Print

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

[AceSV]

I know you're going furry, but let's look at this from a dwarven standpoint.  Do you want to cheese it, or do you want sword-and-board soldiers up front holding the enemy in place while archers rain death on them?  Is it worth taking over the world if it means you have to live with the shame of abusing traps and pathfinding?

Good point.  I'd rather win through glorious combat, but I'd like to have a fail-safe trap in there somewhere to keep things from going completely south if enemies fight past or sneak past the army. 



Let's talk about human dwarf vulpen resources too.  If I go the castle route, what I'll really need first are constructions, so I think I'll take 1 Miner, 4 Peasants and 2 Combat Dwarves, probably Melee Combat.  Screw farming, I'll bring along some egg-layers and non-grazers for meat/bones/leather.  If I'm plotting to seize caravan goods, I can even skip the embark anvil.  With the point savings I can bring some ore, coal and flux to get armor production started.  Come to think of it, the Dwarf/Lagomer/Komodo/Anato caravans will all have useful armor too. 

Edit:  Dangit, I still think of them as dwarves. 

[Max™]

I've had very few large serrated discs jam, they do make a HUGE mess though, and climbing/jumping are much more probable now, so you gotta reconsider a lot of design strategies, heck, the magma flooding I posted above only has the walls/raised section to keep it out of the interior of the fort, and to slow down invaders enough for the magma to reach them (since I always use the "designate the stack from the bottom up, suspending them all, then unsuspend and build from the top down" method to essentially teleport the magma from the bottom input to the top output instantly, which I seem to recall finding in the relativity thread, thanks Girlinhat!) and just rely on being able to seal the interior off entirely if I absolutely have to.

I don't think I could climb up a wall and then up through fortifications hanging out over them, and I've never seen npcs make use of the fact that you can just jump through fortifications, so that's worth keeping in mind.

[AceSV]

I've seen all invaders climb over 1z walls like they weren't there, and I've seen goblins climb up 2z walls, although it looked like some of them could and some of them couldn't.  Komodos have natural climbing skill, and are already one of the more dangerous average-sized races I might face.  Also, all of the animal races have [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] instead of [COMMON_DOMESTIC] so I may be confronted with Legendary Climber war animals.  (I don't think there are any fliers that can be trained for war)  Thus it is imperative that whatever structures I build are completely roofed over, at least eventually. 

[miauw62]

Smoothed natural rock is completely unclimbable, so if you dig a deep enough moat a few z-levels down into the stone you could smooth that. (Idea shamelessly stolen from this thread)
Alternatively, you could just make a 4-wide magma moat. They have to reach your wall before they can climb over them, after all.

[Naryar]

a 2 tile wide magma moat + a simple 1z wall should be enough. I doubt people will jump over the moat, grasp the wall like a ninja and climb.  (more like jump over moat, ram wall, get stunned, dive into magma) Of course, clearing trees helps, and having elevation next to your moat causes problems with archers.

[AceSV]

Smoothed natural rock is completely unclimbable, so if you dig a deep enough moat a few z-levels down into the stone you could smooth that. (Idea shamelessly stolen from this thread)
Alternatively, you could just make a 4-wide magma moat. They have to reach your wall before they can climb over them, after all.

Unless you've got some kind of magical magma moving voodoo (yeah, yeah, yeah, magma piston) I don't see moving enough magma to fill a mote in a year.  It would be easier to just make a water mote at ground level, though if they can climb, I guess they might be able to swim.  Plus, as far as I know, an overhang will completely stop climbers too, and is by far the easiest of these suggestions to implement. 

[AceSV]

Arrgh!  To heck with planning!  Let's get this party started.

Welcome to Bokslozgo: The Absolute Universe. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

See that tiny little Cave_Detailed in the north east, on the border of the glacier?  That is the lone settlement of the Portal of Coal, the Vulpen Civilization.  Even among in our own nation, vulps seem to be something of a rarity, with equids and goblins occupying several positions of power, including a goblin shogun (king).  Apparently, our little settlement never happened upon any pack animals to tame, so there won't be any trade caravans from back home. 

Ah, but could it be more perfect?  No one will expect this bumbling little citystate to wage war on all of Bokslozgo! 

But our new home will be far away from the comforting ice.  Closer to the middle of the world, near the northernmost point of the easternmost road, straddling the foothills of the Imprisoned Points and the shrublands known as the Playful Hill.  The site will be known as Abirrakust, "Romancetomb". 

