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Post by aka Cthulhu on Jul 30, 2016 0:25:02 GMT -5
I realized something. Why try to set an elaborate set-up to trap a werebeast for the purpose of infecting a few soldiers? All I need to do is hope the next time a werebeast attacks there be someone nearby to be bit before having the squad kill the werebeast and hope the one bit is infected so I can spread the infection in a controlled manner.
In that way, I caught a werewolf with the sacrifice of a wood burner and later successfully passed it on to a cheetah man.
In general, I have no pressing need to infect my soldiers. It's just something to fall back on if my undead defense line can't be used, or if my soldiers get infected with a syndrome.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Jul 31, 2016 7:32:15 GMT -5
A basic overview on the raw materials on my fort, and how they're used:
Logs: Wood from trees and underground giant mushrooms. More or less important for a lot of things. -Carpentry: Needed at the start since non-artifact beds can only be made from wood. Wooden barrels and bins are also useful at the start for storage, though I prefer stone for pots (same function as barrels) and metal for bins later on. Wheelbarrows are also best made with wood due to its weight, as well as cages. Still, once you got some beds, bins, and wheelbarrows set up, the need for carpentry is reduced significantly. -Charcoal: By far the most important use of wood for my fort, since the smelters, forges, and glass workshops need charcoal as fuel. Coke from lignite and bituminous coal can be used as fuel as well, but since those stones aren't native to the current fort, while you get four pieces of each to smelt from every human and dwarf caravan each time, so wood into charcoal is the main use of logs now. -Ash: Similar to charcoal, but you can't make it from bituminous coal nor lignite. Used to make lye, which can be used for soap. Also used to make potash for fertilizer, though potash can be further refined in a kiln to become pearlash, which is required to make clear glass - also and creating pearlash also requires fuel. For the record, green glass only requires sand and a fuel source (whether it's charcoal, coke, or magma), while clear glass requires sand, pearlash, and a fuel source. Crystal glass requires uncut rock crystal and pearlash. Because pearlash is made from ash which requires wood, elves will never accept anything made from crystal or clear glass. Green glass is okay for them. I assume they think the dwarves use tree-friendly coke or magma. -Bowyer: Another workshop that requires wood. The workshop can create wooden and bone crossbows, and nothing else. Useful if you're short on metals to make metal crossbows, but aside from that it's nothing that important. In a pinch marksdwarves will use their crossbows as a blunt weapon, so using metals like steel or silver may be ideal... but generally the melee use of a crossbow isn't that impressive either way.
Depending on the biome, logs can be numerous or scarce. Due to my preference for tropical rainforest embarks, I end up having a lot of logs to get from the trees. Once I manage to get several dwarves to chop down every tree, there's usually enough supply to last for years, and by that time when supply begins to get a little low, there should be enough trees to chop down to boost the numbers up by a bit. Still, each time there's usually diminishing returns, since a lot of charcoal is made and needed by the fort. In a few more years in this fort the supply will be insufficient, but by that time I'd be done several times over preparing military supplies; allowing the trees to grow a little longer.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Jul 31, 2016 11:51:34 GMT -5
Next up is clothes:
Two skills deal with making clothes: Leathermaking involves making clothes with tanned hides, while the clothier makes clothes using either plant, silk, yarn, or metal cloth. The last one basically uses candy to make some really expensive clothes, but since clothes decay when worn, I don't really do it since it's a waste of candy.
To get tanned hide, you basically just butcher an animal and one of the byproducts is skin. No matter how big or small, one animal equals one tanned hide. Even with a big breeding program it's not really feasible to do nonstop leatherworking, so it falls upon the caravan for supplying my leatherworker with tanned hides. At max request level for tanned hide, you get four of 'em; but in this case it's four bins with ten tanned hides each. Due to the fact that there are multiple species of tanned hide available, you can easily get a ton of them from the human and dwarven caravan. For me, it's twenty species requested per caravan, so human and dwarven caravans give me 800 tanned hides each time - and basically one skilled leatherworker can use up that supply in a year, just in time to request more.
Tanned hides only have value modifiers related to the animal species of that hide, in addition to the value modifier of the clothing which is influenced by the skill of the leatherworker. Basically, tanned hides are cheap, but my leatherworker can produce a profit turning those hides into clothing.
