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[Deboche]

I had my first ever dwarf die of old age, two actually. The useless thresher mayor and a legendary weaver. Together with a guineacock. It made me so depressed I stopped playing.

What if the same happens to my carefully trained military which I had almost finished bringing up to legendary without a danger room? Or to my other legendary dwarves?

Now I see the point of contaminating the well water with vampire blood. I'll do that tomorrow.

[itg]

Dwarves die of old age between 150 and 170 years old. Just check the ages of key dwarves, if you're worried about it.

[ZzarkLinux]

The zombies don't stop my work on megaprojects. I just finished a 2-story "outside" bunker in the third cavern layer. Now I can bring livestock down closer to my home base on level 66. Well, first I need to butcher a bunch of cats, dogs, rabbits, and alpacas. Somehow I have an alpaca population. I hope the magma sea isn't too much lower...

Also designing a beast-proof watering system. Creature's can't break floor hatches from below, right? And water can pressurize, so I'm going to build my aqueduct with an upward slope and a floor hatch to seal out all the enemies. It's shaped like a sideways S.

Almost half my population is kids, and I had to pull my two axe lords down to help with all the labor. All that remains in the upper fort is a duck stockpile, a slabyard, bunch of totems, the axelords old bedrooms, the bookkeeper room, scattered depot crap, and tallow. Lots of animal tallow.

[Larix]

So my tentative recipe for using military as defence is:
grab migrants with military skills, set them to train always, make weapons and armour as soon as possible. As soon as the first soldiers go elite, recruit the next squads. Ambushes tend to appear during the second year, and can come as early as summer. Expect to lose a soldier or two against the first ambushes, but once they hit legendary, they only seem in serious danger when pitted against elite opponents, when facing serious bad luck or when trying to stem a siege.

I had turtled behind a raised bridge for several months in the second year, while training up my military and thinking about an adequate military architecture, after a station order in front of the depot led to one dead and one wounded archer (mostly my own fault, i had given them an archery target, so they had no ammo when the ambush came) and a swordsdwarf losing all use of one leg - she's a professional crutchwalker and legendary swordsmaster now.

So i designed a welcome room with a single-tile entrance, accessible only through diagonal corridors, to break line-of-sight for archers and deny opponents the advantage of numbers. In the third year, a four-squad ambush showed up and i got scared when i saw the graphics of two dead dwarfs. However, those were goblinised dwarfs who'd come along as part of the ambush. No losses among my military. Instead of a dwarf caravan, a vile force of darkness visited. It was just the cheap one spearsquad with a giant-olm riding captain. They had to pass through a hatch cover which i had set to tightly shut to keep tame animals contained, and the result was that the olm couldn't get through. I couldn't un-set it, either, because the hatch had been "taken by invaders". So that "siege" was repelled by the archer squad.

In the fourth year, a proper siege came up, jabberers, cave crawlers, cave crocodiles, about fifty gobbos. I just stationed everyone in the welcome room and let it play out. "Everyone" meant six legendaries, six "skilled" marksdwarfs, six talented-to-professional soldiers-in-training. Result: siege repelled. Losses of the attacker: 72. Losses of the defender: 2. One was a child who got face-stabbed by a kobold immediately before the siege came in (still a death "during" the siege), the other was a baby shield. One militarydwarf lost a leg, another had her guts torn but managed to walk it off. They're equipped with fine-to-superior bronze, which makes the chopping of armoured goblins a bit slow, but since they generally don't get surrounded, their defensive skills have kept them safe.

I must say i'm impressed. My first experiences with military were utterly awful, but with dedicated training and a decent defensive architecture, soldiers seem no less effective than traps.

I started the military buildup in the winter of the first year, we're near the end of year four and have six legendary-skill, and four more elite melee soldiers. Two soldiers seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot and are still stuck at adept/expert. Time to switch the four new elites to the action zone and make two new training pairs - all squads are pairs of different-weapon soldiers, which is the best non-cheaty setup i know of.

[mounf]

Accidentally discovered a convenient way to deal with elite marksgoblins. You see, my fortress has a large underground entrance which allows attackers to be channelled through a shooting gallery. They then have to run the gauntlet of Marksdwarfs protected behind fortifications, with magma below to fall into. Fairly standard stuff.

