So, as one does, I've been trying to get back into the game after a decent length hiatus. We've all been there, right? Anyways, I've got a brilliant fort planned. Bigger, better, bolder, trying to break the mold all my previous boring glacier hellforts were making. I planned, modded, wrote, and prepared the perfect embark, researched my lore, savescummed embark parties for the perfect ragtag crew, outlined rules and restrictions, and I even did a little art! The perfect storm, all neat and ready for me to hit play. I embarked... and quit. Didn't really feel like all that work. Recording things
nicely? Gross. Actual narration? Cool, but ehhh. I just wasn't in the mood.
What does that all mean? That means, quite clearly, one thing: goblin time! It's time for the third fort in the series of throwaway forts. I've got a system at this point here, so I'll just CTRL+C CTRL+V the 'rules' I follow with these forts. They're pretty loose, but you get the point.
I decide to adhere to the goblin rules outlined by Superdorf in
Poisondrool.
- Goblins don't become uber-legendary gods of war-- at least, not so quickly as dwarves do. All military squads must have a minimum of 4 soldiers in them, to prevent excessive sparring.
- Goblins defend themselves with cold iron, not by cowering behind walls and snares. Enemies must be able to path into the fortress proper at all times, and conventional traps are not to be used on enemy soldiers. (At least, not on purpose.)
- Goblins believe in quantity over quality. All goblins are to have all crafting labors enabled at all times.
I'll be tweaking the rules a little, but for the most part they will be observed. All goblins will be split into one of two castes: craftpeasants and medics. Medics are just that: medics. Generally they will also have some other important job, or a job that can't/shouldn't be drafted. Mining, woodcutting, noble-ing, y'know. Craftpeasants are the other caste. They do everything else. Crafting, hauling, fighting, and just in general killing themselves for me. (I'll have them mostly abbreviated as CP, since nicknaming a hundred goblins Craftpeasant is too much work)
However, as you'll note in Badwild, I happened to quite easily get a bunch of legendary warriors that easily crushed large dwarven armies even when they couldn't figure out how pants work. That's pretty clearly a violation of rule number one, so something has to change.
Well, so maybe 20% is a bit much, that's 5 years of new training to equal 1 year of regular training, which is only getting to ~10 skill level in most things. I should nerf it so I don't lose so many gobli—
Okay then. 10%. This is fine. We'll just crank population way up to compensate for our compensations, since more goblins = more bloodshed, and that's what we all really want out of this, innit? I've got a fancy new laptop I want to test the limits of, so I'll see how well 140 goblins goes and go up from there if I think I can handle it.
After all the boring work making a new install of DF with all races playable mod, the aforementioned combat skill rate mods, a tileset installation, init changes, setting up an imgur dump and dedicated folder for images, DFhack installation, all the work that sucks is done! Oh right, world gen. Hm. Fiiine, I'll make a—no, screw this. I'm taking my fancy world from that perfect fort I'm technically still planning and then throwing an ugly horde of goblins right at my beautiful masterpiece of a world. Doesn't have enough dwarves, so I guess I'll tweak mountains a bit and call it a day. And after slightly more "why aren't the dwarves doing anything" than I'd like, I get this nice little world, "The World of Forever".
It'll do just fine. I appreciate the irony in the name, since this is the Dwarf Fortress equivalent of a DnD one shot.
After a quick comb through, I find a spot that won't immediately suck, and look no further. I want to do a good biome fort, since I keep doing evil biomes all the time in everything and it's getting a mite old.
It's perfectly flat, has a bit of metal, not too many annoying trees, and is near a bunch of dwarves and a few elves. Didn't look for humans settlements, but it says there's humans somewhere in range, so whatever. We'll be angering everybody we can, probably including one of the also nearby goblin civilizations. Also, there is a very small gap in the mountains.
So I don't have to trek all over the place for murderin. We'll be members of "The Wickedness of Failing," another name too hilarious to pass up. It's the Western goblin civilization of the three.
I do take the care to actually prepare carefully for the embark, so I can follow my CP rule. I get a bunch of ore for my military:
and some medics + worthless peasants. The medics have adequate skill in all 5 medical skills.
Maybe "prepare carefully" was an overstatement. Whatever! Embark!
Tormentvirgins... huh. Alright. Doubt they'll be too many families in this fort and I seriously hope there's not an absence of torment, so this'll be an easy name to live up to. 'specially if we see the same frustrating bugs as we have the last two times. Well, lets see what we've got!
Nice flat area, very few annoying ponds (though I suppose that also means very little hospital water, but when did inadequate medical supplies ever stop me from running a hospital?), and a general upbeat vibe from the good biome.
And now... lets get the show on the road. I set up initial labors for the CPs, which is everything a goblin will actually bother doing that isn't medical labor or mining/woodcutting.
I begin my setup. Here's the basic floorplan. Might do a bunch of aboveground stuff to kill time, but goblins aren't afraid of the dark. Also I need stones to do stuff.
