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[kardwill]

Yeah, but that's never happened to me at all. No tantrums, no angry traders. I've locked plenty of traders out to save the fortress and they got killed, never had them siege me (but I do give a 100% markup on trades) So really there's got to be something else going on with your fort.

Mmh, my experience is that humans are a little "touchy" when one of their diplomats gets ambushed by goblins. They tend to send me an army the following year, and sue for peace the year after that army's "mysterious disappearance"...

For the random generated guys : Sure, they are, but for those of us that thrive on immersion, they are also fellow dwarves... It can be a little heart-wrenching to see them slaughtered 

[Reelyanoob]

For the random generated guys : Sure, they are, but for those of us that thrive on immersion, they are also fellow dwarves... It can be a little heart-wrenching to see them slaughtered 

I agree, it does upset me too, but I'm not losing half a dozen trained soldiers to save half a dozen of them.

What you said about the traders is a good point, usually if humans turn up during a siege they've been able to hold their own near my forts, but I take measures to "thin" the ranks. The flooding traps i mentioned are great for this, a number of the invaders get killed and the rest turn tail and run. I really want to get them all, so on my next fort I'm building a trap room with many Hatch/Pressure Plate entrances, so they can path in but not out. The idea is to siphon a whole siege into one of these rooms, to be dealt with later (because they won't run away too early if I keep them alive/uncaged), maybe have 2-3 of these chambers, with controls levers for flooding the chamber, opening a cage-trap corridor for capture, and drawbridges to reveal marksdwarves for a firing squad

[Damien White]

What I meant by calling flooding mechanisms "hypertheoretical" is, I am talking about the first ambush or siege. At that point you merely have established food production or Craftsdwarfes, you are trying to set up some sort of metal Industrie, dig out all neccessary rooms etc.

You usually have no time to dig out, and prepare, some sort of flooding mechanism during the first year.


Just like the restraint version, its a good idea for year 3 or 4 but not year 1. Of course you can try one of these "7 - Miner" embarks and dig out everything while asigning new migrants to usefull jobs, but unless you are very lucky you still get some Problems.



Anyway, what would be your plan on frozen (or even frozen + hostile) embark sites?

[kardwill]

What I meant by calling flooding mechanisms "hypertheoretical" is, I am talking about the first ambush or siege. At that point you merely have established food production or Craftsdwarfes, you are trying to set up some sort of metal Industrie, dig out all neccessary rooms etc.

Well, if you get sieges during the first summer, you may be seriously overdoing the luxury departement. My own fortresses often came to their end because I put growth before security. Not a good idea, unless you're willing to have blood all over the embark site...

[profit]

Actually, I have seen ambushes in year 1 when I use my simple fortress world gens.  The value of the stuff is high enough to draw about 15 immigrants and apparently that is enough to generate a goblin ambush in early fall.

Of course with simple fortress I have everyone clad in steel armor and silver war hammers to greet them, but still... It is possible.

Anyhow.. May I recommend you simply change your loadout to include about 100 tower cap logs and build a wall around your wagons..   You should have enough room in that for above ground farming and just remove a section of wall whenever someone REALLY needs to come in.

After you have a military... You can tear the wall down and make beds out of it.

[Psieye]

Erm, a siege may be announced, an Ambush is not. And most the time the Ambush appears next to a dwarf and so the dwarf gets killed 90% of the time.

There's your problem. WHY do you not know an Ambush is going on before a dwarf finds it? Ok sure, if it's a migrant or a wood hauler/cutter then there's little helping, but fort entrances should have long corridors watched over by animals to detect ambushes long before important dwarves get in contact with the stealth goblins. Then you have ample time to switch on the civilian alert to restrict everyone's movements to limited portions of your fort.

My Entrance look like this:

Code: [Select]

WWWGGGWWW
WWWGGGWWW
WWWGGGWWW
WWWGGGWWW
WGGGGGGGW
WGWGWGWGW
WGWGWGWGW
WDWDWDWDW
WGWGWGWGW
WGWGWGWGW

W = Wall
G = Ground
D = Dog

I get 4 entrance, each one 1 tile wide and 4-6 tiles long, guarded by one war dog. behind the 4 entrances there is the usuall 3 tile Hallway.

You also should know how ambushes work. They are hidden and "passive" unless one of your animals or dwarfes runs straight into them. Some of you told me to place animals all over the place, but even with 20 dogs, breeding like crazy you wont get enough animals for this sort of defence and also not enough ropes.

1 dog is all you need. Maybe 1 rope too if you don't want to just use a 1x1 pasture. The real issue with your sentry dog location is that it's far too close to your main entrance - get some walls built to really push that out far. If you don't want to build your walls, dig out your entrance in such a way that 1 dog can watch everything coming into the fort from faaaaar away.

This might be an great option for year 3 or 4, but not 1.

