SDNet Dwarf Fortress Succession Game (Many images)

[ColonialAdmiral]

See I like close quarters consolidated forts. It's just a bit open, but if you can fix here up Covenant, then I should probably be able to do turn 3. Except I'm gone this weekend, so if you don't finish today, somebody else should take it after you.

Oh, and if you wan't to make a six wide door for the front, just place two doors on the side, then lock them. You can place new doors next to these. Then lock them again, and add in the final pair. Then you can unlock them all and at least we'll have a gate.

[Covenant]

See I like close quarters consolidated forts. It's just a bit open, but if you can fix here up Covenant, then I should probably be able to do turn 3. Except I'm gone this weekend, so if you don't finish today, somebody else should take it after you.

Oh, and if you wan't to make a six wide door for the front, just place two doors on the side, then lock them. You can place new doors next to these. Then lock them again, and add in the final pair. Then you can unlock them all and at least we'll have a gate.

I know how to extend doorways.

What I'm saying is, I'd rather have it be a two-wide chokepoint and just have the trade depo outside. When that becomes dangerous we can install defenses, but adding the depo inside is dangerous, and it's basically just one more thing we need to do. Also, the Dwarf priorities are set up all goofy. We don't need them quite so specialized.

I'll be giving this a third and final try. Otherwise, I think I should just set up a fort in a terrifying zone and do it Norad-style. It was quite successful, and I think we'd benefit greatly from some more closely-spaced stuff.

[ColonialAdmiral]

Yeah I like 2 door entrances as well, I was just making sure that you knew how to do it. I mean, six doors are better than none right? I wish you could make an actuall "Gate" though in this game...

[Covenant]

Yeah I like 2 door entrances as well, I was just making sure that you knew how to do it. I mean, six doors are better than none right? I wish you could make an actuall "Gate" though in this game...

I wish I could make real 'walls' too. I'm going to collapse one of the tunnels though, to backfill it with stone and keep nasties from the magma flow from eating us. If I can't bridge the chasm though, then I'll collapse it there. I would however like to get that gold.

[Covenant]

Alright. Just queued up like, seriously, a fuckton of things. I had them listed, but that's basically my report minus pictures. I'll let them play out and see how things go.

HOLY MOTHER OF DWARFS. No matter what, these fucknuts can't get a road and bridge and depo fixed before summer's human caravan. I'm sorry, I'm just done trying. The skillsets are all fucked up and the fortress is too spread out to be usable.

[ColonialAdmiral]

Maybee a restart.
Exonerate?

[Covenant]

Maybee a restart.
Exonerate?

I'd say a restart is probably best... I mean, I can give it /another/ go, but really, this is just maddeningly difficult. It's partially because, to me, the skillsets seem a bit odd... like our farmer is also our lumberman. People spend a lot of time walking back and forth between distant regions of the fortress, which I think could be better served doing work. Centralizing things would certainly be great, but right now it's just not a real option. I'm going to pop on /again/ and see how much I can improve things.

I'm really using the 'human caravan as a barometer for the rest of the progress. If we can't even get the human wagons to come to us then we've really done exceedingly poorly.

I'll do ONE more shot. I saved after I got started... so what I'll do this time, to lessen my aggrivation, is put all effort into getting us caravan ready. If I can do that, we should be able to survive the winter without our Dwarves going mad.

[ColonialAdmiral]

Think you could use dirt? I'm not sure if wagons can use it, but its quicker.

[Covenant]

Think you could use dirt? I'm not sure if wagons can use it, but its quicker.

HOLY FUCK.

Do you see that? Left side of the screen. HUMANS. They just arrived, just as I'm about to finish my bridge. Goddammitall!!!



I used dirt, don't worry. Know what probably cost me the wagon train? FUCKING ZOMBIE GROUNDHOG BEING TRAINED IN PAST MY BRIDGEBUILDER. I swear, that bridge finished like 2 seconds later, and it just makes me want to cry.

