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[Grendus]

Limestone = win! Limestone and chalk are the best stones in the game. Screw dolomite, nothing but talc there, and marble only has copper. Limestone has malachite, magnetite, and nice veins of coal and lignite.

I just lost a fully crosstrained (legendary wrestler, shield user, and swordsdwarf) to an elite goblin sniper. Two more were wounded. I have 30 more champions, not a huge deal, but it makes me mad to lose three years of investment in training to a couple of iron bolts.

Edit: And squad 5 is made up of wusses. After their first minor injuries, they're all unhappy. Pathetic, squad 4 (the squad who lost dwarves) didn't even shed a tear.

HOLY CRAP! A freakin SWORDSDWARF just broke my record for orcput, knocking one 47 tiles! How the eff did that happen?

Edit2: and I just found the dragon nesting in my glass furnaces. Nice guy really. I guess the goblins chased him in there, I like the concept of my fort having a pet dragon. It's like a mascot.

[Greiger]

Spoiler: Hidden Fun Stuff (click to show/hide)

Breached a pit accidentally while mining adamantine. I dug out all the higher up areas of the stuff, then decided to dig a little lower, figuring I probably still have a few z levels of safety and immediately hit the pits when I start digging.

Tentacle Demons.  Better than spirits I suppose.

My military is ready, most are at least partially outfitted in adamantine and I had prepared a defensive chamber in advance.  The military is led by a legendary spearuser, armoruser, wrestler, and shield user decked out in not just adamantine but FULL MASTERWORK adamantine heavy armor, with THREE artifacts, a adamantine spear, mithril shield, and adamantine boot.  A force to be reckoned with.

The military is in position and I lock the door leading back to the fortress, and the underworld prisoners start pouring out of the pit.  Including a number of Dragons that were made to be playable in adventure mode, and has the unfortunate side effect of making them show up in pits, fortunately they aren't aggressive.

Unfortunately they are still building destroyer, and they break down the door leading into my fortress, and a number of the military take it as an opportunity to go get a drink, fortunately the majority of the army is still at their station.  Shortly after the demons show up, and the fighting begins. 4 tentacle demons die quickly under the hail of bolts spears and swords.  But there is a problem, while examining the fighting I see an artifact sitting on the ground on top of a tentacle demon corpse.  An artifact adamantine spear 'I wonder what that's doing ther-' I check my heroic spear user and he is fleeing the battlefield, unwounded on his way back to the fortress apparently to replace his missing spear.  It's quite a walk, he won't be back during the battle.

The battle immediately turns sour.  The marksmen are running out of bolts and are falling back, the big bad showed up and the tentacle demons aren't running out anytime soon.  Soldiers are abandoning their posts in droves with wounds if they don't die outright, and I have everyone fall back to the lower levels of the fortress itself, to put up a final stand at the magma forges blocking the tunnel to the central stairwell.

Everyone is recruited. And form a wall of flesh blocking the way, some soldiers still wander down into the tunnels for reasons I don't understand and die futility.  Including the spear hero who apparently realizes the only spears left in the fortress are all by the pits and charges down into the fray wielding only his shield.  Surprisingly he manages to kill 3 tentacle demons by himself, essentially unarmed.  Shame there were at least 15 down there.  He didn't make it.

The wall of now constantly tantruming bodies manages to kill all the tentacle demons with help of the remaining military with massive losses, while goblins emerge from ambush at the surface.  The big bad demon wandered into the middle of the chasm (which my fortress happens to be built around) and turns his brain off.

I abandon quickly to make sure theirs still a few goblins and the big bad demon roaming the halls when I come back in adventure mode. A fortress of 180 brought down to 40, due to the failure of what should have been a more than sufficient anti demon defense.

Nothing to see here folks.  Just a few perverted clowns.

[Grendus]

Spoiler: Hidden Fun Stuff (click to show/hide)

Breached a pit accidentally while mining adamantine. I dug out all the higher up areas of the stuff, then decided to dig a little lower, figuring I probably still have a few z levels of safety and immediately hit the pits when I start digging.

Tentacle Demons.  Better than spirits I suppose.

My military is ready, most are at least partially outfitted in adamantine and I had prepared a defensive chamber in advance.  The military is led by a legendary spearuser, armoruser, wrestler, and shield user decked out in not just adamantine but FULL MASTERWORK adamantine heavy armor, with THREE artifacts, a adamantine spear, mithril shield, and adamantine boot.  A force to be reckoned with.

The military is in position and I lock the door leading back to the fortress, and the underworld prisoners start pouring out of the pit.  Including a number of Dragons that were made to be playable in adventure mode, and has the unfortunate side effect of making them show up in pits, fortunately they aren't aggressive.

Unfortunately they are still building destroyer, and they break down the door leading into my fortress, and a number of the military take it as an opportunity to go get a drink, fortunately the majority of the army is still at their station.  Shortly after the demons show up, and the fighting begins. 4 tentacle demons die quickly under the hail of bolts spears and swords.  But there is a problem, while examining the fighting I see an artifact sitting on the ground on top of a tentacle demon corpse.  An artifact adamantine spear 'I wonder what that's doing ther-' I check my heroic spear user and he is fleeing the battlefield, unwounded on his way back to the fortress apparently to replace his missing spear.  It's quite a walk, he won't be back during the battle.

