My current fortress has been the most interesting of my DF2010 fortresses so far. I picked an embark with tons of basalt, obsidian, sand and other non gem-bearing rock as I had grown dependent on plentiful gems to trade in my earlier forts. I do encounter tons of copper, silver and gold, however. I built a smallish fort at the base of a cliff with a brook running nearby so I have a ready supply of water for making farms and traps.
I dropped a shaft straight down to a large magma vent about 30 z-levels below the the surface; I got lucky, hitting a nearby section of the second cave layer that I could isolate by removing all the up-ramps. It makes a nice little farm area for my lower fortress. I set up magma forges, furnaces and relevant stockpiles to get my metalsmithing industry going. My map has no flux, no lignite and no bituminous coal; I've had to equip my army mostly with iron, barring a few steel items I've traded for.
So along comes year three - I'm sitting around 75 pop with 20 in the army when a goblin ambush with 2 squads of gobbos appears. I'm able to beat them back with the help of the dwarven caravan camping in my trade depot at the entrance to my fort, but just barely. I lose three workers and two warriors, and six of the surviving warriors have to hang out in the hospital. Two soldiers managed to have their right arms removed - their weapons hadn't been finished, so the attacked the gobbos as wrestlers. They're badasses and I've suffered heavy losses, so even missing a limb I keep them in my army.
I figure that I need some alternate plan should a real gobbo horde show up, so I begin to build a trap. I plan out a multi-level dead-fall triggered by pressure plate or lever. I outline a 15x10 rectangle in front of my entrance with channels. I dig out everything underneath, leaving a single obsidian support. I then channel down again on the same outline, removing all the up-ramps. I build a support and dig out the the rest of the rectangle. I do this a third time, so that three z-levels of floor are each supported by a single support beam. I build a bridge on the surface over the gap so my dwarves can go hunting and felling trees. I then build a series of pressure plates, linking them to the bottom-most support. The idea is that if the gobbos come across they'll step on the plate and trigger the trap, dropping them three z-levels into a pit. In case that doesn't kill them, I routed part of my brook-fed irrigation to empty into the pit at the pull of a lever. I also built a failsafe lever to remove the bottom support in case the gobbos didn't trigger the trap.
Not much to my surprise, a full-on siege arrives a month after I've finished my trap. I pull everyone inside and station my army just inside the fort. It's now about 30 strong but nowhere near fully equipped due to a weird bug that caused equipment mismatches no matter how many times I delete, wait and reform squads - half of these guys don't want to ditch their random cloth and cheap leather gear despite setting them to all-metal equipment on the military screen. I'm at ease - the gobbos and their giant Olm pet are all gonna take a tumble into the pit, so it doesn't matter if half my soldiers are wearing peasant clothing.
The gobbo horde - a largish squad of about twenty plus a giant Olm - seem reluctant to cross the bridge onto the platform in front of my front entrance. Instead, they head over to the brook and enter one of my irrigation tunnels (that I'd forgotten to seal) that leads to a cistern feeding the hospital's well. I figured they wanted to go for a swim, so I pulled the lever opening the appropriate floodgate when the were all nice and cozy in the irrigation tunnel. about five of the gobbos drowned, and the giant Olm was flushed into my cistern, where it still lives, not bothering anybody at all.
The 15 survivors emerged wet and unhappy. They decided to take the direct route in and charged over my deadfall platform. The stepped on the pressure plate traps. I waited a beat, but nothing happened. as the first gobbo crossed the bridge into my fortress, I pulled the bridge lever and retracted the connecting bridges, dropping one gobbo into the open space under the bridge and trapping the rest on the platform. I manually hit the support failsafe and watched the bottom-most support beam disappear. I thought the gobbos were dead meat. But, wonder of wonders, the platform failed to collapse and three z-levels of floors connect by two support beams are hovering in space. Cave-ins are definitely turned on in my .init (and I had experienced a minor one earlier while building my irrigation system). My bridges for some reason then reconnected as well, either because of some sort of failure or because the gobbos had stepped on a linked pressure plate they had not yet triggered. I thought my fortress was at its end.
But I was wrong. The gobbos stumbled through a thin layer of weapons traps, which maimed a few but mostly bounced off of their armor. My army sat at the far end of the entry hallway, a three square wide tunnel leading into the central staircase down into my fort. Out charged two of my axedwarves , promptly slaying two gobbos apiece. The gobbo horde had had enough and turned around to flee, with my army on their heels.
The two charging axe dwarves harried the retreating gobbos, slaying 5 more before the rest of my soldiers caught up. I then noticed that the axedwarves had only one rm apiece; they were the serious casualties of the previous goblin invasion!. They must be pretty hard in order to lose an arm in one fight and then charge into the next. They both had leveled up to novice axedwarves by the end of the siege, even though they were killing gobbos left and right. I subsequently used them to clear out a cave swallow man tribe in the caverns, mostly because they got to the cave swallow man encampment first. In the end, I only suffered one casualty: a woodcutter who for some reason did not head inside with everyone else when I set the general siege alarm.
The gobbo who fell into the pit when the bridges retracted somehow landed on the second z-level platform (the platform directly under the topmost, ground-level platform). He startles anyone coming over the bridges into the fort, but he can't get at anyone and no one can get to him, so I just let him run around down there as a curiosity. I figure he'll starve eventually.
My next plan is a general exodus from the higher levels down to my lower fort, keeping a secured stair up to the surface depot for trading. I'll then flood my original fortress, since it's now riddled with weirdness like the floating platforms and mismanaged irrigation. Better to start fresh down near the magma pipe. I'll also be able to keep my army together better if and when fliying Fun wanders in from the edge of the Cavern maps.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6228375 times)