Actually, no, not 2. It was finished by the time they were ready to unload goods, by a minute or two, but it was further delayed by the fact that our builder had to go eat.

I wish I could set build priorities.

Ugh. If I made it less wide--just the bare minimum of 4 spaces, this may be closer to doable... but meh. I could do it, maybe... but my will to live is incredibly small at the moment. I could reload it again, or just keep playing, but honestly I dunno. This fortress makes everything such a battle. I wanted to prove that I could get it done in time (all hardships notwithstanding) and I showed I basically could if things had been a bit luckier and if I had been able to more accurately predict the flow of groundhogs. If anyone wants to continue this, I can make the save available mid-season... I don't think I the player can survive this until spring.

Here's what I recommend for the next game:

Dwarfy Laborers

1) Two moderately skilled miners, we don't need Legendary Miners for the beginning, there's no reason to hit the magma flow anyway. It's just dangerous to do before we have enough Dwarfs to make a military squad.

2) One master mason who is also a skilled architect, or at least above dabbling. We need someone who is a dedicated builder, and as it stands, our builders are either all terrible, or mixed in their duties.

3) One dedicated carpenter who also can handle furnace and woodburning operations, since these deal with wood and benefit greatly from clustering the workshops together.

4) One peasent who is also our woodcutter and an axedwarf. The reasoning is this: axes are a good weapon, and you start with an Iron one. By assigning this flunky to the job of cutting trees, we give him something to do to gain levels until he's stronger. Then he can provide basic security as an Axedwarf (and set to hunt, he'll roam the map and murder things for experience) and when he's not busy will move things around as a peasent.

5) A brewer and a cook. These can be the same dwarf, but making them each different lets us also have two farmers easily, and we want two farmers. They'll let us get a farm going and be productive within the first year, and by concentrating our foodstocks in beer and seeds, we'll be able to vastly outstrip the needs of our early community in time for migrants.

6) We're left with a spare Dwarf. Often I made this guy into a cruddy craftsdwarf/mechanic/peasent combination to let us make tons of worthless rock trinkets to sell to caravans as well as make those 10 or so stone mechanisms we want for our floodgates. He can also just be a peasent hauler to go along with the Axeman, as your first injection of colonists usually includes all your retard classes.

Dwarfy Structures:

1) A thin entrance, two squares wide, no more than 4. This lets us better control traffic in and out, which will eventually be little more than enemy traffic, so we don't really need to benefit that much.

2) Dwarf Village setup, with nearly all of our structures outside for the first year. Not only is this smart in that it is fast, but it's also pretty defensible, as there's no building-crushing units out there. Even Elephants rarely chase you too far in... and if we have Elephants, a 6 wide no-chokepoint corridor will be nearly impossible to defend.

3) Sort the workshops by requirement. Not only does this make it easier to track who is using what and where, but it also allows your Dwarfs to access things intelligently. Farms along the river are near the kitchen and still, which is in turn near the dining hall--for example. What we have right now is definately a mess, but it's a spread out mess too. Once you decide to move indoors, have your areas spaced out so that they can be easily accessed!

4) Safe farming!!! Dig to a 3 fall flat piece of wall, put a floodgate into that rather than digging a channel. Then dig a channel behind it all the way to the next floodgate (a ways away, just to make sure nothing gets into that like a mudman or something without you knowing) and THEN that connects to the farm. A small double-door leading into the farm complex that can be easily locked. No floodgate leading into the fortress! If a troll broke that, we'd be screwed.


That's what I think, off the top of my head... I'm sure you have your own way of making fortresses, and I'm sure you thought this one was totally awesome, but either you should play another year (this is directed at the OP) to get it sorted more, or one of us should submit a fortress. I still think a succession game would be fun. I'll give you an idea about what I was thinking of when I mentioned my stuff. I've posted my pic before, but I'll add some text to show what stuff is:

One entrance, an internal moat, and compact construction means it's extremely easy to work in.