Making that 1 dog sentry watch all traffic into the fort is perfectly viable in year 1 if you dig out the suitably long entrance.

Anyway, the main Problem are dwarfes running outside because of stupid reasons. Like i mentioned in the first post, they run outside to watch the Sun or some 2/7 mudhole, even if you provide them with more entertaining stuff, there are still some which run outside.

And yes, I createt Zones for whater, fishing (and disabled every fishing related labor), I got at least 4 meeting areas (1 legendary dining room, 1 legendary statue garden inside, 1 statue garden outside and 1 after a hallway full of caged animals and statues)

Again, this has reached the point where a save will speed discussion up as this shouldn't happen in my experience - there must be some reason dwarves are still hanging around outdoors like that but we've gone through the usual causes so a save is now the next option if you really want to get to the bottom of this.

If I am unlucky the ambush happens right when a migrant wave appears and so 5-8 dwarfes got killed. Even if my dwarfes inside my fortress have no idea who the other dwarfes are, they get mad and throw tantrums.

Check your dwarves' thoughts. Getting into a tantrum because random migrant #7 died just as he entered the map should not happen. See exactly what's causing them to get miserable, it must be something else not the actual migrants' deaths.

I figured out, my dwarfes lived to happy. I stoped engraving the walls (just smoothed them) and they stop throwing tantrums. My theory is, because the lived a live without any sort of negative aspect they got kinda "lazy" and once something goes wrong they get crazy like hell cause they have no idea how to handle the situation.

But its just a theory.

And you say you have legendary dining rooms, legendary statue gardens and all that? Something must be counteracting the happiness boosts - I'd have liked to see the full thought history paragraph as shown in each dwarf's profile but since I've started saying you may as well toss the save up for analysis... yeah. Well, I'm not going to demand the save - your experiences are a curiosity to me but I don't need to quench that feeling if you don't want to upload your save.

[kardwill]

everyone clad in steel armor and silver war hammers to greet them, but still... It is possible.

All this steel stuff must be expensive, no? Esp. if they're high quality. Maybe it's the armors that draw them to your fortress?

[Saiko Kila]

Again, this has reached the point where a save will speed discussion up as this shouldn't happen in my experience - there must be some reason dwarves are still hanging around outdoors like that but we've gone through the usual causes so a save is now the next option if you really want to get to the bottom of this.

My dwarves (including children) go outside - sometimes very far away - when they are on break, and when they don't like crowds (low Company). They are even slow to react to civilian alert, and take their time before they run to the burrow, sometimes too much time and goblins scare them away from entrance. Maybe that's the case. I had that during my last siege - all outsiders had low Company, fortunately for them they had some place to run, and gobbos were more attracted to sentry animals and military.

[Damien White]

I realy would like to provide you with savegames, but there are 3 mayor problems with that.

For one these are problems wich occured during my last 20 or even 30 attempts because i tried different sollutions before posting here (see first post, zerg style, spec ops style, "Marksdwarf gattling" etc.). So I couldnt show you all problems in one savegame. Another Reason are some world generating problems. During the same time I experimentet with the world generation module to learn wich attributes result in wich worlds. The problem here is the crashing of DF.exe once you already got one world and are trying to create another. No big deal, as long as you delete the old regions.

The last problem is my SSD wich is only 64GB in total (btw, SSD realy improve your lag ressistance, I realy recommend buying one) and my settings to save every season. DF gets realy big during 2 ingame years. (I got a 2,5 GB savegame after 1,5 years on a 10x10 embark site ^^")


For now my fortress runs pretty smooth, once "lot of Fun" appears I try to recreate the old problems but for now I try to figure out how to end it propperly. Just building a giant magma reservoir to flood my fortress, but there must be other, more creative, ways to kill ~200 dwarfes, ~100 Goblins, Elves, Kobolds and a Bronzegolem with one lever.

[Reelyanoob]

What I meant by calling flooding mechanisms "hypertheoretical" is, I am talking about the first ambush or siege. At that point you merely have established food production or Craftsdwarfes, you are trying to set up some sort of metal Industrie, dig out all neccessary rooms etc.

Building the few first few flooding tubes (i built at bank of 8 but it was a bit overkill) uses no more time or labour than it would have taken to get farm irrigation up and running in previous versions. The only time-consuming thing for me is to link each tube's P-Plate to the 3 hatches and 1x1 raising bridge per tube, but I didn't bring a trained mechanic. There's no reason flooding defence can't be created within a season or two, if there's a river embark, since we were basically doing the same labours up until a few versions ago for something else which is no longer required, so I'm pretty sure you can't just say there's "no time" in the first year for these preparations.

Metal industry if anything is a luxury in the first year.