On the other hand, clothing is a little bit more multi step. Yarn cloth can be acquired via shearing certain animals (namely, sheep, llama, and alpacas). After you get the sheared stuff, now yarn thread, a weaver can turn that thread into yarn/wool cloth. Like tanned hides, this is a bit hard to do since you need a lot of those animals for constant work, and you also need pastures for them. Also, yarn is the lowest value cloth among the cloths used by the clothier. Yarn cloth and thread can be requested in caravans, but since there's only three species of them, you'll get about 120 units of cloth per caravan. Not really a lot. In general, yarn thread I keep around for sutures for the hospital.
Silk thread has the most expensive cloth material (not counting metal thread). Silk thread to silk cloth. To get silk thread, you can make a weaver spin webs. If that's applicable, he'll go to the nearest tile that has a spider web on it and convert it into thread. Giant cave spider silk is the most expensive, but considering the possibility of there being giant cave spiders nearby, it's a risky business. Silk cloth and thread can also be requested from caravans, though usually only the dwarf caravans have them.
Now plant thread is the bread and butter. The dwarven crop pig tail can be planted during summer and autumn, but aboveground crops, such as cotton, rope reed, and hemp can be harvested all year round as long as the plants are present on the map/possible to plant in the biome. Once the plants are ready to be harvested, they can be processed in a farmer's workshop into thread, then the thread can be turned into cloth in a loom. If you can plant the aboveground cloth-bearing plants, then you have an industry that can easily keep working all year round, even with multiple workers.
So, basically: Leatherworker: animal skin to tanned hide to clothes. Yarn cloth: shear animal to produce yarn then weave via loom to clothes. Silk cloth: gather webs to produce silk thread then weave to cloth via loom. Plant cloth: harvest crops, then process in farmer's workshop to produce thread then send into the loom.
Right now, pondering if I should shut down the leather industry. Turn the leatherworker into another clothier.
Basically, when I get leather from caravans, I usually get the leather without getting the bin, and hauling 800 tanned hides can take a while even though the leather stockpile is close to the depot. Then there's the price.
Tanning a skin does not get a value modifier. A skilled tanner works faster, but the only value you get is from the animal hide, no skill included. Skill value modifiers do come into effect when it's turned to clothes, but in general leather is really low-priced so it's not a massive increase in price.
On the other hand, yarn/silk/plant cloth is a whole different matter. Thread does not have a quality level. On the other hand, cloth does. A skilled weaver can easily produce exceptional to masterwork cloth from thread constantly, then that quality cloth gets a further increase since clothesmaking can add more skill value modifiers. To top it off, thread and cloth can be dyed, which again provides even more value modifiers.
For example:
Masterwork leather shirt, made with (no value modifier) tanned hide. In comparison, Masterwork cotton shirt, made with masterwork cotton cloth, with masterwork red dye.
The multiple quality modifiers give a significant price increase.
In the end, the price doesn't really matter, since I make more than enough to give the caravans a massively obscene profit for them. Still...
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Jul 31, 2016 22:12:43 GMT -5
Next up is glassmaking. It's not a big industry, but I have one dwarf doing constant glasswork, which can be used to make multiple things. Like a carpenter or mason, you can make furniture with glass, but you can also make a number of tools with it, as well as trap components. Glass stuff has decent value, is magma-safe, and clear glass has a nice blue-ish color as well, making it quite useful to forts. You can also make raw glass which functions as an uncut gem, you can cut and encrusted to stuff. The value of cut glass isn't great, but if you can spare the fuel to make the glass it can provide training sources for gem cutters/setters if you lack a gem source, or if you don't want to waste precious gems on the hands of untrained dwarves.
Already mentioned it a while back, but there are three types of glass: Green glass which needs sand and a fuel source. Clear glass which needs sand, pearlash, and fuel. Crystal glass which requires uncut rock crystal, pearlash, and fuel.
To get sand, you need to have empty bags and a source of sand. The sand gathering spot doesn't need to be big, just designate a sand gathering zone in one tile and order a job to haul sand.
