GitP Dwarf Fortress Succession Game 4: Dwarves on Patrol

[Shpadoinkle]

I KEEP MEANING TO POST ABOUT THIS BUT I KEEP FORGETTING BECAUSE I'M A DUMBASS.

Dwarven music.

[Shpadoinkle]

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Galena 16th

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Yeah.

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The marksgoblins seem to have wasted all their bolts on that one caravan guard. I'm gonna see if our marksdwarves have any better aim than they do.

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Unir helfully points out another squad of goblins. I cancel the order to engage the marksgoblin squad and have the military take their "let them come to us" positions.

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Third squad, south of the eastern entrance.

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An attempt at a composite picture; I'm not certain how clear it is. The parts with the blue filters are lower (also I just realized I should have overlaid the middle layer over the walls visible on the bottom one. Oh well, too late to fix now.) Regardless, our marksdwarves and the fortifications are doing their jobs remarkably competently... even if the goblins did scare off the human traders.

So I'm up to autumn. After approximately six hours of play. My piece of crap computer (that I'm convinced works only due to the fact it hasn't realized it shouldn't) runs this save at about 10 FPS. It also takes around five minutes to save.

To be honest I'm not entirely sure I'm going to have the patience to finish the year.

[Luzahn]

Well, we could either find someone willing to play the last bit of it, or we could just have the next turn be that last fourth plus their own year.

Of course, you could also manage to finish. 10 FPS is rough though. Maybe switch off temperature for an improvement, only switching it back on if we fight a firebreather.

[Shpadoinkle]

Temperature is already off and has been since I started my turn. My computer's like 7 years old and I'm running Windows XP, Service pack 3, with 640 MB of RAM. I'm also broke and unemployed so I can't afford to upgrade.

I'll probably be able to finish the year before the weekend unless something happens to destroy my patience.

[Luzahn]

Ah, that's a shame. Good luck with it!

Remember, goblins die quickly under a rain of bolts!

[Wookieetank]

What are those two traps by the bridge for?

They are a remnant from the days of when I was overseer and they were our first, last and only line of dense other than our fancy lever to put up the bridge.

[Shpadoinkle]

Journal of overseer 'Shpadoinkle.'

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Limestone 17th

Incidentally, the humans are going to be leaving minus at least one wagon's worth of stuff, and the goblin attack coming when it did means they wouldn't trade with me, so my successor might want to give them a pretty generous profit next year.

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Anyway, not much to report. Set up a clothing industry. I've got Doren Sazirlotol constantly turning out shirts, trousers, gloves, shoes, and bags.

Sandstone 8th
Very little of note is going on. I'm having some wooden bolts made just to be sure our marksdwarves don't run out. Yes, I know wooden bolts are terrible, but they're better than having our military trying to club goblins to death with the stocks of their crossbows.

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Still working on the upper level. I'm adding another level of walls because creatures will sometimes dodge up or down a level when attacked in melee, and letting goblins bypass the entry hall would be self defeating.

Also pictured: a hell of a lot of clothes.

I'll probably (but can't say definitely) be done tomorrow.

[Luzahn]

Why not make those new upper walls fortifications? We could shoot from all angles, and often our guys will be on the outer wall first.

[Shpadoinkle]

Journal of overseer 'Shpadionkle.'

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Sandstone 26th
Migrants. Only 8 this time. None with any skills of particular note.

Timber 3rd

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ANOTHER strange mood, and it's ANOTHER possession of ANOTHER clothier. What the hell.

Doren claims a clothier's workshop (naturally) and starts gathering stuff.

Timber 11th

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I... I... don't know. I don't think I want to.

Timber 12th
Dwarven caravan is here. I have every spare dwarf start hauling crates full of stone mugs and moldering, threadbare old clothes to the depot.

Timber 13th

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An oddly small force. Still, I shall have The Vigor of Boulders take their stations and see if we can't drive them off.

Timber 20th

The "siege" has been driven off. For some reason the goblins only fired a couple shots. Their leader, a macegoblin riding an elk bird, escaped before he could be eliminated, however.

As for the caravan, I bought all the bolts, meat, fish, and cheese they had (and a few assorted other things, including various armor pieces they had) in exchange for approximately a ton of threadbare, moth eaten, moldering old clothes we took off of dead goblins.

