I am new to this game, and i want to tell about my first fortress to survive its first siege. I got most of the knowledge of this game from the wiki, which is a great source! Thanks to everyone who is writing on it! And of course thanks to Toady and his bro for making this fantastic game!
So this fortress is dug in the flatlands in a tropical forest. It is populated with 175 dwarves plus an uncountable army of cats, kittens, dogs, and puppies. Despite all my attempts to butcher every unclaimed feline they are slowing my poor dwarves to a crawl.
The dwarves themselves are reproducing nicely, and it is a joy to welcome new immigrants every second season or so. That is, except when there is a siege or an ambush waiting to murder them and my fortress is locked off by its drawbridge and ditch.
This was the first, and for a long time the only defense my poor dwarves had. Before i read about burrows i lost many woodcutters that were locked out. As we are now, i have 37 good dwarves resting in their coffins, who died because of battles, murder, accidents, collapse, digging experiments gone wrong, a giant cave spider that lured my dwarves with promises of silk, and forgotten beasts. Among them is a baby that was taken to the battle, i think there should be some classes for young dwarven mothers.
To limit the attacks from below i walled up most entrances to the cave system. There is only one entrance now and the monsters have to fly up to use it since it is the drain of a complex water-trap i build to drown the goblins, kobolts, and trolls that love plunder and pillage my poor defenseless town. It works quite well but it takes ages to refill the water basins that feed it. Nice to have some weapon of mass destruction in your house, and the dwarves are happy to take the wet socks from those murderers after the water is (slowly) drained.
There is another water system in my fortress that was supposed to feed some water-wheels. I build it before i realized that water in the cave-system just disappears. So it has a whole pumping system, driven by windmills to get the water up again. As a dutchman i am quite proud of that part. It can only power one water wheel out of three, and even that one isn't always working. I should have made that channel more sloped, but it seems the advantage of mechanical milling is not that great. The water system is providing a nice waterfall in my fortress and so it is keeping my dwarves happy. It also covered my legendary dining room in mud, which is a shame since the engravings used to spell out MAD.
There are engravings in many parts of the fortress, and many of them illustrate the story of my first mayor, that got removed from his position by a shadowy institution called the "Chamber of Ambiguity". According to the drawings, this movement made a lot of decisions behind my back.
Another (crude) defense mechanism are the many traps that are littered in front of my main gate, as well as on random places above ground. And i hope the huge piles of bones and goblin bodies just outside the fortress will scare away some of the would-be invaders. But thanks to those traps i have about 100 caged prisoners in my animal-storage-rooms. I have been trying to throw them into a pit, but when one of the civilians tries to move them they tend to escape, slice off an arm of the unfortunate dwarf and scare everyone in the fortress. Luckily the storage is located behind my barracks and there is always one squad training. But the first time i tried to move a lot of prisoners to the pit, there was blood all over the hallways.
Only three goblins were thrown in and started make scary faces to passing dwarves. I was hoping my dwarves would get used to it, and maybe become braver fighters in the process but that didn't work out. The most entertaining solution to that problem was to throw an elephant into the pit. It worked quite well, but the elephant is still covered in blood.
That elephant was a left over from a elephant breeding program. But the elves who sold me four of them were smart enough to sell only females. Maybe there will be a herd passing by or one of the caravans will bring only males by mistake.
My dwarves hate it to join the army and with good reason. Quite a few of them have died in their first fight. Also, being outside makes them sick, but i am sure the army will make real dwarves out of those wimps. Maybe the crossbowmen and the blowgunman will like it more when they discover that you can use those weapons as something else than clubs.
There were two dwarves caught in cages in the storage. I tried to free them by dumping them into the dumping-zone and hoping the cages would break. When that didn't work i build furniture-cages out of them and linked them to a lever. Only to be able to give their corpses a proper burial.
Right now there is a forgotten beast camping in the caves. I haven't bothered to go looking for magma since i want to build a proper army first. I don't remember if there was flux-stone in my map, so i am digging around, trying to find some. I have the idea that the division of labour could be more optimal. It is especially difficult to find suitable dwarves for the army. And the cages full of prisoners really bother me. Imagine what would happen if a thief snuck in and freed them all?
The most annoying thing is the low FPS. My dwarves need almost half a second to get to the next tile. I really don't know what to do with that, and if it wasn't for the MAD-message i would have abandoned the fortress long ago.
This got a bit more prosaic than intended. Thanks for reading it all. I hope i was able to entertain you with some rookie mistakes. It took a long time to get my fortress into the present shape and i am really impressed by the surprises this game keeps offering. I am quite sure i am not using the interface optimally, but that'll work out in time.
Any tips on how to speed the game up are more than welcome!
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Topic: My first fortress (that works, more or less) (Read 1491 times)