drop things *into* magma to make it work.  So I'm thinking I can still make myself a mist trap by having open channels of magma on either side of the pathway, and then a stone stockpile on top of a retractable bridge one level up; remove the bridge, and the rocks fall down exactly into the magma, spraying in mist across the path.  The only problem I see is that the stockpile has to be reloaded by hand between each shot, making it poor for larger attacks or in cases where you can't get the whole invasion force to line up nicely on the path at the same time.

[Authority2]

There's a design for a four-tile mini minecart grinder that doesn't use power somewhere on the forum. I linked up seven of them with gold minecarts in my fort. Just dig out the four tiles, build NS track ramps in the upper left/lower right and EW ones in the other two, then have the access to your fort run diagonally through its opposite corners (it requires all the vertical and horizontal walls to work). To be able to turn it off, build a one-tile bridge in one of the closed corners and link it to a lever.

[Pirate Santa]

I think you could improve the mist weapon by using a winding path.
====
###=
====
=###
====
###=

= is the path
# is the magma channels
This way each burst of mist could cover at least twice as much path and potentially twice as much goblin. It also has the benefit of taking longer to traverse.

[Max™]

BBB=bridges
W=constructed wall
F=constructed floor
S=support
#=ground by the support

Code: [Select]

BBB
BWB
BBB
#S#
...
.W.
.F.
.F.
I'm pretty sure you can support a wall by a floor tile from the top. I want to say you can but can't remember what I would do to build one since I've been in adventure mode mindset for so long.

Bridges around the open space where the constructed wall sits, magma below, something gets close enough either drop the wall manually or with pressure plates linked to the support, if the wall dropping doesn't mist right like that just build it upwards from the floor and leave the center of the magma pit open. If you drop the wall from one level up then the sides won't give support and you could probably put grates around the opening instead of bridges, I just used bridges for my above-ground magma pistons.

[Xenophilius]

If all you want is to set the goblins alight, then there is probably an easier way than magma mist.

Above the trap corridor, have a corridor full of magma, that is disconnected from the source, sitting on a retractable (magma safe) bridge. Make the floor of the trap corridor out of magma safe grates and below the trap corridor install a sufficiently large drain. When a goblin is in the corridor, retracting the bridge will make the magma fall and the falling magma should set anything in the corridor alight. Since it will fall down to the lower level immediately, it should not destroy any fire safe object. No pump should be needed although refilling the magma reservoir will probably be slow.

Note that I did not try this out so it might not work at all.

[Skullsploder]

Ok, here is my best idea:

z0 is the top level of the volcano's lava. On z-1 is the entrance to your fort. The entrance is reached by a narrow vertical stairway of up/down stairs. On z0, directly above the top of the stairway, is a retracting bridge or a bunch of hatches, all linked up to a lever and all magma proof. There would be a pipe dug to he edge of the caldera, filling the pipe with magma up to the hatches. It'll work better if you have a raising bridge directly adjacent to the hatch, linked to the same lever, that can block off the pipe, as this will ensure a precise amount of magma is always dropped (BBetter if you use a retracting bridge instead of hatches as well - cheaper and ensures the block and the hatch open/close at the same time) From z-1 down it's just more staircase.. the longer he better, because more goblins will be set alight with each drop. At the bottom you have a last set of up down stairs adjacent to the entrance, and below those you have grates above a drain, with a way to get back up to the entrance level - just to ensure no fighters or delicious goblite ever fall into the magma drain. All in all, very simple, just some basic digging, two bridges, and some grates.