Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Antifringe]

To fully understand what's going on here, you may want to read the Terraforming and Terrorforming threads.
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=23559.0
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=23622.0


Behold Sibreksizar



 Nestled in the foothills of The Relieved Point mountain range, under the shadow of the volcanic New Flame, and spanning into the southern border of the dense Strangled Forest!  There is an extensive underground river fed by the nearby Seerashmed brook, and a magnificent chasm marks the boundary between the mountains and the forest valley.  There are confirmed reports of marble, sand, arable soil, iron deposits, and a wealth of precious gems and metals.   Rumors abound about a vein of the mythical adamantine, but serious-minded dwarves pay these stories no heed.

The explorers report that the New Flame lies in the northwestern corner of a box canyon, providing an unprecedently smooth surface.  The canyon abruptly terminates into a sheer cliff face, plunging down to the grassy valley floor.



But there are dangers.  The chasm is a breeding ground for both troglodytes and birdmen, and the two tribes have formed an uneasy alliance.  Several caravans have been lost to these brigands. Survivors report that the savages use trained naked mole dogs, giant moles, and terrifying giant birds as war animals.

The subterranean tributary of the Seerashmed brook is home to an unusually large community of mer creatures.  These aggressive beings have apparently found a channel to the surface and are using it to raid the nearby outlands. 

The New Flame would be dangerous just as a volcano, but it is also home to numerous fire beings.  The fire imps are especially malicious. The scouts observed them burning a mountain goat to death, apparently just for sport.

These hazards also bring opportunities for the bold.  The courageous scouts made they following additional discoveries:

The Vermillion Halls.  Built around a magma spring and paved in volcanic cinnabar, the fiery nobility of the New Flame to hold court here.  It also contains a hoard of collected hematite and bauxite, the only two treasures that the fire beings can hoard without destroying.  It is likely that the hematite in this chamber represents the entire natural supply in the mountain.  The bauxite is even more momentous, since no reliable source as ever been reported by any of the three civilized peoples.  The presence of these materials and a magma pool make this an ideal site for a forge, but the magma pool is believed to connect directly to the caldera.  Any attempt at setting camp in these halls will surely draw unwelcome attention!



The Seerashmed Marshes!  A naturally occurring underground marsh, washed up on the banks of the underground river  The fresh water and tower cap forest are treasures enough, but this area is also used as the treasure store of the Seerashmed mer creatures. Conquering this area will not be easy.  The scouts reported that a crude channel connects the marsh to the eastern end of the box canyon.  Colonists will have to be wary of raiders.



An unnamed sandy cave.



This cave, burrowed into the side of a forested hill and connected directly to the chasm, serves as the den of the beast men of the forest.  The wares of waylaid caravans can be seen strew carelessly about the rough, loamy floor.  Would be thieves risk being trapped between the single narrow entrance and the yawning abyss of the chasm.  Even worse, the chasm allows the birdmen to flit in and out, making a pincer attack a very real possibility. 

The team of 35 veteran soldiers have been assembled.  They will cleanse the land of these evils, and claim the riches of Sibreksizar by rightful conquest!

***

That's how it was supposed to go.  The expedition and most of the supplies were almost completely wiped out by an avalanche while traversing the Relieved Points.  The seven survivors are bereft of arms and armor, low on food and water, and sick with despair.   Stranded and alone, they have no choice but to dig in, make a stand, and try to survive.

***
The situation:

I used an extreme application of the "Terrorforming" technique to create a very hostile map. 

Here are of the known monsters:

Denizens of the Stranglewood
27 Caveswallowmen
24 Troglodytes
27 Naked Mole Dogs
30 Giant Moles
22 Giant Cave Swallows

Denizens of the Seerashmed Marshes
28 Lizardmen
29 Snakemen
28 Olmmen
55 Frogmen
12 Giant Olms
13 Cave Crocodiles

Denizens of the New Flame
43 Fire Imps
23 Magma Men

Experiments have shown that the humanoid monsters frequently go into ambush mode when reclaiming a site.  I strongly suspect that there are many more trogs and caveswallowmen than there appear to be.