I also offload all nobility things on the woodcutter medic, since he's not perpetually busy digging.
By the end of spring, we've got a nice fort carved out. The second empty square is carved out, so I make it into a tavern. Everybody's busy, but it'll keep the beak dogs from attracting those abominable unicorns.
Everything's going smoothly, and the fort is progressing quick. And then suddenly—
*
sighhh* Yes thank you game, I
am aware that goblins send their caravans in the summer. Thank you. Whatever, I didn't need anything from them in bulk anyways. I'll just remember to make a depot next time. I request metal and medical supplies and give orders for a depot to be made for them to sit in while I don't actually bother trading with them.
After the caravan, things are pretty quiet for most of the rest of the season. I set up a military and start prep for training (it's all hands on deck for a bit longer, though, can't let the CPs have a "break" just yet).
Not a full 10 yet, but training will be extremely slow when it starts and I'm not even starting it yet, so not much reason to worry about skill gap yet. I just make a copper whip+wood shield uniform for now, since that's what I've got.
And then, almost exactly halfway through summer, hark! Migrants!
I watch them stream onto the map and then have a look at what they all actually are.
Three children, which isn't ideal but doesn't really matter. None of them will be working age any time soon—the oldest is three. Still, I get four able bodies out of it, so it's not the end of the world. It basically doubles my workforce, since three of my starting seven are medics.
The medics with pickaxes are getting low on stuff to do, so I also designate a *real* barracks to be dug and make them dig the main staircase all the way down to the caverns.
I'm lucky and they hit the caverns in a nice spot: the breach is only one z level tall, making it nice and easy to re-seal and continue the staircase uninterrupted with a minor amount of construction. While the stairway is open, one of the medics has a brief encounter with a hungry head, which I didn't actually see in real time since I've been zooming along at 200 FPS to get stuff done.
Only bruises, so missus medic doesn't really need any medical care. I don't even bother making a zone. Most of the people who should be down there are armed, either with picks or the whips I brought along, but in order to minimize incidents I order the CPs to dogpile both the hungry head and a nearby giant olm. It goes as expected.
Shortly after, a troll peacefully wanders up the staircase before scaring the liaison and murdering one of the beak dogs. My CPs get a bit more combat XP.
I opt to quickly finish the walling-off, since that troll could've been actually dangerous to my untrained goblins, and as much as mass-murder is fun, I don't quite want it yet because it will inhibit future mass-murder if it happens now.
Just as mid-autumn hits, the medics hit warm stone, finishing the main staircase.
My second hard-coded wave arrives a little later, bringing an almost identical group to the last one for all the things that matter to me, which is number of usable goblins versus number of useless children.
This wave fills up the last of my first squad, with two extra CPs that I don't bother recruiting, since I don't have any semblance of a metalworking industry online and I only brought ten whips.
Speaking of metalworking, one of our "Deep metals" is native silver.
Nice for blunt weapons, though there's still nothing to make armor out of except for imported/initially brought iron. That said, I brought
plenty of limonite at the start, as you all saw.
Winter flies by, with a few big progress milestones but nothing of actual interest. I finish clear-cutting the embark and moving all the wood around my staircase,
and smoothing has begun,
and metalworking is getting underway,
and lastly...
Marriage! Between two of the starting seven, who happened to have downtime on account of both being medics. Guess the miners need more work, can't go around getting married couples having children.
And with that, the year draws to a quiet close. Chisels clink, the forges are coming to life, trees have been cut down, and... dangit, that sounds too dwarfy! The goblins are all unskilled, the fort has already been given a nice sprinkling of blood, merchants gave me a bunch of free garbage on account of the series' trademark bugs, goblins are going to start getting upset since I haven't made an atom smasher to destroy those troll corpses, we have no functioning hospital and will need one soon, and nobody is competent at anythi—wait I said that one already. You get the point. Goblins! Not Dwarves™!
All in all, not too shabby for a first year, given that I'm hard-pressed to even embellish things to be going poorly. Didn't make as much progress as I would've liked, but a lot of the heavy lifting is out of the way, like rooms being set up and wood being hauled. Wood will be a serious problem for smithing and I'll definitely have to look to the caverns for extra, which I also need for a good source of water. Next year will probably be another boring one, since I need those things, a hospital, a bit of training (for all the good it will do; it's probably worthless with how much I nerfed it), and to really crank my metalsmithing up, since my unskilled goblins will get massacred with no armor. Come to think of it, I need more bedrooms too, but that'll become a backburner project as I should have enough goblins to do multiple things next year. And... huh. Since I have virtually no ability to get skilled soldiers, I might need to unironically use beak dogs for raids, which I guess would have to be a year 2 project as well. So, a lot on my plate, but not unmanageable.
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Topic: Tormentvirgins: Because dying from bugs twice wasn't enough (Read 1885 times)