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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 1, 2015 3:31:22 GMT -5
Two deaths via fortress accident. One was a woodcutter. After I had finished hauling off a season's worth of animals from the underground, the floor hatches to the upper levels were sealed off. I realized way too late; I checked the unit list and realized the fort was short one dwarf. Found him underground months later when animal haulers were carting off the next set of captured creatures. No wounds, just death by dehydration.
Second one fell. Lately I've been making up-down stairs instead of making a down stairs on one floor and up stairs on the floor below. Well, the floor below was being mined out, and under the up-down stairs was empty space. So one hauler who was in a hurry to gather stone took the up-down stairs instead of the stairs I made for the miners. He fell one level down and hit a mined obsidian floor - pretty much smashed up all his limbs. If he had survived, there was no way he was ever gonna do any work anymore.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 1, 2015 12:06:50 GMT -5
Dammit, another titan!
Correction, another useless titan! Another blob titan, this time made of steam. Like the last one, it has a shell.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 2, 2015 9:50:14 GMT -5
Clearing out stock. Practically gave away 60k units of prepared meals to the humans, and 40k units of booze to the dwarves. Compared to the stuff I traded for, the caravans are getting a million or two in profits. Maybe several times more than that, really. A single pot of prepared meals, for example, filled with masterwork meals, can be worth 10-20k, and I gave away hundreds of them.
Can't help but think of the economic implications of that. Caravan gets tens of thousands of prepared food to bring back, leading to the collapse of demand for their cooks, butchers, and farmers.
Caught my first cave dragon on this fort. Now to get a male.
The unbutcherable creatures, and the crundles, are getting dropped into magma disposal. Once they hit the open bridge, they still have five levels of open space before they hit magma. On a day when there's a ton of creatures to dispose off, magma mist rises up all the way to the open bridge.
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Post by "Gentleman" AJ Powell on Nov 2, 2015 10:29:31 GMT -5
Sorry to like, interrupt your posts, but just popping in to say I'm still reading all these, find it real interesting. It's like a text-based LP, thoroughly entertaining! Keep it up!
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 2, 2015 10:44:08 GMT -5
Sorry to like, interrupt your posts, but just popping in to say I'm still reading all these, find it real interesting. It's like a text-based LP, thoroughly entertaining! Keep it up! I'm kind of considering making a more straight text LP, more or less detailing a yearly progress of a fort. Maybe. Most likely when I have the guts to embark on a mixed biome where one of the biomes is evil, or at the very least nearer to a goblin civilization. That said, I am quite excited for the next release. Temples, taverns, music and bards, books, being able to have non-dwarven animal races as members of the fort, adventurers visiting your fort, tech trees. There is no justice in the world I if won't be able to make a musical instrument that's not made of dragon bones. 'course, the release will have a ton of bugs so I'll probably wait even longer until a version is released with the bugs mostly fixed.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 2, 2015 11:49:25 GMT -5
Today in breeding,
Caught a male cave dragon, surprisingly shortly after catching a female. I suppose it's due to my dwarves more or less depleting the population of wandering creatures underground. Jabberers, rutherers, and even crundles. Those species are more often than not immediately butchered after training, because I already have a tame population for the first two, and the crundles I've never really tried to breed a tame population due to their low meat returns. They may lay a ton of eggs, but I'd rather not let my butchers busy themselves trying to process a whole ton of them because I already have an animal that does that with larger meat returns.
Giant dingos are breeding rather slowly. Shame, as pups reach adulthood in a year. Can't be war trained, but they're aggressive.
Giant lions are a bit more busy with breeding. I've kept the pair I caught as the breeders, since the female only gives birth to three at most. Takes 3 years for a cub to mature, and they can be trained for war or hunting. They're twice larger than the giant dingos.
The normal sized ostriches are egg layers only. No need to hatch more of them, really. It seems that genetics does play a role, so the breeding population are all either muscular, gigantic, fat or a combination of those three. Four females lay eggs, and one male is available if ever I want to hatch eggs.
Giant ostriches I hatch some, but most are just eggs for cooking. Five females, one male, and only one female get their eggs hatched while the rest are sent to the egg stockpile. Like the normal sized ostriches, chicks take one year to reach adulthood.