Moonstone 1st

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Um... crap. It seems I accidentally ordered the trade depot deconstructed without noticing until it was done being torn down (hard as it may be to believe, I DO make mistakes too.) The dwarven caravan is leaving without most of their stuff, and rebuilding the depot is going to take... well, considering how long it takes to get ANYTHING done in this fort, it's probably not going to be done for a year or so since all the stuff the caravan left has to be moved out of the way first. So I had a second one erected just across the hall.

So... yeah. My successor probably ought to offer the dwarven caravan an extra 50K or so worth of stuff next year.

[Shpadoinkle]

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Moonstone 28th
Not a whole lot to report. Incidentally, for about the last six months or so, I've been training our military as pump operators so they don't get bad thoughts when they're released from duty. I've moved the refuse stockpiles up to the second level of the fort because it's huge and there's nothing else to do with it. I'm having bones taken to a second stockpile underground, near a craftsdwarves workshop.

Also...

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My tomb. Don't screw around with it, please.

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Workshops and stuff for our textiles industry. The stockpiles are for rope reed and pig tails, thread, cloth, dyes, and finished clothes. And also wood because we're running low on space to store wood.

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I may have mentioned this already, but I'm having trees from near the surface walls cleared out so our marksdwarves have clear shots at invaders before they get to the entrance.

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We have a bunch of baby large cats that will surely prove completely ineffective against goblinoids once they grow up. They might make a decent last-ditch line of defense, however, if any goblinoids happen to make it past the barracks.

Almost there! There's like a month of the year left, an when you're running the game at 9 FPS that still takes a while. I should be finished with it by this evening if nothing comes up.

[Luzahn]

...Did you convert my useless pile of garbage into a mausoleum?

It does look pretty awesome though. We should put all of our named dwarves in there. Or dig more.

And I knew there was something I'd forgotten to do. Kill all of the trees. They impair things. There is a limit to crossbow range though, you should see a line of bolts somewhere showing it, we can spare trees past that.

[Shpadoinkle]

Incidentally, Luzahn, I've given your dwarf the custom title of 'Tyrant' to help him feel better about the fact that he's missing half of his spine and is effectively paralyzed below the waist. He doesn't have any labors enabled at present because he moves so slow.

[Luzahn]

Incidentally, Luzahn, I've given your dwarf the custom title of 'Tyrant' to help him feel better about the fact that he's missing half of his spine and is effectively paralyzed below the waist. He doesn't have any labors enabled at present because he moves so slow.

...

*Starts furiously scribbling designs for the Mobile Oppression Device.*

[Shpadoinkle]

Actually I was mistaken- he just has a bruised spine, and a broken leg (which now has a cast applied to it.) Anyway...

Journal of overseer 'Shpadoinkle.'

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Obsidian 18th

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Kulet Dodokudiz, psychotic assbeater that he is, kills four zorvin axemen.

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Including one whose head he caved in by kicking it. It should be noted that he was wearing regular cloth shoes.

Granite 1
The new year has arrived, and my time as overseer has come to an end.

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End of year stats.

WATCH THE DAMN BOOZE SUPPLY. Asking sincerely here; why am I the only one who does this?

Save: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=7295

[Grif]

At this point, how many named dwarfs are they? I recall some of us were asking to be dorfed. (More importantly, am I alive? )

As for the booze supply, I tend to just let it hover around 200 drinks, give or take.

Also, for FPS sake, can we limit the population to 100 or so? A fort this large slows my laptop to a mere 20-30 FPS. Not too shabby, but it does makes things longer, and I imagine players like Shpadoinkle would appreciate being able to play the fort at a decent rate. Maybe get an atom smasher going in order to start getting rid of excess stuff.

[Shpadoinkle]

Yeah, 'Grif' is still a live and still dirtsmithing. I believe all nicknamed dwarves around from the start of my turn are still alive.

[Luzahn]

Please post within 24 hours if you would like the next turn.

I'll be putting my name in.

Now, the edit to limit fortress size isn't stored in the save, is it? We'd have to have each player do that. Or just start dropping migrants into lava, but that'd cause ghost problems.

[Shpadoinkle]

It's it's in the init.txt or init_d.txt files (like population caps,) then it's not tied to a region folder.

