The whole "All my soldiers dying from double-whammy forgotten beast attacks followed by raging out-of-control fires" was CERTAINLY not the end of Koshid's troubles, heh. During that same, terrible, awful year, I got my
very first goblin siege!!
...Which made me realise, the main building of my fort... This above-ground wooden hall... Is basically a massive dwarf-death trap when attacked by archers. You see, back when I started this fort, it was doing TERRIBLY, all my dwarves were murdering each other, bla bla bla, until I assigned a super-awesome sheriff who killed everyone. Judge Dredd style.
Anyway, while everything was going so bad, I never expected my fort to survive, so I decided to get my miners to collapse the entire thing and end it with a bang. Do I dug out a big cavern under the hall, and channeled out all the ground surrounding the building, but it didn't fall, only the dwarf who was digging died, as the ENTIRE THING was being held up by a few trees and workshops.
Around that time, the fort started picking up and doing really well, so I thought, 'Stuff it, let's just keep going', and forgot about my evil plans.
So, long story short, here's a diagram of how that building ended up:
++++++++++++++++++++++
+ + Goblin Crossbowmen stand here:
+ HALL + |
+ + (Side-on view) \/
ooooo ++++++++++++++++++++++ oooooooooooooooooooooo
oooo # {|} ooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooo # {|} Dwarves down here ooooooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
So, the goblin army (which consisted of a whole heap of crossbowmen, one swordsman who I assumed was their leader, and a cave crocodile) could just stand of the edge of the big excavation and pick off the dwarves working at the workshops below. D'oh.
Fortunately, I'd moved all my dwarves' quarters to an underground hall already, so it was just the dwarves who'd been working at a few of my workshops or were coming up from the caverns who got filled with bolts. Still, it was pretty nasty, just a blur of silver '\'s flying across the rapidly-turning-red map... :S
The survivors were all ordered into the main hall, built below a three-way river branch on the map. A few of my dwarves, the ones with babies, I keep there all the time, to stop those damn goblins killing them all.
I didn't really know what to do... The goblins (and cave crocodile) were just running around killing everything above-ground, with the pathetic remnants of my military stationed in the dining hall. Then, suddenly, as I was watching the slaughter going on on the surface, I noticed a little blue dot running along, away from the stairs down into the safe area... I thought, what the hell?
It was a dwarf. One of the nursery guards, in fact: A bunch of poor unfortunate dwarves with weapon skills who I gave the boring job of guarding the nursery area of the halls against anything that might some how get there.
This guy was sick of his boring desk-job, changing nappies and helping the dwarven mothers with their knitting. He was ready for
action. He was rushing out at a bunch of crossbow-goblins with his axe... And then I saw, behind him, another ridiculously badass hero: A tame black bear, which I'd looted from a bunch of murdered elf traders. That bear was
pissed.
Then, just the two of them, they absolutely tore through the goblins. Most of them were out of bolts anyway, but it was still awesome watching the bear tearing arms and legs off as the dwarf, nicknamed Beryl for some reason, hacked them into dogfood.
He named his sidekick the bear Zurdosil, or Mergedglazes. Dunno how he came up with that.
The rest of the goblins pissed themselves and ran, leaving only the cave crocodile which found its way into the halls and was beaten to a pulp by sheer numbers. I burst out laughing at the awesomeness on the screen.
Then I modded bears to be trainable, trained Zordosil as a war-bear, and now he follows Beryl (My best warrior-dwarf remaining) everywhere.
The goblins came again next year, though, many more of them, riding all sorts of monsters and led by a macemaster and swordsmaster. And none of them were crossbowmen, mostly defenceless after running out of ammo. So eek!
My dwarves spent most of the year ekeing out a pathetic existence in the halls under the river, protected from an army of trolls by a stone hatchcover. I actually had to build above-ground farms on the other side of the river, walled them off, and watched in horror as the trolls and cave crocodiles destroyed everything, and smashed open the hallowed resting places of my dead dwarves and gnawed on their bones... Eventually they got bored and left, leaving only the trolls, who were easily slaughtered. I'm gonna have to change some things around here... It's time... To learn...
Traps.