Jabberers I continue to keep in a hatch-only role. Unfertilized eggs are sent to the stockpiles though. Five females, one male. One female can lay 3 eggs at most per time. One year to mature, and two to reach full size, and when full size is bigger than a rhinoceros, that's very good.
Giant cave swallows I hatch. Only two females. Most birds seem to reach adulthood in one year, and this one's the same. Breeding and butchering the hatchlings once they've grown for variety.
Helmet snakes I got ten females and one male. Due to their egg-laying capacity their primary use is for laying eggs for food. Can't be fully tamed as they hatch as adults. Kept one male since someday the females will grow old and someone has to take their place.
Giant cave spiders are also born as adults. Despite this I let them breed as much as possible. Most of them are butchered anyway. Unlike several giant insect creatures, they have a long lifespan.
Got some tame rhinoceros calves. No more parents, so I have to wait until the three calves grow into adulthood. If the male or both females are gay, I'll have to hope I catch more rhinoceros to get any breeding done. Can't have a lot of them though, since they need to feed on grass to survive.
Rutherers are like rhinoceros, except for a slightly lower meat value and not being able to be trained for war. They're as big as rhinos, though, and they don't need to feed on grass to survive. No adults in the fort, but a lot of tame children stuffed in cages.
That about covers everything. For the giant ostriches and jabberers, I immediately butcher any hatchling that has size attributes that describe them as small, skinny, or average. I want big children, who'll grow up into big adults for maximum meat returns.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 2, 2015 14:18:47 GMT -5
Among the megabeasts, what I want as a pet is the roc. Unlike dragons, and it's smaller, non-fire breathing brethren the cave dragon, a roc only needs 20 years to reach full size, and is one of the largest creatures in the game. Immortal, and best of all they become adults in one year. Meaning that there's a hatchling state, meaning that they can be tamed.
'course, like all megabeasts, they're rare, and I'd have to be real patient or be real lucky to catch one, let alone two for a breeding pair.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 2, 2015 14:24:38 GMT -5
Anyways, it's time to lay out the plans to dig deep and find the circus. Setting a spike trap is good, but for most part I reckon I should train my 50-population fort into an army.
Set up an outpost at the very top of the candy tower; namely, a narrow hallway so that the clowns will have to meet my army single-file. Preferably there would be a ballista waiting for them murderizing the first wave with steel ballistas. Before the hallway, I can also stuff all my animals and let them loose as a sacrificial wave to kill a few clowns. Hallway will be lined with spike traps. So basically, I have to reduce 3 for army duty; one will open up the circus via mining; most likely dying in the process. One to man the ballista, and another to never stop pulling levers.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 2, 2015 18:41:39 GMT -5
I may have put a big dent on the wild crundle and rutherer population this time. Large herds of them show up every time, and due to cage trap placement pretty much all of them get caged. Then they get butchered for meat.
Now, due to that, other species are moving in. Useless, annoying species. One is the blood men. Completely useless unless I keep some as a zoo exhibit. Nothing problematic in a fight, as being made of liquid they break away with hits from unexperienced dwarves.
The other is the creeping eyes. Butcherable, but not tameable. Okay amount of meat, not huge, but provides enough amounts, as well as fat and leather. On the other hand, the only way for them to get butchered is to kill them first, which can take some time. And they come in large packs; about 10-15 show up each time... and for a while a new wave would show up just as I finished having my military kill the previous wave.
And so just as the autumn caravan left the fort, and winter passed and spring came, I killed 200-plus creeping eyes. I got tired of having my butcher and refuse haulers process all them bodies that I simply made my haulers dump them into the magma dump. Hopefully I've wiped out their population from the area.
In between the creeping eye infestation, I did manage to catch a few more cave dragons. Majority of them are males, and those are going into war training. Same with females who don't have the size attributes I don't want.
The caged creeping eyes and blood men were also dumped into the magma bath.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 2, 2015 20:30:35 GMT -5
The population of giant cave spiders is booming. Barely 2 in-game years ago there was only two, and now there's 26. More or less due to the fact that there's a lot of females born and since they're born adults already, many of them gave birth just a few months after being born.
Need to do something about the population. I'll take some of the grown ones and maybe butcher them, and stuff the rest in cages. Most of the males will be butchered, I suppose.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 3, 2015 11:48:21 GMT -5
Whew. Just finished constructing a little thing that took over a game year to finish, and before that a year to prepare for. Above ground, you can't construct pretty much everything aside from paved roads. On the underground caverns, there's none of that limitation.
