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[Splint]

So, I have obtained a breeding population of saltwater crocodiles, alligators and giant rattlesnakes. 
Sadly no hippos, giant tigers or armadillos (renewable shell).

Giant rattlesnakes? Color me envious. I bet those will really do a number on any hapless thief...
Crocs are pretty awesome as well, both for combat and meat/egg industry.

Clearly these beasts must be made combat trainable.

[Lolfail0009]

A Forgotten Beast showed up in one of my caverns. Seeing as it was merely an ash quadruped, I simply could not be fucked dealing with it ((still no military '^^)) but it was harassing my haulers. Decided to take a mulligan on that one, and cast EXTERMINATE FORGOTTEN_BEAST_180. Now maybe I can start carting that nether-cap back up for my magma pump stack.

[Snaake]

Hmmm..just remembered that cougars, being big cats (and like all little cats), can't be trained.  I have decided that the Elves are messing with my mind.

Untrue, one of my forts had War Leopards.  34.11 though, not sure about 40.x yet.

Really?  The DF Wiki says cougars can't be trained.
...

Have a look at http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Animal_trainer
Most large cats and actually even ocelots and bobcats, even though the latter are only 8000 cc as adults, less than a third the size of a dog, can be trained for both hunting and war (as are the giant versions of all the previous). In fact, it seems cougars may be the sole untrainable-large-cat exception that proves the rule.

On one hand, war training isn't absolutely necessary for sufficiently dangerous and aggressive animals (hunting training is pretty crucial if you want to use the animals for hunting, since it makes them better at sneaking), but if you consider this to be a bug/accidental omission by Toady, feel free to edit the RAWs of the save; I think just adding the training tags wouldn't require a regen.

[Aranador]

Cougars are ornery, bad tempered, vicious, savage blighters that are always right on the edge of flipping out and mauling anything nearby - including their own breeding mate.  Heavens help us all if one ever becomes a ninja.

Pretty much all other felines, from tigers to tabbies, are cutsy wuutsie kitties as long as you are not their dinner.  (But be mindful that a playful bite from a house cat is very different than from a 700lb tiger).  Cheetahs especially are extremely lovable cats.  Probably only male lions come close to being as bastardly as the cougars, and that's more because they want to own everything.

So yeah - Toady is spot on with this one.  Might be interesting to collect all your cougars and drop them into a pit and then throw captured goblins in there too, although not sure if the non-fortress resident code would then have the cougars eat them.

[PDF urist master]

a fire imp got trapped in a cage and his mates decided to hover around him. I don't know how they managed to path into that, seeing that they only live in the magma sea and my cage traps are 100 tiles away from any magma pool.

either way, I sent an ax lord to deal with the menace, hopefully to drive them off without destroying the cage (made of wood, as I didn't expect a fucking fire imp to show up inside it). It didn't work. The fire imps got spooked and sent the axe lord on fire, running away in the process. My ax lord did manage to kill one, but the another ran so fast that he didn't catch up.

The fire lit up his head and the fat started melting. Miraculously, he survived whilst being very pale, but the resulting fireball sent the cave on fire. The resulting flames engulfed the cage traps and destroyed the cages with in.

By this point, I had ordered my ax lord back into the fort so he doesn't burn alive. The inferno had freed the fire imp, who upon seeing my ax lord, got scared off and threw another fireball at him.

[Mentalpatient87]

I'm going to start a new fort after I clean up the kitchen. Open to suggestions on what kind of biome to set up in. I usually like to drop down in a place with plenty of variety. I never have much luck with varieties of animals, however. This saddens me.

[elpreda]

Evil Ocean embark. Let the war on zombie sperm whales begin.

[Larix]

Arctic oceans give some interesting animals. If possible, combine with taiga. Of course, if you find a "terrifying" one, you might encounter zombie giant elephant seals, which would be slightly overkill, considering the "small" harp seals can eat a whole embark crew in record time when undead. If you're less ambitious, a walrus farm gives absurd amounts of meat and bone, and some ivory.

