rezaf
2901
I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but not too long ago it took years for any remotely serious goblin threat to appear if you just took it slowly and built up an early economy consisting of stonecrafts and farming.
Isn’t this kind of slow growth possible any longer in the newest versions?
rezaf
I’m sure it is. In my example fort, my problem was in searching for basic metals, I ended up breaching the Magma Sea. From further reading, that tends to include the value of any Hell fort in your total wealth, which in turn results in immediate attacks.
Retracting bridge is good enough all by itself. But I always start my fortresses with a 6-wide corridor (with two right angles in it) that I fill with as many rock and cage traps as possible. Once I feel secure behind those and start collecting goblin weapons, I start replacing rock traps with 10-weapon traps. I also have smelters set to keep melting items, and I flag all goblin armor to be melted.
To start rock traps right away I always include an engineer in my embark build and set him to making mechanisms.
6 wide seems too wide to me. The caravans only need 3 wide (and I gather not even that, right now), and the goblins tend to move in narrower bands than that even when they’re going through your Hall of Death™. It requires a lot of traps to fill a corridor that wide, particularly if you’re short on one of the components (i.e. very little wood for cages because the embark location has no trees).
I picked 6 because when my population hits 200 there are a lot of dwarfs going in and out and I want to be sure they don’t create bottlenecks later. But you’re right, it’s not economical with the traps. Hmmmmmmmm
What are those dwarfs doing, going in and out? I always tried to keep everyone indoors as much as possible. Hunters and woodcutters needed to go out, but that was it. Surface crops can be grown indoors as long as the tile is roofed from the sky with a constructed floor, rather than a natural one. If I did any fishing, it was in a constructed underground lake.
rezaf
2907
This may very well be the case, but I’m sure you will agree that you cannot accidentally breach the magma sea. It’s like a gazillion levels down.
But obviously you know that very well, I’m mearly a dabbling dwarffortrrist that never did stuff like roofed indoor outdoor farms and self-constructed underground seas for fishing.
Btw., did Toady make changes there or is it still one-time-irrigation?
rezaf
No, no you can’t do that accidentally. However, it’s worth noting that the value of bees is currently bugged. If you have a bee hive on your map, they add a huge amount to your fort value, and you get attacked early.
I believe this is unchanged. I don’t know yet, I haven’t played a fort with the current version long enough for this to be an issue.
Glacier fort #2 was killed off by a Yeti. That is an early attack that you can’t avoid, and can’t really fend off with starting equipment.
salwon
2909
Maybe I’m just lucky, but I haven’t had any problems at all finding ore in the new versions. Any good sediments should have at least one of the economic metals - you’re not trying to get ore from igneous layers, are you?
You can’t select sites by layer type anymore. Are you sure you’re playing 31.19?
Spam
2911
Btw., did Toady make changes there or is it still one-time-irrigation?
It’s back to 40d style: irrigate bare rock before you can farm, no mud required on any indoor/outdoor soil.
salwon
2912
Okay no, I didn’t realize that had changed between 31.18 and 19. So you can’t see what layers are in an area on the embark menu anymore, or search for flux stone?
This I like. One-time irrigation makes no sense.
I think I might be missing what Gus means, but you can still search for flux stone, and there are new search filters for shallow and deep metal which you can use now too.
What size embark areas are you guys starting on? I generally go 2x2, which is more than enough spread for my fort and helps keep framerate up, but trees run out very very quickly, even in a heavily foreseted area.
I just want to point out that, on a glacier, you don’t make a flood trap, you make a carbonite trap.
It works GREAT.
So you aren’t playing with 31.19. You haven’t seen the new metal scarcity, then, it shows up in .19 along with the changes to the embark screen.
You can search for layers, but the only layer types are ice, soil, flux stone, shallow metals, and deep metals. There’s no detailed layer list anymore. Most locations have 1, maybe 2 types of metal, tops, and usually those don’t include iron. Bronze is out of the question because it requires tin and copper.
By the way, trying to use the goblins as a metal source doesn’t work. I just ran another fort, and the goblin ambush (6 crossbow goblins) steadfastly refused to enter the trapped corridor. This was year 2, so I’d managed to trade for 5 bars of Steel, and thus had equipment for one (1) guardsman. I sent him out and they killed him immediately, steel chain is no longer immunity to low-quality crossbow bolts.
At present, it looks like my fort is permanently under siege, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I chose a location with both “shallow metal” and “deep metal,” but so far all I’ve found is gold. Lots and lots of gold, which is completely useless for defending my fort.
I’ll see what I can do about salvaging this tomorrow, but my immediate impression is that 0.19 is unplayable because of the shortage of metal for weapons.
Gus, unarmoured and unarmed dwarves are fine for repelling your typical invasion.
Like you my first invasion came after tunnelling down to adamantium. I had 21 military dwarves who were mostly unarmoured and half-skilled fighters. They went up against a force of 15 gobline crossbowmen by charging straight out the front door and scared them off within 5 seconds. I lost three dwarves, and another four are in hospital waiting to die of infection.
Combat has clearly changed a lot since I last played, which was ~31.08 or so. The way it used to be, going out unarmored and unarmed against goblins was a good way to lose everyone without inflicting any casualties. Wrestling was a bad joke. On the other hand, a small squad of steel-clad axe dwarves could chop up just about anything. I thought the one guy would last a lot longer than he did.
I’ve got some leather lying around, so maybe tomorrow I’ll put together a squad and outfit them with leather armor and nothing else. I might give some of 'em crossbows, since I have plenty of bone bolts, though they seemed awfully ineffective against the local wildlife.
In any case, I really don’t like these changes. Yeah, it was grotesque before, but this is a severe overcorrection. Finding non-weapons metals is almost the same as finding no metal, since it’s still ridiculously easy to generate enough stone crafts to buy anything the caravan brings. A big supply of gold doesn’t help if you can’t trade it for something useful.
Agree about the resource changes. All I seem to have is shallow copper. Perhaps copper weaponry is effective now though…
Has anyone tried hives yet? None in my embark zone.
My understanding is that hives will get you killed, since the bees add 18,000 to your fort value each due to a bug.
