I got the say, diseases are a real pain to handle.
I was proud of my village. Huts standing. A wall of wicker with wicker doors (wicker bridge was a bit out of concept I thought). If someone bypassed the doors, he got cut to tiny pieces by my axewielding cannibals, awarding me a nice amount of bone stacks.
Everything was working fine, actually.
Then, those dwarves that came to colonize the land embarked on this island. They soon sent me willing peasants to do some work. When joining my tribe - to serve Armok, as I thought - they brought a gift with them. It was a dwarf. He was known as "Doctor Ingtakunnos", which means Doctor Twilighthooved. A nervous wreck eager to help everyone.
Then it happened. A soldier got wounded, which set in march the whole machinery of destruction that "doctor" would bring upon me.
It was the Militia Commander who they brought to the hospital, almost intact, just having a broken finger. Or toe. Or something minor like that. My new doctor, first of his kind in my village, immediately got to work. He diagnosed the Commander and began his work...
After a few days the commander was sick. He had fever. Weird, I've never seen that before. Could be a reaction to the wound, though. Nothing to worry about. My Commander was being fed and watered by multiple dwarves in that time, all eager to ease his pain, so he would soon decapitate some more goblins.
Then, it all happened very fast. Just twenty days later, my hospital was filled with feverish dwarves. They couldn't work. They barely moved at all. They just were resting in the hospital, about twenty of them. Twenty. All of them needed water and something to eat, of course. So I ordered my military off duty to tend to those sickelings, along with the rest of my peasantry. Bad idea, as I would soon discover.
Along all my peasants - except for the Thatcher, who didn't give a damn - all of my military dwarves were in the hospital. It was crowded. I was missing beds left and right. They were starving, dehydrated and most of all, feverish and didn't move.
As if they had a spy, goblins attacked me at that time. The doors were not closed. All but my thatcher were in the hospital, slowly dying. Then the goblins marched downward, as if guided by something, and killed everyone in the hospital in a matter of seconds. What a bloody mess.
It wasn't long before they found the thatcher, either...
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Well, I had hoped for a long-lived fortress. Unfortunately, the diseases struck me. And I couldn't do anything against it, it seemed.
I might just go ahead and turn diseases off, then try anew. Was a fun experience nonetheless, but really, those diseases are hard to handle. They keep spreading over and over, worse than a tantrum spiral. The tantrum spiral at least has a chance to cause the death of those who cause it, and terminate it with a couple dwarves leftover. Not the disease. The disease keeps them crippled, starving, and spreads, all while prompting the healthy to tend to the sick, and infecting them in turn. And what medicine was I supposed to have against that?
Anyways, I got a nice idea of my cannibal village now and attempt again, hopefully having something worthwhile to tell about.
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Edit: It would indeed be nice to have the ability to customize the color for furniture. I like customization. The more, the better - as long as the paint doesn't cause fever, that is.
Also, a quick question. I noticed that, with custom names > 9 chars, the actual job would not be displayed in the unit list anymore. Is there any remedy to that? If not, I might just keep my names shorter, so no worries