Started a fortress intending to experiment with just what it takes to conquer hell. 2x2 embark. Plenty of candy, though I didn't get to it. Nice fort. 160 dwarves, 60 in the army, most equipped with iron, bronze, or better. Two underground layers of tree farm, enclosed the map with a wall, 200+ cage traps to stop invasions cold so my boys can train up on captured goblins without the exploit of danger rooms. Mist-generator in the legendary dining hall. Massive magma furnace/smelter level to process goblinite. Legendary craftsdwarves, legendary masons, legendary mechanics, near-legendary armor and weaponsmiths (from migrations, no less). Humming food, clothing, leather, animal industries. Lowest happiness is borderline ecstatic.
Two critical errors.
1. Backup saves turned off, because I'm loading and unloading this fort throughout the day and constantly hunting for the latest save file is a pain. If something goes wrong I can always just kill the process and reload the last save; now that the fortress is strong and self-contained I won't need to go back a season.
2. One communal dormitory and one barracks. I don't need to worry about tantrum spirals; I'm not going to take any mass casualties, and lots of strong relationships make for lots of happy dwarves. I like my dwarves to be happy. And digging out bedrooms is such a pain, and there's no coal on this map so I've got a perpetual wood shortage even with friendly elves AND two tree-farm levels and I always need bins and barrels more than beds. Besides, I put doors on all the workshops, so I can isolate any crazed unfulfilled moods. It's not a problem.
Ambushes happen. They are effortlessly processed by my cage traps and my soldiers take joy in slaughter as they tear the naked goblins and trolls to bits.
A siege arrives. It is also absorbed effortlessly. This fortress is unkillable. (No flying goblins this time so we're secure behind our beautiful wall.)
A titan made of steam dares make an appearance. Ha! My skilled squads take him out with a single blow.
Another siege. I laugh at your crap sieges, Dwarf Fortress.
Another titan, this one made of salt. He is dispatched and our donkey meat roasts are made all the more savory. One soldier dies. Our first casualty. Two more soldiers somehow lose feet - I think they got wounded and the feet fell off, but I don't really know. They are ably cared for in the infirmary by our elite physicians. The fortress sails on, serene and happy.
A siege - a big one this time! And led by a goblin general. Quite impressive, several squads of trolls, goblin bowmen by the dozens, the map swarms with goblin figures. Tragically, two dwarves are outside recovering wood - a soldier and a bowyer, neither important. The soldier goes down fighting. The bowyer somehow manages to kill the leader of the pike squad before being torn to bits - apparently he was a semi-epic fighter and I missed him in my induction screening for the army. They mill confusedly around their fallen leader. The remainder of the siege streams mindlessly into the legion of cage traps as our dwarves laugh and drink inside. A few flee the edge of the map. The lone band of pikemen sits disconsolate on the southern map edge, unwilling to leave their dead leader but not yet having had enough punishment to flee the map.
Well, I've had this happen before and it causes no end of problems. I'm not having my delicate FPS lag because of bunch of idiot pikemen won't go home. Veteran squads a and b head out the gate and draw some pikemen away from the main body.
A few pikemen charge to engage. Wow, these guys are actually pretty tough. My squad leaders go down with injuries. The squad will not engage. Squads c and d come to reinforce - but spotting the pikemen, they charge in singly instead of waiting to mass. With melee spreading across the bottom of the map, the veterans finally give up consoling their squad leaders for their injured footsies and charge into battle. The pikemen are slaughtered. When it is over, seven of my brave soldiers have perished. A terrible battle - but one which we can recover from. Nine casualties out of 160 will not destroy morale. The season changes, and the save file is written.
Now, to recover...except...my God. Apparently those nine casualties were the most beloved dwarves in the history of dwarvenkind. EIGHTY dwarves are miserable or worse. Everyone, report to the waterfall room and statue garden for mandatory goodthoughts! It is not enough. One soldier driven mad by his experiences goes berserk and kills a child before his squadmates grimly bring him down. The child's parents, already bereaved by the death of their friends, go mad.
The murder cycle begins.
Ten dwarves have already filled our small, unintended-for-use burial chapel. The masons hastily carve more coffins. They fill up as the murders continue. Each murder triggers more death, more carnage, more insanity. Our population drops from 150 to 140. A butcher with four children does not have enough to live for; when his youngest becomes melancholy and jumps into the disposal chasm he berserks in turn and the whole family spirals into madness and death. Dwarf Therapist shows row upon row of unbroken red squares. A few oblivious dwarves soldier cheerfully on, ecstatic to the last. The population is 130. Now 125. Now 120. The mist generator is shattered by a tantruming engineer. Orders to repair it go unfilled. A mason with a fey mood, unnoticed in the storm of tantrum and punching messages, is driven mad and carves a swathe through the surviving children. The baron is struck down by an unknown hand and the Royal Mausoleum which had given him happy thoughts only a few weeks earlier becomes his final resting place. Leaderless, the dwarves elect a new mayor who serves only days before being killed in his turn. The population is below 100 now, nearly all miserable and tantruming.
A shining beacon of a fortress, a baronetcy, well on the road towards becoming the Mountainhome, is now a charnel house of broken cage traps, shattered tables, smashed screw pumps and toppled statues. Miasma fills the corridors as the bodies of children rot in the mud.
All hope is lost. The captured goblins, unspoiled and still caged in the storage area from lack of dwarven labor to strip them, mock and jeer from behind the stout wooden bars. Their own mockery will be the last thing they hear, as they starve and die in the abandoned halls of the fortress.
Thank you, heroic bowyer. Your astounding feat of goblin murder has killed your family, killed your friends. You killed them all.
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Topic: Face Palm moments you had in Dwarf Fortress (Read 2208938 times)