See, here's a fort that makes it extremely simple to navigate. Areas that you don't want Dwarfs to spend much time in are off and away, and the fort itself supports over 100 Dwarfs easily, with massive north/south construction to remove the need for a lot of lateral expansion. Best of all, it makes it really easy to navigate, as the only reason they need to travel a long distance is in order to go to bed, which is something that you really don't need to care much about anyway. Walk-time to bed is a drop in the bucket compared to the time it takes to navigate the one we have now.

You can also see, I've left room to expand the entryway to a 5 wide corridor later once we have an external moat too. Until then it doesn't make sense for us to have the depo inside.

Anyway, I just wanted to be constructive.

[Exonerate]

I'm not currently at home and won't be for an entire week so my internet access is sporadic. You're getting pathing errors because you're trying to select materials on both sides of the bridge - one reason I made the second tunnel was so you could bridge that too, which creates a secondary path that can be used when you want to tear down a bridge and rebuild it. Materials are organized by type then date of discovery, so what you can do is dig a bit on one side, then use the rocks you just excavated (which will all be on the same side of the river/chasm) to build the bridge.

It's not like I was trying to handicap you - I laid the fortress out as I saw fit. I've run several iterations of fortresses and the latest one is just something I thought was worth trying. You have two legendary miners you can use to dig around. If you really dislike the placement that much, feel free to tear down things and place them elsewhere - it's your fortress (for the time being ). Half the buildings are placed just on a temporary basis anyways. And in my defense, a drawbridge is a great defense.

If you guys agree that the fortress is too buggy to continue (and not just against your preferences), then go ahead and restart it. Otherwise, I think half the fun and hilarity is when you mash a bunch of people with different backgrounds together to make a fort. You see the human caravan as an indicator of success - in my current fortress (around it's 10th year with 180+ dwarves), I still haven't really gotten around to completing the road because I just didn't find their supplies necessary at all. You view hitting magma early as dangerous, but I see it as an opportunity to set up an early magma forge and smelter.

By the way, the woodcutter was originally a peasant. It's just that I had enough wood for the time being and didn't want to agitate the wildlife, so I turned off woodcutting. He decided to be a farmer on his own.

[ColonialAdmiral]

I'm up for a restart, but I'm gone this weekend anyways. I'm still up for this one if you want, but I'll need someone to go before me at least. Whatever the majority decides to go with, I'll do.

[Covenant]

I just can't handle it. It's too far away from the way I like to play for me to be able to enjoy the time spent trying to shape it into something I can call productive. And that's the real issue, maybe this is a great '3 years into the game' fort, but right now we're barely keeping up with our migrants in terms of food and there's a lot of dangerously sloppy building that went on. I know that's part of the fun, but we should try to have a strong start, not a maddeningly frustrating one.

If the other people want to take over for the first year and keep us afloat, that'd be great. Otherwise, I want to die when I say this, I'll give this game another shot. I'm positive I can, at least, get this place into some state of readiness for winter and endure until spring. Then, concievably, I'll get a chance to play it again once it's not so insanely designed.

[Covenant]

Okay!

I fixed the fort up real nice. It's not gorgeous, but it's definately working right. Got a road, my bridge, all this other stuff going, mass production of Shrooms, and I have a Gopher Genocide Group keeping the population of undead down.

We also now have a legendary bonecrafter, which is freakin' amazing. We'll be able to make bone bolts so fast it'll make your head spin. Anyway, we'll all die at some point horribly, but not within my year. It just hit summer. AAR to follow!

Oh, I also customized some titles for future guys. So you'll know what the Lumberjack does, and what the Brewmaster is, and such. It'll say right on their name.

[Covenant]

Space Saved:

AAR to follow shortly!

Within a day. I've hit Springtime. The guy who starts after me will have a relatively easy time, but there's a few things to consider, and one of which is the farm. Some jackass left a rock on the door and I've been unable to get him to move it yet. We'll see how that goes.

