I finally found The Spot I've Always Wanted. An easy-to-find magma pipe, river, underground river, flux stone and much, much more. I was really exited about building this particular fortress: I really loved to try out this new "literally build fortress around a magma pipe" -idea I had got. I know, not a revolutionary idea, but all my previous fortresses had been either complete failures or just really, really boring to play thanks to very bad design & layout.
I embarked, started making fortress, everything was fine. Just got farm started up, magma re-directed so I could make magma smelters/forges and stuff, booze/barrel production going on, housing for every dwarf. First caravan visits and I make very good trades thanks to well crafted mechanisms. I already get my first immigrants and population goes up to 14 dwarves. Things are going well.
Then I get "A vile force of darkness has arrived!" (or whatever the siege message is).
Oh shit, I completely forgot to disable the orc mod before I created this world & embarked! I have no emergency fortress sealing mechanisms, no raising bridges, moats, walls or even DOORS that I could forbid. Only thing between the massive orcish horde and my 14 civialian dwarves are stone-fall traps, 5x3 squares in size. I draft all dwarves and position them in same place for a last stand. Orcs run over the traps like nothing happened and proceed to slaughter every living dwarf. "Your strenght has broken" (or whatever the "YOU LOSE!" -message is).
At first I'm pissed at myself for forgetting whole orc mod, and then bit depressed over losing a very good spot and starting fortress. Then I remember a feature I have never ever used before: (R)eclaim fortress. Yes, I have never reclaimed a fortress before, so I guess you could call this a milestone for me. Anyway, at first I'm amazed. What? SEVENTY dwarves instead of my 14? And ALL of them trained soldiers? Nice! And what?
I can buy new items too? Very nice. But first time reclaiming and all, of course I manage to fuck things up completely.
First of all, I buy anvil. I had already brought 1 anvil with me on 1st embark, and bought a 2nd anvil from caravan but I didn't know if those would still be there when I arrived with my brand new army. I buy some war dogs and other Total Waste of Points things. MISTAKE. Anyway, I arrive on the scene, I charge with my army into the fortress, and...nothing. There's no-one in sight. Only a couple of orcs on (u)nit screen, and they are scattered all over the map: no threat for me. So I make all dwarves as civilians (cool! a whole bunch of multi-skilled dwarves!) and start the process of re-building fortress. I make new stockpiles, command all workshops to start building lots of stuff, and then I start the process of reclaiming items. Manually one-by-one. I never thought of using the mass-reclaim tool. So I search the map for items like barrels, remaining copper picks and stuff like that. Then I look at "idle" -indicator and it seems abnormally high. I thought I made you guys do some useful stuff.
Oh shit #2.
First of all, the so-called "miners" didn't have their "mining"-labor activated. Woopie. And for some reason workshops are not working. Why are they not working?
I pause the game and start searching dwarf-wikipedia for clues. I bump into info about mass-reclaiming, and how it can be used to reclaim objects
and buildings. What? You have to reclaim buildings too? Oops. So I manage to reclaim the buildings, but it's all too late. No new beds have been built. No new living quarters have been mined, no new food has been farmed, no new booze has been built, no new picks have been built. I notice booze has ran out, food is almost out too. Dwarves are thirsty and REALLY PISSED. All 70, military trained and fully armed. Then the new orc invasion arrives. I draft every single dwarf and this triggers a massive wave of dwarves tantruming, enraging, insane or otherwise just plain pissed & crazy. Somehow I manage to kill the orcs, but by this time my own drwarves have pretty much killed each other, leaving me with only bit over 20 insane or enraged dwarves. So, I finally experienced my first infamous Tantrum Spiral. Time to abondon fortress and re-claim. And this time I'll do it right.
And so I have. Nothing exiting to tell here. I bought huge piles of food/drinks/wood, I got things back up & running. And most important of all: I built a defence to repel any future orc invasions. It took total of 2 reclaims, but this time my dwarves haven't gone insane. Here's a small pic of my current fortress
It's nothing special compared to what I see/read about on these forums, but it's just to show what I fought for all this time.
For a while I was starting to get bored with this game but this chain of events really showed me how FUN this game can be (no sarcasm here, btw).
Sorry for all this text, I just felt I should share.
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Topic: I haven't had this much Fun in a LONG time (Read 1190 times)