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[WarRoot]

Wallchance, year 133

Fought off the goblins with no casualties, a swordsdwarf suffered an arm injury, he is resting in the hospital, but will recuperate shortly. I also thought that ranged weapons act like railguns in DF, but seen quite some copper bolts turned to bruises.

Now the green glass cockatoo FB, was another deal, it's deadly dust caused swelling, which really quickly lead to necrosis, lost two full squads to it. Decided to memorialise them all.  (Okay, one markdwarf survived, but decided to walk barefoot on the syndrome inducing snow, because he saw a shinier boot, and bled out from his left foot, then another did the same ) Another marksdwarf went insane from the losses, he is now wandering around the fort in melancholy. I'm in the process off paving the whole surface area, to keep it clean, and I will need to reorganize my military, conscript some expendable dwarves etc. I hope some migrants arrive.

Demons can sometimes become civilization leaders, and I think can show up as ambassadors or generals of armies.  Could one have shown up with a goblin siege and gotten in a fight with the FB?

Do you remember anything about what Ana did on your map?  Have you breached the HFS?

No, the only goblin siege that arrived with a leader, was a goblin law-giver. I checked the reports, no sign of Ana, I don't even have a corpse of it, I breached the HFS in the same year, but I don't know if it was before, or after the incident, and I always screen cap the FBs that arrive, I don't think I would miss it.

Though the law-giver goblin seemed to have disappeared from the civilization, after running away from the siege.

[Splint]

Though the law-giver goblin seemed to have disappeared from the civilization, after running away from the siege.

That's a common bug with leaders. If they show up, it's best to just kill them so they'll have good reason to not show up on the civ screen anymore.

[WarRoot]

Though the law-giver goblin seemed to have disappeared from the civilization, after running away from the siege.

That's a common bug with leaders. If they show up, it's best to just kill them so they'll have good reason to not show up on the civ screen anymore.

Well I wanted to, but he hung out at the edge of the map, while the other goblins poured on my fort, and their morale broke not long after he decided to help his buddies, so they made their escape without scratch. Though it's bloody stupid that a goblin law-giver would come with a siege without any weapons or armor, so I'm going with the 'my dwarves are nice guys and won't attack civilians' story.

[Larix]

Hmm, my first attempt at making a primarily mechanical adder[1] failed thanks to reverse power flow. So that was what the strange arrangements with double lines in other peoples' designs were for...

Nonetheless, the multiple-bit mechanical adder/subtractor is at heart pretty simple. I only installed five bits, because i only cared about the basic function:



5-bit adder/subtractor, no support for negative numbers. No extraneous output providers are needed, and fully optimised (i wasted one column to the right) it should require, per bit with carry input, 9x2 tiles, 31 power and 22 mechanisms for gears, connections, the rollers and the carry pressure plate (needed as input for the sum calculation, thus non-optional).

To the left, a bunch of even/odd gates taking input from lines A, B and the Carry for the current bit. This simply outputs the sum, as per usual, and functions the same in addition and subtraction.
Logically, it might look something like:

O☼P

P = power, O = Output, ☼ = AXBXC

To the right, the carry calculator.
Logically:

Code: [Select]

PABCO
   ☼
PABCO
   ☼
PABCO
P = power, A = on/on input from line A, B = on/on input from line B, C = Carry, O = output (sent to the sum calculation), ☼ = A XOR B connected gear. The power on/off on the carry of each cells serves as input for the next cell, but because of the difference gear there will be no power backflow from the next carry if the next cell's A and B are both on.

The whole contraption will also perform subtractions if you invert all A-Line connections for the carry calculations. In this simple implementation, it cannot handle negative numbers, though.

At least that's what i think it does. The basic function test was passed, but i can't exclude bugs or logical errors. The calculator doesn't need to be switched off to change input, or even to switch between addition and subtraction. Power connections just automatically reconfigure themselves. Carry calculations are near-instantaneous, because they work entirely through power flow without any signals apart from the main input. The sum signals can show a false positive for ~100 steps because of the unavoidable delay between a carry 'calculating' and sending its signal to the sum gear. But what's visible after ~120 steps should be the correct result.

[1] Someone suggested a construction depending 100% on gears to generate all output, without power-to-signal converters. I wasn't going to try that, the designs presented were absurdly oversized and -complicated at four bits already.

[malimbar04]

"The elves are here!" the scout dwarf runs into the overseer's room.

"Well, are they on this side of the waterfall?" This was an important distinction. They embarked next to a waterfall, and different civilizations can come from three different sides. Accross the waterfall, or accross the river. Because of the way the bridges were constructed, the only way to the for proper was across the lower river, and then across the waterfall.