Also, if one has magma, one can pretty much have an infinite supply of green glass since all you need is sand, which is also in infinite amounts.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Jul 31, 2016 23:34:52 GMT -5
Next up is food: one of the highest value industries, but also one that requires the most work. Dwarves can eat food basically raw, and you can also trade them away as that, but in general you get more value from cooking them.
You can cook three types of meals: Easy meals: biscuits, which uses two ingredients. Fine meals: stews, which uses three. Lavish meals: roasts, which uses four.
This is a rough, not exactly accurate description of how meal prices is set. Let's say you make an easy meal; first ingredient is one cat meat and second ingredient is dog meat. Let's say the price of the normal quality meal of that is 50. Since there's two, the total price would be 100, since 1 meat plus one meat equals two. Cooking skill takes part in the end result, so if the dog meat is masterfully cooked, and the cat meat is masterfully cooked as well, it'll be something like 300x2. Furthermore, the ingredient quality plays a certain role. It's mostly meat, as certain animals have value modifiers, like dog meat has no value modifier, but elephant meat has 5x value modifier. So using 1 elephant meat plus 1 elephant meat will produce a higher value meal compared to the dog-cat meat meal.
Then we get into quantity; it's rare to have item stacks that only has one of the item. Elephant meat can number in the hundreds, so if you were to make a lavish meal of elephant meat only; you'd be getting a massive roast stack of about 400+, with the value and skill modifiers coming into play to produce a high priced stack to trade.
That's about it. Later I'll cover all the food items that make up my fort's cooking industry.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Aug 2, 2016 10:53:31 GMT -5
Well, let's take at all the possible food sources, at least the ones I got in the fort:
Farming: plants and whatnot. All sorts of plant types with different uses. Some can be brewed, some can be cooked. Some are only edible when milled into flour, and some can only be cooked/can't be eaten raw, while some can't be brewed nor cooked but serve a different purpose - like cotton can only be made into thread for cloth.
Cotton and other plants do have some other uses. They can be milled into paste which can be used for cooking - but further pressing it can produce oil and press cake, both can be used as cooking ingredients, while oil can be made into soap.
Eating them raw, milling them, or brewing them produces seeds. Cooking plants does not produce seeds, which can be tricky when you find out that your cook used up all the plants leaving no seeds to plant later. Some plants can only be cooked or eaten raw - no brewing or milling applicable, so it's usually tricky to keep those in constant supply.
Anyways, there's two types of crops, aboveground and underground. Underground crops are dwarf civ crops; they can be planted on any biome, but many of them can only be planted on certain seasons, and in general there are far fewer varieties of underground crops. Like the underground crop that can be made into thread can only be planted during summer and autumn seasons. On the other hand, aboveground crops can be planted during any season, as long as the biome can support that plant. Though it says aboveground, you can easily plant them underground by exposing the underground tiles to the surface - though that requires a certain amount of planning.
There is one other way to get plants without farming, and that's from gathering plants in the surface and underground caverns. Fruit can be gathered above ground as well. Gathering plants above ground can provide aboveground crops which can be processed into seeds via brewing/milling/etc, and aside from waiting for the human caravans is the only way to get aboveground crop seeds.
Also, milling plants require empty bags, and pressing paste into oil requires jugs for containing. Cloth plants like cotton can also be mashed into slurry which can then be pressed into paper.
Next up is fishing. And beekeeping. Never bothered with these industries, so no comment.
That leaves the meat industry. Fairly simple to get meat: either hunt or breed your meat sources, or get meat products from the caravans. Breeding or hunting is far superior, as every meat product in a caravan comes in stacks of five, while you can get far more in butchering your own animals. One animal can produce several stacks of meat products: obviously there's meat, but there's also different stuff stacked separately like fat, tripe, sweetbread, eyes, lungs, brains, heart, and some other stuff. Different animals can have extra stuff, or less stuff; like you can expect a giant slug to only have meat and fat only, and maybe a brain.
Butchering meat also produces some other products. Bones for bonecrafting, skin for tanning, and hair for thread. Only the sheep, alpaca, and llama have hair which can be weaved into cloth. Other animal can only be made into thread, but even that has its use since it can be used for sutures for medical purposes, or bookbinding.