So, I pretty much constructed walls on nearly every cavern entry point in cavern's 2 and 3. All but one for each of those two caverns. This does two things, one is that any creature is forced to enter from one point in each cavern, and two is that they get caught in a hallway filled with a ton of cage traps. I more or less made it in hopes of cutting down the time it needs to haul trapped animals, and since it's concentrated on one point the haulers only have one area to haul items out, which may save time.
Hopefully this will also generally protect my fort. For now, the floor hatches remain open. Before the walls were placed, there was so many entry points that it was more or less impossible to set up a few cage traps on all of them, so I couldn't tell where an animal would enter from. If they were the type of animals who will attack dwarves and buildings, I'd have a lot of trouble managing possible injuries or deaths. With just one entry point, hostile and non-hostile creatures can only enter from one point. I don't have to make my militia patrol several areas now, as all I need is a pet sentry to guard that point in case of dangerous creatures.
Walling in the caverns was a lot of effort. Made a ton of rock blocks, which are lighter to carry than rocks making construction speed up. I set up block stockpiles in the caverns for the preparation phase. Constructing the walls took longer, as some cavern entrances are several floors high, so I had to build extra floors for my dwarves to stand on to build more walls.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 3, 2015 23:21:13 GMT -5
Hmm, sealing off the cavern entrances via walls seems to have reduced the amount of creatures entering the fort's area instead. Not that it's a bad thing at this point, as I already caught what I need to catch. I might consider removing some walls to allow more creatures in, but if I do that I'll set up cage traps near those points.
Giant cave spiders are quite explosive at breeding. Got up to 50 in no time, so I'm butchering some of the one-year olds to make room. The one year olds give about 19 units of meat, plus other edible byproducts, which seems to be the average amount I can expect from the species.
Trying to set a cap for edible items in the fort to save space. Meat, plants, fish, drinks, and others (mostly prepared meals) won't go higher than 10k units each. Any excess will be given to caravans. Total amount of food before that was around 100k, which requires a ton of stockpiles to contain. Now I need one or two at best.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 4, 2015 7:46:19 GMT -5
Caught some white storks. I'm not sure if I should breed them or set them up for egglaying. On average, non-giant white storks give 2-6 units of meat, plus some other edible organs. Not a whole lot, so breeding hatchlings to adulthood won't provide a ton of meat for a year of waiting. They lay 7 eggs at most during egg laying time, so unless I breed a lot of tame ones, that's really not a lot.
I suppose I should just wait until giant versions show up before stork becomes part of the regular menu.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 4, 2015 9:44:48 GMT -5
Not counting war hammers, maces, and crossbows, I got at least one of each type of weapon that's masterwork and made of candy. The materials that's made of candy are super sharp and super light, but as I mentioned before, as the material is super light it means that blunt damage made from the lightweight candy is pretty much useless. A copper mace would probably even do better than a candy one. Swords, spears, and picks has one masterwork each, and I managed to spam axes until I have five. That will be reserved for an axedwarf squad. Gonna be careful in picking the best dwarves in the fort for that job - at the very least, no negative attributes, and is at least strong or very strong before military training is assigned upon them.
As for the remaining candy... I dunno. Lightweight and strong armor seems nice, but I don't think I don't have enough wafers to equip my army. Steel I got in large numbers thanks to a pretty good hematite vein and flux, so steel will be the default armor for all the militia.
All that's left is to decorate the fort with raw candy. More value to attract more sieges. I reckon, instead of smelting the raw candy to wafers, I'll use the wafers as is. Memorial slabs is the way to go. Like statues they can be used as a hall for throwing parties. A masterwork raw candy slab is valued at 30k, while a statue made of candy wafers is 90k at masterwork quality. While forged statues cost three times as a raw candy slab, a slab only requires one piece of raw candy. A wafer requires one piece of raw candy, and a statue requires a lot of wafers - so on the whole I'll get more value with more slabs.