Bringing 7 miners isn't going to help (well i bring 2, and 3 might speed things up a little). There's only 8 mined squares per tube in my design ,on z=0 and z-1, plus the water intake tube on z+1. A skilled mechanic would help link the whole thing quicker.

During the same time I experimentet with the world generation module to learn wich attributes result in wich worlds. The problem here is the crashing of DF.exe once you already got one world and are trying to create another. No big deal, as long as you delete the old regions.

I gen large batches of worlds to find good sites, tweaking worldgen settings between gen's as I go and only delete them when I get annoyed with so many folders. And my laptop only has 40GB HD total. The DF folder is sitting on my desktop, and the C: drive is only 5 GB !

I've never had a crash for that reason. You REALLY can't have two worlds at once??

Maybe it's the creating 10x10 sites which save to 2.5 GB and the like which is crashing DF, I bet you make max size worlds / history too?

[greycat]

DF gets realy big during 2 ingame years. (I got a 2,5 GB savegame after 1,5 years on a 10x10 embark site ^^")

You are doing something seriously wrong.  Or, at least, seriously different from anything I have ever experienced.

My fortress on my work machine is in its fourth year, that year being 254.  (You aren't using a 1050-year history, are you??  Seriously, that's a bug.  It's supposed to be 250.)

The save game size for a fortress in its fourth year with a 250-year history in a standard-size embark area (4x4 IIRC) is:

Code: [Select]

wooledg@wooledg:~/df_linux/data/save$ du -sh *
20K current
18M region1

Eighteen megabytes.

[kardwill]

Well, his embark was a little over 6 times yours, and a "5-season save+initial save+ current save" fortress means 7 saves. That's a x42 factor to begin with...

[Damien White]

No, no max History, I get realy unlucky with that option. Three times there where no other dwarfes on the continent because they got killed somewhere in time, so no migrants >.<"

Btw, I was talking about advanced world creation, creating 30 z-level Waterfalls etc (wich I never get T.T)

Bringing 7 miners isn't going to help (well i bring 2, and 3 might speed things up a little). There's only 8 mined squares per tube in my design ,on z=0 and z-1, plus the water intake tube on z+1. A skilled mechanic would help link the whole thing quicker.

Hmm, most the time I have to dig a bit until my river, but no i dont create 10x10 Maps everytime, this was just some sort of experiment to get 6 biomes in one Map.

I gen large batches of worlds to find good sites, tweaking worldgen settings between gen's as I go and only delete them when I get annoyed with so many folders. And my laptop only has 40GB HD total. The DF folder is sitting on my desktop, and the C: drive is only 5 GB !

I've never had a crash for that reason. You REALLY can't have two worlds at once??

It crashes once I want to create another region, no idea, why. Maybe the OS, maybe the hardware, some bug or the martians. It just happens, thats all I know. Because of the limited space i didnt save old regions in seperatet files and just deleted them, wich was kinda stupid i have to admit.

Metal industry if anything is a luxury in the first year.

You sure about that? Others tell you to get metal asap for your military O.o


@ Greycat: Per Save that my be correct, but if you activate the seasonal saving option in "Lazy newb pack" your savegame gets kinda huge. A save folder containing a 4x4 savegame of ~2,5 years is 818 MB (857 on disk) and contains 15.080 files.

These files are in folders called:
"region1_aut_252"
"region1_aut_253"
"region1_aut_255" (no aut_254 O.o)
"region1_spr_252"
"region1_spr_253"
"region1_spr_255"
"region1_sum_252"
"region1_sum_253"
"region1_win_252"
"region1_win_253"


@ Kardwill: its just the numbers of single savegames, most the time my embark sites are 4x4 up to 6x6, the 10x10 was some sort of experiment.

[TolyK]

DF gets realy big during 2 ingame years. (I got a 2,5 GB savegame after 1,5 years on a 10x10 embark site ^^")

dammit, you computer can handle that?  *envy*

You are doing something seriously wrong.  Or, at least, seriously different from anything I have ever experienced.

My fortress on my work machine is in its fourth year, that year being 254.  (You aren't using a 1050-year history, are you??  Seriously, that's a bug.  It's supposed to be 250.)

The save game size for a fortress in its fourth year with a 250-year history in a standard-size embark area (4x4 IIRC) is:

Code: [Select]

wooledg@wooledg:~/df_linux/data/save$ du -sh *
20K current
18M region1

Eighteen megabytes.

there's a large factor due to it being 10x10, and possibly also deeper.

[kardwill]

You sure about that? Others tell you to get metal asap for your military O.o

Well, metal is hard to get, the industry needs some manpower, and the expensive items are goblin-bait, so it's a design choice that can be seen as a luxury for a starting undefended fortress. At least in great quantities (a single coal smelter+forge operation to crank out a few copper axes and picks and silver hammers is another thing)
training weapons are interesting mostly because they allow you to start training your militia before you hit metal