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[Kneenibble]

How might a fellow come to know that his parent civilization is dead, or perhaps dying?  I got used to waves of dozens of migrants a few times a year, and then suddenly it slowed to a trickle of three or four perhaps once a year.

In my own fort, I pierced the first cavern layer, defeated the bony fire-breathing dinosaur there, and started up a silk business.  Then I dug down deeper and deeper in search of precious things, and startled upon the third cavern layer with a tantalizing magma pool.  But what happened to the second?  There are 26 layers between the bottom of the first and the ceiling of the third, and I have chipped into many of them for metals: not a trace of a middle cavern.

Meanwhile, I expect the biggest goblin siege yet in this my fort's eleventh winter.  Last time they shot my Legendary Appraiser / Legendary Mason in the leg before she crawled to safety, and spent most of the year on a crutch.

[ImagoDeo]

How might a fellow come to know that his parent civilization is dead, or perhaps dying?  I got used to waves of dozens of migrants a few times a year, and then suddenly it slowed to a trickle of three or four perhaps once a year.

So long as you're still getting migrants every so often, that means your civilization is alive. The reason for the trickle may be that you've reached your population cap. You can raise it if you want more dwarfpower. If a fort's population has met or exceeded the set pop cap when the liason successfully leaves the map, you won't get any further migrants until he/she reports back that you're under it.

As to the caverns - you probably just don't have a second layer. That happens sometimes on shallower maps with not as many z-levels between the surface and the bottom of the magma sea.

[PDF urist master]

I realized that there were a lot of tattered masterwork clothing in my stocks screen which could be the grounds for a future tantrum spiral. So I got rid of most of them by selling them to the humans. May they cloth their gods in our rags.

I've also come to notice that my favourite method of dealing with fire breathing beasts is to send a dragon against them. It's practical as dragons have high natural skill in combat and are completely immune to fire, while the forgotten beasts cannot withstand dragonfire even though they breathe fire themselves. It's also harder for me to trap them in cages as their fire can destroy webs and wooden cages, which I rely on for cage traps as they're lightweight (though I still somehow caught one). The irony of the situation is also hilarious and I think it's like sending a zippo light into the sun.

The only downside is that I can't harvest the meat afterwards.

[TheFlame52]

<fire-breathing FBs>

The strange thing is, fire-breathing FBs aren't actually fireproof. They only have [FIREIMMUNE], which keeps them from staying on fire and nothing more. My fire imps have melted the fat off many an forgotten beast. I have confirmed this from looking at the raws for a fire-breathing FB.

[klefenz]

I realized that there were a lot of tattered masterwork clothing in my stocks screen which could be the grounds for a future tantrum spiral. So I got rid of most of them by selling them to the humans. May they cloth their gods in our rags.

I've also come to notice that my favourite method of dealing with fire breathing beasts is to send a dragon against them. It's practical as dragons have high natural skill in combat and are completely immune to fire, while the forgotten beasts cannot withstand dragonfire even though they breathe fire themselves. It's also harder for me to trap them in cages as their fire can destroy webs and wooden cages, which I rely on for cage traps as they're lightweight (though I still somehow caught one). The irony of the situation is also hilarious and I think it's like sending a zippo light into the sun.

The only downside is that I can't harvest the meat afterwards.

Firebreathing creatures wont fire on cages because they dont pick them as targets for that attack. It can happen though, that there is a dwarf or a cat near the traps causing the beast to attack with fire, burning the traps.

[Larix]

Fooled around a bit with worldgen to make it possible and got my surface-hitting volcano in a glacier (100-100 volcanism, -1000 to +20 temperature, 150 volcanoes in a "smaller" world). Hematite veins allowed building the necessary pumps and...

yeah, it's quite crazy. Magma melts the ice, which instantly re-freezes, and instantly re-melts when the magma moves again etc. Getting it started isn't too easy, because it'll create obsidian walls quite regularly, which will simply wall the magma in if they shut the output. So i built a nice long "pipe" (of ice walls ) through the glacier until i found an ouput place where i could release it. Created cave-ins, and cave-in cascades, and the obsidian-and-ice tongue made it the ~60 tiles to the map edge. Migrants love to spawn underneath it, which ended not so well for a child.

There are probably other options, but i was having a hard enough time keeping everyone alive (all food froze, no useful imports from the home civ). Melting glacier ice with magma doesn't work so well to create potable water - it typically re-freezes without properly flowing off.

[Richard190]

  I had to withstand  4 or 5 waves of invaders, and a two humanoid monster. The casualties affected my dwarfs happines (Aparently the deceased were popular dwarfs), the fortress turned to madness so I drowned it, together with my dwarfs. So much fun.

[Panando]

This is what the fall of my last fortress 'Gilded rain' looked like:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Note the zombies (bottom right ish), flooding everything with magma was the only way to be sure!. May they all rest in peace.

[MrsStick]

Ownrag looks to be going downhill pretty quickly. I had a FB make it to the surface and attack my dwarves, but we managed it fairly easily (only lost a bunch of war dogs and a handful of dwarves). After that, we had a snatcher, a thief, and then the human caravan came. Cool - I could use some weapons. But then a siege came, so I turtled and let the humans and my traps deal with it. Then, I was training my military and had a chained gobbo injure quite a few including my new awesome mayor (NO MANDATES!). I have had several dwarves tantrum and die due to no one caring (I have half the fort burrowed in my hospital! Someone do something!). My medical care had been going really well until now.

Down to 70 beards, and a diplomat just left unhappy due to my awesome mayor dying. I think my next fort might be a challenge one - one pick challenge maybe?

Edit: I even had turned everyone's medical tasks on. EVERYONE had medical enabled. AARGH.

[Iamblichos]

Single Pick Challenge on a glacier.  Colonized the first cavern, got the food and booze up and running, got crap for useful metal... cassiterite and gold.  Of course, the utility in gold is that now I can pretty much buy any caravan without touching the food stocks    Metalcrafters are up to masterwork level, and things are ticking along.

Big joke of the year... latest migrant wave had 9 beards, EVERY ONE of whom had... beekeeping.  On a glacier.  Seriously.  You little buggers are dreadfully confused if you are looking for snow-bees.

[ImagoDeo]

Well, I'm going to reactivate Tombscoast's pumps. We'll do our damndest to flood these caverns with magma, whether or not it flows off the edge of the map. And in the meantime, the tree farm is slowly churning out logs to make charcoal, and steel production can continue. We'll build an army and an atomsmashing program to get some zombies properly liquified.

[da_nang]

New fort:
>Miserable (73)

Well, there goes that fort, I guess. All because of a goblin ambush...

[Iamblichos]

SERIOUSLY?!

[ImagoDeo]

News from Tombscoast:

We've diverted a water supply line from the surface ponds, which continue to catch rainwater, and have added a water line into the caverns to facilitate the spread of magma in all directions. We do need to be careful not to inadvertently block the flow of water or magma. Such an accident occurred once already and it was thankfully cleared without incident.

FPS is shit, but that'll be true until I get all 450 walking corpses cleared, no matter what I'm doing with lava and water and obsidian.

[MrsStick]

Down to 53 beards. I've been pretty much continually activating my military to kill train with live targets, waiting for a tantrum spiral. Maybe next I'll attack the elves that are here to trade...