Who is going after me? I want to mail off this save.

[ColonialAdmiral]

I'll take it Covenant.

[Covenant]

The Spring Thaws.



First things first, I'm running the show this year. I don't know what mamby-pamby leadership you Dwarves had last year, but this farm is terribly designed. Were you all sober when you made this, and not thinking clearly? By the stones, there's a still down here beign DECONSTRUCTED? What's the mountain coming to. First things first, drain this flood and get a door put in here. I'm not sure what Dwarf's genius idea it was to have a floodgate leading into our fort, but I'm guessing it was a Jeweler.



Second of all, we need some blasted rooms. Sleeping in conjoining beds may be fine for Snow White's Seven Dwarfs, but we're not going to be sleeping--all fourtysome of us--in bunks like cheerleaders. Get your shovels men, and get digging! Here's a rough template of what I was thinking of. I want to see this done sometime by next month so I can start installing beds for you louts.



And honestly, why is there no bridge over this big old rip in the ground? Here, put up two little bridges, we'll get things back into some semblence of order soon enough. And if you ladies and gents could be bothered to, throw some doors up across there. Let's not be stupid.

Waters Run Free, The Ice is Gone



Frustrated with the undead gophers, I assigned several hunters and a woodsman to roam the wilderness with orders to kill anything that moved. The first-dead would be slaughtered and their bones worn down into bolts, and the second-dead would be left to rot away until their bones took on unlife as well, after which we would tear them apart and turn them into bolts as well. It was a good plan, if I may say so, and took a massive population of gophers down to a mere handful of new arrivals. It also facilitated the extremely rapid construction of a rough-hewn wooden bridge. While stone would be a proper bridge, I had no faith in these Dwarfs to build anything from stone, and had them lay down a rough log bridge and set out plans for a trampled dirt road. This would be an extremely rugged path, but it was enough to allow the human caravans to stop off, and deposit extremely valuable wares into our hands in exchange for some worthless stone knicknacks.



Suddenly, Kogan was seized by fits, and dashed off into the wilderness. He drug the corpse of a undead cougar, the same creature who had lead to our first death before my tenure. Ripping it apart, he began to saw it down, seizing upon a dead gopher for supplimental bones.



It was not a terribly impressive construction overall, as he refused to ever put it down or actually mount a weapon on it. However, the skills he learned allowed him to move from being a creater of knicknacks to our main bone-bolt productiondwarf. He also began to develop an odd habit of picking up the stray bits of kills when they struck his fancy, and saving them for his own. He put great effort into these, making several Masterpiece bolts, and the other Dwarfs referred to him as the bone collector because of this odd prediliction.



Shouts from the dining hall sounded much less merried than usual, and it quickly became clear--a zombie groundhog had chased one of our migrants inside, and he had run the circut of the fort, disrupting work, and eventually driving the metalsmith out from the fort itself in terror. The dogs made short work of it, and proceeded to nibble on the still-quivering bones for hours. Kogan didn't seem interested.

I grew greatly more frustrated with this, and brought to me our head lumberjackdwarf. He was handy with an axe, and I had him appointed as our first and only fulltime soldier. Though the rangers roamed the woods to keep the populations low, I needed someone to guard the gates. I assigned him a war dog and leather armor, and had him put his Iron Battleaxe to groundhog skulls instead of trees.

The carnage would stink for weeks. He charged into the unknown and hew at the tide of gophers and groundhogs. They arrived in a great host of the Earth, groundsquirrels and rabbits and rats, swimming from the ground like moles, a great grey-brown tide of undeath and hatred. He killed them all, and their skeletons baked in the summer sun along the muddied road, turned green by their ichor and rot.

For his trials, he was promoted to an Axedwarf and named Zombieslayer of our fort, but came back with only stony tears. His war dog had drowned after it followed a skeleton into the swirling rapids, and the brutality had deadened him. He grew taciturn and claimed not to care about anything. I worried privately, and had his room installed with the first of our coffers, and wished to have him sent a statue as well, but never found the time. I do regret this now.