The monster treasure vaults are not readily available to the player, but they still contribute to the fortress wealth.  This will attract goblin and kobold ambushes. 

Immigrants will probably be a long time in coming.  My first act after reclaiming the site was to kill the 28 extraneous dwarves.  This is not the sort of thing that travelers like to read about in the brochure!  Any migrants that do arrive will be unarmed and likely to get shredded by the natives.  The founders cannot rely on reinforcements to save the day.

Caravans can bring much needed supplies, but unless I create and protect a safe route to the depot, I don't think that the wagons will make it.  Besides, how will I have time to create trade goods?

The survivors have about one year's worth of meat and alcohol.  There are no plants or seeds.  They have four war dogs which can be used for food, but they will also be vital for defense.  The only wood they have is the wood that the wagon is made out of.  They have no weapons or armor.  They do have an anvil, but no real prospect of using it.

To not get overrun, they must dig in, prepare their defenses, and level up.  Unfortunately, they also need to get seeds, arable soil, and water, all of which requires venturing out into the dangerous regions.  To thrive, they must make metal weapons and armor.

The survivors are sick with despair, seeing as how I just executed all of their friends.  I cannot afford any negative thoughts.  I will savescum for a while if it turns out that I keep losing everyone to insanity right off the bat.

I'm planning on doing some hardcore Seven Samurai action.  Faced with a numerically superior foe, the dwarves will have to strategically strike at exposed monsters, trying to whittle down their numbers through hit and run tactics.   Elaborate defenses like trap corridors and moats are not allowed.  Even a full goblin siege is completely stymied by a single strip of water.  I'm trying to play this as a unique challenge.  There's no point in making a super hard map if the first thing I do is build a monster thresher to do all of the fighting for me.

I will post updates as play progresses.  This may be a hilariously short game.

In true Seven Samurai fashion, I will try to keep accurate count of of my kills, so as to better track the military situation.

I'll also make a backup of this and see what it looks like in adventure mode!

[sneakey pete]

Looks like this'll be good. Don't suppose you'll take named dwarves?

[Haven]

It's made of the awesome. For the sake of noting, kills are traked on the Dwarf's profile page.

Also, are you allowing immigration? Are you taking applicants? Are you uploading the map so we can all have a die-along?

[Glacies]

I'd like a dwarf if they're named ones. Make him the brewer/cook/grower/macedwarf.

[Guillo]

Do you have a backup save of this map from just before sending in your reclamation team? I tried to terraform this a couple times and accidentally breached the caldera the first time and stupidly dug up an underground river the second time...

I would greatly appreciate it if you threw up a save on DFFD.

[Antifringe]

Do you have a backup save of this map from just before sending in your reclamation team? I tried to terraform this a couple times and accidentally breached the caldera the first time and stupidly dug up an underground river the second time...

I highly recommend Dtil.  It lets you undo critical errors, and also made many of the more elaborate effects possible.  You might also try For Each Tile.

I would greatly appreciate it if you threw up a save on DFFD.

I made many progressive saves.  I have the virgin world, I have several saves at different points of the terraforming (in case I wanted to change something), a "terrorformed" map and a save I made right after killing the extra dwarves and destroying the unwanted weapons and armor.   

I'll see about uploading when I get back from work.

And yes, you can all get names.  For flavor, each of the seven is a master of a different weapon (well, there are two axedwarves because there are only six weapons).  Their civilian skills are random.  They are supposed to be random survivors, not a cogent team.  Maybe they'll all have useful skills.  Maybe they're all cheesemakers.  They're going to have to learn.

[zorp]

Wow. Can i have a named dwarf
Mummy mummy! i want a named dwarf for my Bday!
Could you call one Manthius?
thanks in advance

[Zako]

Me too! Me too!

If you are naming dwarves, can I have a marksdwarf or axedwarf? Either is good, but prefer the marksdwarf.

