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[The Architect]

Well, finished! Triple update, my bad. However...

30th Obsidian, 'Beakbane'
Every single hellspawn is dead. That's right, we got em all. Once we thinned their numbers and took out the leader with that trap, the rest were a mere joke. I've fulfilled my 5-year charter, and there's plenty to show for it too! I wonder if I'll stay here, or move on?

----------------------------------------------------

Bring on the next challenge. I am a noob no longer! FPS back up to 30 without the demons!!!!!!
Of course we have to wait until the others finish.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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Or do we? I'm thinking of a new kind of succession game. One where we give the file to two players, have each post updates, then use the one we like best at the end of their turn. Good idea, or one prone to tick people off? Will post a link here to map upload when available.

[TauQuebb]

Hmm, it could tick people off yes, a weeks typing, storytelling and playing only to have it axed. But you could run two concurrent succession games, looping through four-ish players on each team, 8 year sucession fort challange or something.

[Zifnab]

End of Year 4


Prepared Meals: 2094
Casualties:
3 Dwarves
1 Human Merchant
1 Wagon
1 Muskox (merchant)
I've butchered so many cats/dogs/crippled wardogs that it is hard to tell how many are actual casualties. I've listed the trained dogs and pets.
19 War dogs
1 Cat
1 Horse
3 Kittens
Kills: 209
Dark gnomes 12
Cave Croc 1
Giant Olm 1
Naked Mole Dog 7
Giant Rat 1
Large Rat 1
Giant Cave Swallow 1
Troll 1
Kobold 3
Snailman 18
Harpy 15
Frogman 6
Lizardman 4
Olmman 6
Snakeman 3
Antman 5
Cave Swallowman 4
Goblin 57 (1 with a second name)
Slugman 13
Giant Eagle 2
Beak dogs 15
Sasquatch 2
Frog Demons 30
Demon 1

[The Architect]

Well I hate that you worked so hard on animal casualties, and I don't know who decided to start posting them, but that has absolutely nothing to do with anything, so don't get bent out of shape trying to get them right in year 5.
The casualties among your dwarves are used to determine your "popularity", which is final population minus casualties (thus one person, who has 120 dwarves because they lost 20 and the game replaced them with immigrants, won't beat those who have 119 and kept them alive).

Your wealth is scary. I guess I have to say goodbye to my leader position, considering you're just a step behind me a year earlier. bah.
Maybe I could have beat you without stupidly getting my most important early dwarves drowned by harpies? On the bright side, maybe still in the running for Ronald Mcdonald?

Making meals worth 38k now. haha!

Grammar edit.

[sarack]

After a couple of days of not being able to play, I've finished year 3. All I can really say about this year is wow. Just wow.

WALL OF TEXT about clearing HFS:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spring started off pretty bland. A bit of exploratory mining, some smelting and smithing to start getting my army equiped, nothing really exciting. Then in late spring, I found the HFS. From this point I dedicated my fort to preparing to clear out the clowns and claim the HFS as my own. Over summer, I prepared traps, armed soldiers and trained my army so that by mid-autumn my army consisted of 18 armed champions in various amounts of armour.

Then it all went wrong.

My plan was pretty straight-forward: open the HFS, drop a ceiling on the clowns, dump most of the survivors down a very deep pit and storm the HFS with my army to kill the rest of them. In a very DF-ish kind of way, my lever-pullers were too busy partying to pull the first lever. The ceiling-collapser only actually killed 3 demons. I then quickly realised that I must have mistaken the lack of a 'connect bridge' job on the second lever to mean it was done. The job was actually cancelled. So when I pulled the lever, hoping to dump the demon hordes into death... nothing. Only one thing for it - I charged the demons with my 18 champions and about 30 war dogs. And won. With only 3 dwarfs dieing. I'm still not completely sure of how it happened (I suspect the demons scattered in the tunnels I had used to mine and my guys just swarmed them) but what I do know is this:
a) HFS is cleared
b) "Engraved on the floor is a well-designed image of a frog demon by Tosid Kolmat. The frog demon is cringing"
c) One of my champions apparently killed 8 demons with nothing but a steel shortsword - no armour at all!

