Continuing my situation with the FB, werewarthog (not wereboar as I said earlier), and outpost liaison: I take the time and search through my dwarves for Baron candidates. It turns out that I have over a dozen with no item preferences, including my resident vampire, who is currently sitting out a 401 day sentence for 2 murders. He's also one of my best soldiers, which makes having him in prison inconvenient at the moment. But there's no way I'm making him Baron. Anyway, I pick out the least offensive of the lot and recommend him to the liaison, then sit impatiently through all the gossip about who got kidnapped, and who got elected mayor in forts I've never heard of. Then we go through the trade agreements while I'm really thinking about other things. "You want lots of drums next year? Sure, whatever. We're making rock mugs, like usual." I finally get rid of him. "Yeah, yeah, rise and fall together. Excuse me while I go deal with a forgotten beast and a werewarthog, or we're going to fall together a lot sooner than you might think."
So I get the lever pulled and the bridge raises so I don't have to deal with the FB in the caverns for the moment. Then I set the "DEFCON1" alert to activate the civilian burrow, and then station my melee and crossbow squads in the hallway just inside the door that leads out to the depot and main entrance hallway. At this point the werewarthog is getting close enough to my outer walls that I'm a little concerned about whether the crossbow dwarves who are supposed to be patrolling the walls will make it inside in time, so I check and there is no one on the walls. I suppose this should bother me, but at this point I'm happy to see that they're derelicting their duties.
I watch the werehog rush through my outer gate, and just as he's going down the ramp into my fort towards my waiting ambush, the commander of my crossbow squad appears at the top of the ramp. *facepalm*. "WTF are you doing there?!!" He and the hog start dancing around, jumping out of each other's way while I direct both squads to get out there and help.
I go and check to see where they all are, and see two swordsdwarves and the outpost liaison coming up the hallway between the main stairs and the entrance. The archer captain and the werehog continue dancing, and I see the hog manage to bite the captain a couple of times, so I make a note to quarantine him if he survives. Then the hog gets a wrestling hold on the captain and dislocates his hip, causing the captain to give in to the pain. In the mean time, the liaison and the two soldiers get to the 1 tile wide door and do a Three Stooges routine trying to get through it, forcing the soldiers to get down and crawl. "Thanks a lot, liaison. I really need for you to slow my troops down. You're just going to turn around and run as soon as you round the next corner and see the fight, anyways."
Well, the hog is now alternating between practicing various wrestling moves and futilely trying to bit the captain's head through his -steel helm-. Another marksdwarf shows up, fires one bolt (to no effect) and then decides to rush into hand to hand combat with a werewarthog. Another facepalm moment.
Then the liaison rounds the corner ahead of the swordsdwarves, and rather than run away, he charges forward. He proceeds to rush up to the werewarthog and grab its tongue! Facepalm moment number 3. "Here's something they may not have taught you in diplomacy school: If you're fighting a night creature who spreads it's terrible curse by biting, do not put your hands anywhere near its mouth. In particular, do not reach inside its mouth and grab its tongue, you inbred moron!"
Predictably, the werehog spends most of the rest of the fight biting and shaking the liaison. This does, however, give the rest of my troops the opportunity to arrive and eventually kill the beast. So now I've got an archer captain that was bitten a few times and has several dislocated joints, another soldier who I think was bitten once or twice (need to go over the logs again), and an outpost liaison who was bitten so many times that he is faint from loss of blood. I don't know if I want him to survive or not. All the effort of searching for a baron candidate is wasted if he dies. But if he lives, will I have to worry about him turning into a werewarthog in the heart of my fort next year when he comes back?
I love this game!
Keith