It turns out the Portal of Coal did manage to domesticate Falcons, Wild Boar and Grizzly Bears.  They also domesticated Polar Bears, but I deemed those too expensive to bring along at embark.  Since there will be no trade caravans, hopefully the migrants will bring a few.  I like falcons because they're a sort of combination chicken-cat and fast enough to run away from most dangers. 

[i2amroy]

Smoothed natural rock is completely unclimbable, so if you dig a deep enough moat a few z-levels down into the stone you could smooth that. (Idea shamelessly stolen from this thread)

Yeah, the grinder design I posted depends on that and also create an overhang directly beneath the hatches to ensure they can't climb out or catch themselves while falling.

[Max™]

I poked around in adventurer mode a little and confirmed that while you can climb around on block walls (mostly just harder to catch a hold of as you fall) if there is a fortification overhang I can not find any way to get through outside of using dfhack to launch myself upwards through the fortification.

_# fortification towards the outside
][ wall with fortification overhang
----------^make sure there is nothing on the same z level as the fortifications within 4 tiles and I could not get in without using dfhack. If there was a nearby tree or something you can jump through fortitifications as an adventurer, but as I said npcs don't seem to realize this, so that's a great layout to channel folks around, and faster than a full roof.

[Devin]

Say, for the grinder design to work, does that mean that unlike levers pressure plates activate things instantly without the usual delay for levers?

[utunnels]

I started a new fort and paved the long entrance corridor with atom-smashers.
Should be fun if you turtle underground and pull the lever repeatedly...

[Max™]

Plates aren't instant but they're very fast, but yes, functionally instant compared to waiting for Mr. Slowass McHauler to get around to pulling a lever at a critical moment when he decides he needs to go change his socks and get a sandwich.

[utunnels]

Yeah, if you can get a vampire, you can assign it to the lever...

[AceSV]

Well, the annoying thing happened.  I left Automatic Job Assignments on, so even after I restarted DF with it turned off, they still wouldn't take orders.  So after the first migrant wave, I set up some burrows and now things are moving along, but we're behind schedule.  I decided to start building the multiple wall fortress, but I decided to use a spiral pattern instead of a circular pattern to maximize transit time. 

The komodo and equid caravans have arrived and begrudgingly left us some goodies.  I know humans exist because some of our civ nobles are human, but they haven't visited the fortress yet.  I'm pretty sure elves were also out there, but I haven't seen them yet either.  Dwarves might be on the other side of the world outside of our range.  I think there's a closeby Anato settlement too, but I haven't seen them yet. 

After 10 months, the wall is not nearly complete, so I've decided to fill the mote immediately as a precaution.  I think I'm not following my own advice and building too complex a structure. 

After 1 year, her's what I've got:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1 year is less time than I thought it would be.  I'll think I'll keep building and seizing goods for a little bit longer.  There were goblins, kobolds and two towers on our list of neighbors, so the time limit will become very real very soon.  I also didn't get any more migrants after the second wave.  As discussed, there might not be any more vulps left to join the fort, which would gravely impact our strategy. 

The grizzly bears have provided a few cubs.  Some Lagomers came to celebrate the new year by giving us all of their stuff.  Some of their stuff included a jaguar and a giant jaguar, which will be dangerous if they bring those into combat. 

[AceSV]

A few months back, we caught a glimpse of some undead armies passing through on the way to some other target, probably the large fortress due east.  But today we had our first official visit from the towers.  A single Equid Spearman corpse.  I was slightly disappointed, slightly relieved and slightly worried.  Equids are essentially centaurs, twice the size of a human with 4 deadly hooves for when they forget to use weapons.  Since I've been mostly struggling to make my workforce complete the castle walls, I haven't added any manpower to my military besides the two swordsvulps I embarked with.  And in horror, I look and realize that the lazy vulps suspended the lever's link-to-bridge job.  Two swordsvulps against an Equid Spearman Zombie is a complete toss-up.  But luckily they handled it with ease:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In fact, it only took only one of my swordvulps to get the job done without a scratch.  Probably in large part thanks to the (+<<-steel short sword->>+) and (+steel shiel+) that we stole from the caravans. 

I've come to a new decision.  There is a saying that "you don't go to war with the armor you want, you go to war with the army you have."  To make war actually interesting, I need an army of Vulps and it would be decades before I could raise enough soldiers.  But what I do have are Grizzly Bears.  These too will take time to mature, but it strikes me as the most obtainable goal for now.  I have also discovered wild yaks in the area.  Taming them may allow trade with the capital, which could one day bring us Polar Bears as well.  So I'm going to turtle in, keep seizing caravan shipments and raise my army of grizzly bears.