My strength was broken by an army of zombies and necromancers. A combined force of twenty axedwarves and hammerdwarves, who had easily held off two necromancer ambushes beforehand with minimal casualties, barely held off the horde for a minute, and all the zombies killed were instantly resurrected, along with my own soldiers. The zombies flooded my fortress, which is extremely well-connected and hard to cut off into segments. Most of the one hundred civilian dwarves were trapped in the mines, with zombies shambling into the network of cramped tunnels and slowly surrounding the cowering dwarves. An attempt was made to push towards the farm level using two squads of legendary miners armed with copper picks, but the dwarves were separated and couldn't regroup before embarking on their mission. As such, one or two dwarves would charge into the horde, which was mostly congregated in the bedroom level and dining hall, and rapidly be ripped to shreds and added to the mass of undead. With all the battle-capable dwarves down, I gave up on the saving the fort's population, and instead decided to try to preserve one or two dwarven specimens whose existence would keep the fort from completely failing. My first priority was ensuring the survival of the newly-appointed baron (I now realize that this would have been an ultimately failing effort, as I wouldn't be able to get the entitled bastard to work to save himself). Unfortunately, all of the exits to the mine were blocked by crowds of zombies, and the mine itself was slowly being saturated with undead. The dwarves everywhere else in the fortress had already died, and the dwarf population hiding in the mine was rapidly being diminished. Before I could formulate a way to get the baron out of his crypt, I saw a zombie dwarf and an animate human corpse coming at him from both ends of the tunnel he was in. Not being able to recruit him into the military, I attempted to rally all of the other dwarves into squads of wrestlers to come save the noble, but they were mostly far away (I had mined out quite a bit of the map at this point, so the network of tunnels was extremely vast) and preoccupied with being eaten. As the baron was being torn apart, a dwarven child came up to the scene of the confrontation. I imagine he, like any aspiring young dwarf, knew to hate all nobles, as he seemed to walk right up to the poor bastard, stand there in the presence of two zombies and their hideously-disfigured victim for a second, then run away back into the mines. Another survivor who I followed in her final moments was a legendary miner named Ast, who apparently hadn't died in the push towards the farms. She was a recently-widowed mother, who was still carrying her wailing baby along with her masterwork copper pick. She was the only surviving member of the battle-miner squads and the only surviving dwarf not in the mines, stuck in an empty warehouse on the workshop level, right below the bedroom level. Right outside were around 50 zombies, blocking all exits and slowly moving inside the door-less room. I sent her on a mad dash to one of the rooms above, past the bulk of the invading forces, hoping to lock her inside and then mine a tunnel out of it down into the caverns. Unfortunately, military station commands aren't a great way to maneuver dwarves precisely near forces of enemies, and Ast immediately attacked the zombie closest to her, rather than escaping. I retracted the order, and that caused her to stop attacking and instead run away, but now she had no direction. She ran out into the hallway, then down it straight into a dead end. Her and her baby were ripped limb from limb before she could collapse a single zombie. After that, I lost interest, with the only thirty or so survivors all haulers or otherwise uninteresting dwarves. I sat back and watched as they were all cornered and one-by-one added to the fishmen necromancers' evil army. The last to die was a stark raving mad child, who was insane before the siege ever began due to his request in a strange mood for leather right after I had butchered all my animals and made them into quivers and shields for my to-be marksdwarf force. He ran naked right into the horde, not seeming to even notice their existence. I had grand plans for the fortress, but I am not sad at its fall. It is refreshing to have a fortress be destroyed naturally for a change, before I ever lost interest in or became bored with it.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6217010 times)