Now that things had begun proceeding nicely, I drafted the construction of a great hall. We had a great many tables, but few of them were actually installed, so I crafted a massive great-table. At one day, it will stretch the length--or perhaps some day the Width, of the hall, which was already legendary in size though sparse. It was rather small, but as our mason was busy building doors and blocks and coffers, it would do for now, and was greatly larger than we needed strictly anyway.

The blocks were to be used to construct my successor's road, though if they found their way into another use, that would be fine as well. I also set about ordering the deconstruction of a lever to the Bad Floodgate, so that no clever Dwarf would ever pull it, or child, or goblin. I could only imagine the horror of seeing a great tide roll in from the farms and kill us all because a goblin had decided to play with the pulleys.

I took the liberty of beginning another construction though, and began placing supports along the magma flow. With orders to mine out the surrounding walls, it would create a controlled cavein if a lever it was tied to was pulled. This could allow us to breathe easier, as that river of fire was just another terror waiting to be braved, and with such a small defensive force, I did not believe it was the right time to bridge it, even if we had the steel to attempt it.



As summer approached, our first harvests began coming in, and it was a bumper crop to be sure! The amount of Funky Shrooms in our first load was also due to my policy of "Hit the Dirt". The idea is, if anyone's bored or not busy with some other job, they're sent to farm. Suddenly, everyone in the fort seemed to remember some previous order of mine, and quickly other projects began being finished, and those unfortunate enough to have free time were thrown into the mud to plant and harvest.

Summer Breaks



A more glorious sight I have not seen! Human caravaners, though laden with a great too much junk than meat, are an excellent means to begin collecting bins of leather for future tasks. Zombies and Skeletal groundhogs are terrible for the leatherworking trade, and surely at some point a Broker will arrive and declare that we must construct him several leather couches. Unless he wants the couches to be made of zombie leather and skeleton bones, and promptly eat him we need to look elsewhere for our leather. Plus, the bins are extremely useful.

Fall Brings the End of Life

As the season turned, we were met with several grim pieces of news.



First was a death, by Cougar, of The Chopper, whose name eludes me. What makes this death more tragic is that he had gone off to hunt just before a peasent gave birth, and announced dear Chopper as the father. Fall is a time of many passings.

Oddly, I had sent Chopper out to do battle because, in great part, the man annoyed me. My guilt in this matter is in no part small, and had I known he was the only married Dwarf in the fort, I may have been less ready to order him to face down the Cougar. However, he did kill it with his last stroke, and the two of them died on the spot.



Not long later, a beast crawled up from the chasm and tore at one of the men. I had begun constructing a system for a controlled implosion of the magma flow, as I believed the chasm and lava river were both extremely dangerous, and I felt we had enough concerns that did not require us to expand so deep--especially before we had safely begun to mine past the cash and create steel. Without steel, we cannot bridge the flow, or even construct a magma forge. The body lay there, in chunks, until it rotted away. Apparently none of his compatriots wished to move what was left of the body, though they did clean the chunks off the bridge. It was a macabre scene I wished not to repeat, and sent the Zombieslayer to stand watch.

The moledog was butchered and it's carcass tossed outside into a heap of garbage.

Icemorn, the Winters of Drunkenness

Though the fall was a time of great sadness, the winter was a time of great bounty. My aggressive farming scheme had paid off, and now at last there was time for merriment. Nearly all who wished a room could have one, and a further expansion of housing was made to accomidate those who arrived before the freeze. Trees were felled in great numbers to be turned into all variety of wooden toys for all the good dwarfboys and dwarfgirls. Our Mechanic posed as that lovely symbol of merriment, Sintar Krak, and almost lasted the night before passing out in a stupor.

However, the alcohol was not limitless, and though our still was in production at all times, I did not understand why we had such poor output. I began to wonder if our Brewmaster was not too much a fan of his own brewery.



My fears seem well founded.