"No, they're just across that. should I raise the first bridge?" Idiot scout dwarves can't think for themselves. The overseer did all, set all jobs, and had to give highly detailed orders to vague and general groups of dwarves. So this was not an unexpected question. "Of course".

As the overseer went back to his work of designing the fort - giving orders for smoothing stone, digging areas, biulding workshops, and so forth, another scout comes in. "The merchants are leaving." Wait, what?

"Did they even come to the trade depot? you're supposed to tell me that."

"no".

"They all just left?"

"All but one, and their donkey."

"Well, where are those then?"

"at the bottom of the waterfall. The elf is dead, and the donkey looks to be drowning."

"Brilliant." The overseer pulled out another layer of schmatics and pulls the dwarf forward. He draws some scribbles on the map. "See that there is this area carved out. It'll give the donkey a way to get up out of the river, onto a path, and then ideally let it go free. Or, if not, at least we can butcher it or something."

The dwarf runs off to relay the orders.

The dwarf runs back in. "The donkey has gone insane. It's about 5 ticks west, wandering inside the river. It showed no interest in coming up."

Damn.

The scout runs out, then immediately runs back in. "We're under siege."

"What?! by whom!?"

"Necromancers."

"Raise the bridges, all of them! Now, which section are they in?"

"across the waterfall, with an undead hoard. There is one Necromancer."

"Blast, well at least we're safe until winter."

The scout, strangely, was not curious on this point. "Why, what happens in the winter?"

"The river freezes over. Come on scout, I got some constructing to do if we're going to survive this. And scout... by armoks beard you better listen. Winter is Coming."

[Splint]

It seems even the biggest of orcs isn't a match for a speedy enough raptor that manages to grapple them. Bridgedflea, the regular raptor warden of an access tunnel, earned her title from managing to rip the throat out of a human bandit snatcher has bested an orc warlor. Granted the warlord took a bolt to the cheek and stumbled into a wall but still. She snapped both of the orc's arms and a leg before Col. Asmel came along on his way back from a meal and put his sword through the offending greenskin's head, finishing it off.

Also, a forgotten beast ran afoul of some troglodytes in the unexplored regions. How do i know this? They're the only listed cave civ, two ambushes of them were spotted, and a forgotten beast showed up dead on my unit lists.

[PDF urist master]

i did not expect the deadly spittle FB to headshot my giant cave spider. guess i'll have to redesign my defences.

[smjjames]

I just got my first web spitting FB, Shedim, a gigantic skinless theropod, it has large mandibles and a bloated body. Although the body part list in the wounds list seems to suggest insect mandibles, I think maybe it has a split jaw kind of deal.

Hopefully my FB distraction device works. I'm pondering whether to send my two full squads (macedwarves and axedwarves, ALL legendaries, though one became an elite wrestler for some reason) after it and plow through the webs by sheer numbers and the fact that the FB would be in a small space or grab  a crack squad of marksdwarves and range it. Good thing I built an airlock kind of thing for the entrance to the first cavern.

I also need to build another bridge in front of the cage traps so I don't get too many miscellaneous stuff caught in there.

Edit: And a sparrow man decided to try and land on a weapon trap :/

[Tarqiup Inua]

One of my original seven just died. I just breached an aquifer and postponed building stairs in the hole until later... some time after that I found one of my dwarves stuck right under future staircase, because the stairway back got it's top accidentally deconstructed... I am thinking to myself... fine, I'll build new stairway and save him... didn't happen - my second mistake was designating the closest piece of wood for construction of new stairway - the same wood that has fallen down after the original got deconstructed... the dwarf down there hunted for a vermin instead of building himself a way out and died shortly thereafter, nobody else in the fortress could reach the designated building material... when I realized my mistake, I had to facepalm.

[Larix]

The above adder design is of course much too simple and practical. I went and built a sum calculation circuit that doesn't require converting the carry into a signal first. Since the carry of the addition _only_ occurs as presence or absence of power on the gear (it's a simple unswitched gear that either receives power or... doesn't), there's a little catch.

The basic logic, once again, is pretty easy: when the carry input of the bit is on and A and B input have the same value, the sum signal must be on. This is easy to check simply by putting an A XNOR B gear behind the carry input - if carry has power and A=B, power is transmitted. The other half is trickier: if A and B have different values and carry is _off_, the sum bit is on. Now we can't directly activate something through a carry that's off - in pure mechanics, 'off' means no power. We can only run the logic in reverse: connect a directly-powered A XOR B gear to some machinery, but also build a counteracting piece of machinery that's on when the carry is on and A and B have different values.