Own fort: an elven diplomat visited. Of course, they only wanted to complain about our logging operations. The baroness even threw a party to greet the diplomat but i don't think it was appreciated (no really, she spent most of the month of Granite with "Attend Party at well", which of course was too noisy for her to hear the diplomat's whining ).

[Mentalpatient87]

Alright, I have taken your suggestions... and summarily dismissed them. After my last fort went four years on a half-ocean embark without seeing a single sea creature I decided I'm not gonna mess with oceans anymore. Instead, I elected to found "Glovedmobbed" in the middle of a temperate conifer forest. Shared biomes include a tropical conifer forest and a tropical shrubland. We're right at the end (or beginning?) of a river full of carp and hippos. Minerals and materials are plentiful, but I'm probably going to have to pierce an aquifer. I believe the surroundings are either wilderness or untamed wilds. Or both. Not sure.

EDIT: Oooh! And there's a tetrahedrite AND a magnetite vein sticking out of the side of the hill about ten tiles away from my wagon. I think we'll start digging in there.

[Aranador]

BoltFrenzy suffered a goblin ambush just before the end of the second year (in fact the year ended just as the last raider left the map)

It was glorious.  5 dozen poorly trained reasonably equipped dwarves, all with their crossbow handy and trusting no one, rushed down to the grand entry lane - the 'best' at the front, the least valuable behind them, and the important at the back.  The goblins arrived, charging through the herd of goats that were the first line of 'defence' and a river of badly aimed bolts flowed into them.  They charged the fusillade, and of course found the one guy who hadn't put on a mail shirt - stabbing them in the shoulder.  That will learn you - the overseer included mail shirts in your uniform for a reason, and our armourer didn't get to be a legend by producing some PoS zinc low boot, but by making eleventy billion armour pieces.

Given that it was only one squad of speargoblins, the battle ended with just that one friendly injury (oh, and a dead chicken) and most of the goblins being pin cushioned as they ran.

I would have got the last one too, but as I was chasing, my squads found a kobold thief and gave chase to that instead.  To be fair, the kobold got quite far - but then my Giant War Cheetah (why do people not like elves again?) got the scent and daymn but kitty runs fast, swooping in for the kill and earning a name.

The new year though - it will be terrifying.  In the course of this year my fortress wealth catapulted into the stratosphere with the amount of steel armour and masterwork bronze crossbows I have made (the weaponsmith did become a legend because of an artefact, but given that it was a steel crossbow worth 198000 urist, I don't mind - that thing was worth 1.5 times my entire fortress wealth combined at the time it was made).  You see, I added in 2 more goblin races, each progressively stronger, so there is going to be frikkin hordes of them.


Welcome to BoltFrenzy.  Trust no-one, keep your crossbow handy, the Overseer is your friend.

[smjjames]

Started a new Fortress in DF2014 (while keeping the other one going, of course).   I picked a pocket world and low or small for everything else.  And picked a region I thought was Okay.  But no trees.  NO trees.  So I am being VERY careful about what wood is used for.

Lemme guess, you embarked on a desert? Yeah, a desert embark is a challenge because wood is at a preminum. Fortunately though, you can make rock pots instead of barrels.

There should still be trees in the caverns, regardless of surface biome.

[Mentalpatient87]

I might have missed one or two, but it looks like every. single. important figure in my civilization is a goblin. All of them. What the hell?

EDIT: Also, little advice please maybe? How wide of a paved road should I have outside my walls to prevent invaders from jumping over from trees? Or am I wasting my time on paranoia?

EDIT 2: (Man I do a lot of edits lately..) I also seem to have a large infestation of carp and milkfish breeding and multiplying in my river. How do I kill them and harvest their meat?

