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[JTH]

I'm doing a bunch of stuff, but the most important thing is my current project. After having paved a nice dirt road out of my volcano fortress, I'm lining the immediate entrance with hundreds of cage traps. Now any siege or ambush will immediatley be stopped by walls of cages. If the sieges get bad enough I'll just raise the drawbridge and position my archers on the ledge above. I'm still waiting for any epic seiges. I got my first one a couple seasons ago and it only had ten gobbos and an Elk Bird. Not much actions despite having 150 constantly ecstatic dorfs.

[Icee77]

Well, my best squad of four just got infected by a forgotten beast. So, instead of sending them to rot, I send them to the HFS Carnival to die a glorious death. Unfortunately, it also infects my other legendary squads. So all my guys have become Dwarf Slayers, determined to die a glorious death. The rest of my dwarfs will rot to death for all I care.

[Niccolo]

Oh they'll move the cages no problem.  you can build and remove the construction just fine.  It's a combination of not being able to build a cage on top of any existing construction, and the inability to push things...

I will keep experimenting, but the magma flood idea would definitely work, and it would give me a chance to learn all about magma safe pumps, I suppose.

Well, if you've got to learn about it at some point, may as well learn about it by making your dwarves burn.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Can't build on bridges, so I can't place them there.

Designate a garbage dump on bridge, dump cages there, seal, pull lever. You said you didn't care about the cages...

[Eric Blank]

Without even attempting to replenish my militia, I'm sending them to finish off the last squad of trolls so we may see the caravan this season. If another siege arrives though, we'll just have to wait it out.

The instant I unpause to continue after this post? Goblins come to siege us as well. At least they'll charge right out onto the trap bridge and get slaughtered. The military will have to hold position out of there reach and hopefully the goblins will deal with themselves, for the most part. Probably going to lose one of my last legendary soldiers anyway...

NO. NO. NO NONONONONO. Ogres are besieging us now too. Is there no end? Are the orcs and the cyclopes coming next after I unpause? Will I EVER find out if the Cobalds declared war on me or not? Can I please just buy some damn mithril off the caravans so I can adequately arm my troops to deal with these guys?!

[Lemunde]

So through a combination of neglecting a fisherdwarf that snuck into my fortress and a bone carver getting a mood, most of my fortress is now decorated with turtle shell. That stuff will fill up your refuse pile within minutes if you're not paying attention.

[Eric Blank]

Armok forsaken me! A squad leader's cave crocodile is pathing through a water source into a farming area/well, by destroying the door in the way and is about to flood my farming areas. And what can I do to stop him? Pray the winter freeze happens RIGHT NOW. It doesnt...

@!#^

Locking the door broke his pathing though... The goblin drowned and now i have another hostile war party witting outside my only other entrance... Indefinitely...

Then the Trolls sent reinforcements. What does that make? 3 different forces sieging me and an extra squad stuck on my front door? 100+ enemies clad in and armed with mithril for 4 legendaries and a bunch of wussy novices to fight comparatively barehanded and naked despite their masterwork steel gear?
This looks like a job for dorfs... never got around to finishing my doomsday device.

So then? The aquatic ones start piling into my new animal pasture through the ponds with ramps going under the walls in a couple spots, and the well they're connected to. I have been successfully invaded, and dwarves have died, including the head craftsman, one of the most sociable fellows around...

[zehive]

I've spent most of today trying to drop caged goblins/trolls in magma.

It's harder than I thought.  First, I thought I could use a raising bridge to fling them into lava.  Nope.  Can't build on bridges, so I can't place them there.  But I learned about how to build both retracting a raising bridges, so that was time well spent.

Then I channeled some holes above my magma chamber, and cover them in hatch covers, and create my pit.  and assign them to the pit, and they instantly run away.

As do... deer... badgers.. racoons... really, anything not tame.  Which defeats the purpose.  If they're tame, the dwarfs will just drag them to the hole in the floor and shove them in.  You don't even need to build the cages nearby. 
Ok, but they're not tame!  I've built walls on 7 sides of the pit, put single tile-width hallways leading to each hole, to force the dwarves behind the cages, so the victims have no where to run, and they still just jump out and run away, past the dwarf and out to chaotic freedom.

Is there no way to do this without burning two mechanisms per cage for every death?  I mean... can't I just build the cages and then push them into the magma, somehow?  I cage-catch a bajillion of these guys, I want an efficient means of disposal!  (that isn't an atom smasher/falling bridge)  I just want goblin-magma-puff-smoke.  I don't care about the lost cages.

I've looked through the wiki and I get that you can use two mechanisms, and a lever to remotely open cages, but you apparently can't "transfer" goblins like you can tame animals, which again, is pointless because tame animals don't need special transferring!  /grumble

Yes, I can just have the military there to turn them into bolt-porcupines, but the point of the cage traps (for me) is a nice packaging for disposal.

why cage them? create a straight down pit over the magma, assign the goblin to the pit, goblin gets dropped into magma and becomes !!goblin!!

[Flaming Toadstool]

So, I have a different fort going on. I embarked on the very tip of a mountainous region, while the bulk is on a woodlandish area. At the beginning, badgers were tormenting my woodcutter and herbalist, until I realized I didn't assign them a war dog each. After I assigned them, moments later a badger lay dead near my wagon. That might have taught those other badgers a lesson or two.