As the ice began to thin, a Mason was struck by the spirit of the season and rushed to craft a wonderous trinket of his own. However, his demands took the form of scribbled drawings and maddened mumblings, and I posted our Axedwarf at the Masonry shop to assure me that he would not turn wild. He was not the first Mason to craft an item, or attempt it, and the other had become so potent an engraver that we called him Stoneweaver, but his demands for bones, bars of metal, and rough gems of some sort that we didn't seem to have did worry me. He may not be able to complete his task, but I did have a glass furnace built. Perhaps his 'gems' as glass, but he cannot speak to tell me.



While my time is ended, and I have taken the liberty of comissioning a statue made of gold and a few kegs of Funky Mushroom Wine to take back with me on my Pony, I leave the fort in good hands, I hope. It has been a trying time, but somehow I feel as if I had known what to expect nearly before I arrived. Still, what was once a mired hole is now a functioning fortress, and I look forward to my next stewardship, and old friends.

===========
Notes
===========

1) There's a switch in the hallway. If you pull it, it'll collapse all those pillars. I wanted to cut off the magma flow, or at least make it less than 6 spaces wide, so that magma critters don't eat us. If you disagree, you'll need steel to make a bridge. Mine the areas between the flow and the chasm for hemitite so we can make some.

2) There's a few specially titled Dwarfs. These all have specific roles and are useful to familiarize yourself with. Their titles are generally obvious. Stoneweaver is an engraver, Bone Collector is a bonecrafter, etc.

3) There's a strange mood Dwarf right now. He's already grabbed some stone, but his other demands may not be met yet. I have a glass furnace and am tryng to make some metal bars from the metal we can currently smelt.

4) The road will wash away come spring. Either use the blocks to create a permanent one or make a new one before the humans arrive! I have some buildings outside, including the depo, but that should be perfectly save for a few more years. I considered putting the depo inside but I'm not sure where. Possibly inside that front hallway, and then either south or north into the wall, so it doesn't breach the base defenses if things follow them in.

5) I'm making barrels and such as well as beds with wood. Once we have enough barrels to let people drink, but also have a surplus, we can turn off of 'cook plump helmets' and have them only cook the wine. This will extend food stocks.

6) You'll probably get some Nobles soon. The area 'south' of the main housing block are rooms fit for nobles, which will ask for an office, dining room, and bedroom. There's some undug land there, as I didn't know if I wanted to make it food storage or something.

7) There's a rock over the door leading between farm and workshop/fort area. MOVE IT. Or put doors all around it to keep it from flooding. It will be hard to start farming with that rock there, and getting started early is always helpful.

Year 3 Save File

[ColonialAdmiral]

*Cracks Knuckles*
Time to get to work...

[ColonialAdmiral]

What was Kogan the bonecrafter making? Bolts?
He just threw a tantrum and destroyed the bridge, and then fell in and drowned...

Hmm...
I need to try this again...

[ColonialAdmiral]

Ok, I figured it out. When you fire a masterpeice bolt at something that then drowns, or dies in the water, then it will anger the creator. However, if it goes into a land animal (or zombie on land) then nothing happens.

[ColonialAdmiral]

Alright, I've got the fort moving along smoothly. I won't be able to post anything till monday though...I'll be out of town.

[ColonialAdmiral]

Ok I'm almost through the winter. Story will follow tommorow.

[Covenant]

Ok I'm almost through the winter. Story will follow tommorow.

How's the fort I left you? Basically everything easy to understand and such? I didn't bother remaking a lot of things, but I did try to get us rolling in the direction of permanent stuff for the bridge and give us a plan in case we want to abandon the chasm/magma flow area for a while.

[ColonialAdmiral]

It's been working fine. I had to dig a new farming room because I couldn't move that damned rock, and the second I finished it, They moved the rock out of the old farming room...

[Exonerate]

So... any updates?

[ColonialAdmiral]

Sorry.

I'll have it up tommorow I promise.