[Sus]

Having no access to goblins or other surefire sources of Fun, the fortress just trudges along

All hail the World Activation Release!  
We have new neighbors. They are called The Confederacy of Winter, they are humans, and they are at war with The Wild Girder, our parent civilization, and therefore also with The Charcoal Staff-Furnace of Smoothness. (Sometimes, the RNG comes up with a really sweet name.) This fact was relayed to me in the form of half a dozen Human Wrestlers showing up on the premises of Sastres Anan. They proceeded to mug a foolish hunter who adamantly refused to drop the giant pangolin corpse she was hauling, until one of the lanky monsters wrest it from her hands and beat her to death with it. In retaliation, my militia killed two of the creatures, and the rest fled. All they left behind was two dead bodies clad in over-sized clothing, plus of course the poor peon they murdered. I think they managed to steal her precious giant pangolin corpse, too.

Meanwhile, our wildlife research initiative is coming along swimmingly. We have captured a pair of rhinoceroses and managed to get them to breed in captivity. Their offspring have become tame, while the parents captured from the wild remain +Trained+. This probably means our civilization will soon have domesticated the great (and valuable!) horned beasts. (Current status: General familiarity.) We also have an ostrich cock and an ostrich hen, but they remain Semi-Wild and the current extent of Ostrich Science is limited to A few facts.

...I just realized something. Rhinos have

Code: [Select]

[TRAINABLE], which means they can be trained, not only for war, but for hunting as well. Of course, that is kind of pointless since
1) Even with War Rhinos, the dorfs still won't ride 'em to battle,
and
2) their grazing requirements make assigning them to follow a soldier or hunter rather impractical, to say the least.

But still: Hunting Rhinoceros? Hunting being a stealth and perception based skill... just... how? How do you train an animal with the body size of an adult SUV, all the grace of a steamroller, and practically nonexistent eyesight to spot or ambush prey for you? The mind boggles... 

[soulsource]

I had a siege of about 20 goblins and 5 trolls. You can't imagine the smile on my face, when I saw troll and goblin bodyparts fly around like projectiles, after the poor invaders happened to find out about my high quality weapon traps, placed at strategically important locations... Sadly they missed two traps right in front of my drawbridge, so I chose to open the bridge shortly to lure them to certain death. One of my civilian dwarfs happened to be within line of sight for them briefly, and that moron charged them unarmed... Insta-Death ensued. Yet, this brief gruesome event led one of my military dwarfs, a legendary swordsdwarf, to forget about his orders, and instead take on the whole remaining force of the siege, alone. Of course I immediately ordered the rest of the military after that crazy dwarf, but when they arrived on the battlefield, all they found was a pile of goblin corpses, and an unharmed swordsdwarf, who "Took joy in slaughter recently"...

Sadly, after I lowered the alarm for the civilian dwarfs and they were busy cleaning the mess that my traps and one crazy swordsdwarf left behind, a minotaur showed up, and before the civilians could retreat to safety or the military could reach the refuse stockpile, already three laborers fell victim to the attacking cow-creature... At least the military could dispose that beast quickly and without any further injuries.

On the bright side, I've managed to dig down to the magma sea, and the construction of my magma pump stack has begun. Now I only need to make a lot of magma safe doors and pumps...

[slothen]

Tower siege left after 3+ seasons of siege.  It was okay, there was work to be done underground.  Then as my civilians were up on the surface collecting wood from the newly grown trees and vomiting, a wereass attacked.  Killed two dwarfs and injured another before being hacked to bits in its monster form.  Sadly one of the dead was my fortress manager and skilled weaver/clothier.  tragic.

Lots of unhappy dwarfs.  Mostly because of miasma in the caverns and a few deaths and hauntings.  The bedrooms are completed and there's a nice well room and dining room, but it hasn't been enough.  None of them are miserable though so I've been not too worried.  My assistant chief medical dwarf was elected as the new mayor and has done a good job of cheering people up, but it clearly has taken its toll as she just decided to create and artifact.  Except instead of building the artifact-quality mail shirt she'd been dreaming about her whole life, she decided to murder a miner and turn his body into something...