Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Yes

132 (53%)

No

45 (18.1%)

Depends

72 (28.9%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[Dave1004]

Ooh, Starver, thanks. I think I might just do that . I just got my first two Goblin Ambushes, barely a month apart. My elite soldier was ripping through them, but they decided to sneak up behind my west wall, and wait until an idiot dorf ran out, then they poured in. I had to summon my ragtag militia to stop them. My super-awesome-copper-armor-soldier now has 11 goblin kills, and I only lost two militia, and one civilian!

Wish I could have gone back in time, but eh...

Yeah, my cages failed horribly. I had two a few blocks in front of each four gates (N/E/S/W), but they did nothing. Ah, well. Maybe I will pasture a war dog, they are kinda...useless...

Praise everything for walls! Saved most of my civilians lives that day!

[Mushroo]

Yeah, my cages failed horribly. I had two a few blocks in front of each four gates (N/E/S/W), but they did nothing.

You need to place the cages such that enemies have to pass through those tiles. If the goblins can go around the traps to get to your door they won't do much good.
Also you need one trap per enemy, 2 cage traps will only catch 2 goblins (at the maximum).
And you need to make sure the traps are loaded (empty cages are made at a carpenter workshop or forge, and loaded into the trap by a dwarf with mechanic labor).

There are lots more considerations, for example using burrows to make sure your mechanics don't run out into the fight to re-load sprung traps. This is explained in great detail in the wiki.

[Dave1004]

Hmm. Thanks, Mushroo . I just played for about two hours, when I got that dreaded "Dwarf.exe has stopped working"... Going to have a LOT of work on my hands to redo! Urgh...

And I was JUST going to start saving seasonally. Meh, more time to prepare for the coming ambush, I guess. (And I just located what seems to be that Adminite stuff on floor 65 or so...Grr

[jaxy15]

Don't start mining adamantine until you have a very good military.
Something very bad may happen.

[Starver]

Now... should I advise you ignore everything else, in this new attempt, dig straight back down to where you found it and mine out as much as you can as quickly as you can..?

No, I probably should not.  For a number of reasons.

Spoiler: Do not look... (click to show/hide)

I told you not to look!  Just for that, I won't say anything more about this...

[laijka]

So I started to play this again today. 3rd time is the charm I hope. 

And after a half hour of getting my mind blown by confusion and dashing out of game in to the wiki and youtube tutorials I found this thread. And wow, I have learned A LOT just by reading your questions Dave and everyones answers.

So thank you for that. 

[Dave1004]

Awesome, Laijka! You're totally welcome to post any questions you have too on the thead, you never know; - Maybe I'm wondering the same thing!

@Jaxy: Don't worry, I know that if you mine Adamantine, and grab the sword thingy, you'll get swarmed by demons. I only dug out two layers of Adamantine, but it takes AGES to turn it into the strand thingy. My soldiers went from copper to adamantine

Thanks for the...Warning, though (I read a lot on the forums. Knowledge is POWER!)

[jaxy15]

The swords only appear in the fortresses.

[Fayceless]

The sword is something else entirely, I don't think it has any relation to "cotton candy" other than the fact that it's made of it.

[Dave1004]

Cotton candy, as in Adamantine, right. At that one layer, there's a message: "You hear horrifying screams coming from the darkness!"...

Meh. I wonder if Demons can get past fifteen saw blade traps, in a tight corridor. A mixture of Adamantine, steel, and glass blades in them...Wait. Do traps hit them? I want more adamantine....

[jaxy15]

They all have [TRAPAVOID]
Also pray to Armok you don't get metal demons, they're deadly.
And use supports to cause caveins, insta kills.

[Sutremaine]

Repeating spikes will hit them, but not weapon traps with spikes in them. In theory, the best cave in trap would be something like this:

Code: [Select]

##############
#          ###
# ######## ###
#_____I____###
##____________

With the space below the support being full of beautifully tempting doors and statues. When the demons are all in there wrecking things and pathing up against the wall you built, squish.

Code: [Select]

##############
#          ###
#       ###
#_        _###
##########____

No access, should anything not be caught. The #s, being natural stone, will form a floor above them and seal off the layer on which the support once stood.

[Dave1004]

I....Thanks, Sutre, but...It's too late. No, no, not demons. Not this time.

Skeletal Badgers. About 15 of them...Whooee. That was...messy.

I'll adopt that tactic, if I must kill demons. Thanks, man .

A question - How do I train large animals? I have some caged Skeletal Badgers, but when I go to kennels, press "m" (to train large animals) and then hover over the badgers cage, it just switches to the "i" zone (Animals, obviously)

...?

[ZachUSAman]

... yes and no.
Dwarf fortress is a game where diving in is pretty easy to do, and you will never reach the bottom.

[Sutremaine]

The undead can't be trained or tamed.

In vanilla DF there are few animals trainable, as the DM doesn't work and so you never get to work with exotic animals. To make an animal trainable, it has to have [TRAINABLE] for both hunting and war, or [TRAINABLE_HUNTING] or [TRAINABLE_WAR] for one or the other. It also needs to be a tame animal that is not in a cage or in a pasture.

Once you've got all that, selecting the appropriate training command (I think it might always read 'dog' no matter what you're training) will call a random eligible animal over to be trained. To enforce training of the correct animals you can pasture them temporarily to get them in the right place, then lock them in with the trainer.