When I embarked, I saw that the hill that I dug into was composed of some microcline. This made me happy, as that is one of my favorite stones to build rooms/furniture with. So I did the basic thing where I build stuff, dig rooms, and just in general try and get set up.

One thing I wish was implemented in this game is the option to make furniture out of materials that you specify, not the random grab that the dwarfs do, because I want all my furniture made out of microcline. Setting up a stockpile with only microcline allowed near the mason workshop is a start, but sometimes my mason decides he want to go grab some rhyolite from the burial chamber. In retrospect, this was not so bad, because rhyolite looks pretty pimpin' too.

Plan for this fort: Build a base outside composed of microcline and maybe some other colourful stones. This will take a lot of stone to do though, and I don't know if I will have enough. Maybe I'll do each floor in a different colour.

Question: What are the most colourful stones? I am using the Pheobus graphics pack if that makes any difference.

[Eric Blank]

Well... A wyvern showed up just now and proceeded to start a fight with the ogre platoon down south and set the grass on fire. Excellent. Really needed that.

In the last 6 months ive lost nearly 30 dwarves in the sieges. Needless to say my workforce is utterly devastated as I use everyone but smiths, stoneworkers (which includes miners) woodsmen and high-skill dwarves in the military, and recruits have been suiciding like crazy trying to pick up equipment in obscure and hazardous locations. Like right next to the enemy whom they are not prepared to fight.
The livestock is mostly wiped out as well.
If I don't get that caravan, and fail to export a metric butt-ton of junk, I may not get enough migrants to satisfy the needs of such a large and inefficient fortress. It will take decades to clean up all the mess... Don't think we ever finished cleaning the dodge-me trap. I may switch to a magma incinerator (or just fill it with magma...) specifically to reduce the amount of worthless crap it generates every time something falls in. Although my dwarves fall in a lot and denying them their already amazing tombs is disrespectful to both them and the stoneworkers. An example of such disrespect is the woman that died opening the magma moat to the pipe. Never made a slab for her, so she's been haunting the magma moat ever since...

[HunterBlackLuna]

An ambush! Curse them!
Sound the civilian alert! Call the fishers and woodcutters back!
An ambush! Curse them!

Fortunately, a lot of random animals have been derping around, and this proves to be quite the advantage. The Gobbers, instead of going for straggler Dorfs, have chosen to allow all my folks to get behind the walls and to safety and instead pursue a different target.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnHmskwqCCQ



EDIT: The Gobbers then proceeded to further prove their deadliness and intelligence by getting caught in endless rows of cage and stonefall traps. We've got half a dozen Gobber prisoners now, plus others who just stood around in our traps when there was a deliberately clear path into our fortress. Trying to free their friends? Scared? In any case, they didn't impede our trading with the human caravan that had arrived earlier, very well guarded.

The caravan was so happy with our terms that they were willing to help bust our pathetic little quasi-siege on their way out. Ten of my Dorfs plus at least half a dozen human soldiers launched a joint-attack on like five-six injured Gobbers. The fight was over so fast, it was glorious.

[Mount]

I started on a nifty map with oooodles of fire clay and lignite, so I had intended to make a ceramic tower..  sadly, the roving pack of 6 giant badgers seem to have other plans.

[Haspen]

Koganolon, a 1 year old fortress, is done.

First I accidentally dug in wrong piece of wet stone and there goes lower bedrooms and food storage, taking my only steel-wielding recruits and few civvies - actually half of the fort.

Three days later, shruk siege that rapes every civilian and unarmored recruits. The lone survivor was a woodcutter who managed to defend himself from two enemies, and then ran out of the fortress into the wild.

I think I broke personal record of losing a fort

[BodyGripper]

One thing I wish was implemented in this game is the option to make furniture out of materials that you specify, not the random grab that the dwarfs do, because I want all my furniture made out of microcline. Setting up a stockpile with only microcline allowed near the mason workshop is a start, but sometimes my mason decides he want to go grab some rhyolite from the burial chamber.

Try designating a burrow that contains only the microcline stockpile (and maybe the food/drink stockpile) for the mason.  I've been doing this recently to make marble blocks for my construction.

Anyway, in my fortress, not much new is going on.  Lots of migrants are showing up, and I'm drafting most of them into "test squads", which I lock in a room with several goblins.  The ones that get kills will be placed in real squads, and the ones that don't will continue until they die.

[Lemunde]

Question: What are the most colourful stones? I am using the Pheobus graphics pack if that makes any difference.

The most colorful stones that I know of are microcline (light blue), kimberlite (deep blue), kaolinite (dark red), bauxite (dark red), olivine (green), orthoclase (yellow), cinnabar (bright red) and cobaltite (blue). I think gypsum might be yellow too, I don't remember. You're lucky to get more than one of these on a single map.

Interesting facts about these stones:

Kimberlite can contain diamonds.
Bauxite can contain rubies.
Olivine can contain platinum.
Kaolinite can be used at a kiln to produce porcelain items which are quite valuable.
Cinnabar and cobaltite are considered metal ores by the game and may cheat you out of getting metal.
Orthoclase used to be the most hated stone by the community. Now that it's become much more rare it's sought after as much as these other stones.