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[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

in 2d losing was fun because it was so easy now in 3d losing is fun because you have to make it most of the time and who doesn't love a madness inducing megastructure? where like giant gods to them giant cthulhu type elder gods but you know what i mean. right?

[Noble Digger]

So I recently had an awesome titan attack on my current fort, Knotlances.

It's spring. The hippies have shown up with a bunch of useless cloth and a few berries. My military are at their posts when...goblin ambush! Thankfully most of them attack from the western side; the only entrance that I've trapped heavily. My military mops up, taking down a couple of suspiciously tall, slender goblins with pointy ears. The place is a mess though, and my traps are now all clogged/set off.

So that tears it. First these elves bring worthless crap to my depot, now they're leading goblin ambushers? I send my trader to the trade depot and sieze the berries. The elves are a bit upset and decided to leave early.

That's when the titan shows up. Titan heads for the south entrance where the elves are just leaving. She proceeds to kill a mule, pick up a bin of cloth and pound the elves to a fine paste with it! Almost as if she knew my frustration, and was trying to say "Yeah, seriously guys. Enough with the *&$^%-ing cloth."

Sadly this was the only thing we could agree on. The titan proceeded to slaughter my military, who were apparently busy patting themselves on the backs after the goblin ambush. They trickle in in ones and twos and are promptly cloth-binned to death.

That's when the immigrants arrived.

The titan figures she likes the look of these new playmates. She wanders halfway over the map and begins mashing the new arrivals into the ground. Killing roughly half (some 7 or 8 out of 16) of them.

To make a long story short it returned to the fort killed a couple of wardogs and made short work of my remaining melee dwarves. I had to recruit everyone to fight the thing. It kills or mortally wounds even more dwarves, but eventually a mechanic strikes the killing blow.

Final count is 28 dead dwarves. Fifteen more die later from their wounds, lack of health care, beatings for tantrum-related crimes or being murdered by tantruming dwarves.

Incredibly they pull through. The fort is still going. I've enshrined the titan's cloth bin as a memorial. 

Probably already suggested, but place a series of workshops near that bin and decorate it with everything you possibly can. Stud it with 20 kinds of metal, decorate with bone, encrust with gems, cloth images, leather images.

[Deathworks]

Hello!

Jester: I think your advice does not necessarily help with the "goal" of the discussion. While your methods are sound ways of increasing the tantrum probability, they do not really guarantee a tantrum spiral which makes a fortress collapse. In addition, I am not sure whether you would be able to really destroy the fortress by this method in a reasonable amount of time - I would suspect that you get one dwarf tantrum, maybe injure two others before getting killed by the Sheriff or some such. Then the injured two tantrum with even less efficiency (I mean, after the first dwarf probably cut off parts of them, their attacks lose power, I expect), and in less than 10 tantrums, things would probably calm down again.

In addition, it seems to lack the suddenness of a tantrum spiral. Your fortress would be bleak and constantly on the brink of destruction anyway, so I would imagine it would effectively remain in a state of constant decay with just enough immigration to stay alive. A sudden tantrum spiral hitting a prospering fortress sounds much more "interesting" - with social bonds well-established and dwarves blissfully optimistic, the sudden outbreak of violence would become an impressive tide; and if not just half a dozen but dozens of dwarves get involved in violence and die because of a chain reaction, I would expect immigration figures to go down (as well as probably an increase in miscarriages).

Deathworks

[Angellus]

Hello!

Well, that is indeed an impressive incident. As for the cloth bin, I can only assume the titan hoped to find a deadly loincloth hidden in there, the standard weapon of epic heroes

How big was your fortress population at the time of the incident? This would make it easier for us to understand just what this meant for your fortress.

As for pulling through, I think that really losing DF in fortress mode completely is very difficult to achieve. Perma-flooding is no longer available, so only mass starvation could cause trouble, but ever since 3D, starvation didn't really pose half as much of a danger as in 2D (at least in standard maps).

In the end, you will have a handful of dwarves who had no friends and thus didn't tantrum, and they will continue from scratch.

Actually, now that I think of it, it could be a challenge for some of the nastier players - preparing a fortress that will actually get wiped out completely by a tantrum spiral. I think that would be rather difficult to achieve (especially if you allow for normal immigration).

Deathworks

I once had a single farmer killed and they tauntrumed down from something like 86 to 0...

[Deathworks]

Greetings!

That is a really impressive incident there, Angellus. May I ask whether the fortress was meant to go down like that or whether this was a (nasty) surprise for you? What was the fortress like before that happened?

Deathworks

[sneakey pete]

No rooms. This seems to be the biggest key to it. The happy thoughts from their own bed are usually enough to tip the balance for me.

[Angellus]

Greetings!

That is a really impressive incident there, Angellus. May I ask whether the fortress was meant to go down like that or whether this was a (nasty) surprise for you? What was the fortress like before that happened?

Deathworks

It was a nice, rather large fortress, completely underground exept for its defences, consisting of a entryhall with two ballista's and after that a (LOOOOOONG) corridor with traps of all kinds, I held back nearly every siege with the ballista's , which continiously trained (I had moats and walls around that place, so that it would spare my ammunition ^^).
Then at a certain moment, a farmer went out into the moat, retrieving the ammo and got shot by a goblin, insta-gib.
At that moment tauntrums started to happen, one after another, mostly in my central meeting area, where nearly every dwarf in my fortress spends 90% of his/her time.
One tauntrum leads to another tauntrum and soon I was watching as my complete fortress was mauling itself to a unending tauntrum spiral.
The last dwarf standing was a lost and incontent babbling dwarf, who never had my approvement of making her artifact... (I found this last dwarf after I returned after a short respite, wanted to let them tauntrum out themselves.)

[Vieto]

I would suggest praying for immigrants.