Of course, I'll make a couple of blocks and cut gems for strange moods. Any rock can be cut at a jeweler, and usually they have less value than gems. On the other hand, candy is the highest value material in the game. A cut candy is worth several times more than cut diamonds - the highest value gem available.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 4, 2015 10:34:24 GMT -5
Ohhhhhhh boy. Oh boy. Megabeast showed up. A female hydra. Oh boy. Almost caught one of the pastured rhinoceros calves I had, if not for the fact I lined up the edges of the pastures with cages. Megabeasts, unlike titans and forgotten beasts, cannot avoid traps.
Now it's trained. On one hand, I can hope like hell that a male shows up and breeds with the female. There's some mechanics about megabeast breeding, so I have some doubts. Also, hydras have the same growth weakness as the dragons and cave dragons. Any offspring will start off tiny and take a hundred years to reach a respectable size.
To top it all off, while a hydra has great regenerative abilities, according to the wiki, it can't regrow body parts. So lopping off one head may cause severe blood loss and death of all other heads.
Still, it's a freaking hydra.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 4, 2015 11:41:01 GMT -5
Animals can't get pregnant in cages, even if there's a male and female of the same species inside the cage. On the other hand, they can give birth inside of cages, if they got pregnant before entering cage.
This pretty much explains why I get lots of giant cave spider hatchlings every few months or so. Back to an almost 50 population of giant cave spiders.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 4, 2015 16:54:53 GMT -5
Learned how to obsidianize creatures. Basically an enemy bathed in lava mixed with water is pretty much an instant kill like cave ins. On the other hand, using it on a moving enemy will be much harder.
I can probably make use of it against the circus, but the only water source is the river up top. Pumping magma up will take more effort, but sending a river flowing down will also require a ton of work.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 4, 2015 19:07:37 GMT -5
Of all the... The first forgotten beast shows up. They're more or less like titans, except instead of showing up aboveground they show up on cavern layers. This one's made of ash. When I opened up the bridge to let my squad in, one of the hammerdwarfs took one swing and it gets smashed into two dead pieces. Being made of ash, it can't be butchered.
Like really, all I want is to make a lavish meal with the meat of titans or forgotten beasts. Megabeast would be preferable, as rocs, dragons, and hydras have value multipliers in their meat.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 4, 2015 20:32:38 GMT -5
Bah. Time to roll the dice. We're going to the circus!
A five dwarf legendary squad, and the rest are untrained civilians. I have an artifact hatch cover and an artifact door; artifact furniture can't be destroyed, so my general plan is to slowly funnel out a small amount of the clowns to be fought. Hopefully one at a time, or at least a five on five fight at worst.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Nov 5, 2015 10:18:14 GMT -5
The circus was... somewhat disappointing. It was more luck for me than anything, removing most of the challenge.
For one thing, it's the clowns themselves. Like titans, clowns get randomized attributes, mostly in the material that makes up their body and their main form of fun. The ones I got had a variety of nasty stuff; mostly poison, and one type of demon had web shooter. Web shooting titans and clowns can shoot out a wide stream of webs, paralyzing everything except web shooters, and if they're webbed they can't defend themselves - making them easy targets on getting their body crushed.
On the other hand, the clowns lose out on their bodies. Salt, snow, steam, ash... materials that pretty much turn them into glass cannons - well, glass creatures are actually quite tough, while being made of snow makes it super easy to get body parts crushed.
Then, it was the prep I had. To stop them from going up, I had an artifact hatch cover sealing the upper floors. Artifacts can't be destroyed by building destroyers - and clowns are building destroyers. Being an artifact also attracts them to try anyway. On the floor under the hatch is filled with spike traps. Unlike regular traps spike traps work on trap avoiding creatures, as they're triggered by levers or pressure plates. I had the former, and a dwarf whose sole purpose in that moment was to keep pulling the lever over and over and over again. The spikes are either steel or candy.
So the clowns would congregate within the floor under the hatch cover, trying to destroy an indestructible artifact and slowly dying from spikes.
So yeah. Without a doubt, my military would be overwhelmed by normal means, even if the materials of those clowns were misfit-like, but since I used cheap tactics I won with nearly no dead on my side. Two soldiers died because they rushed down the hatch while it was unlocked. They managed to take down a few clowns before getting overwhelmed.
That's it for this fort.
Next fort I'll try a more military method against the circus. Still, for now I'll take a few days off while I go back to playing Cataclysm DDA. I'll make a thread for that to record my misadventures in a zombie infested world.
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