All right guys, I promised myself I wouldn't do an update unless it was a decent quality story update - but I'm in the middle of two big essays, and I haven't had time to write up anything in a few days. So rather than just have Quinn be like "This happened. And then this happened. Relevant witticism. Implied humour," I'm just gonna half-ass it and give an OOC run-down. This is from fall 15 to the beginning of spring 16, so we've just finished Year 5. Woooo.
First of all I gotta mention something. I realized after I had started playing that I had forgotten to remove goblins from worldgen (I didn't want them to attack at all, damn the foul creatures). So to try and fix it, I set their body temperature super high so they'd just burn up upon arrival and I could just forbid their burnt corpses and ignore them.
Problem is, see, there's apparently a huge repository of giant wolf spiders around somewhere, and the goblins show up mounted on them too rather than it just being an orc thing. So what happens is A Vile Force Of Darkness arrives, I'm zoomed to a plume of smoke, and then about 50 spiders charge the castle. And my unit list looks like this (for a few pages):
A spiders-only siege is very strange. Incidentally, their goddamned webs make them literally like impossible to beat. It's like fighting a horde of 50 GCSes that are extra fast, and one of them is capable of immobilizing your entire military on its own. Had two of these; only a few were actually engaged via melee combat. Also, wild giant wolf spiders are showing up in packs of 5 or so on the edge of the map now. I gotta be careful about that.
The moat's full, as you can see, and I've begun work on the hovels. The first like five are built but not furnished, and another five are in progress. I dunno how many I'll need total. I used the UG river to fill the moat using what I think is a pretty clever floodgate system.
The UG river is 21-23z above the moat. To fill it 90% of the way, I had both sets of floodgates open. For the last little bit, I pulled a switch that triggers the floodgates you see which acts as baffles to keep the water pressure of the moat at the right height without overflowing. If I pull a second switch, the red Xs floodgates (currently not visible) would shut and seal the source and moat entirely. What this means is that if I really want? I can flood the goddamned world by opening that moat up, so long as I seal the map edges. Hehehe.
Another fun fact about the river! I went and caught everything in it. Literally, everything, except two frogmen that were in the actual waterfall at the time I sealed it off. So now our caged animal storage has: a zombie fire imp, a zombie GCS, a zombie giant olm, a zombie giant toad, a mud man (the only non-zombie thing!), two zombie lizardmen, and two zombie frogmen. I'm considering checking the lizard and frogmen genders (currently can't as they're caged but I'd find a way) and modding them to make them breedable and possibly war trainable. Irwin's gonna have some fun with these fellows :D
The dwarves brought me about a zillion bars of all kinds of metal. I bought them all, then gave them about 100,000 profit on top of that. Morul the bone carver and Doom the stonecrafter make goddamned amazing wealth-boosters, though wealth isn't my main focus here.
Goraillion ended up making a large, serrated iron disc. It was in his preferences. I savescummed a bit to see if he would make anything else, since I don't use weapon traps, period, but alas. Oh well. We've got a legendary weaponsmith, at least. Incidentally, he was stuck on raw gems even though we had like a zillion in the stockpile. I ended up having a miner go dig some out of the mountain face and he grabbed one. Here's the description (worth 146,400):
We now have two artifacts featuring king #3, Zas Boardrasp (our current monarch), and one of kings 1 and 2. Just, y'know, in case you were wondering. >_>
Sakzul Crestedshot, Rykue and Gutendorf's daughter, has a fey mood. stuck on raw gems again, I think. Grr. Not sure why that keeps happening. If Sodak went legendary, that would make the most legendary family ever!
Three random migrants died in sparring injuries when I switched Ingish's zerg rush squad from wrestling to swords. I removed the barracks. Think I might need to skill up Jyrvus in armoursmithing.
Aaaaand I'm digging out a magma cistern - 20x20x12, for 4800 tiles of 7/7 magma when it's full. I think with some clever floodgating I can rig up the pump stack I'm gonna use to fill it to also draw from it and dispense it elsewhere. Not sure where to build my power plant yet though.
Julius' blockmaking has finally skilled him up to legendary. Woo! Between Julius and Goraillion, the legendary list is up to I think 20 now. Plus Sakzul will make another shortly.
I think that's everything. Elves haven't come yet, but now that I have dwarves bringing me all my goodies, I might get them to wage war on me. I could use something for the melee military to fight since both goblins AND orcs bring goddamned cheating spiders.
hmm...not had much experience with GCS's myself...can their webs go through fortifications? is their range the same as marksdwarves? If it is then couldn't you just use it in like a GCS tower to shoot down on attackers? Or modify the floodgate design with bridges and fotrifications?
GCSes can't shoot up or down z-levels from what I know, so any GCS-weapon would have to be on the main jungle level. I think they only web at what they can path to, which means a complicated system of drawbridges and fortifications, I believe. I haven't messed around much with the spideys before. Dunno. It'll take some experimenting.
The other thing is that in DF, enemy A and enemy B are BEST FRIENDS and ONLY YOUR DWARVES are subject to attacks. So a wild GCS won't attack invaders... and a tame GCS will run away like other pets do. If I made it war trainable I could use it against sieges, I think. But having it wild is more fun :P
I suspect Sodel will be a great dwarf, being the only pure-bred Mightygrip :P
So, ultimately what are you planning to do with the Zombie GCS? I like what beanchubbs said, you could make it an entrance on the side of the castle, and open it with the main passage closed when a melee siege eventually comes.
...Or you could do the boring, non-bloodsheddy way and specify a peasant as 'Bait', give him legendary accomodations to keep him happy and constantly send him to get web'd...
Not sure what I'm gonna do with it. If I wanted a silk farm, that'd be easy enough without using a peasant. But it's no fun, yeah. As mentioned above, working it into the defenses could be a bit tricky... but I'm sure having a horde of monsters has
some Fun use if we think hard enough.
(ps, your dwarf is 'Sadok,' not 'Sodel.' Sodel was Quinn's killed-off-for-real love interest, Sadok is a child. Important distinction if we're gonna keep this fort PG-13 :P)
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Topic: The Castle Mightygrips: Cancelled. [community] (Read 48089 times)