Of course, some animals produce milk as well. Dwarves are somewhat leery in using liquids as cooking ingredients, but milk can be processed into cheese, which can be eaten as is or used as an ingredient. You'll need animals that can produce milk, or get milk in barrels from caravans. Generally, for me it's easier to get a decent milk supply on caravans, since most milk producing animals require a pasture to survive. The only exception to pastures are pigs, and you can cage them all up and have a farmer milk the lot of them.
Eggs can also be produced by some animals, and often they're a great source since often egg-laying animals can produce more offspring than non-egg layers.
As for fat, before they can be cooked, they need to be made into tallow by a cook. Tallow can be used as an ingredient for cooking, or be made into soap.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Aug 3, 2016 3:53:52 GMT -5
Anyways, putting aside fort industries for now, things have been happening.
For general fort defense, set up containment rooms at the cavern entrances that lead up into the fort. It's basically a simple room where I got an animal chained up inside and spike traps connected to levers set up. Two gateways, both bridges that can be raised: one leads out into the caverns, and one leading into the stairs.
Basically, the concept is to seal the gate leading up to the fort when a forgotten beast arrives. Due to the fact that there's an animal chained up inside the containment room, the forgotten beast will home in from there. There's a matter of timing to pull the lever raising the other bridge. I want to seal the beast in the containment room, but there's a time delay and the bridge will raise some time after the lever is pulled. It would be nice to make a bigger room, but since making steel spikes can be rather time and resource consuming, I have to settle with not a quite big room, but generally I have the timing down.
If the forgotten beast manages to kill the chained animal and exit the room before it's sealed, I just lower the bridge leading to the stairs, chain up another animal, raise the stairs gate and lower the cavern gate and try again.
In general, this is only for poison/dust emitting beasts, and web spitting ones. Other beasts can be taken down relatively easy by militia force. Forgotten beasts made of organic material only require a few times for the spike to impale them to kill them, which inorganic ones takes a little more time, but can be killed as well.
May need to set one up in the surface level as well. Titans have been attacking, and they're pretty much forgotten beasts on the surface. This one was a web-spitting dinosaur. I had no choice but to make my entire militia rush it - in the general hope that some won't get webbed and they keep the titan busy while the webbed ones get untouched. When someone is webbed, they cannot move, dodge, or defend, and titans are big so they can easily maim or kill a soldier with ease.
Thankfully, only one died. Crushed head. Another human soldier was dented in the head, but all in all it was a curable injury and he's back in the service after a short time recuperating.
Aside from that, got deaths from wild animal attack and old age.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Aug 3, 2016 4:02:06 GMT -5
Also, tested out a couple of things:
Undead defense system: used this on the containment room because I didn't have enough steel to set up enough spikes at the time. It works, at least on organic forgotten beasts (haven't tried pitting them on inorganic forgotten beasts). That forgotten beast emits poison gas, so I didn't want to test out what effects the poison has, so I released three giant undead rhinos on it. Aside from one getting its teeth knocked out, the giant undead rhinos managed to kill it. They got wounded, but the poison had no effect against them.
Reviving forgotten beasts: since semi-megabeasts like giants can be revived, I tried reviving a forgotten beast. Since they can't be caged by normal means (though I have devised a set-up that can do that for most FBs) I had to settle with non-mangled corpses (mangled corpses can't be revived by necromancers). My test subject was a flying FB, but it was a mutilated corpse - those types of corpses can be revived, but they lack certain body parts, thus mutilated. This one got a wing and several limbs chopped off, but since it wasn't mangled, the necromancer managed to revive it.
...unfortunately, I failed to realize that undead retained certain qualities they had when still alive. This one couldn't fly because of the chopped wing, but it had the forgotten beast ability to not trigger most traps, so they couldn't be caged. I need to find a giant cave spider in order to be able to cage most forgotten beasts. The ones that produce web can't be trapped with that method.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Aug 3, 2016 9:38:20 GMT -5
Well, let's finish the fort industries with rock and metal. Mining will eventually lead to finding rocks and ores, so it's part of a healthy fort economy and general survival. Most rocks have the same value, and serve the same purpose, masonry and crafts. Masonry generally deals with furniture like tables and doors and whatnot; early on it's essential like carpentry, but once you have enough you really won't need more of it. Making blocks with the mason has more longevity if you want to pave roads or make walls and floors cheaply. Rock blocks are lighter than actual rock, and one rock produces four blocks. You can make blocks from glass, metal, and logs, but each of those gives you one block per one material, so rocks are certainly more economical.