So it boils down to this:

Code: [Select]

  O
X-R
CQ-FXP

C - carry input, Q - XNOR (eQuality) gate connected to A and B, X - XOR (difference) gate connected to A and B, P - Power (always offers power to the right-hand difference gate), F - "forward" roller pushing towards the output, R - "reverse" roller preventing the cart from reaching the output plate, O - output plate.

I built this thing and it works mostly alright, but
1. it requires much more space and power than the design which converts the carry into a signal to run through a simple single-gear summation gate.
2. the pathing i used has some strange bug: if input is changed during operation, the carts can fly off on diagonal paths (there are no actual diagonals in the design, so it's almost certainly a bug). It works without issue both in addition and subtraction if power is only provided after the input has been entered. The first design has no trouble with switches during operation.
EDIT: i've been stupid, there was a diagonal-acceleration spot in the original track design. Confusingly, it only very rarely caused a cart to go off track, when it should have happened all the time. I've corrected the tracks and it now works properly.
3. it was really just an arbitrary exercise - trying to get a summation engine to work where no signals apart from the actual sum are generated.

So, i think this is legitimately an entirely-mechanical adder/subtractor, only using signal conversion to produce the output. The design with intermediate signal conversion (creating an operation signal from the "carry") still is better most of the time, because it uses less space, power and machine parts. The fully-mechanical one needs fewer signal converters (number of input bits +1, vs. 2 times number of input bits), which could save a tiny bit of fps.

[ranger22550]

Oh GOD Thats Not Where the head goes! NO Mr Dwarf Dont Charge those Necros in the refuse pile NOOO. Oh God All That BLOOD And So Many bones. Wait I have a Elephant corpse in it. Welp Fort your screwed. Time To watch the carnage with some popcorn.
thats what happening in my Fort. necro ninjas.

[Tarqiup Inua]

The fortress I mentioned few posts back fell... during it's existence my marksmen had to deal with animated sheep wool trying to eat them several times. Then goblin ambush appeared...

Military rushed to repel them, but was unfortunately badly equipped (leather + some iron)... then first bodies of my fallen dwarves started to rise. Eventually, goblin ambush was defeated and my fortress fell to the zombie apocalypse. Never have I found the necromancer dwarf.

How do I tell the dwarf is a necromancer?

...and what force is usually needed to fend of the first ambush? (one squad of bowmen and some melee goblins)

[Splint]

The dwarf that goes ignored by the dead s generally ether a vampire or an undiscovered necromancer, as I have read accounts of necromancers  occasionally not ending up in towers and migrating to forts.

As to repelling the first ambush, this can be variable. If there are rangers included you may as well button up or lure them into a trap of some kind, but the melee ones can be repelled with as little as a squad of unarmored/barely armored speardwarves. You'd be amazed at how well such underequipped dwarves can do with just some leather armor and helmets, a wood shield, and a spear of any metal, providing they outnumber the enemy or have some ranged support of their own if they aren't better quality soldiers (invaders w/o natural skills tend to be from novice to proficient in skill except the squad leaders who seem to go from accomplished up to great and sometimes legendary.)

[Areyar]

New fort.
My current military died horribly. First fort in . . . it seems ages that had any iron ores available, so I had good equipment made of fine iron.
We were about equal in number and my dwarves competent and better, but they insisted on running in clumps of two at the enemy, getting chopped up like crundles!
got an emergency squad together of noobs and dyers, but these rushed outside to get the weapons knocked out of the hands of their protectors and got killed naked with only a steel helm on. (note to self: only do replace clothes when not in a hurry)
Goblins got as far as the main corridor, where all other dwarves were cowering, two got caged at the gates and two others shot up badly by the huntsdwarfs I had forgotten about. 

Strangely, job-flow is much better now that half the people are corpses.
Got a catacombs built in notime.

[Splint]

Well, it seems frost giants are very bad at kidnapping even little nith babies. One was found dead in a pond shortly after a frost giant was sighted, having apparently been drowned.

The drow came and numerous new nasties were added to the list of "things to eat my enemies." Faedogs, more raptors of both sorts, cheetahs, lions, and even a couple giant rats and cave bears. Supplementing this of course are the slade, fire, and wapstone turrets I purchased from home and the nightweavers.

"Where's the dorfs?" The goblins ask.
"Where's the squishy mountain folk?" The orc comrades ask.

Oh they are there, but you must best the simple beasts before they will deem you worth fighting.

EDIT: Ok, I'm laughing far harder than I should, but a warlock tried to slip into the fort and got jumped by Bridgedflea and Col. Asmel, and upon expiration, the sweetpod plot randomly combusted. While this would be perfectly understandable if the warlock was a pyromancer, he wasn't he was an ice master. So.... not sure what to make of that.