I like to think there are dark rumours circulating among the neigbouring civilizations. "Do not attack Chantwall. Seriously. You will regret it."
Things were running pretty smoothly, I had brought a few cartloads of magma up to power smelters forges and (especially!) glass furnaces, marble plus goblinite was keeping my steel industry fed, I had a couple of squads of legendary soldiers. I had started a wildlife collection program, posting cage traps at chokepoints on the ground and in the caverns. This had the side effect of causing ambushes to bog down and camp outside, but my legendary dwarves would happily go out and massacre the non-trapped goblins. No really interesting wildlife, apart from a couple of dragons I am repeatedly training in hopes of teaching my civilization more about dragon taming. But things were going pretty smoothly, apart from a somewhat low FPS. So I thought it would be a good time to open up a candy spire.
I took a cautious approach: I dug out a welcoming chamber above the top of the spire, with a piece of floor suspended from a support above its roof. I handed my bravest cheesemaker a pick and told him to dig down, then locked the hatch after him. Soon enough, terrible screams from below. Perfect, just wait for them all to join the party, then pull the lever.
I'm still not quite sure what happened, but they got through that locked hatch. Now, I'm a suspenders-and-belt kind of girl, so I had my military stationed above the welcoming chamber, and another lockable hatch above that. The military gave a pretty decent showing, considering that they were on fire, but I was left with a mob of clowns milling around in what I thought was safe space.
Okay, next attempt: clowns versus zombies. Set up a necromancer behind a window and fortifications, set up a mass pit on the roof, and opened the hatch to the clowns. Now, okay, I did forget necromancers (even behind glass) scare dwarves, so I couldn't get the bridge to shut off the necromancer's view properly hooked up. But the setup basically worked: I could shovel in captives and have them raised as zombies.
Which is why I think there might be rumours about Chantwall. If you attack us, you will probably end up in a cage, where we will toss you into a pit full of clowns. Who will kill you, but the necromancers will raise you from the dead to fight them again, and again, and again.
Unfortunately, this turns out not to be a very effective way of fighting clowns. Living enemies can wield weapons, but they also fight the zombies rather than the clowns. Once zombified, goblins are nearly useless. A troll zombie will occasionally get in a decent hit on a clown, but they are quickly reduced to useless gibbets; the hands and head can be raised, but they never hit the clowns. In fact, they serve as excellent punching bags for clowns, so the clowns become very well-trained. Nevertheless, if you shovel in enough trolls you can occasionally kill a clown.
Two or three goblin ambushes later - they take a lot longer with a beginner military - I was down to a hard core of five or six clowns. But I now had a captive giant cave spider. Aha! Let's web some cages and trap them all. So I built a twisty little corridor full of cage traps, walled with fortifications, staked a couple of cats at one end, and pitted the giant cave spider behind a fortification at the other. And - nothing. I sent some dwarves in, and the spider got all excited, but still no webs. I still don't know why it didn't work. But this clearly wasn't going to get rid of my clowns.
Attempt, um, four? - was inspired by the fact that there's another way you can lose zombies out of the death pits. The clowns can fling zombies through fortifications. So the clowns were all clustered in a corner breathing fire at an already-on-fire zombie on the other side of a fortification. I dug out a room above them and a floor above that and dropped the floor. Splat! No more clowns.
Well, almost no more. Turns out when I let dwarves in to clean up, there was one more lurking two levels below. And unfortunately the zillion dwarves who rushed in were scared by the burning zombies, so they ran in circles instead of up the stairs. So the best I could do was shut the hatch and say goodbye. And since the circles they were running in were in full view of the necromancer, after the initial dwarves-versus-zombies infighting, they each got several chances to attack the clown. And, sure enough, they eventually took down the clown. Success at last!
Okay, kind of a Pyrrhic victory: Chantwall is down from about 100 dwarves to more like 25 very unhappy inhabitants. But I think things are simmering down, more or less. Unfortunately, the death pit is still inhabited by several burning zombies. They don't seem to actually move, and I've got rid of the necromancer, but they emit smoke, so my military dwarves won't go near them (and of course they scare my civilians). I'm hoping some marksdwarves can put them down, but so far they all seem to stand around gormlessly wondering why they don't have any ammunition. I've lost at least one dwarf to thirst because he was too afraid to leave the death pit.
Still, if I can keep things mostly together until a dwarven caravan comes in, I should soon find waves of immigrants eager to join us in this blood-soaked, vomit-stained utopia. Right? We've got a nice dining room!
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6237021 times)