@zifnab What part of the year did you clear the HFS? And if I might be so bold, that's pretty cheap dropping the roof on the HFS. A true dwarf faces demons head-on, whether they planned to or not! (let's ignore the bit where I tried and failed to use 2 different traps vs. demons)

Compared to killing all of the clowns, nothing much happened except for 3 goblin ambushes at once. I'm pretty sure nothing can kill this fort now, so I basically just let my dwarfs party right through to spring.

Stats:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Popularity: 59 - 9 = 50
Kills:
Savage

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

2 giant eagles inc 1 named
22 goblins of various professions
2 caveswallowmen inc 1 named
7 antmen
3 lizardmen
6 snakemen
5 olmmen
5 frogmen
12 harpies inc 2 named
30 frog demons
1 demon
2 kobold thieves
1 troll
1 giant cave swallow
1 giant rat
1 cave crocodile
1 giant olm
17 beak dogs
Total: 121 inc 4 named

Non-Savage

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9 snailmen
9 naked mole dogs
1 large rat
28 dark gnomes
17 hoary marmots
11 mountain goats
Total: 75

Grand Total: 196 inc 4 named

For the benefit of others, I think I've killed one of every creature that anyone is likely to encounter on this map. Architect - if you could point out any mis-catergorised(sp?) creatures on either of these lists, I'll move them and then people can use the lists as a reference when deciding which kills to count and which to ignore.

And as I side note before I go to sleep: has anybody else noticed that the local elves are called "the leaf of cremating"? They're just asking to be set on fire.

[Zifnab]

You haven't killed a sasquatch yet.  Are anyone else's engravers utterly obsessed with sasquatches?  I'm guessing almost a third of my engravings are along the lines of this is an engraving of a sasquatch and a goblin.  The goblin is cringing/in a fetal position/etc.

I cleared the pool by the end of the second summer, the pit by the end of the second winter, and hfs the very beginning of year 4. 

My other plan for HFS was to cut a hole in the ceiling, and dump a bunch of trapped goblins inside so that I'd be able to see all of the demons, then take them on. 

[The Architect]

Yes, I noticed the same thing about my engravers. Goblins scared of Sasquatches, all the first 4 years. Not a damn historic event in about 400 masterful engravings I read through/glanced over. After reading some item descriptions I realize the accounts could be stitched on some sock somewhere instead. VERY disappointing; at this point I've given up (ran it another 2 seasons to clean up, what with the queen arriving early spring, etc.) No sasquatches showed up for a LONG time, but sometime in year 4 one appeared on my list of kills and the engravings mysteriously stopped. Eerie.

FYI about HFS:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You can't kill demons with normal traps. You can't atomsmash them. You can't drop them into a chasm with a bridge. In other words, we are not allowed to cheapass our way through a demon fight. Period. Maybe dropping the ceiling is an exception, but you have to remember that I had to dig out a complex maze to hold them all, sacrifice 2 dwarves (would have been a kitten had time allowed), and time it right to get them. There was also a loaded ballista with extra ammo and two legendary operators surrounded by champions, elites and suited legendary miners to deal with stragglers, or the whole force should they make it through. No automatic kill/cheap trick methods work, the only non-standard ways allowed being flooding, upright spikes, and cave-ins. And all of those require a lot of planning, setup, and proper execution or they are worthless. That's why clearing the HFS within 5 years (if you can find it) is such an accomplishment. NIce idea with the goblins, btw. Damn, should have thought of that

Tips with executing non-automatic traps include utilizing recruit+dismiss: Pause, recruit a nearby working dwarf, remove his jobs, un-recruit him, and issue the Pull the Lever command. When you unpause, the nearest dwarf without a priority job will grab the Pull the Lever job; even a nearby siege operator could be temporarily removed from his machine to do this. Also, placing the lever near your normal workplace allows it to be pulled at a moment's notice without sending a dwarf into danger. I made serious mistakes with all of my lever placements in my first major successful fortress, resulting in many needless casualties before I got it right. Many players place their vital levers in dining halls, barracks, zoos, or statue gardens where someone is most likely to be hanging about with nothing to do (nobles hang out there too, and LOVE lever-pulling). Some random guy whose job I had dubbed "Unemployed" pulled mine.