The battle immediately turns sour.  The marksmen are running out of bolts and are falling back, the big bad showed up and the tentacle demons aren't running out anytime soon.  Soldiers are abandoning their posts in droves with wounds if they don't die outright, and I have everyone fall back to the lower levels of the fortress itself, to put up a final stand at the magma forges blocking the tunnel to the central stairwell.

Everyone is recruited. And form a wall of flesh blocking the way, some soldiers still wander down into the tunnels for reasons I don't understand and die futility.  Including the spear hero who apparently realizes the only spears left in the fortress are all by the pits and charges down into the fray wielding only his shield.  Surprisingly he manages to kill 3 tentacle demons by himself, essentially unarmed.  Shame there were at least 15 down there.  He didn't make it.

The wall of now constantly tantruming bodies manages to kill all the tentacle demons with help of the remaining military with massive losses, while goblins emerge from ambush at the surface.  The big bad demon wandered into the middle of the chasm (which my fortress happens to be built around) and turns his brain off.

I abandon quickly to make sure theirs still a few goblins and the big bad demon roaming the halls when I come back in adventure mode. A fortress of 180 brought down to 40, due to the failure of what should have been a more than sufficient anti demon defense.

Nothing to see here folks.  Just a few perverted clowns.

How many professional military did you have to take on the pervy clowns? Just curious.

[brainfire]

Not a whole lot on the fort front- I realized a while after starting to build two towers that they line up on either side of what looks like a pass that runs into the mountain range I embarked on the edge of, so it looks like they're guarding the pass. Lucky that it happened to line up that way, it makes them a lot cooler

One amusing thing happened, though- two giant lions wandered semi-close to my fort, and a single dwarven caravan guard wandered off from the depot to hack one of them into a couple pieces. It mangled his leg in the process, but he still decided to slowly limp after the second giant lion... and scared it all the way across the map and off the edge. Caravan guards are hardcore.

[Greiger]

How many professional military did you have to take on the pervy clowns? Just curious.

I don't have the numbers readily available anymore but I think it was something along the lines of
8 Crossbow (1 champion 4 elite 3 normal).
6 Sword (1 champion 3 elite 2 normal)
10 spear (2 champion 5 elite 3 normal)
and 3 or 4 spinal wound wrestlers using either sword or spear that took internal wounds sometime during wrestling skill training that were just given their weapons when I noticed the injuries.

[Grendus]

Hide the women and drown the children, the baron has arrived.

Well, technically it's a baroness. And technically it's not a disaster since none of my nobles demand anything I don't have locally (short of blue gold, which I have to import the zinc for but w/e). The only irritating noble is the consort, who has a thing for idols. I may carbonite him, or I may just deal with it.

[The Architect]

That's a recipe for suicide.

Spears just get stuck and force your spearmen to wrestle, so you better have them as legendary wrestlers. Champion swordmasters would be an excellent idea.

Point #2: You needed a pile of legendary soldiers, not a couple. They get tired. Also, sending in a pile of non-legendaries is likely to result only in your troops being slaughtered. Your crossbowmen were unlikely to even hit the enemy at "normal" levels of skill.

[Greiger]

Spoiler: too detailed to get away with just using 'clowns' (click to show/hide)

Well the chamber I built positioned the clowns so close to the crossbowmen that they would have a hard time missing. Not to mention that there were so many that even if they missed they would hit something.  They would be in melee range if not for the fortifications I built, they were specifically designed to let crossbowmen fire from as little as two tiles away while the clowns were fighting the meleers.  A tried and true design I used before successfully.

The crossbow users were using stariron bolts (160% effectiveness, rare as hell, but I had adamantine so I didn't need to make it into weapons like usual) with mostly masterwork bone crossbows so damage wasn't an issue.  And they even managed to lungshot the circus master, shame it was only one lung and he didn't go down. He wasn't being a significant force in the fight anyway, mostly just lobbing fire in random directions, likely doing more damage to his buddies than to me. I think my big failing there was that I neglected to make an ammo stockpile down there.  And once they ran out of bolts they either ran off back into the fortress or charged into the melee and got slaughtered.

And yea, I imagine swordsmasters are better than spearmasters, against them, but I like to use both equally.  Spears sticking in is probably precisely why my crack spearuser with all the artifacts bailed though.  While he was there and the crossbowmen still had bolts it was an absolute slaughter, noone on my side even was touched for awhile.  Then once the bolt support stopped and the spear unit lost it's center guy the melees were overrun and the shit hit the fan. 

I have been successful with that kind of military against clowns before, it just took tons of prep. The clown defense chambers are usually better defended than the fortress' front door.  But maybe this time I was overconfident and didn't prepare fully.  I didn't stick a pair of balista pointing into the adamant mine like I usually did either, thinking the higher quality than usual gear and the multi-artifact spearchamp would make them redundant.  This was also only the second time I fought pedo-clowns too, those limbs may have absorbed more damage uselessly than I counted on.