Aside from masonry, certain non-ore rocks do have other uses. Obsidian, for example, can me crafted into obsidian swords; not as excellent quality as iron, but if you lack metal it could be an essential weapon for survival.
Stone crafts, like many other craft items, are really only good for trade. Some dwarves will take crafts for themselves to make their little dwarf selves happy. In general, rock crafts don't bring a lot of value, but you can always be sure that there will always be a supply if you mine for a bit. Also, stonecrafting also is involved in the creation of rock pots, a stone alternative to wooden barrels for storing booze and food.
Now, we go to metals. For the creation of weapons and armor, metal ore is an essential component in making sure that your militia is armed. Of course, you need to make sure that there's metal ore to be mined in the area, and that metal is of military quality. If no such ore exists in the area, then the only source if from trade in caravans, either as ore, metal bars, or armor and weapons melted down. The first two can be rather lacking, since at most you'd get four of each ore/metal you request, while you can get far more weapons and armor to melt down.
As for the non-military quality ores, their only real use is for making furniture and crafts. They usually have more value than glass, stone, cloth, or wood crafts and furniture, but certain metals like lead or tin have very little value that some stones have equal value. There's also the matter of one ore equals four metal bars, and some metal furniture costs 3 bars to craft, which can make their value rather dubious.
On the other hand, certain metals can be combined to make better value alloys. Like 3 bars of tin (value 2 each) and 1 bar of copper (also value 2) can make fine pewter (value 5). You get four bars in total, so if you compare numbers (tin+tin+tin+copper=value 8 vs fine pewterx4=20) creating the alloy could provide a lot more value. Even more so if you use the ores instead: 3 ores of tin and one ore of copper will produce 16 bars of fine pewter for only one fuel, saving you charcoal and time.
With regards to fine pewter, you can also instead use the tin bars and copper bars (or their ore) to create bronze, which can be used for weapons and armor, and as far as quality goes, much better than copper for your military.
In any case, some alloys only average the value of the ores/metals. Take electrum for example; it has a value of 20, and it requires one gold bar which has a value of 30 and one silver bar with a value of 10. You get two electrum bars, which more or less averages itself in value. No gain, no loss. Using gold ore and silver ore produces 8 bars, since one ore produces four bars, with some exceptions. Of course, this can still prove itself economical if you go with ores. If you have a small supply of gold nuggets, if you have more tetrahedrite from mining, or get some from caravans, you can use tetrahedrite since it also bears silver on it (smelting tetrahedrite produces 4 copper bars, and 0-4 silver bars with each silver bar having a 20 percent chance to occur).
Well, let's do maths to make the example easier to understand for me,
Say you have one gold nugget. Smelting it as it is gives you four gold bars, for a value of 120 for all of them. If you use the gold nugget and mix it with tetrahedrite instead, you get 8 electrum bars with a total combined value of 160, giving you a definite profit.
In some alloys, though, you can't smelt directly from ores, such as rose gold (3 gold bars, 1 copper bars) won't really give you any value increase, only averaging the values together. Still, it has its uses, since rose gold has a nice purple color if you want to decorate your base.