By (unintended) coincidence, the bridge that controls entry to the room is 3x2 and ~20 range from my marksdwarfs, so elite goblins tend to stand on it to shoot, one quick ~toggle~ later and the problem is neatly removed... Usually my marksdwarfs can dodge bolts until the problem goes away.

Sadly, I have yet to see any one dodge off of the 1 wide walkway and fall into the magma yet. A pity as it would simplify clean-up greatly. Oh, well, next job is to connect up the spikes on the walkway to a repeater, maybe the goblins will dodge off the walkway then? I've since added a seperate welcoming room with a magma reservoir above for times when I just want to deal with a seige without creating too much mess, now i'm just waiting for a seige to test it on.

The shooting gallery is on dfma: http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-31281-welcominghall, any suggestions very welcome.

[Larix]

Three observations on vampires:
Vampires "on break" appear to disregard all attempts to direct them when they have the smell of a sleeping dwarf - military orders, burrow orders, nothing matters. Only locked doors and similar solid obstacles help.
Vampires who are nominally active military while draining a citizen will get the "took joy in slaughter" happy thought. As far as i can tell, that's the only direct benefit a vampire will get from killing people. They can get further happy thoughts when you identify them as murderers on the justice screen but keep them unavailable for justicing.
Sucking a dwarf dry does _nothing_ to alleviate alcohol withdrawal - a long-abstinent dwarf still had the "needs alcohol and can't remember he last had some" thought immediately after drinking all the boozey blood a child had in it.

[flame99]

I've started a masterwork fortress, although I have no experience with Masterwork. In addition to that, I embarked on a half evil, half good area. I didn't know much about the livestock options, so I grabbed one that sounded cool and didn't cost thousands of points. Namely, armored cragtooth boars. I start on the evil side, and find it to be reanimating. I thought that I was going to lose my fort before I even started, before the boars charged into combat with the undead faedog menacing my miners, and my god, those things rip through flesh like butter! The faedog didn't stand a chance.

[Splint]

I've started a masterwork fortress, although I have no experience with Masterwork. In addition to that, I embarked on a half evil, half good area. I didn't know much about the livestock options, so I grabbed one that sounded cool and didn't cost thousands of points. Namely, armored cragtooth boars. I start on the evil side, and find it to be reanimating. I thought that I was going to lose my fort before I even started, before the boars charged into combat with the undead faedog menacing my miners, and my god, those things rip through flesh like butter! The faedog didn't stand a chance.

Due to limitations they're sterile. You'll have to buy normal ones if you want to breed more war boars.

[the1337doofus]

I found out why you assign useless dwarves to make stone trinkets. If you don't, they socialize. If they socialize, they make friends. If they make friends and die, they kill the fort.

[DogsRNice]

im building down to the magma sea to build magma forges etc. and then building a minecart track down there to the main fort i have to be carful to avoid the caverns because of a web throwing fb that killed my 40 legendary skill dwarf army in(don't worry i used the df hack die command so it never happened (it was a test)) seconds without getting harmed

[Larix]

I've been given an appropriately challenging invasion by the end of the fifth year - cave dragons and... the goblins' administrator, a fire-spitting tortoise fiend. Could have been worse (deadly dust, say) but this beast alone was more than a match for my military. Not being able to see a thing in all the smoke didn't help directing my dwindling forces. All but one marksdwarfs were burnt, and half my seasoned military was wiped out, but the fiend eventually died and the siege was routed. I had to carefully oversee the unhappy citizens for the next few months, as well as the massive cleanup of finely chopped goblins, rutherers, jabberers and cave dragons. Of course, shortly after the elven caravan came, another siege arrived, this time only with trolls as backup, but i decided to sit this one out anyway: i lost four of my eight weaponmasters, seven of eight marksdwarfs and two rookies, as well as about a dozen civilians - a few insisted on pasturing wardogs in a deactivated pasture, another handful went insane and died over lost relatives. 119 beards remain, 63 of which are adult. Recruiting new military promises to get much harder. At least the two vampires are no worse for wear, still happily pumping in their walled-off chambers.

