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Author Topic: Forgotten beasts and me  (Read 1469 times)

petersohn

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Forgotten beasts and me
« on: August 29, 2010, 03:47:04 pm »

So I met my first forgotten beast. I breached the first cavern level, and put some traps and a door in the only passage between my fortress and the cavern to keep creatures out. I was using the cavern for tree and silk gathering. And, due to the cage traps, tons of creatures that will come handy. I already have a tame GCS.

So this is the time when the FB arrived. I never met one before, so I didn't really know what to do. Some dwarves were down there hauling logs up to the fortress. Needless to say, they were the first target of the beastie. I soon saw that it ignores traps, so I locked the door. After it were finished killing my dwarves down there, it stopped a few tiles from the door. I thought that the door stopped it, so I went back managing my fortress.

So what to do now? Send in the military? They are such a rookies. They had a lot of armour and wrestling training, but so little weapon training, and they only have iron equipment. So, I decided to come up with another plan.

I was doing my business when I saw other dwarves dying. I looked at the cavern, and saw my dwarves collecting my dead. Whoops! How did they get down there? I soon realised that the door is gone and the beast is rampaging in the mines chasing and killing dwarves. OK, I thought, it is time to have some Fun. My last chance is to send in the military. I ordered my squads to kill the FB, and waited. After a few more dead dwarves, seeing that they don't come, I looked at what they are doing. "Soldier (cannot follow order)". What the hell? The civilians are dying down there, and the soldiers are just standing around clueless. OK, best I can do, order them to move near the FB. It didn't take much time that they run down there and started fighting.

Suspense, suspense. What will happen?

OK, it seems that they won't go down that fast. It is good news, but I have to go now. Save, exit.

Next time I have the chance, I fire up DF, and continue to see what happens. I scroll to the battle scene and unpause. After a few moments, the FB is dead. No soldiers are dead or wounded. What an anticlimax!

OK, it's time for some cleanup. Let's see our losses. 8 dwarves are dead and one wounded (he lost one arm and one leg). Now get back to the daily work and continue our Great Project. Wait, the humans have just arrived and want to trade with me! They are already unloading. Quick, finish the business with them. And don't forget to tell the engraver to carve this incident to as many walls and floors as possible. But what is he doing? Lots of pictures of the foundation of my fortress, Counselledslings (why didn't I get a really creepy name like the great precursors?), historical events, the rise of my leaders. Oh, the Cave Crocodile incident of last year is here, too. Keep on the good work, Dumed!
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Thatdude

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #1 on: August 29, 2010, 04:11:40 pm »

Yup, FBs can be complete wusses. The first one I got was a salt ball that had 3 stumpy tails. So in goes the military and first to reach it is my hammerdwarf. At this point I think "Let's see if Toady has fixed unkillable FBs"
2 seconds later I see that the hammerdwarf just one shotted it... That was interesting...
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Internet Kraken

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #2 on: August 29, 2010, 04:17:42 pm »

I've killed over a dozen of Forgotten Beasts in my fort, so I was never afraid of them. Then I encountered one with an [UNDIRECTED_DUST] attack.

Urist McSoldier is caught in a burst of Forgotten Beast frozen extract!
Urist McSoldier has died after colliding with an obstacle.
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Picture a dwarf, warrior, mechanic, or some other incredibly useful profession. Now picture him dead. That's what infections do.
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FlamingCow

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #3 on: August 29, 2010, 04:20:13 pm »

Yeah, sadly the balance has been shifted with the new material physics. Anything without armour is very easy to kill with edged weapons, this includes FBs. On the other hand, I far prefer that to "Oh, a Forgotten Beast *Abandon*". The extracts make life interesting too.
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petersohn

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #4 on: August 30, 2010, 12:38:52 am »

Yeah, sadly the balance has been shifted with the new material physics. Anything without armour is very easy to kill with edged weapons, this includes FBs. On the other hand, I far prefer that to "Oh, a Forgotten Beast *Abandon*". The extracts make life interesting too.
It means that an unarmoured FB is no match for any armoured dwarf? Well, they had pretty good armour training, but still, I thought it would be a tougher fight. When I was fighting with goblins in my prior DF2010 fortresses, I always had some losses if I attacked some armed goblins. It very much seems that in this version you just can't train someone up to be invincible as fast as you could in 40d.
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Zaik

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #5 on: August 30, 2010, 01:16:55 am »

Yeah, my last forgotten beast was "a towering anklyosaurid" with horns and whatnot. He caught some dwarves that can't seem to stay out of the caverns for i don't know what reason but i was sure i turned refuse gathering off and un-dumped everything down there and yet they still are constantly going in and out of there anyway.

He killed four or 5 growers and other haulers, and one spearmaster hit him 5 times within a second or so and ripped his brain, lungs, and guts to shreds. Also sent one of his parts flying, though i don't remember which one.
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Eugenitor

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #6 on: September 01, 2010, 05:59:16 am »

My current fort is devoted entirely to the killing of FBs.