[Gnoman]

I'm still interested in a turn.

[McDouggal]

I submit my candidacy!

(gets tossed into the magma chute)

Nevermind...

No, really. I will wreck it within a week.

[Luzahn]

I submit my candidacy!

(gets tossed into the magma chute)

Nevermind...

No, really. I will wreck it within a week.

Would you actually want the turn? You'd get first claim to it as a new player in the thread.

EDIT: I see the white. Damned, sneaky white.

[McDouggal]

Would you actually want the turn? You'd get first claim to it as a new player in the thread.

EDIT: I see the white. Damned, sneaky white.

This is the guy who has had a fort tantrum in the first season. I don't want to wreck this one :P

[Grif]

A mature fort is actually pretty hard to send into a tantrum spiral if you know even a modicum of the basics, since the happiness boosts and all are already in place.

Plus, remember the motto of Dwarf Fortress.

Losing is !!Fun!!.

[McDouggal]

A mature fort is actually pretty hard to send into a tantrum spiral if you know even a modicum of the basics, since the happiness boosts and all are already in place.

Plus, remember the motto of Dwarf Fortress.

Losing is !!Fun!!.

I'm also losing fast enough due to bad starts/bad luck that my grasp of the basics is kinda... bad.

[Grif]

I'm also losing fast enough due to bad starts/bad luck that my grasp of the basics is kinda... bad.

What better way to learn then?

You can pose any questions you have in the thread. And if that still doesn't assure your heart, then turn on seasonal save so that you can save scum if things go a little too pear-shaped.

[Wookieetank]

What better way to learn then?

You can pose any questions you have in the thread. And if that still doesn't assure your heart, then turn on seasonal save so that you can save scum if things go a little too pear-shaped.

I'll second Grif's nomination of McDougal. Failing that, I'm more than happy to see what I can do with the fort myself.

[Shpadoinkle]

I meant to mention this but I really only touched on it; I set up a textiles industry. We have two threshers, two dyers, a dedicated weaver, and a dedicated clothier, with supplies stockpiled nearby. I've been having the clothier make cloth crafts (a masterwork bracelet made from masterfully dyed masterwork rope reed cloth can easily go for 700*, and you can fit like fifty of them in one bin, plus they're lighter than mugs so they a crate of them doesn't take as long to haul to the depot. Also it occupies more than one dwarf, so you have fewer idlers, AND it frees up stonecrafters to dedicate more time to making large stone pots, which we still need a bunch of.)

The way I have the farms and food stockpiles set up, dwarves will grab a mature plant from the farm plots and immediately take it down the nearby stairs to the plants stockpile at the bottom. THEN another dwarf will grab a barrel or pot and take that to the stockpile there, fill it up, and take it to one of the other stockpiles nearby that allows food containers. Solves the problem of having plants sit on the farm plots for a month or two while the harvester walks all the way to the other end of the fort to grab the ONE barrel there, then come all the way back, put one plant in it, and return it to the other end of the fort.

We have a crapton of bins and logs. Probably won't need more for a while, but I recommend keeping the areas near the walls of the fort cleared of trees so our marksdwarves will have clear shots at invading hostiles before they get to the gates.

Some of the stuff that's been laying on the ground outside the walls dropped by merchants- you know, tiles that have like a hundred objects on them?- I channeled the ground out from under those tiles, built floors over them, then dug tunnels so we could retrieve the crap dropped there in safety and don't have dozens of dwarves running around in the open for months.

Incidentally, you may notice that the kids have engraving experience- yes, I cheated a bit with Dwarf Therapist and turned on Engraving/Smoothing for them in order to get my tomb smoothed faster, though I only had our engraver actually engrave stuff. I figure if kids will harvest plants and tear down walls, smoothing a floor isn't too much to ask of them too. Besides, they gotta earn their keep somehow.

[McDouggal]

Alright-I will take the turn AFTER this one. My college is starting classes this coming week, which means not a lot of time to game. I doubt that I'd be able to get beyond Fall this week

[Luzahn]

My roll has determined that Grif shall have the save.

Grif, ensure that we die with honor. Or at least with hilarity.

[Grif]

Grif, ensure that we die with honor. Or at least with hilarity.

Methinks you will rue this day of passing the fort to me.