Some strange things going on today as I searched for a new map and played around with some old ones. Reclaiming a fortress resulted in the Merchants, captured invader humans, and captured goblins still on the map when I abandoned it showing up again as aimless friendlies, randomly placed. Odd, eh? All those Deceased wagons were a little creepy, too. And of course the bloody corpses were strung out in the halls where they were in transit, their belongings apparently strewn about but their fresh meat and that of the still-chained corpses of their livestock apparently untouched by the local wildlife.

[kilakan]

I turned it on so I could read history from engravings and the reason there is so many goblin-Sasquatch pictures is there was over 10 incidents involving 3 different Sasquatches ripping/killing goblins......... so It's a pretty frequent historical event.

[The Architect]

Where do you do that? That's the only reason I read engravings; I keep looking for the ones about my guys killing hydras and crap.

[Linthar]

Year 4 is done and only one more to go. I have to admit, my fortress isn't going to be one of the better one's in the contest. I got to focused on building my mega-project, and did not focus enough on the rest of the fort, which combined with a lack of proper planning, has left the whole thing rather messy. Anyways I have only one last major thing left to complete. Instead of trying to kill the HFS, I have a plan that if it works, will make pulling my self-destruct lever unleash the HFS stuff on the world. Because it's always fun to destroy forts in the most possible number of ways at the same time.

[kilakan]

go into the data folder in DF, then look for something called Init and in it Init again, and there's a whole list of settings, like turn invaders on/off, migrant cap, weather everything like that and there's one called [show_all_history_in_dwarf_mode] and if you put in yes it'll tell you all about your engravings.

[Kelsa]

Year 2 went much smoother than the first year.

Diary of Stukos "Matchedtours" Tadsigun

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Spring 82,
As the spring thaw brought life back to "Hallmirrors" I found myself promoted to the dubious position of Expedition Leader.  The Elves were arriving with a caravan and they needed to talk to someone, and that hot head Sibrek "Galleyshock" Degelotung was not the best choice as she had killed our last expedition leader in a fit of rage, we deemed her too emotional.  I just hope that she will not take the group decision out against me personally. 
Spring also brought with it a gaggle of new immigrants.  I quickly assigned some to expanding our mining and some to act as our millitary.  It was a good thing I did as soon after one of our miners cracked into a bottomless chasm, home to a varity of no good creatures, including a Troll just waiting to swarm into our fortress.  It was quickly dispatch by our crack team of wrestlers.

Summer 82,
We found our selves once again on set by Harpies luckily, other than a surprise loss of a fisherman as they came into sight over the brook, we were able to dispatch them rather quickly.  Around this time one of our mine shafts opened into a underground pond, with a down-stair hanging precarious over the water.  I quickly assigned a hatch to be put over the stair so our more squeamish Dwarves would not be disturbed by the wild life below.  The Human caravan brought an anvil and I instructed our trader to procure it immediately to correct the oversite our former leader had made when we set out.  Considering the wealth of resources at our disposal I cannot imagine why he had not procured one with the Dwarven caravan the year prior.  I quickly established a metalsmith's forge and got to work actually using all that steel we'd been producing.

Autumn 82,
I've just been informed that the two children who arrived earlier this spring have been orphaned.  Their mother, had been recruited to fight some beakdogs after their father had fallen victim to them.  Now all they seem to do is sit in the dinning room and throw parties.  At least they are happy.  Other than that minor incident the Autumn was quiet.  Our Dwarven fellows arrived with a caravan filled with fabulous goods, and more immigrants soon followed.