[doublestrafe]

The embark site was advertised as the best ever--volcano, coal, iron, marble, sand, clay, river, gold, silver, copper, what have you--all on a warm tropical broadleaf forest. It lived up to its hype. It had it all. Including--and this was not noted on the package--necromancers.

Just as the first, modest goblin siege ate up all my cage traps, a huge necromancer siege hit. I ordered my (untrained) military to scramble underground and axed the stairs, because there's just no way. About half of them are trapped out there anyway because they were gung ho to kill some zombies. So it goes.

The thing that's making me nervous is that the besieging necromancer, while walking around, uncovered a necromancer ambush. A hostile necromancer ambush. Right now they're taking aimless swings at each other; they don't seem very good at it. It makes me wonder, though...just how many towers are around here? Was this entire setup, well, a setup? Because if it is, it's the most metadwarfy thing I've ever seen.

[the1337doofus]

The embark site was advertised as the best ever--volcano, coal, iron, marble, sand, clay, river, gold, silver, copper, what have you--all on a warm tropical broadleaf forest. It lived up to its hype. It had it all. Including--and this was not noted on the package--necromancers.

Just as the first, modest goblin siege ate up all my cage traps, a huge necromancer siege hit. I ordered my (untrained) military to scramble underground and axed the stairs, because there's just no way. About half of them are trapped out there anyway because they were gung ho to kill some zombies. So it goes.

The thing that's making me nervous is that the besieging necromancer, while walking around, uncovered a necromancer ambush. A hostile necromancer ambush. Right now they're taking aimless swings at each other; they don't seem very good at it. It makes me wonder, though...just how many towers are around here? Was this entire setup, well, a setup? Because if it is, it's the most metadwarfy thing I've ever seen.

If enemies could break down walls/climb up ledges, you'd be so screwed. And that's saying there's not something already lurking in your fort. Which, with your apparent luck, it's probably zombie kobolds.

[doublestrafe]

If enemies could break down walls/climb up ledges, you'd be so screwed. And that's saying there's not something already lurking in your fort. Which, with your apparent luck, it's probably zombie kobolds.

Turns out the biggest enemy was laziness. The first thing I did in the game was to make a food stockpile on top of the mountain to get stuff off the cart. I made a quantum stockpile for prepared meals later, in the dining hall, but I never killed the original stockpile.

Guess where they decided to keep all my food and most of my seeds?

I'm not quite dead yet; had to build a quern and recruit a backup cook (because my legendary idiot is on break) but I'm wringing some meals out of what plants I've got. I've got 88 survivors to feed and 10 turkey hens, two of which I slaughtered. I may have to tap the as yet undiscovered caverns just to find wild plump helmets, though.

One really lucky stroke was that one of the necromancers stumbled into one of my few remaining cage traps. The others--at least the others I know about--have left, leaving the zombies behind. If all I have to deal with is undead, I may just be able to pull this out, and then I have the potential for a necromancer training facility.

[Larix]

I opened the bridge after all, stationed my two remaining elite squads in the welcome room and the two not-trained-out hammerdwarfs a bit behind. Of course, when the goblin squads started pouring in, it still turned into a free-for-all, and the two hammerdwarfs actually scored a bunch of kills each by finishing off goblins wounded by the two sword- and one axemaster. The only casualty of the fight was the spearmaster, who opposed the goblin spearmaster and got a badly mangled foot out of the deal. Now our count of crutchwalking soldiers is up to two again (the one-legged axelady was burnt in the demonic conflagration of winter). And of course, _another_ siege showed up in summer. This is just ridiculous. The new squads plain refuse to train with the least inkling of efficiency and each barely-wounded experienced soldier means a loss of 20% of the fort's military. And a prospective marksdwarf commited suicide by insisting on trying to pick up a forbidden piece of equipment - forbidden because the corridor was _full of trolls_.

Still, working with military and no traps at all feels workable, at least if architecture is used to optimise the playing field and time encounters (via bridge). Demonic generals are very good at taking out even the best defence forces, though.