Thanks!

[Antifringe]

So, made a few experimental stabs at this today, and it's freaking hard!  At the start, you have almost unchallenged control over most of the box canyon, but the monsters gradually begin to spread out.  I had fire imps burning the supplies, I had a cave crocodile bite the leg off of my leader while he was conducting a meeting at the wagon, I had moles the size of Volvos eating my dogs and I had a freaking Haast's eagle making strafing runs on my workers.  What few survivors I had left were forced underground before I had even began to move my supplies inside.  The trogs are probably pissing in the wine barrels even as I speak.

It sucked, but in a fun way.

What's not so fun is dealing with insanity.  The surviving dwarves all start out deep in the miserable band of the mood spectrum.  It requires intense save scumming to get anything done without permanently losing people to madness.  There isn't time to build bedrooms or statue gardens or anything.  No fun at all.

There is a solution, but it requires even more engineering.  I had the original terraforming team build an above-ground sanatorium.  It consists of seven rooms, each one with filled with statues and redundant furniture.  The idea is that you can lock each of your chosen seven in a separate padded cell and keep them there until they admire enough statues and smash enough furniture to  elevate their mode to "very unhappy."    You can then let them out. 

This keeps you from arbitrarily losing the game before even digging your first room, but preserves the challenge of having to deal with extremely unhappy dwarves. 

Once the sanatorium has served its purpose, you can just pretend that it doesn't exist.  I might even include a self destruct lever to help with the tidying up.  My initial tests indicate that this method can work with only a minimal amount of save scumming.   

I also discovered that since you start out with over 30 dwarves, your leader becomes a mayor.  This is true even after you kill off the extra dwarves, and remains true even if the original mayor was one of the ones you killed.  I wonder if this also means that I'll be getting fey moods and sieges.

I'll try again tomorrow and see if I can make a proper update.

Oh, yeah, everyone who asked gets a dwarf.  I'll try to accommodate your wishes as best as possible.  I hope you like dying!

[Jools]

Can you name the swordsdwarf Kikuchiyo?

And if possible, give him a pointlessly large sword, and get him fatally wounded by a goblin leader with a crossbow (who he then kills).

[MathijsBuster]

Mhh.. this looks interesting!
Can I get a dwarf named Adaras with a crossbow? Other weapon is fine too. x3

Good luck! This will be an interesting read.

[Glacies]

You people and your sissy ranged weapons. 

[Paulus Fahlstrom]

I'd be curious to check out the map and see what you're up against. I don't suppose you could post it on DFFD?

[Antifringe]

Whew!  This scenario sure takes a lot of prep work!  Killing off the extra dwarves without causing a suicide spiral is very tricky.  The sanatorium idea helped, but it wasn't enough.  I had one dwarf smash six pieces of furniture in a row without climbing out of "miserable." 

The problem is that the Dwarf Crusher completely destroys its victims.  It doesn't leave a corpse.  To the friends of the deceased, this is the same thing as letting the bodies rot away.  This means that everyone was a taking a double dose of unhappiness. 

To fix this, I magicked up some water with Dtil and made a drowning chamber instead.  This seems to help a lot.  The dwarves are still miserable, but a little bit of anger therapy seems to be enough to make them merely "very unhappy".  I think that I can make this concept work now.

As a side effect, the very first project that the survivors must undertake is to properly inter their dead comrades.  This adds a nice bit of bleak drama to the game and further deepens the challenge.

A lot of people have been pointing me to the direction of the DFFD.  I didn't know about this resource until just now.  Before I upload anything, I would like to generate a nice, cleanly produced save game where all of the tedious metagame chores have been finished.  That way, people can just jump right into the action.   

[Antifringe]

Finally found time to get this up and running!  I finally squashed the insanity issue by adding the [NOEMOTION] tag to the dwarves.  While I don't like doing this, I believe it is the only way to make this scenario playable.  After a full game year passes, the negative thoughts associated with initial deaths should dissipate, and I can remove this tag.