Winter 82,
Keeping everyone occupied seems to be a full time chore.  It seems like we don't have nearly enough beds, and our Carpenter has taken up wood burning instead of making more.  Somehow I've managed to keep every one happy through these long months although we seem to have ran out of alcohol.  Thankfully the well had been finished for some time now so no one had to venture into the frozen waste above.  Strangely the winter was the safest time of year, no causalities.

Stats

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Popularity = 21 (32 - 11 loses)
Savage Kills:
3 Goblins
2 Kobolds Theives
7 Harpies (3 named)
1 Troll
8 Beak Dogs

Non-Savage Kills:
1 Giant Rat
1 Large Rat
8 Mountian Goats
3 Dark Gnomes

Let me know if I missed any important stats.

Also:  @Architect.  That first year is nothing compared to the first fort I ran;  I lost five of my starting dwarves by the first winter and my first immigrants did not arrive until spring.

[Linthar]

Finished my final year. Didn't actually get much done. Between my frame rate dropping like a rock and a lack of inspiration, I spent a good bit of time with the fort running in the background to get it done. In the end it's not my best fort, and it's certainly not going to be the best one in the contest, but I did get a few nice things done.

Firstly theirs my mega project, the great floating pyramid of doom. Why is it of doom you might ask? Because there is a whole three pillars between it and several thousand tons of rocky death falling on the fort below. The exterior at least looks wonderful.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I also achieved what I believe is a decent population count with 107 dwarves - 12 deaths. This number was helped by a truely absurd number of births. I currently have 5 babies in my fort and 13 other children.

I also managed to achieve defender of the peace. Not a single merchant came to harm during my reign. I had a close call or two, but the elf merchants were able to run for long enough for my military to save the day.

Of course the part I'm most proud of is the self destruct lever. While it may not be as efficient as the one in TauQuebb's fort, it still is able to eliminate my entire population. It causes four things to happen. Firstly it drops the great floating pyramid of doom onto the fort, killing anything above ground, or on the first level. This caused 57 deaths. Secondly it floods the lowest three levels drowning an additional 27 dwarves. Thirdly it releases every single caged enemy on the map. This actually proved useless as they all were either drowned, killed by the two military dwarves who escaped the initial destruction, or were blocked off by a freshly opened pit. If I had known that would be the result I wouldn't have put up the cage traps I did. But the final component of the system releases the HFS through use of a controlled cave in to fill in a channel. The contents within then proceeded to kill all remaining 23 dwarves, except the one sealed in a specially made bunker making the system a success.

It also had one unintended but amazing consequence. One of the cisterns used in the flooding is located directly beneath part of the pyramid. Dropping the pyramid apparently knocked some of the water onto the surface, and froze the entire entrance into a nearly solid block of ice.



Final meal count: 190

Map: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7247-speardrilled
Save if anyone wants it http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=1506
Sorry for the long post.

[The Architect]

Stylish! Nice planning with the self-destruct, and the proof of concept with the survival bunker. I don't know how we are going to select the winner for megaconstruction, but we'll see. I know I lost! My self-destruct is just cranking the pump on all the way, and stopping the drain (the whole fort area is enclosed in a wall of microcline and microcline drawbridges causing it to fill up with no escape).

If you don't mind, I will wait to update our stats til a few more report in.

[Goron]

I finished my first year quite a while ago but I guess I forgot to upload. Currently in my second year but have not played for several days. I should be less busy this week and thus be able to catch up some.

Nothing impressive... Just got myself a safe little haven. I dug into that little hill to the south and have been acting out of there. Avoided some beakdogs- now just trying to get myself organized. I am confident I will not be a contender for 'winner' as my play style is too slow and safe... But its fun nonetheless.

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