To that end, I've built/carved fortifications such that the FBs have no way in, and my marksdwarves can shoot them at leisure. There's also a magma pump stack going into the bottom cavern. (Hey, salt FB? You weren't magma-safe! :D)

Other than a few strange bugs involving water, trees, and magma, this strategy has worked very well. A legendary marksdwarf wielding an artifact crossbow has a tendency to take brain-tearing headshots... and a Cave Swallow Blowgunner killed a mud FB by whacking it once with his blowgun.
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Grimlocke

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #7 on: September 01, 2010, 06:16:14 am »

Seems that FB balance has swung to the other extreme since the unkillable inorganics were fixed.

Before fully realizing this, I had a fortress nearly succumb to tanrums, leaving it with only 4 dwarves. I had locked up the thing in order to stablize it but in the mean time a whole bunch of ambushers had gathered outside and 3 FBs in the caverns. Thinking I could have these problems dissolve eachother, I linked each cavern layers with the surface and opened the surface bridge.

In went the ambushers, and they lost a total of... 1. Killing 3 FBs. Didnt solve the problem at all, and didnt even let me feast on forgotten beast spleen roast.
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I make Grimlocke's History & Realism Mods. Its got poleaxes, sturdy joints and bloomeries. Now compatible with DF Revised!

Eugenitor

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #8 on: September 01, 2010, 06:34:55 am »

Luck has a lot to do with it. There are still a lot of really hard to kill FBs out there, particularly the insectoids. Unless you get headshots, those take a lot of killing because they very rarely bleed and have a lot of extra body parts for dwarves to waste their attacks on. Some of the material "composed of X" are still very hard to kill, akin to a bronze colossus.

Blobs are what drop like flies now- mud, fire, whatever, if it's not solid it'll just fall apart in one hit.

Did the ambushers get any syndromes?
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Grimlocke

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #9 on: September 01, 2010, 07:31:15 am »

Nah, they made a nasty puddle of various blood and garbage but none of them seemed very troubled about it. There was an insectoid too, a giant tick of all things. It might have gotten killed by a fluke shot. Another was indeed a blob of some incohesive material, the last was some vertebrate.

To be fair though, the ambushers were modded to wear and wield steel and bronze.
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I make Grimlocke's History & Realism Mods. Its got poleaxes, sturdy joints and bloomeries. Now compatible with DF Revised!

Darkcrystal

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #10 on: September 01, 2010, 08:44:40 am »

I usually look at what kind of things I have to watch out for when dealing with a forgotten beast. Anything that has dust or venom I just use archers on an archer tower I made so that I don't go anywhere near them. Also forbid any beast corpse once they are taken care off since I've already lost a good 20-30 dwarf from forgotten beast syndrome since my current fort started. That could have been a start to the end for this fort if I didn't react quick enough.
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Krythorne

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #11 on: September 01, 2010, 10:13:09 am »

My first forgotten beast was a giant eyeball/eyebeast (with a deadly sting which never got tested). I mobilized my military worrying similarly how their lack of training and poor equipment would leave them faring but opted to send them in regardless, I charged them down to the depths and .. found it stunned on the floor. Checked the logs, turns out it'd caught up to a worker who had panicked and punched it in the eye.

My second was no better, it was a 'giant blind pheasant' and its warning tag was literally 'beware it's deadly drool'. Not threatening at all, but does sound gross to have creeping up behind you. This one was even less fortunate and ambushed a miner only to be promptly killed by the miner's pick.

In short I thought they were neat, but no match for any dwarf over the age of 4. This is until one tagged along in a goblin siege, a scaled rhino with a 'frost extract' attack. It didn't cause knock back into walls but caused folk to be stunned with breathing problems and covered head to toe with blisters, however this included the goblins too which turned the entire siege into a calamity of dwarves vs goblins falling unconscious on one another in the part of my defences I use to bottleneck attackers for the kill. Since everyone but itself was unconscious it managed to get inside too and caused mayhem in splattering everything before it died to archers.

It was so bad that I still have my dwarves keep discovering pockets of frost goo that wasn't cleared up (mainly along outside where they don't clean) which results in my dwarves getting blistered feet (clothes wore off ages ago) and reporting to hospital which kinda works out for me in terms of keeping my doctors in training in their diagnosis skills. O.o
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theqmann

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #12 on: September 01, 2010, 11:49:02 am »

I had a chained kitten that mortally wounded a FB recently.  Talk about a wuss.
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KojaK

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #13 on: September 01, 2010, 11:57:32 am »

A legendary marksdwarf wielding an artifact crossbow has a tendency to take brain-tearing headshots...

Thanks for standin' still wanka!
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claer_runway

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Re: Forgotten beasts and me
« Reply #14 on: September 01, 2010, 12:01:57 pm »

for the record, which non-vermin animal is the worst fighter, on average?
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