Each journal entry will correspond to a single "dwarf day," defined as the period between sleep cycles.

All dwarves have novice level skill in Armor User, Shield User, and Wrestler.  They also each have novice level in one weapon and have unprefixed skill in one civilian profession.  Given the extreme difficultly of the situation, I relaxed my intial restrictions and chose the seven civilian skills based on what I thought would help my dwawrves survive.

There five named dwarves and two still up for grabs:

Kikuchiyo: Weaponsmith, Sword   
Adaras: Leatherworker, Crossbow
Zako: Bonecarver, Crossbow
Glacies: Grower, Mace
Manthius: Herbalist, Hammer
Unnamed #1: Armorsmith, Axe
Unnamed #2: Organizer, Axe (I actually wanted Appraiser, but OH WELL!)


Here is an annotated map to help readers understand the tactical situation better:



I'm no going to try to narrate this in character.  I have no idea you is going to live or die, and this is really more a story about tactics then character development.

Day One

The situation is hard.  The most natural method for starting a fort would be to tunnel directly in to the face of the sheer cliff, but the entire northern valley is crawling with monsters.  A single giant mole could kill or cripple two dwarves in a few rounds, or any one of the numerous flying critters could come swooping out of the sky and climb back up into the clouds carrying some dwarf's face in its claws.  I choose to burrow straight down into the mountain, right by the base camp.  While ultimately this is not as good a position as using the cliff face, it has the benefit of not getting my entire squad killed, so I'm going for it.

I designate areas for food storage, dining commons, workshop space, and living quarters.  Most of this mountain is made of marble, and any dwarves who live through this will be able to live like kings.

I'm barely done making designations when I notice a pack of marmots cavorting near the base camp.  I have no idea when the next time will be that I seem game animals roaming in a safe spot of the map, and I could really use the meat, bones, and leather.  I don't dare assign anyone to the hunting job (this is a great way to get people killed on this map), so I quickly draft everybody in the hopes that I can run the marmots into a corner. 

This does not work well.  During the chase, some of the panicked marmots scattered onto the top of the volcanic mound.  Fire imps started pouring out of the caldera like ants out of an anthill.

Run little dwarf, run!

I immediately tried to pull out, but the imps had other plans.

A minute into the game and someone almost dies

After two hair rising near misses, the imps break off their pursuit.  I watch in fascinated horror as eleven imps climb out of the caldera and pour out into the southern reaches of the map

I have no choice but concede uncontested control of the bottom part of the map to the fire monsters.  The fire imps end up killing one of the marmots, but there is no way I could ever claim the corpse without risking serious injury or death.  It'll just have to rot.

Meanwhile, I notice activity at the entrance to the marsh.  Two frogmen and a cave croc have wandered out and are milling around.  If it weren't for the croc, I'd probably organize a militia and try to rack up an easy two kills, but that croc can snap limb off an unarmored dwarf in one round. 

I also notice a troglodyte scout has climbed the foothills to the east and is observing my base camp.  I try circling two men behind him to cut off his line of retreat and catch him in a pincer, but he immediately retreats behind the ridge line as soon as the first dwarf leaves the base camp. 

Three snakemen have emerged for the marsh channel, bring a giant olm with them.  There is now a sizable force of mer creatures  occupying the eastern map.  I notice that they are starting to spread out and explore.  If they keep expanding at this rate, they will overrun my wagon before I even break the ground. 

Regretting the time lost to the marmot chase, I quickly assign everyone to mining.  I notice that by the time everyone grabs their picks, there are now two troglodytes watching me from the ridge line.

Wanting to prioritize my digging before the first sleep cycle hits and costs me even more time, I dig out a single room for food storage and start hauling stuff in.  I get the last barrel in just a few minutes before night fall.

Status:
Food 55
Drink 119
Seeds none
Wood 2

Kills none

I'm leaving town this weekend, but I'll play some more next week.