P.S. And yea regular troops usually just get slaughtered, I stick the high skill meleers in front, so that they take (and hopefully counterattack with) all the punishment while the lower skill guys jump in behind them and add a few extra attacks.  Ideally the front guys are using their skill to parry and counter preventing the lower skill guys from getting many attacks sent their way.  Doesn't work on gobbos, since they can counter too, but stuff without weapons skill like megabeasts and wildlife it seems alright.

[Grendus]

That's a recipe for suicide.

Spears just get stuck and force your spearmen to wrestle, so you better have them as legendary wrestlers. Champion swordmasters would be an excellent idea.

Point #2: You needed a pile of legendary soldiers, not a couple. They get tired. Also, sending in a pile of non-legendaries is likely to result only in your troops being slaughtered. Your crossbowmen were unlikely to even hit the enemy at "normal" levels of skill.

Swords are meh against tentacle clowns. You need a lot of speardwarves, enough that they can kill a tentacle clown quickly and regroup before more clowns come, and enough that if one's spear gets stuck the others can kill it before it forces the first to abandon his weapon and seek shelter.

Crosstraining as a wrestler is not just a good idea in this situation. Wrestling is used for dodge calculations and gives absurd amounts of exp. Crosstraining a professional legendary soldier as a wrestler is the number one way to make him/her stronger. For taking on the circus, it's almost mandatory.

But yea, sounds like you had some clowny fun.

Edit: As a side note, my fortress dropped to 9 FPS when I marked the entire fort for engraving. I removed the designation and turned off temperature and my FPS jumped back up to 75. Holy crap! Now I can get through more than a year every two days, I love it. I was about to give up on my fortress, now I'm back to work on the constructed obsidian tower.

[Greiger]

Well I figure just about anything is meh against them, but at least swords reduce the number of limbs.  Spears won't do anything helpful if they hit a limb instead of a critical spot.  Though the lucky bodyshot is nice, and while I lack experience with hammer type weapons I can't imagine how they would be much better than the others.

Yes good clowny fun.  I don't think I actually lost a fort to a military situation in a good while.

[GrafZeppelin]

I managed to trap the oncoming "Warrior" onslaught (custom race) by trapping them in a one tile wide hallway. Then, I opened another way! They saw the light, and raced toward it...only to see the shadow of my champion, who slaughtered all 32 of them.

[personofshadow]

I'm playing with the dig deeper mod, and my usual tactic for orcs is pretend no one is home until they go away, partially cause I tend to be lazy with my military early on, but I digress, this happening isn't orc related.

I've got my five marksdwarves, only current military responsible for keeps the others safe. I get the message that my mason was interrupted by a gargoyle while trying to finish the fortifications my markswarves would later sit in. So I send them out to take care of the mess.

It goes alright, the gargoyle gets into melee with one of them and wounds him pretty bad before getting shot to death, I figure, whatever, couple months bed rest and he'll be good as new. I go and check whats wounded only to discover that the gargoyle ripped out BOTH OF HIS EYES!

Well, this leaves me with two options really, the first is to offer him an early retirement so that he can spend his days telling stories of his battle scars, or I can hand him a crossbow as soon as he finishes healing up his yellow wound and inform him that he has been promoted to captain of the marksdwarves.

[The Architect]

Swords are unbalanced. They slaughter everything. Quibbling over spears and talking about them like they actually do what they should is silly. The only time a sword won't do better than anything else is... well, never. Maybe a mace vs severonbreaks.

[Grendus]

I would prefer spears to swords, swords are too messy and have a lower crit chance, but to each his own. I would take my chances with weapon sticks, presuming I had enough dwarves that no single dwarf was critical. Of course, in the situation described, I'd almost prefer hammerdwarves. Lack of a stick chance is a huge advantage in long or outnumbered fights. I suppose swords are a happy medium, but it's not entirely clear cut.

However, that aside, he's right. Bolt stockpiles and more dwarves would have turned the tide in his favor. Also, locking the soldiers in so they couldn't retreat would have helped, functional dwarves with broken limbs will continue to fight if they can't reach a bed.

[The Architect]

Spears don't have a higher critical chance. They have a different kind of critical. Swords actually have a higher chance, and their critical is severing. Dealing with the mess is part of it; if you don't want to then you should use an impact weapon. Hammers are inferior to maces due to weight. Spears will stick, rendering your spearmasters into wrestlers (which is why I said it is necessary to train your spearmasters in wrestling, though of course you ideally train all military dwarves in wrestling). All of this will change, but at the moment swords are by far the most effective weapons there are. Nothing else even comes close. A sword will stick, but only *extremely* rarely, to the point that I've run a fort for 10 years now with champion swordmasters and orc/goblin sieges, with only two swords dropped.

Speaking normatively, swords shouldn't be as effective against tentacle demons as other weapons. But speaking factually, they are much MORE effective, against tentacle demons and everything else in the game. It's just what we have to work with right now. The system will change.