That's about it. Next time I'll talk about the military quality metals, I suppose.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Aug 3, 2016 10:01:26 GMT -5
Well, let's try finishing this rather poorly made kinda-tutorial of the game with military-grade metals, starting from the bottom all the way to the top:
Copper: Not the strongest metal out there. Not great as armor, and not the sharpest metal in the forge, though as a blunt weapon it's somewhat okay. Decent for ammunition, as for most part metal quality doesn't matter too much there. You can use copper to make bronze or bismuth bronze, which is certainly better than copper. Silver: Quite heavy and dense, so perfect for blunt weapons. On the other hand, it's horrible for cutting weapons. Overall steel is better since it's great for all kinds of weapons, but silver is more or less superior for blunt force damage. That said, gold and platinum are far better, but you can only get blunt weapons of those from artifact creation. Silver is also the only military-grade metal that can't be forged into armor. Bronze and bismuth bronze: Don't have iron? Bronze and bismuth bronze is an acceptable replacement for it. The only difference between bronze and bismuth bronze is that bismuth bronze requires an extra kind of metal bar, but the end result is more expensive than normal bronze. Iron: The basic metal for your everyday needs. More importantly, it's a component of steel, so if it's possible, go the extra step and arm your militia with steel rather than iron. Still, if somehow that's not possible, iron is the best overall metal for military use if steel can't be created. Steel: Overall the best metal to use. Sharp weapons, tough armor. Also high value, equal to gold, though it can take some time to make steel. If you wanna keep a fort defended, arm your militia with steel equipment for the best chance to survive. They can be quite heavy, though, so inexperienced militia may end up moving too slow.
Lastly, we got candy, or also known as adamantine. Can be found in all maps, but also very dangerous to mine due to the things that guard them. Very sharp weapons, and very light and durable armor. On the other hand, due to it's light weight it's remarkably pathetic to use as a blunt weapon.
There are also divine metals, which you really only get in adventure mode, though word is that sometimes they might show up in caravans. They're more or less similar to adamantine, but carries more weight so these may be great blunt weapons.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Aug 4, 2016 10:29:47 GMT -5
Almost ran into a food shortage. Basically had decided to add two more cooks to process all the food into meals, since a lot of meat was piling up. They quickly grew in skill, and after a while I underestimated the speed of which skilled workers can do their jobs - something I should have realized that my three smelters can easily melt down an entire caravan's armor and weapon stock in short time. Anyway, once food was running low they started adding the booze as ingredients. Liquids are generally rarely used for ingredients, but when solids are low liquids then get used with more frequency: in general a meal only requires one solid ingredient in order to be created, and as for liquid ingredients cooks can use up to three barrels worth per cooking.
I also generally trade/give away 90% of my food and drink stock on caravans. When the dwarven caravan hit I realized the the cooks burned through nearly all the liquor when I was moving things. Usually on the drinks screen I'd have around 20-30 pages of liquor to move, and in this case there was only one and a half pages.
Managed to fix things somewhat; had some giant monitor lizard hatchlings caged up to resupply the food stocks, while I made my third cook into the second brewer.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Aug 4, 2016 11:15:41 GMT -5
Also, to give an image of how much stuff I practically freely give away in trade:
Imported wealth (from all caravans): total value of 104812 - pretty sure it should be higher, since at I generally get 100k worth of stuff from human and dwarven caravans yearly. So let's say 2 million worth of value in the span of 10 years.
Exported wealth: 25,082,638 - probably more accurate than imported weath. For a while it was about 40% cooked food and 40% clothing, with 20% in misc. stuff, but due to adding a second cook (and temporarily a third), cooked meals has become a far bigger chunk export wise.
Also, current created wealth in the fort is 21,999,999. Items given away in trade don't count in created wealth anymore, so the total created wealth of the fort if combined with exported wealth is roughly a little above 40 million.
Due to this, forgotten beasts appear on a regular basis. The real dangerous ones I take care of in the containment rooms, while the not so dangerous ones I can manage to beat with a two-dwarf hammer squad. The organic ones, at least, since hammers aren't super useful against beings that feel no pain when bones are broken.
In general, I prefer sending hammer squads out for hunting and fighting FBs. Since there's no cutting edge, there's less risk of body parts getting cut apart, which takes more work in hauling and processing. It's not 100% guaranteed, since teeth and horns can get knocked out. Quite nice to see teeth flying out during battles, though it's a pain to clean up.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Aug 5, 2016 8:47:28 GMT -5
Finally got a chance to really test out my undead defense system. Forgotten beast attack; giant hairy spider that breathes poison gas. Since it's a spider, it also spews webs.
Lured it in with a chained armadillo, then pulled the lever to seal the entrance way when the spider began to move towards the armadillo. The gates closed a short while after the FB entered, then I pulled the lever to release 7 blind cave ogres. Undead are not immune to webs, but due to the close proximity between the undead and the FB the latter had no chance to web up the small horde as they proceeded to bite the FB to death.
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